"The man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralize the extra-diagetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify [...] he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a sense a satisfying sense of omnipotence." (Mulvey, 1975)
Simply put, most cinema is made for men's viewing pleasure, with what is portrayed onscreen being meant to create a sense of identification with the protagonist. With this in mind, one could be forgiven for thinking the majority of movies in the 'slasher' genre subvert this tendency considering the trope of the "final girl." In the 'slasher' subgenre of horror film, pioneered by John Carpenter's 1978 Halloween, the protagonist is typically a female character: a female character whose virginity and virtue, her embrace of the kind of values that would assuage the anxiety of a male spectator following the advancements of the second wave of feminism, ensure her survival from the murderous advances of who the male spectator is actually intended to identify with: a (in most cases) blank slate of POV shots set on violently punishing those, particularly female, who transgress from the idealized notion of femininity. As Brewer (2009) notes: "On most measures, the non-surviving female characters were more frequently more sexual or appeared more sexual than the surviving females as well as the non-surviving males within each film." While there is a great deal of apologia from a feminist perspective about the "final girl" and how she causes a male audience member to identify with an imperiled woman, turn your attention to how director Anna Biller describes viewing an exploitation film in the cinema and the effect it had on female members of the audience:
"I once attended a screening of THE SWINGING BARMAIDS where there were hordes of young women in leather jackets screaming at the screen and rooting for the killer as he ripped the sexy young woman's clothes off and proceeded to rape and slaughter her. Their sentiment was something along the lines of, "Haha, die, bitch! Yeah! Get your slut clothes ripped off so we can see your pathetic man-pleasing whore body, and let’s see that body mutilated! No more GIRLY GIRLS!" (Biller, 2014)
To examine the different ways that gendered violence is portrayed in the horror genre, it is helpful to turn one's attention to a film I mentioned in my opening paragraph and the subsequent film series made by one of it's creators. One of the defining horror films of the 1970's, ushering in the "rape-revenge" subgenre in which a woman is sexually assaulted before revenge is dealt to those who violated her, The Last House on The Left (1972) was written and directed by Wes Craven, who would later helm 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street, one of the more legitimately interesting slasher films, and produced by Sean S. Cunningham, who would go on to produce and direct the slasher film whose franchise would duke it out the various Nightmare on Elm Street sequels throughout the 1980's: Friday the 13th (1980). Last House, a riff on Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, concerns Mari and Lucy, two 17-year old friends who celebrate the former's birthday by leaving their upstate New York home to attend a concert in the big city. While trying to score some marijuana, the girls are kidnapped by the cruel Krug and his gang (including a feral lover named Sadie- shades of the Manson family, a drug-addled son, and a switchblade wielding sex offender) and subjected to horrible degradation before being murdered in a wooded area coincidentally close to where Mari's parents live. From there, the film takes an (albeit ultraviolent) page from The Virgin Spring with Mari's parents discovering what has happened to their daughter and taking revenge into their own hands. Craven, an academic who found his way into low-budget cinema, based the gritty, hand-held footage of the gendered violence in the film's harrowing, uncomfortable middle section not on fantasy but on the realities portrayed all over television news at the time and on the covers of magazines, the actual gendered violence that occurred during the My Lai Massacre, a subject that often came up when defending the film: In the documentary American Nightmare, Craven discussed the famous picture of a girl suffering burns from the napalming of the village Trang Bang as his ‘coming of age into realizing that Americans weren’t always the good guys and that things we could do could be horrendous or evil or dark or impossible to explain: My Lai, for instance’" (Simon, 2000) The footage and acts portrayed are graphic, impossible to enjoy, and all-too-real. Ample attention is paid to facial expressions, and when Mari is finally shot and left to die, the murderous gang are overcome with disgust over what they have done. I would argue that, while a terrible ordeal to sit through, and while somewhat cheapened by it's narrative resolution, which allows for one of the murdered girl's parents to extract revenge (a definite divorce from the realism of the middle section), the way gendered violence is portrayed here is actually a more responsible way of portraying such acts and creates a great deal of empathy with the victims than the altogether less graphic, special-effects heavy dismemberings in Friday the 13th and it's sequels.
In the Friday the 13th series, camp counselors at Camp Crystal Lake are slayed by a murderer, in the first film, Mrs. Voorhees seeking revenge for the drowning death of her young disabled son Jason, and in the sequels, Jason himself seeking revenge for his mother's beheading in the first film of the series. All of the films in the series feature the "final girl" trope, and are relatively scare-free and cliche-prone, existing solely to string together a series of murders and gore-effects, most of which were excised from the films before release so that the film might receive an R-rating. What is troubling is, as stated before, the rationale behind who is murdered, how this murder acts as a substitute for a sexual act, and through whose eyes we view this sexual/violent act through. "[F]rom the viewer's perspective, it is imperative that the killer be male, even though his identity is often unknown until the end of the film; therefore, throughout the film, it is up to the viewers to subjectively decide that the killer is male based on assumption of social norms and the perspective through which filmmakers tell the story." (Brewer, 2009) This assumption is because of how the filmic technique most used- point-of-view, often accompanied by heavy breathing, seeks not only to obscure the identity of the killer, but to put us (and by us I mean the male audience member) in the killer's shoes. I can't help but think of heterosexual pornography, much of which is shot point-of-view, and that which isn't is so preoccupied with portraying the female performer as spectacle that the male performer's face is often kept offscreen for the majority of the sexual act. In contrast to the non-descript nature of the penis-wielding male porn performer or the knife-wielding maniac, the woman onscreen will invariably be lavished with attention- dressed in a revealing manner before being engaged in a violent, penetrative act (notice the slasher most often uses a knife, a poker, or something similarly phallic and thrustable versus, say, a shooting at a victim from a distance, or bopping them over the head with a hammer). As stated by Mulvey (1975) "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Women displayed as object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfield to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to, and signifies male desire." More scary to most straight male audience members, then or least the male filmmakers churning out slasher movies, is the mix of castration-fear and fear-of-rejection that a beautiful woman-object represents to a man in a society increasingly shifting away from patriarchy. Thus it is that a Jason Voorhees is able to allow the male spectator the chance to vicariously lash out violently against the women who represent their weakness/insecurity in a way that mirrors the sex scene in a porn film: there is build up, foreplay, the act itself, followed by a "money shot", only with the woman's blood in place of other bodily fluids, the end result being the spectacle having been "destroyed", humiliated, and made lesser than.
When contrasting the approach to gendered violence in something like Friday the 13th to that of the something a bit more considered like The Last House on the Left, which wants you to empathize with the victim and the terror they experience through gendered violence, it perhaps goes without saying that the latter, for all it's reputation as being obscene and rough and less-acceptable than your Paramount Studios-funded popcorn slasher flick, is actually in-line with the reality of the violence women experience versus the male domination fantasy on display in the former. When I'd sit before the TV screen as a kid with my action figures, I definitely know that one of these films inspired within me a deep revulsion and a recognition that horror exists in the real world and is awful, whereas the other I would generally ignore except to look up and cheer on someone getting a knife rammed through their head or fire poker shoved through their gut. I'm a huge horror fan, but I know I for one am sick of being made to identify with mute, hulking non-entities whose value system (and it's accordant hypocrisy) is not that far removed from your average Trump voter! I'm also sick of this idea that the "final girl" trope is some kind of subversive feminist statement: yes, there are instances where a good argument can be made for this, but if the woman's survival generally hinges on the fact that she's "saving herself for marriage" or that she doesn't indulge in "masculine" vices like drinking, how feminist a statement is that trope really?
Works Cited
Biller,
A. (2014, January 14). The Misogyny of the Modern Slasher Film.
Anna's Blog.
http://annabillersblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-misogyny-of-modern-slasher-film.html.
Brewer,
C. (2009). "The Stereotypic Portrayal of Women in Slasher Films:
Then Versus Now" (2009). LSU Master's Theses. 56.
https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/56
Mulvey,
L. (1975) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6-18.
https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6
Simon,
A [director]. (2000). The American Nightmare [DVD]. Minerva
Pictures.
Rovner,
J. (2021, April 13). Juvenile Life Without Parole: An Overview. The
Sentencing Project.
https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/juvenile-life-without-parole/.
