HORRIFIC REFLECTIONS
AMERICAN SOCIETY AND THE
SLASHER FILM
When art, whether consciously
or unconsciously, manages to tap into the zeitgeist and say something about the
times we live in, it is never coincidental. It is often the purposeful choice
of the creator; when Charlie Chaplin wrote, produced, directed and starred in The Great Dictator in 1940 as a
character called Adenoid Hynkel, there can be no doubt that he had something to
say about the rise of the Nazi’s and chose the filmic medium to communicate this.
Sometimes, however, films can’t help being influenced by the times they are
made in and, through a kind of artistic osmosis, they are reflections of their
times. One could argue, for example, that the spate of American b-movie sci-fi
films released in the late 50s which were concerned with invasions by evil,
sinister forces may not have been intended as explicit explorations of the
nation’s cold war anxiety, but they were. Quite often, people ask ‘But did the
filmmaker really mean that? Or are you reading too much into it?’ The answer is
that whether they did or didn’t (and most of the time, the really good ones
do!) it doesn’t alter the fact that it is there. The film was made at a
particular moment in history and art is like a sponge, absorbing the social,
political and cultural concerns of the time in which it was produced.
Slasher films have been
derided and dismissed since the first one – Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. At the time, it received quite
negative reviews, was called a blot on Hitchcock’s career and renowned film
critic C.A Lejeune even resigned her post at The Observer after walking out of
a screening in disgust. Now however, along with the majority of Hitchcock’s
work and thanks in no small part to french film critics of the 60s and the
magazine Cahiers du Cinema, it is now held up as a masterpiece. Can the same be
said, however, of the Slasher films that started to be churned out by
low-budget producers as soon as Halloween
became one of the most successful independent films of all time in 1978?
Probably not. It would be hard to convince anyone that Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare deserves to be compared to
Hitch’s stunning film. But that doesn’t mean these films don’t have something
very interesting to say about the American society they were produced in.
Freddy’s Dead
is pretty rubbish, however.
The opening of John
Carpenter’s Halloween is a prologue
to the narrative set in 1963. In this famous one-take sequence, a teenage girl
and her boyfriend are watched as they make out on a couch before running up to
the bedroom. After the boy leaves, dismissively claiming he’ll call her, the
girl is horrifically stabbed to death by her younger brother Michael, who she
was supposed to be babysitting. So far, so schlocky. But there is something
deeper under the surface here.
The fact that the sequence is
set in 1963 is extremely interesting. This is around the same time that the
contraceptive pill for women was freely available for the first time in the US. One cannot
underestimate the impact this had on how women lived their lives and were seen
by society. No longer were they only to be wives and mothers, there essentially
for procreation and as submissive to their male counterparts. Now, they could
have consequence-free sex exactly like men could. They were liberated from the
confines of society’s expectations of them at this time. Some felt this was an
exciting, progressive move towards sexual equality. Others, mainly men, were
threatened.
Combine this with what
happens in the scene itself. The teenagers are in a clearly casual
relationship. They are unmarried, young and appear to not be committed,
especially as the boy leaves immediately after they have finished having sex.
And she doesn’t seem to care; she asks him to call her, but isn’t troubled by
his lack of an affirmative positive response – she continues to brush her hair,
semi-naked, humming a tune serenely. This is clearly representative of a new
type of relationship in American society. The fact that the sequence is a POV
shot from Michael’s perspective, who calmly takes a knife and only deviates
from looking forward to glance at the couch he saw them kissing on and the bed
he knows they’ve had sex on, before he kills her, indicates perhaps the
ideological perspective of the filmmaker. Is Carpenter using the character of
Michael to explore a metaphorical conservative response to this new sexual
revolution? Perhaps. Either way, this scene is clearly a reaction to the female
liberation which was only on the rise when the film was actually made in 1978.
Halloween
also presents us with the iconic figure of the grown up Michael Myers; a
masked, vacant blank canvas onto whom American could project its own particular
fears and insecurities. He attacks America where it feels most safe – the
suburbs. Here the middle classes fled in the 50s away from the cities with
their crowds and crime and immigrants (hence the term White Flight) desperate
to live the American Dream. It was here they built their castles, encased in
white picket fences, a haven for these traditional, affluent families. It is no
coincidence that the film is set in the fictional suburb of Haddonfield; this
could be anywhere. That was the point. Carpenter places into this idyll the
almost supernatural figure of Myers, a hulking, brutally violent, silent
assassin. And he penetrates the one place that is truly sacred in American
society – the home. His motives are hinted at, but never crystallised or made
explicit. He has no facial expressions for us to read or understand. He
represents the rotten core underneath the surface of suburban America; the
anxious, sickening feeling that something isn’t quite right. Think about what
had happened to the once glorious post-war America by the time we arrive at the
late seventies: a shift away from patriarchal society into something more open
and less rigid. A President assassinated in broad daylight, his brother the same
only 5 years later. An unjust war in Vietnam that tarnished their reputation,
killed and traumatised their own young men and, worst of all to the American
psyche, a war they lost. The Kent State Massacre in which American forces
killed their own people without provocation and finally Watergate – an entire
nation deceived by the one man they had always held up as a symbol of honesty
and hope – The President. Here was a country besieged by themselves, fighting a
civil war between the hearts and minds of their own citizens. Here was a
country worried, scared, anxious and fearful, uncertain of their place in the
world and of what might happen next. Here was Haddonfield, under attack by one
of their own, Michael Myers, without any way to work out how to stop him.
Flash forward almost twenty
years and the humble Slasher film is still capable of reflecting the concerns
of American society. Scream – Wes
Craven’s post-modern deconstruction of the genre – is still at its core a
genuine Slasher with all the tropes present and correct, although some
hilariously inverted and injected with a heavy dose of irony. This in itself is
a reflection of the times – the mid-nineties saw the rise of the internet and
an eruption of nostalgia for popular culture which in turn led to a generation
one step removed from the actual times they were living in, which in turn has
led to where we are now: an almost virtual existence where all popular culture
from every historical period exists at the same time and is constantly consumed
and then regurgitated into pastiche, parody, homage or simple carbon copy.
Scream
clearly has something to say about this new generation of teenagers and the
American society they live in. In the White House is Bill Clinton; a
permissive, progressive pot-smoking liberal with a somewhat relaxed attitude to
sexuality. What we see in Scream for
the first time is a female protagonist who loses her virginity but who is
allowed to survive. This reflects the now definite change in how women were
viewed – not only were they allowed to defeat the killer themselves (in Halloween a cowering, weeping Jamie Lee
Curtis needs an authoritative male to use the gun on Myers, whereas Neve
Campbell not only shoots the killer in the head, but actually dresses in his
costume, a bold statement on the empowerment of women at this time), but they
were now allowed to be sexually active in a consequence-free environment.
What’s also interesting about
Scream is that it clearly has
something to say about the state of the American family in the 90s. The (mainly
absent) parents in Scream are the
teenagers of Halloween – the baby
boomers. Here is a generation who broke down societies rules, desperate not to
become their parents and to wither within the confines of their traditionalist
structures. This is a generation who embraced the idea of divorce and, as a
consequence, the whole idea of the family unit began to disintegrate. We know
that Slasher has always been a distinctly Conservative genre, a reactionary
genre, and Scream is no different.
Here, Neve Campbell’s protagonist is sexually frigid as a result of her mother’s
rumoured sexual openness. Billy blames the fact that he is a homicidal maniac
on the fact that his father left his mother and had an affair. What we see here
is a generation of teenagers – the 90’s Generation X – hurt and emotionally
stunted because of their parent’s embracing of casual sex and a more relaxed
attitude to monogamy. What Scream
appears to be saying is that we have created a youth who are all too aware of
the fragilities of the once strong and undefeatable American family and who are
now turning on each other, concerned with nothing but self-preservation and
themselves; a narcissistic generation ruined by their parents. It is no
coincidence that in Scream the
killers are the teenagers themselves. In this America, the threat is not from
the outside anymore. The threat is themselves and their own decaying values. In
addition to this, Scream also has
something to say about desensitisation and the effect that violent films have
had on these teenagers. Scream is so
conservative in its ideological outlook, that it even attacks itself! For
example, Stu is literally killed by a Slasher film – a TV showing Halloween is thrown on his face and
electrocutes him. Billy is attacked and defeated when he momentarily loses
focus and is distracted by a Slasher film showing on video. Craven clearly
seems to be accusing the very genre he helped create of corrupting this new
teenage generation who have been raised on home video and casual violence.
What we see here then is that
popular culture and film in particular will always have something to say about
the time in which it was produced, whether by design or coincidence. Slasher in
particular soaks up the cultural climate, the fears and anxieties of our time,
and presents them to us as allegories or metaphors – moralistic fairy tales for
each new generation. And what’s really
interesting about Halloween especially
is that it manages to exist in two ways; as a firm reaction to the time in
which it was made and as something which transcends historical, political and
social factors. We can project whatever we like onto Michael Myers; in his
emotionless face and blank expression we will always see what really frightens
us. His eyes are the mirrors in which we will always see our own horrific
personal and cultural reflections.
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