Wickham Clayton (Eds.) - Style and Form in The Hollywood Slasher Film-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2015)

Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film
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Style and Form in the
Hollywood Slasher Film
Edited by
Wickham Clayton
University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK
Introduction, Selection and editorial content © Wickham Clayton 2015
Chapters © Contributors 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-49646-1
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First published 2015 by

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This book is dedicated to Wicklet,
the person who sneaks into my room at night
Contents
List of Figures and Tables ix

Acknowledgements x
Notes on Contributors xi
introduction: The Collection Awakes 1
Wickham Clayton
Part I The Birth, Death and Revenge of the

Hollywood Slasher 15
1 (In)Stability of Point of View in When a Stranger Calls
and Eyes of a Stranger 17
David Roche
2 Undermining the Moneygrubbers, or: How I Learned
to Stop Worrying and Love Friday the 13th Part V 37
Wickham Clayton
3 I Framed Freddy: Functional Aesthetics in the
A Nightmare on Elm Street Series 51
Karra Shimabukuro
4 Candyman and Saw: Reimagining the Slasher Film
through Urban Gothic 67
Stacey Abbott
Part II Older, Darker and Self-Aware 79

5 Franchise Legacy and Neo-slasher Conventions
in Halloween H20 81
Andrew Patrick Nelson
6 Roses Are Red, Violence Is Too: Exploring Stylistic
Excess in Valentine 92
Mark Richard Adams
7 Puzzles, Contraptions and the Highly Elaborate Moment:
The Inevitability of Death in the Grand Slasher Narratives
of the Final Destination and Saw Series of Films 106
Ian Conrich
viii Contents
8 The Killer Who Never Was: Complex Storytelling,

the Saw Saga and the Shifting Moral Alignment
of Puzzle Film Horror 118
Matthew Freeman
9 Resurrecting Carrie 131
Gary Bettinson
Part III Form versus Theory 147

10 Reframing Parody and Intertextuality in Scream:
Formal and Theoretical Approaches to the
‘Postmodern’ Slasher 149
Fran Pheasant-Kelly
11 Crises of Identification in the Supernatural Slasher: The
Resurrection of the Supernatural Slasher Villain 161
Jessica Balanzategui
12 ‘Come on, Boy, Bring It!’: Embracing Queer Erotic
Aesthetics in Marcus Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre (2003) 180
Darren Elliott-Smith
13 Beyond Surveillance: Questions of the Real in the
Neopostmodern Horror Film 195
Dana Och
14 The Slasher, the Final Girl and the Anti-Denouement 213
Janet Staiger
Bibliography 229
Filmography 240
Index 247
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
0.1 The Paramount Studios logo from Psycho (1960;

dir Alfred Hitchock). The image, unlike the typical
contemporary logo, utilizes in its foreground the
horizontal line motif that appears both in the opening
credits and throughout the film xvi
1.1 When a Stranger Calls (1979; dir Fred Walton): Jill
Johnson (Carol Kane), framed by the window, the
high-angle shot suggesting the invisible stranger’s
potential omniscience 25
1.2 Eyes of a Stranger (1981; dir Ken Wiederhorn):
Tracy Harris (Jennifer Jason Leigh), blind to the
stranger (John DiSanti) whose voyeurism is now
emphasized through the ironic use of
frame-within-the-frame composition 34
2.1 Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985;
dir Danny Steinmann): Demon (Miguel A. Nunez Jr),
terrorized before dying in tears, like multiple
men in this film 48
3.1 A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
(1987; dir Chuck Russell): Representation of
the Elm Street house 61
3.2 A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987;
dir Chuck Russell): Climax in the hall of mirrors 63
6.1 Valentine (2001; dir Jamie Blanks): Bird’s-eye view
of Paige trapped in the Jacuzzi as the Cherub
attacks with a drill 100
6.2 Valentine (2001; dir Jamie Blanks): Lily becomes lost
in a maze of coloured screens, noise and body parts 103
Tables
14.1 The formula 216

14.2 Textual explanations for causes of disorder 219
14.3 Heroes/heroines and endings 220
ix
Acknowledgements
This project has been around for the better part of three years, so there
are many people to thank, for better or worse. I originally wanted to title
this book ‘From Hell’s Heart I Stab at Thee’: Style and Form in the Hollywood
Slasher. My Moby Dick reference certainly wasn’t marketable, but I love
it too much to let it disappear, so there you have it. I’d like to thank my
contributors, both those who have been attached and waiting patiently
for the last couple of years and those who came into the project within
a much more sensible period of time. I’d also like to thank Brigid Cherry,
Liz Dixon and Emilio Audissino for their hard work.
I’d like to especially thank Chris Penfold at Palgrave Macmillan for
finding this book interesting enough to actively work towards bringing
it to publication.
Thank you to those scholars who have been closely involved in help-
ing me to expose my excited gibberish about my love for the cinema
to a larger (sometimes captive) audience: Stacey Abbott (again – I can’t
thank her enough), Sarah Harman, Mikel Koven, Iain Robert Smith, Todd
Berliner, Carol Walker, Andy Small, Claire Barwell, Michael Chanan, Paul
Sutton, Bethan Jones, Johnny Walker and on and on. I also thank Sarah
Wharton, whose work inspired me and informed some of my analyses to
no small degree.
I have many friends in (from) America (and beyond) who have
cheered me on and continue to do so. Among them (and sadly I will
exclude some due to forgetfulness): J. P. DeMario, Jessica Finney, John
Mark Davidson, D. Merricks, Martha Lynn Corner, Shannon Jackson,
Jason Russell, Joe Ketchum, Drew Johnston and a bevy of others.
Georgia Humphreys and her family have provided a significant
amount of moral support, advice and general help on this project and
frankly, my life – all of it welcome and undeserved.
My family in America, my mom and dad particularly – though my
sister Whitney and my niece Catie shouldn’t be excluded – have all pro-
vided a significant amount of encouragement and support, moral and
monetary, to ensure I could afford to survive to the point of publication.
Here’s hoping that wasn’t their end goal.
Finally, I’d like to thank my son, Wicklet, for too many reasons to
count.
x
Notes on Contributors
Stacey Abbott is a reader in Film and Television Studies at the University

of Roehampton. She is the author of Celluloid Vampires (2007), Angel: TV
Milestone (2009) and co-author, with Lorna Jowett, of TV Horror: The Dark
Side of the Small Screen (2012). She has published chapters on blockbuster
horror films, the hybrid horror/science-fiction films of George Romero
and Larry Cohen and the use of special effects in demonic possession
films, as well as numerous chapters examining the development of hor-
ror within television. She is currently writing a book entitled Undead
Apocalypse, which looks at the 21st-century vampire and zombie.
Mark Richard Adams received his first-class BA with honours from

Southampton Solent University along with a dissertation award before
going on to obtain a masters with merit at Brunel University in Cult
Film and Television. Following a successful viva, he is working on the
final alterations for his thesis, ‘Unpacking the Industrial, Cultural and
Historical Contexts of Doctor Who’s Fan-Producers’, which was funded
by a Brunel scholarship. This study includes an examination of the insti-
tutional contexts of fan-producers and a historical study of the concept
of authorship and authority over a text. Publications include a chapter
on masochism in Screening Twilight: Critical Approaches to a Cinematic
Phenomenon (2014) and a forthcoming chapter on queer monsters for an
anthology on the works of Clive Barker.
Jessica Balanzategui is a doctoral candidate at The University of Mel-

bourne. She has taught film, media and literature studies at James Cook
University and The University of Melbourne. Her doctoral thesis explores
the construction of uncanny child characters in a recent assemblage of
transnational horror films from America, Spain, and Japan. She has pub-
lished work on the uncanny child, madness and asylums in the horror
film in refereed journals and has presented at a number of international
conferences. She is currently editing a special issue of Refractory: A Jour-
nal of Entertainment Media titled ‘Transmedia Horror’.
Gary Bettinson lectures in Film Studies at Lancaster University. He has

published on various aspects of formalism and poetics in New Review of
Film and Television, Film Studies: An International Review, Asian Cinema
xi
xii Notes on Contributors
and several edited collections, including Puzzle Films: Complex Storytell-

ing in Contemporary Cinema (ed. Warren Buckland), Hollywood Puzzle
Films (ed. Warren Buckland) and David Lynch/In Theory (ed. Francois-
Xavier Gleyzon). He is currently preparing two anthologies: The Poetics
of Chinese Cinema (co-edited with James Udden) and Hong Kong Horror
Cinema (co-edited with Daniel Martin).
Wickham Clayton is a writer and lecturer at the University for the

Creative Arts. He is contributing co-editor to Screening Twilight: Critical
Approaches to a Cinematic Phenomenon (with Sarah Harman, 2014) and
the Summer 2014 special issue of Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media
dedicated to the adaptive relationships between film/TV and board
games (with Bethan Jones). Wickham is currently developing his PhD
thesis into a monograph for publication about the aesthetics of perspec-
tive in the Friday the 13th franchise.
Ian Conrich is Associate Head of School: Research at the University of

South Australia. Previously, he was Professor of Film and Visual Culture
at the University of Derby, Honorary Fellow at the University of Essex
and Founding Director of the Centre for New Zealand Studies, Birkbeck,
University of London. He was the 2005 MacGeorge Visiting Scholar at
the University of Melbourne, and in 2005–06 he was a visiting scholar at
the University of Oxford in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthro-
pology. In 2008 he was named Air New Zealand New Zealander of the
Year. Chair of the New Zealand Studies Association since 1997, he is an
editor of the Journal of British Cinema and Television, associate editor of
Film and Philosophy and an advisory board member of Interactive Media
and Studies in Australasian Cinema. He has been a guest editor of the Har-
vard Review, Post Script, Asian Cinema and Studies in Travel Writing. The
author of Studies in New Zealand Cinema (2009), Easter Island, Myths, and
Popular Culture (2011) and New Zealand Cinema (2014) and co-author
of The Cinema of Sri Lanka: South Asian Film in Texts and Contexts (2015)
and Gothic Dissections in Film and Literature: The Body in Parts (2015), he
is an author, editor or co-editor of a further 13 books.
Darren Elliott-Smith is a senior lecturer in Film and Television at

University of Hertfordshire. He holds a PhD from Royal Holloway,
University of London. His thesis was titled ‘Off-Cuts: Gay Masculinities
in Queer Horror Film and Television since 2000’. He has published several
chapters on LGBTQ horror film and television focusing on avant-garde,
cult and mainstream titles in edited collections for I.B. Tauris, ECW and
McFarland Press and has previously worked as a film programmer for
Notes on Contributors xiii
the BFI and at several film venues and festivals. He has a forthcoming
monograph based on his research with I.B. Tauris in 2016 provisionally
titled ‘Gay Masculinities at the Margins of Queer Horror Film and Televi-
sion’. His research interests include gender, sexuality and erotic aesthet-
ics on screen, psychoanalysis in film and television, the consumption of
cult/trash television and film and adaptation and appropriation in the
moving image.
Matthew Freeman is a visiting lecturer in Media and Communication

Studies at Birmingham City University and holds a PhD in Culture, Film
and Media Studies from the University of Nottingham. He is the author
(with Carlos A. Scolari and Paolo Bertetti) of Transmedia Archaeology: Sto-
rytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). His first sole-authored monograph, titled
Wizards, Jungles & Men of Steel: The Industrial History of Transmedia Sto-
rytelling, is under contract with New York University Press. He has also
published in journals such as The International Journal of Cultural Stud-
ies, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and International Journal
of Communication.
Andrew Patrick Nelson is Assistant Professor of Film History and Criti-

cal Studies at Montana State University. He is the author of Still in the
Saddle: The Hollywood Western, 1969–1980 (2015).
Dana Och is Lecturer in English and Film Studies at the University of

Pittsburgh. She writes frequently on horror, including publications on
Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, becoming-
animal in the post-colonial zombie comedy and holiday horror films.
She recently co-edited the anthology Transnational Horror Across Visual
Media: Fragmented Bodies (2014).
Fran Pheasant-Kelly is MA Course Leader and Reader in Film and Tel-

evision Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, UK, where she is
also co-director of the Centre for Film, Media, Discourse and Culture.
Her research centres on fantasy, 9/11, abjection and space, which form
the basis for a co-edited collection Spaces of the Cinematic Home: Behind
the Screen Door (2015) and two monographs, Abject Spaces in American
Cinema: Institutions, Identity and Psychoanalysis in Film (2013) and Fan-
tasy Film Post 9/11 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Other recent publica-
tions include ‘Between Knowingness and Innocence: Child Ciphers in
Marnie and The Birds’ in Debbie Olson (ed.) Children in the Films of Alfred
Hitchcock (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and ‘Reframing Gender and Visual
xiv Notes on Contributors
Pleasure: New Signifying Practices in Contemporary Cinema’ in Gilad

Padva and Nurit Buchweitz (eds) Sensational Pleasures in Cinema, Litera-
ture and Visual Culture: The Phallic Eye (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
David Roche is an associate professor at the Université Toulouse Jean

Jaurès, France where he teaches American film and literature. He is the
author of Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s: Why Don’t
They Do It Like They Used To? (2014) and L’Imagination malsaine: Russell
Banks, Raymond Carver, David Cronenberg, Bret Easton Ellis, David Lynch
(2007), the editor of Approaches to Film and Reception Theories (with
Christophe Gelly, 2012) and Conversations with Russell Banks (2012), and
he has published articles on Tim Burton, David Cronenberg, Emir Kus-
turica, Sergio Leone, David Lynch, Edgar Allan Poe, George A. Romero
and Quentin Tarantino.
Karra Shimabukuro is a PhD student in British and Irish Literary Studies

at the University of New Mexico. Her research focuses on how folkloric
characters are represented in literature and popular culture – specifically
the devil. She regularly writes reviews for The Journal of Popular Culture
and The Journal of Folklore Research Review and is a regular presenter at
the Popular Culture National Conference. Her most recent work deals
with the liminal space of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the paratext of its
board game in Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media, and Freddy Krueger
folkloric roots as a bogeyman in Studies in Popular Culture.
Janet Staiger is the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor Emeritus in

Communication and Professor Emeritus of Women’s and Gender Stud-
ies in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas
at Austin.
Figure 0.1 The Paramount Studios logo from Psycho (1960; dir Alfred Hitchock).
The image, unlike the typical contemporary logo, utilizes in its foreground the
horizontal line motif that appears both in the opening credits and throughout
the film
introduction
The Collection Awakes
Wickham Clayton
Leon Trotsky (1923/1996) once warned of the dangers of formalism. I’d

like to think that if he’d seen Friday the 13th Part V, Trotsky would have
changed his mind.
While this may not be the case, I contend that a) formalism is a valuable
methodology that can be utilized to understand a range of phenomena
within film studies, and b) within discourse on the slasher subgenre of
horror, and most especially the Hollywood slasher film, formalism is con-
spicuously absent. Although academic work on the slasher film has been
present since the 1980s, the focus, and praise, has been primarily on the
stand-out independent films frequently linked to auteurs, which display
the flexibility, non-institutionalized freedom and often political impetus
to create overtly subversive works that respond to or reflect the culture
and conditions under which they appeared. Where form appears, it is
often infused with interpretational significance that may or may not be
either intentional or applicable. Furthermore, it is the Hollywood product,
the texts created or distributed within the confines of the larger for-profit
wings of the industry, overtly developed to capitalize on trends and turn
a profit, that either broadly stand as contrasting examples to these ‘great’
works, that is dissected as emblematic of the socio-political, cultural or
psychological status quo, or is ignored altogether.
While I personally know some young academics currently working to fill
sections of this gap in scholarly writing, this book aims to simultaneously
address all of these elements. The chapters in this book provide examples of
the way in which this particular method (formalism) can be used to study
these particular films (Hollywood slashers) and ultimately demonstrate that
these elements do not have to stand opposite of, or in isolation from, the-
ory, interpretation or non-Hollywood slashers. Although I speak highly of
formalism, there is a (still) ongoing debate, as there was in Trotsky’s day,
1
2 Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film
about the utility and moral propriety of formalism, which I will first address
to contextualize the position of this book within this debate.
The style and form . . .
Formalism, sometimes called neo-formalism, is taken from the principles

of Russian formalism, which was created as a form of literary analysis
and remodelled for application to cinema (Thompson 1988, 5–6). Much
groundwork has been laid here, particularly by David Bordwell, Kristin
Thompson, Stephen Prince and Noël Carroll. I was personally taught dur-
ing my undergraduate degree by Todd Berliner, whose book Hollywood
Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema (2010) opens with a staunch and
fairly aggressive defence and call to use of formalism. Berliner’s aggres-
sive defence is not unwarranted. Formalism is the subject of an ongoing
methodological debate between those who practise the method and those
who feel it is both practically and morally contrary to modes of cultural
analysis. I have more extensively discussed this debate in my PhD thesis
(Clayton 2013), but I will here outline the key points of debate.
The major arguments against formalism are outlined below:
1 Formalism is a method that is too cold, clinical and dull for an
approach to the arts, which are designed to elicit passion and
emotion: ‘The effort to set art free from life, to declare it a craft
self-sufficient unto itself, devitalizes and kills art’ (Trotsky 1923/1996,
57).
2 By its very nature, formalism cannot engage with questions of value,
which is of utmost importance in discussing art: ‘It is of course the
case that there are a variety of sociological and formal enquiries, from
Moretti’s distant readings to Bordwell and Thomson’s (sic.) statistical
analysis of classic Hollywood, which must, by their very methodol-
ogy, ignore questions of value’ (McCabe 2011, 9).
3 By attempting not to adopt, bare or communicate an ideology,
formalism either works contrary to socio-political/economic posi-
tions that are more progressive or it upholds dominant ideologies:
‘Although Žižek finds it necessary to address science as “knowledge in
the Real” (i.e., Marxism) and therefore criticizes some of the reigning
practices in cultural studies, particularly a certain variety of historical
relativism, he considers this silent passing over of the tough ideo-
logical questions by post-Theorists to be somewhat of a spontane-
ous ideological attachment to the reigning political power’ (Flisfeder
2012, 90; parentheses in original).
4 By focusing on microcosmic elements of film form, formalists
risk missing, and failing to engage with, the ‘big picture’ or larger
introduction 3
‘meaning’, even to the point where formalists ignore basic repre-

sentative indicators (i.e., this image is a series of patterns, lines and
colours, not a mountain at sunset): ‘This focusing on the way of talk-
ing, rather than on the reality of what is talked about, is sometimes
taken to indicate that we mean by literature a kind of self-referential
language, a language which talks about itself’ (Eagleton 2008, 7).1
Some of these arguments are accurate and some either misrepresenta-
tive or misunderstanding of the aims of formalism. I cannot claim to
speak for the other contributors to this collection, but I shall here speak
for myself (evoking some research) to support my position as a propo-
nent of formalism, and hence the purpose of this book, as well as the
bulk of my other work.
Regarding the first point, I deem it both accurate and not. Ultimately,
the question of formalism’s effect on the reader or the writer of such
analysis is highly subjective. I love observing film form, and I find it
exciting and fascinating, though I know people that find it tedious and
unenjoyable. This, however, is beside the point. As an academic, I find
it of utmost importance to understand the medium, how it communi-
cates ideas and concepts, and why we love certain texts, groups of texts
or the medium as a whole. Formalism is central to discovering this and
absolutely essential to understanding any medium. Shakespearean critic
Stephen Booth responds to the function of criticism, more precisely
interpretive criticism, in the humanities, saying,
. . . academic criticism, which would do well to join the ‘pure’

sciences and revel in having no motive ulterior to the desire to know,
is ordinarily all too ambitious of producing practical consequence. It
is a criticism that implies, seems indeed to assume, that critical atten-
tions make literary works work better (1990, 262).
Whether you agree with or even approve of Booth’s damning accu-

sations against the state of academic criticism (as I do) or not, his ini-
tial claim, that criticism should take a scientific approach, is worthy of
consideration and places works of art well within the realm of valid
academic observation. However, Trotsky’s claim that art has an inher-
ent vitality and life, a specious claim at best, is directly contradicted
by Booth, who claims that ‘imaginative literature is frivolous. Deniably
frivolous, however’ (263).2 It is, of course, this deniability that causes the
fundamental rift between formalists and ‘theorists’.
In considering McCabe’s statement that formalism is unable to discuss
questions of value, this indicates, to my mind, a working within a set of
valuation criteria that I find imperceptible. Berliner’s Hollywood Incoherent
is fully dedicated to looking at a decade where Hollywood was produc-

ing films such as The French Connection (1971; dir William Friedkin), The
Exorcist (1973; dir William Friedkin), Nashville (1975; dir Robert Altman)
and Taxi Driver (1976; dir Martin Scorsese), which are still loved by audi-
ences and considered among the greatest films ever produced, and the
formal characteristics that would explain their longevity. According to
Berliner, in reference to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972),
‘if Francis Ford Coppola could take a book by Mario Puzo commonly
regarded as pulp (even by Puzo) and, with minimal thematic changes,
turn it into what most commentators and filmgoers consider one of the
best movies of the decade, then ideology and social relevance cannot be
fundamental to artistic value’ (2010, 17). A look at davidbordwell.net
will show a range of blog entries by Bordwell and Thompson, together
and individually, not only looking at considerations of form but how
form can be used to create valuations of certain texts. Indeed, establish-
ing value is one of the more significant uses of formalism.
The third point, with regards to upholding dominant ideologies, is
somewhat justified to date. However, David Bordwell highlights the lim-
ited scope of what Žižek appears to deem the appropriate ideology: ‘For
our theorists, politics equals left politics equals the glory years of May
1968 theory. Marx is always invoked, with nods to Eurocommunism,
Althusser, and, surprisingly, Mao’ (2005b). Bordwell brings into question
the ideological scope of theorists opposed to formalism on ideological
grounds. Booth considers theorists with such ideological preconcep-
tions as ‘critics who usually end up accusing the past of being the past
and [ . . . ] triumphantly accusing the culture that produced a work of
being the culture we already know it to be’ (265). Counter-attacks aside,
Berliner is forthright with his position:
A colleague once accused me of excluding non-dominant, non-

normative experiences in my scholarship. I instinctively sought to
defend myself against the accusation, until I realized that she was
right. I do sometimes exclude non-dominant and non-normative
experiences, just as scholars such as [Janet] Staiger sometimes exclude
the dominant, normative experiences that I want to illuminate in this
book. My specialization here offers a way to understand the means by
which a movie stimulates shared experiences for spectators’ (20–1).
Here, Berliner is appropriating a mode of analysis to understand, as sci-

entifically as possible, common reception experiences. Kristin Thomp-
son, however, fully rebuffs this accusation, saying, ‘Before neoformalism
introduction 5
is condemned as conservative, however, it should be noted that its

view of the purpose of art avoids the traditional concept of aesthetic
contemplation as passive. The spectator’s relationship to the artwork
becomes active’ (10). That said, within this book I provide an outlet for
critics, theorists even (including Staiger), to use formalism to support
their readings for their dominant, non-dominant, normative or non-
normative positions, and many of the contributors, in agreement with
Thompson, consider active reception within their analyses.
Finally, regarding Eagleton’s statement about the myopic rigidity of
formalism, it must be admitted that he refers specifically to Russian for-
malism. However, as Kristin Thompson states,
Though it is frequently assumed that the Russian Formalists advo-

cated an art-for-art’s-sake position, this was not at all the case. Rather,
they found an alternative to a communications model of art – and
avoided a high/low art split as well – by distinguishing between prac-
tical, everyday perception and specifically aesthetic, non-practical
perception. For neoformalists, then, art is a realm separate from all
other types of cultural artifacts because it presents a unique set of
perceptual requirements. Art is set apart from the everyday world, in
which we use our perception for practical ends (1988, 8).3
Furthermore, it is important to point out that, within cognitivism and

historical poetics as branches of formalism, contexts are absolutely nec-
essary. Cognitivism engages with the psychological processes of being
an active reader of a film, historical poetics with film texts developing
within an overarching aesthetic continuum. Considering lines, shapes,
colour, sound and so on without meaning or context is impractical,
impossible even, within these branches. And while these arguments may
not fully quell the arguments against a study of form, I hope this book
demonstrates to a certain extent, even if you’re not wholly converted to
Booth’s ‘scientific’ approach, that form and theory are, at the very least,
not necessarily mutually exclusive. Furthermore, I hope that this book
demonstrates that formalism doesn’t necessarily require a high/low art
split even within the same medium, as can be seen through the follow-
ing examples . . .
. . . of the Hollywood slasher film
There are a few key works which already address the slasher, and many
of the chapters in this collection respond to and engage with these
works. One of the most (if not the most significant) work to date on
the slasher film is Carol J. Clover’s book Men, Women, and Chain Saws:
Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992). Clover’s book aims to engage
with the assumption that the slasher is a voyeuristic source of violent
male misogynistic pleasure. Clover, who fully grants that these are far
from progressive or feminist texts, argues that these films allow for fluid
gender identification, where male viewers willingly identify with female
characters, particularly with the ‘Final Girl’, the primarily female char-
acter who survives until the end and dispatches or escapes the killer. The
term ‘Final Girl’ still circulates within the common parlance of slasher
discourse.
While Clover’s is extraordinarily significant, there are other key
works on the genre. Robin Wood, in his book Hollywood from Vietnam
to Reagan . . . and Beyond (2003) includes a chapter ‘Horror in the 80s’
which argues that, unlike the radical liberal commentary provided by
1970s horror cinema, the 1980s (particularly the slashers which this
book takes as its primary subject) depict a politically reactionary, sexu-
ally and socially repressive world view, reflective of mainstream Rea-
ganite culture. I must say, I disagree. In 1984, John McCarty published
Splatter Movies: Breaking the Last Taboo of the Screen, detailing the his-
torical trend in cinema to show graphic, explicit violence, containing
a significant early historical account, and defence, of the slasher film.
Vera Dika, in her book Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and
the Films of the Stalker Cycle (1990), isolates the structural and generic
formula of the ‘stalker’ film – Dika argues that ‘slasher’ is a misnomer,
as the bulk of the narrative consists of characters being stalked, not
slashed – and how these films function individually and can be char-
acterized. Finally, Adam Rockoff, in Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of
the Slasher Film, 1978–1986, and an anonymously directed documentary
eponymously titled, historically details the rise and decline of the first
stalker cycle, demonstrating its later influence. While this is not compre-
hensive, these are the key works that have laid much of the theoretical
groundwork on the films this book discusses.
The slasher film, as a subgenre of horror, has formal, aesthetic and
generic roots dating almost as far back as history itself. From early
experiments in literal first-person camerawork to German expression-
ism’s development of an abstract and all-encompassing approach to
rendering mood, emotion and perspective – which is notably most
often associated with early horror cinema – the overall general format
of the slasher is the result of a cumulative effect of aesthetic devel-
opment.4 However, three key films released in 1960 are attributed as
introduction 7
significant forbears to the slasher: Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face

(Les Yeux Sans Visage; 1960), Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) and
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).5 These films contained many signif-
icant narrative elements (multiple sequences dedicated solely to the
depiction of specified modes of murder, victims being stalked, sym-
pathetic killers, attempts to display visceral bodily mutilation) and
thematic elements (strong focus on voyeurism and either suggested
or explicit consideration of psychoanalysis to understand transgressive
behaviour) which still proliferate within the various current iterations
of the slasher film.
While certain films, like The Honeymoon Killers (1969; dir Leonard Kas-
tle), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974; dir Tobe Hooper), Black Christ-
mas (1974; dir Bob Clark) and even Jaws (1975; dir Steven Spielberg) and
Carrie (1976; dir Brian De Palma), can be seen as early prototypes of the
slasher, as well as the individual auteurist styles of Alfred Hitchcock and
Italian giallo film-makers Mario Bava and Dario Argento, it was John
Carpenter’s 1978 Hitchcock-inspired film Halloween that is considered
the first slasher proper (Rockoff 2002, 61). Carpenter’s film, produced and
distributed independently on a $300,000 budget (50) acted as a template
to films that would later be categorized as ‘slashers’.6 Halloween proved
an unexpected and unprecedented success, making $50 million (50)
at the box office. Hollywood, seeing profitable potential in a narrative
and stylistic formula, began developing and purchasing for distribution
films that adhered to this template. This is where Style and Form in the
Hollywood Slasher Film begins, and I will here outline a loose working
chronology (perhaps not widely agreed upon, but which will be used for
the purposes of this book) of the slasher subgenre as it appears in this
book and how the chapters within address this chronology.
Contents
The slasher, according to Richard Nowell in his book Blood Money: A

History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle, contains a story structure char-
acterized by ‘a shadowy blade-wielding killer responding to an event
by stalking and murdering the members of a youth group before the
threat s/he poses is neutralised’ (2011, 20). Similarly, Clover describes
the slasher as ‘the immensely generative story of a psychokiller who
slashes to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until he
is subdued or killed, usually by the one girl who survives’ (1992, 21).
While Dika does not contest such summaries, she feels that the focus is
overtly misplaced. Dika writes,
Although many of the films identified in this way have been called
‘slasher’ films (thus placing the defining characteristic on the cen-
tral narrative action) the term ‘stalker’ film (which will be used here)
alludes instead to the act of looking and especially to the distinctive
set of point-of-view shots employed by these films (1990, 14).
Ultimately, there is still a clear idea of the general narrative template

for the slasher, which it will be called here, and this book is dedicated
to showing how this narrative model is rendered in different texts and
what film style can tell us about these movies.
Nowell makes the claim that while Halloween may have been influen-
tial, the scale of its influence has been overestimated, and the first film
of the first slasher film cycle is definitively Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday
the 13th (1980, 9). Cunningham, overtly influenced by both Halloween
and Mario Bava (Grove 2005, 11–12) created a film explicitly intended
to capitalize on the success of Halloween.7 While Friday the 13th stands
as a significant text for the subgenre, particularly due to its success-
ful recombination of Halloween’s elements (Dika 1990, 64) as evinced
through financial profits, it is by no means the first film to have that
idea. Indeed, too many films modelling Halloween’s form were released
within months of Friday the 13th, both before and after (e.g., Paul Lynch’s
Prom Night [1980] which was released two months after Friday the 13th),
for it to be determined the first film to capitalize on Halloween’s success,
though to Nowell’s credit, the success of Friday the 13th was unseen by its
immediate contemporaries.
The first section of this book, ‘The Birth, Death and Revenge of the
Hollywood Slasher’, begins with this period of significant dissemina-
tion of slasher texts. In the first chapter, ‘(In)Stability of Point of View in
When a Stranger Calls and Eyes of a Stranger’, David Roche looks at these
two films, the former (1979; dir Fred Walton) released before Friday the
13th, and the latter (1981; dir Ken Wiederhorn) released after, to critically
examine cognitive conceptions of point of view within what he calls the
‘slasher-thriller hybrid’. Roche argues that the destabilized point of view,
a key trope of the slasher film, illuminates the difference between the
slasher and the thriller, both of which are founded on a similar narrative
premise.
These films represent the period from 1979–81, when the slasher was
extremely prolific. Friday the 13th Part II (1981; dir Steve Miner), Hal-
loween II (1981; dir Rick Rosenthal), Happy Birthday to Me (1981; dir J.
Lee Thompson), Terror Train (1980; dir Roger Spottiswoode), The Burning
(1981; dir Tony Maylam), My Bloody Valentine (1981; dir George Mihalka),
introduction 9
Maniac (1980; dir William Lustig), The Funhouse (1981; dir Tobe Hooper)
and The Driller Killer (1979; dir Abel Ferrara) is but a shortlist of the more
significant titles made independently, by minor studios, and by major
studios in the genre during those three years. Slashers were still a sub-
genre that met with significant success in 1982 – the year that Friday the
13th Part III 3D (dir Steve Miner) was released, which introduced Jason’s
iconographic hockey mask. During this period, a tendency for sequeliza-
tion emerged, as can be seen through the annual release between 1980
and 1982 of a Friday the 13th film, as well as a sequel to Halloween in
1981, and even a second sequel, Halloween III: Season of the Witch (dir
Tommy Lee Wallace) in 1982, which retained the franchise link without
any narrative connection to the previous two. The following year, 1983,
was another successful year for the slasher, with a notable diminishment
in 1984 of both the number of slashers made and their box-office tak-
ings. This was the year that the Friday the 13th franchise tried, for the first
time, to complete the film series with Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
(dir Joseph Zito). The following year saw the attempt to continue the
series: Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (dir Danny Steinmann). It is this
film that is of concern in Chapter 2.
‘Undermining the Moneygrubbers, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love Friday the 13th Part V’, apart from providing a requisite Kubrick
reference, is a defence of this oft-ignored and derided (though increasingly
becoming a cult favourite) film. Though the profitable, but disappoint-
ing, performance at the box office, as well as recent online fan reviews,
are partially indicative of dislike of this entry in the Friday the 13th series,
A New Beginning, I argue, is a bold piece of subversive film-making that
has rarely been equalled either in the slasher or in other genres, based on
an analysis of generic and narrative development, characterization and
aesthetics. A New Beginning failed to significantly influence or help revive
the slasher film; the previous year provided a text that did.
In 1984, Wes Craven released A Nightmare on Elm Street – a slasher film
infusing overt supernatural elements – through the mini-major studio
New Line Cinema, which led to tremendous box-office success and the
strengthening of the studio, leading it towards eventual ‘major’ status
(Rockoff 2002, 156) and a revitalization of the slasher film. The film
spawned five sequels between 1985 and 1991, a self-referential follow-
up in 1994, a franchise crossover with the Friday the 13th franchise in
2003 and a remake in 2010. Karra Shimabukuro turns her attention
to the original film and its first five sequels in Chapter 3, ‘I Framed
Freddy: Functional Aesthetics in the A Nightmare on Elm Street Series’.
Taking Bordwell’s outline of the properties of modernist film-making,
Shimabukuro demonstrates how these films adhere to these qualities,

while simultaneously demonstrating how the franchise itself dictates a
form of authorship, with stylistic qualities being anchored to the need
for narrative consistency and continuity between films.
During this time, there were not only more A Nightmare on Elm Street
films but also three more Friday the 13th films, two more Halloween films,
two sequels to The Slumber Party Massacre (1982; dir Amy Jones) and two
sequels to Sleepaway Camp (1983; dir Robert Hiltzik) among others. Dur-
ing the early 1990s, there were some interesting, if not always successful,
experiments with the slasher format. The aforementioned self-referential
follow-up to the A Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, New Nightmare (1994;
dir Wes Craven), saw the return of Craven as director, creating a film
about the actors from the original film – Heather Langenkamp, Johnny
Depp and even Craven playing fictionalized versions of themselves –
dealing with the ‘actual’ dream monster that inspired the first film. In
1993, the Friday the 13th series was picked up by New Line with the second
attempt to end the series, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (dir Adam
Marcus), featuring a Jason that is a body-travelling demon worm. Hallow-
een 666: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995; dir Joe Chappelle) explained
that Michael Myers was in fact being controlled by a pagan cult all along.
However, amongst these films, which had varying levels of success, one
film appeared that is still acknowledged as a significant film of the genre
(Worland 2007, 107); it is one of Stacey Abbott’s two case studies in
Chapter 4. In ‘Candyman and Saw: Reimagining the Slasher Film through
Urban Gothic’, Abbott looks both at this period and ahead 12 years, ana-
lysing stylistic elements of Candyman (1992; dir Bernard Rose) and James
Wan’s 2004 film Saw to demonstrate how these films, each linked to the
slasher subgenre, utilize qualities of urban Gothic.
While the slasher seemed to have waned in the early 1990s, in 1996,
Wes Craven continued his experiments in self-referentiality with the suc-
cessful film Scream, a slasher film where the killer is highly and explicitly
aware of the tropes of the slasher, and the potential victims must be
aware of these tropes in order to survive. Valerie Wee has dubbed this
tendency of the slasher ‘hyperpostmodernism’ and has noted the Scream
series’ import in this tendency (2005). This period marks the beginning
of Part II of this book: ‘Older, Darker and Self-Aware’. Scream resulted in
three sequels, and in its immediate wake through the rest of the decade,
slasher films were released that either emulated Scream’s tendency to
metanarration, such as Urban Legend (1998; dir Jamie Blanks), or took
the film as a cue for revised interest in the original slasher template,
such as I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997; dir Jim Gillespie).8
introduction 11
Additionally, some of the original series were revived in this period and
featured the production and delayed release of the tenth Friday the 13th
film, Jason X (2001; dir James Isaac).
Another instalment of a long-running film series is Halloween H20:
Twenty Years Later (1998; dir Steve Miner), the case study at the centre of
Chapter 5. Andrew Patrick Nelson, in ‘Franchise Legacy and Neo-slasher
Conventions in Halloween H20’ argues that the seventh Halloween film
doesn’t fully satisfy the tendency towards self-referentiality in slasher
films in the years following Scream. In Nelson’s words, ‘Rather than a
straightforward example of the late-1990s slasher, it is more accurate
to describe H20 as an attempt to mediate between the competing influ-
ences of the Halloween franchise and the self-conscious neo-slasher cycle
of horror films exemplified by Scream’.
While Halloween H20 entertains both metanarrative and merely refer-
ential considerations in its construction, Chapter 6, ‘Roses Are Red, Vio-
lence Is Too: Exploring Stylistic Excess in Valentine’, provides an analysis
of a film that utilizes slasher tropes but includes an inventive approach
towards style. Mark Richard Adams looks at Jamie Blanks’ 2001 film Val-
entine, arguing that, whereas slashers tend to utilize a stark stylistic form,
this film adopts an excess of style contrary to its generic forbears. Adams
argues that this unique approach to slasher aesthetic makes Valentine a
film worthy of academic consideration.
From this period until the present, it can be argued that the slasher has
generated some individual tendencies within the subgenre and has even
strongly influenced closely related subgenres of horror. In 2003, director
Marcus Nispel, through Michael Bay’s production company Platinum
Dunes, created the remake The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was
distributed by New Line Cinema. This film’s profitability spurred a still
ongoing tendency to remake earlier horror, slasher and slasher-related
properties, many through Platinum Dunes, which will be addressed in
later chapters. In 2004, another significant tendency within the slasher
appears: ‘torture horror’, marked through the release of Saw, which will
be addressed again later.9, 10 Furthermore, in the early 2010s, there is an
apparent attempt at the revitalization of the 1990s postmodern slasher
boom, which establishes a further self-referentiality of even metanar-
rational texts, sometimes dubbed (within this collection at least) ‘neo-
postmodernism’. It is some of these movements that the final chapters
in this section address, and in Chapter 7, Ian Conrich discusses a slasher
tendency that touches upon all of these movements.
In ‘Puzzles, Contraptions and the Highly Elaborate Moment: The Inev-
itability of Death in the Grand Slasher Narratives of the Final Destination
and Saw Series of Films’, Conrich discusses two series in what he calls the
‘grand slasher’, wherein ‘death appears all-pervasive and generally can-
not be escaped or defeated’. Conrich traces the evolution of the slasher
film, from various developing slasher cycles up to the ‘grand slasher’,
which begins with the Final Destination films starting in 2000 through
to films released as recently as 2012, and argues for the consideration
of this particular tendency as a significant presence within the develop-
ment of the slasher.
Following this, we have studies of two of the previously discussed
tendencies in the slasher. Matthew Freeman, in Chapter 8, ‘The Killer
Who Never Was: Complex Storytelling, the Saw Series and the Shifting
Moral Alignment of Puzzle Film Horror’, considers the torture horror
series Saw, arguing that, despite critical dismissiveness and the compara-
tive narrational simplicity of its slasher predecessors, these films involve
highly complex narratives pointing towards significant moral considera-
tions. Freeman argues that these films do not only retain intricate puzzle
narratives within the individual texts, but there is a complex overarch-
ing serial narrative as well which stands apart from the slasher’s previ-
ous long-running series. And in Chapter 9, ‘Resurrecting Carrie’, Gary
Bettinson addresses the trend of remaking slasher films, analysing both
Brian De Palma’s 1976 film Carrie and Kimberly Peirce’s 2013 remake.
Bettinson’s argument is twofold: first, Carrie (1976), while not strictly
within the canonical slasher timeline in the wake of Halloween, stands
as a significant generic predecessor that pioneered narrative tropes that
were later adopted widely by slashers; and second, the 2013 remake sub-
sumes these common tropes as well as tropes from other film genres
while establishing its own innovations, ultimately arguing that both
films ‘are integral to the slasher genre’s inception and evolution’.
Part III of this book, ‘Form versus Theory’, contains chapters which
demonstrate that formal considerations and theoretical analysis are
not necessarily mutually exclusive. I hope to show, through these final
chapters, that a close study and observation can inform and positively
strengthen theoretical arguments and methodologies and that these
perspectives can be considered unique to the cinematic form.
In Chapter 10, ‘Parody, Pastiche and Intertextuality in Scream: Formal
and Theoretical Approaches to the Postmodern Slasher’, Fran Pheasant-
Kelly engages with theories of postmodernism and intertextuality along-
side analyses of form in the Scream series. This is done to understand
critical claims to the series’ postmodernity and its ultimate significance
for, and influence on, the slasher film. Following this, Jessica Balanza-
tegui considers late 1990s/early 2000s supernatural slasher films Fallen
introduction 13
(1998; dir Gregory Hobblit), In Dreams (1999; dir Neil Jordan) and Frailty
(2001; dir Bill Paxton). In Chapter 11, ‘Crises of Identification in the
Supernatural Slasher: The Resurrection of the Supernatural Slasher Vil-
lain’, Balanzategui argues that while these films retain overt traces of
the narrative template of the slasher, the hero(ine)/killer identificatory
binary becomes destabilized, where there are not necessarily two sepa-
rate individuals but ambiguities and fusions of consciousness.
The following two chapters then focus on theoretical concepts in rela-
tion to specific aesthetic approaches. Darren Elliott-Smith utilizes queer
theory for analysis in Chapter 12, ‘“Come on, Boy, Bring It!”: Embracing
Queer Erotic Aesthetics in Marcus Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’.
Elliott-Smith argues that Nispel’s remake clearly aesthetizes the suffering,
yet idealized, male body contrary to theoretical assertions of the eroticiza-
tion of the suffering female in the slasher film. Furthermore, Elliott-Smith
closely analyses the style of key sequences which frame murder and tor-
ture in a similar way to cinematic romance. Following this, in Chapter 13,
‘Beyond Surveillance: Questions of the Real in the Neopostmodern Horror
Film’, Dana Och observes a range of ‘neopostmodern’ slasher films, both
Hollywood and independent, to show how aesthetics of surveillance chal-
lenge conceptions of ‘reality’ within a self-referential format. Och argues
that surveillance’s clear identification of the visual apparatus contributes
to a reading of self-referentiality while capitalizing upon the fear of socio-
political and cultural norms and allowing viewers to question their own
psychological scopophilic desires.
Concluding this volume, Chapter 14, ‘The Slasher, the Final Girl and
the Anti-denouement’, sees theorist Janet Staiger return to the work
established by Carol Clover in Men, Women, and Chain Saws. Staiger
reconsiders several core tenets of Clover’s analysis of the slasher sub-
genre and approaches Clover’s arguments using formal and statistical
analysis of some of the key films of the slasher subgenre. Ultimately,
Staiger analyses gendered assumptions of slasher reception and consid-
ers the pleasures the subgenre provides.
This collection aims to help redress the balance of scholarly work on

the slasher, especially the Hollywood slasher film. Some of these chap-
ters argue for a reconsideration of texts that have been largely ignored
academically; some provide new analyses of films that have been sub-
jected to previous, and in some cases less favourable, criticism; some
forge purely formalist analyses of films in a genre that rarely receives
such treatment; and finally, some chapters closely observe the form of
the slasher film to support theoretical arguments. My aim and intent in
compiling this collection is to help fill an existing gap in film analysis,

and unfortunately, a single book is not sufficient to do so. However, my
hope is that this will go some way to demonstrating new ways to look
at and think about some of these films and hopefully provide some new
ground for future analysis of the slasher film, a subgenre highly disrepu-
table, culturally significant and often financially profitable.
Notes
1 This list comes from my own PhD thesis: Bearing Witness to a Whole Bunch
of Murders: The Aesthetics of Perspective in the Friday the 13th Films (Clayton
2013, 214–15).
2 I would argue that, while Booth is making a very good point of the high
canonical significance we apply to writers like Shakespeare, this type of dis-
course occurs throughout the humanities – it is standard practice to imbue
artworks in one’s chosen medium of analysis with importance and meaning
beyond entertainment.
3 This is something that will be particularly useful with regards to this book.
4 Chapter 2 of my thesis (23–73) takes great pains to carefully trace this aes-
thetic development.
5 An early shorter cut of Eyes Without a Face was released in the USA under the
title The Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus.
6 Or ‘stalker films’ (Dika 1990) or ‘splatter films’ (McCarty1984).
7 ‘Around early 1979, I was living in Stratford. Sean and I were going to each
other’s houses probably two, three or four days a week just working on
things. We were coming up with projects that we thought would be great
for Clint Eastwood and other stuff that, of course, never got made. Then one
day he called me up and said, “Halloween is making a lot of money at the box
office. Why don’t we rip it off?”’ – Victor Miller, Friday the 13th screenwriter
(quoted in Bracke 2006, 17).
8 Some in this collection, including Andrew Patrick Nelson and Dana Och,
situate I Know What You Did Last Summer within this self-reflexive tendency.
9 In a personal correspondence with Janet Staiger, she strongly disagrees with
categorizing torture horror alongside the slasher: ‘My primary distinction
is that the torture p**n films work on an aesthetics of gore (gross-out) and
investigation of body pain (where the ‘p**n’ term came from, obviously);
slashers operate on shock: a sudden (heart-stopping) attack from some-
where, with the actual body mutilation often occurring off-screen and/or
only a quick shot to the outcome for the body. While revenge motivates
both subgenres’ action, the killer in torture p**n is methodical and complex
(see an ‘ur-text’ of Seven [1995; dir David Fincher]). In slashers, the action
is usually fortuitous . . . who is handy to be quickly killed (although a sub-
theme of displacements might also be there). I will say that the Nightmare
series is different from the Halloween and Friday series in its reveling in visual
extravagance and narrative layers (dream/not dream/maybe dream)’ (per-
sonal correspondence, 17 September 2014; italics in original).
10 Steve Jones contests and clearly finds evidence of the fallacious appropria-
tion of the popular term ‘torture porn’ (2013); I prefer to use the term coined
by Jeremy Morris (2010), ‘torture horror’.
Part I
The Birth, Death and Revenge of
the Hollywood Slasher
1
(In)Stability of Point of View in
When a Stranger Calls and Eyes
of a Stranger
David Roche
Carol J. Clover opened the fourth chapter, ‘The Eye of Horror’, of her
book Men, Women, and Chain Saws with the statement: ‘Eyes are every-
where in horror cinema’ (1992, 167), and Linda Williams (1983/1996)
before her had already insisted on the importance of the male, female
and monstrous characters’ ‘looks’. Both critics are highly indebted to
Laura Mulvey’s famous thesis that Hollywood narrative films posit a
male gaze that punishes and/or fetishizes the female body. Clover has
argued that the horror genre is just as much concerned with the ‘reac-
tive gaze’, figured as feminine, of the spectator, and thus linked to the
victim, as with the ‘assaultive gaze, figured masculine, of the camera (or
some stand-in)’, and thus linked to the monster or killer (181). The fact
that Clover’s corpus comprises exclusively post-Psycho (1960; dir Alfred
Hitchcock) and post-Peeping Tom (1960; dir Michael Powell) horror films
and mainly slasher films of the 1970s and 1980s – unlike Williams, Clo-
ver has very little to say about the classical Hollywood movies – would
tend to suggest that her insights are especially pertinent when consider-
ing contemporary American horror films.
Vera Dika (1987) was among the first to identify some of the salient
features of the stalker or slasher genre:
1 The narrative is driven forward by both the heroine and the killer (89).
2 The killer is ‘depersonalized in a literal sense, with his body and the
more intricate workings of his consciousness hidden from the specta-
tor’ (88).
3 The victims’ vulnerability is a question of lack of vision: ‘they are
quickly dispatched, punished in terms of the film’s formal logic not
17
only because of their inability to see but also because they have
allowed themselves to be seen’ (89).
4 The POV-shots ‘tend to fragment the visual field by observing a
potential victim from a variety of different focal lengths and angles’
(88).
In short, the defining features of the slasher would be, on the narrative
level, a premise in the Gothic tradition whereby the Final Girl and the
other victims are persecuted by a depersonalized stalker, and on the for-
mal level, a conspicuous instability of point of view.1 Both are connected,
as Dika and Clover have demonstrated, through the relationship between
power, vulnerability and the gaze. Over the course of the narrative, the
Final Girl assumes the gaze which then enables her to vanquish or neu-
tralize the killer (Clover 1992, 60), the film sometimes associating devices
(like the POV-shot) initially associated with the killer with the Final Girl.
Of course, the question of point of view in film cannot be limited to
the usage of POV-shots. Its study is heavily indebted to the work of liter-
ary critic Gérard Genette. Whereas many film critics have directly appro-
priated his typology of focalization in literature, François Jost has argued
that it is necessary to redefine the terms by distinguishing between
focalization, the ‘cognitive point of view of the story’, and ‘oculariza-
tion’, ‘the relation between what a camera shows and what a character
is supposed to see’ (1990, 130; my translation). He proposes the follow-
ing typology: ‘internal focalization’ occurs when the viewer is provided
with as much information as the focalizer, ‘external focalization’ when
the viewer is provided with less, and ‘spectatorial focalization’ when
the viewer is provided with more (138–41). Ocularization can be of two
sorts: ‘internal’ or ‘zero’, depending on whether or not what is shown
can be related to what a character sees. Jost then identifies two forms of
‘internal ocularization’: ‘primary internal’, which involves direct repre-
sentation of a character’s perspective, and ‘secondary internal’, which
involves indirect representation (132–3). The paradigmatic instances of
zero, primary internal and secondary internal ocularization are, respec-
tively, the nobody’s shot, the POV-shot and the shot/reverse shot with
eyeline match. As we shall see, the instability of point of view which
characterizes the slasher renders problematic, and thus interesting, the
usage of Jost’s terminology.
Regardless of whether or not Halloween (1978; dir John Carpenter)
is the first slasher – Black Christmas (1974; dir Bob Clark) also vies for
the title – and even if it borrows much from previous films like Psycho,
The Exorcist (1973; dir William Friedkin), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
(1974; dir Tobe Hooper) and Black Christmas (Wood 2003, 171), it offers
(In)Stability of Point of View 19
a good starting point for a study of strategies and style in the genre
insomuch as it is one of the rare films to have received critical atten-
tion from this perspective, film critics and scholars having tended to
favour discussions about the politics of American horror films.2 Steve
Neale superbly analysed Halloween as ‘a series of barely differentiated
repetitions’ (1981, 356). The first two sections deploy one strategy each,
that are then ‘weave[d]’ together in the final two sections that take place
at Haddonfield (357). The famous POV-shot of the opening scene fulfills
several functions, notably ‘to “suspend” the spectator’s knowledge, posi-
tion, and sense of certainty that knowledge, position, and certainty will
come with the film’s resolution’, and
to associate marked but unmotivated point-of-view shots with

Michael and thus with the agent of violence and aggression in the
film. Such shots will function henceforth to signify Michael’s poten-
tial (if not actual) presence and therefore danger to those characters
who are caught as objects in the frame demonstrating the incidence
of this look (359).
The second section, where the Shape attacks the nurse, introduces a
second strategy, which I will call frame-within-the-frame composition.
In Neale’s words,
Again, then, suspense and aggression are functions of a lack of knowl-

edge and adequate viewpoint on the part of the spectator. They are
articulated here, however, not around a point-of-view shot as such,
but rather around fields of vision as marked by the frame (360).
The third section combines these two strategies: potential POV-shots

turn out to be over-the-shoulder-shots, and thus semi-POV-shots, when
the Shape steps into the frame (362). While identifying many of the
points previously developed by Neale, Jean-Baptiste Thoret’s own analy-
ses of Halloween draw attention to some other consequences of the usage
of these strategies. If the film seems to resort to spectatorial focalization
as the viewer is given a cognitive advantage over the heroine-victim,
focalization can, to some extent, be deemed external as the spectator
is at a cognitive disadvantage vis-à-vis the Shape (1998, 195). Moreo-
ver, after the POV-shot of the opening scene, all camera movements,
namely the Steadycam and tracking shots used in the third and fourth
sections, become ‘suspect’, signalling the Shape’s potential presence. In
my own study of strategies and style in independent American horror
movies of the 1970s, including Halloween, I have foregrounded the

functions of the instability of point of view and frame-within-the-frame
composition, probably the two most recurrent visual strategies in con-
temporary American horror movies. The first is often produced ‘by alter-
nating between POV-shots and mock-POV-shots’ (Roche 2014, 270),
‘creates uncertainty regarding the origin of the gaze’ (270) and generally
‘involves spectatorial focalization’ (270). The second relies on medium
and close shots to ‘convey a sense of being trapped and the impression
that the threat can come from all sides’ (270). What I failed to note is
that frame-within-the-frame composition also, as Neale has suggested,
participates in the instability of point of view, as these shots imply inter-
nal focalization where knowledge is limited to the victim’s.
Rather than verify that ‘formulaic’ slashers systematically resort to
these strategies, thereby conforming to generic conventions, I propose
to examine what happens when they are used in films like When a Stran-
ger Calls (1979; dir Fred Walton) and Eyes of a Stranger (1981; dir Ken
Wiederhorn), which are generally included in the post-Halloween cycle
of slashers but are actually hybrids.3 Like many slashers, both films are
listed on IMDb under ‘horror’ and ‘thriller’. Yet in a way, the psychologi-
cal thriller is the slasher’s inverted double since the criminal is person-
alized, with notable consequences on the narrative and formal levels.
When a Stranger Calls and Eyes of a Stranger are, then, slasher-thriller
hybrids because they personalize the depersonalized stalker before the
film is halfway over.4 I will further argue that Eyes of a Stranger does not
follow the rules of the genre, as Robin Wood has said (2003, 177), but
comments on these rules by wielding them as a slasher and undermin-
ing them as a thriller in order to produce the intelligent feminist critique
of masculine attitudes both Wood and Clover have celebrated (Wood
2003, 175–9; Clover 1992, 151, 190–1).
The similarities between both films go well beyond the way their titles
seem to echo (a ‘stranger’) and play off (the voice vs. the gaze) each
other. Both films have received little critical attention, though Eyes of a
Stranger has been defended by both Wood and Clover. As far as narrative
structure is concerned, they can be divided into four acts.
When a Stranger Calls:

1 Jill Johnson is tormented by a disembodied voice on the phone at the
Mandrakis house.
2 John Clifford searches for Curt Duncan while the latter attempts
to survive and befriend Tracy, a woman he just met at a bar called
Torchy’s.
3 Clifford chases Duncan, who escapes.

4 Jill’s family, the ironically named Lockarts, fail to lock out Duncan,
who torments them.
Eyes of a Stranger:
1 Debbie Ormsley and her boyfriend, Jeff, are murdered by a
psychokiller.
2 News anchorwoman Jane Harris increasingly suspects her neighbour
Stanley Herbert across the way.
3 Jane takes matters into her own hands, eventually turning the tables
on Herbert by calling him [76:40].
4 Herbert realizes that Jane is tormenting him and attacks her near-
catatonic sister Tracy.5
The first acts are the only ones clearly based on a recognizable slasher
premise: a babysitter or waitress tormented by a male pervert on the
phone;6 in this respect, the opening scene of Eyes of a Stranger clearly
revisits that of When a Stranger Calls, with Herbert calling Debbie four
times before she calls the police. The second and third acts, which make
up the bulk of both films, mainly adopt the conventions of the psycho-
logical thriller: the emphasis is on the investigations, and the murderers
are personalized to the extent that Duncan’s inner life is represented
[66:50] and Herbert’s distress at being found out is portrayed [59:10].
What’s more, the second act of When a Stranger Calls immediately makes
Duncan a figure of pathos: he gets beaten up by a patron at Torchy’s
after getting told off by Tracy [32:45] and later begs for money before
drinking coffee alone instead of with Tracy, whom he previously invited
[54:35]; he is ultimately tormented by repressed images of the horrific
murder of the Mandrakis children he committed [66:55].
The two films differ as to the cohesion with which they articulate
the slasher and the psychological thriller. Both films, as we shall see,
continue to utilize slasher strategies in the stalking and murder scenes.
However, the two stalking scenes of When a Stranger Calls are limited to
the second act, while the three murder scenes are more evenly spaced
out over the second and third acts of Eyes of a Stranger and mark transi-
tions between the various acts. In other words, When a Stranger Calls
almost entirely adheres to the psychological thriller during the second
and third acts, whereas Eyes of a Stranger does so progressively as the
psychopath’s identity becomes increasingly certain, thereby retaining a
structure based on repeated attacks characteristic of the slasher. Accord-
ingly, Herbert remains entirely personalized in the final act, except, per-
haps, from Tracy’s perspective, since she cannot see him, and it is not
certain whether she is aware of her older sister’s investigation.7 When a

Stranger Calls, on the other hand, attempts to return to the slasher in the
final act. This is announced in the last scene of the third act through a
backward tracking shot of Duncan’s face disappearing in the darkness
and becoming once again the disembodied voice from the first act: ‘No
one can see me anymore. Nobody can hear me. No one touches me. I’m
not here. I don’t exist. I was never born. I won’t be seen anymore. No
one can hear me . . . ’ [75:55]. The final act initially appears as a replay
of the first act, with events having come full circle – it is now Jill’s chil-
dren who are going to be babysat while she and her husband Stephen
go to the restaurant – but expectations are thwarted: it is Jill, not Sharon
the babysitter, who receives a phone call at the restaurant, and when
the Lockarts return home, their children and the babysitter are safe
and sound.8 The final scenes ultimately blend slasher conventions with
those of the psychological thriller by cross-cutting between Jill Lockart
and Clifford, who manages to achieve his goal of executing Duncan.
Analysing the instability of point of view in these hybrid films will
ultimately be a way of testing how genre specific it is. Obviously, this
does not meant that all films that produce an instability of point of view
are slashers but that the instability of point of view is what Rick Altman
would call a ‘syntactic’ characteristic of the genre, just as the POV-shot is
a ‘semantic’ characteristic.9 In so doing, I hope to qualify Clover’s state-
ment that ‘[c]amerawork may play with the terms’ of identifications in
the horror film, ‘but it does not set them’ (1992, 10). I argue that the
depersonalization of the killer is largely an effect of the mise en cadre, in
other words, the frames and camera movements.
When a Stranger Calls
The famous first act of When a Stranger Calls develops several strategies
that introduce an instability of point of view and that are, like the prem-
ise, borrowed from Black Christmas and especially Halloween. It opens
with an establishing shot of a suburban neighbourhood while the as-
yet-unknown heroine, Jill Johnson, walks up to the Mandrakis house on
the opposite side of the street [0:40]. The camera’s position, its panning
left and its resemblance to similar shots from Halloween [9:20, 20:25],
suggest this shot is a potential POV-shot, a cue that is reinforced by the
title of the film and the eerie string score. Subsequent scenes reutilize
similar establishing shots, maintaining the possibility that the threat is
lurking outside [4:15]. One full shot in particular shows Jill, framed by
the window, looking back over her shoulder outside after the stranger’s
rephrased question – ‘Have you checked the children?’ has become

‘Why haven’t you checked the children?’ – has made her aware of his
potential omniscience [12:25]. This first form of instability of point of
view conveys uncertainty as to whether or not the outdoor shots reflect
the point of view of the stranger from the title.
The instability increases when the outdoor shots are countered by
ambiguous shots inside the house. Instability, then, would equally be
spatial, evoking the stranger’s potential ubiquity.10 Indeed, the third
scene opens with a series of three shots of a dark kitchen, a dark living
room and the central hallway and staircase [3:00]. Though these shots
recall those at the end of Halloween which reveal spaces having previ-
ously been occupied by the Shape now occupied by nothing but his
heavy breathing [84:50], at this point where the stranger’s presence has
yet to be revealed, they merely constitute what Christian Metz would
call a ‘descriptive syntagm’ – they are linked exclusively by ‘a relation
of spatial coexistence’ (2003, 129; my translation). These nobody’s shots
are by no means mediated by Jill, who can be heard talking on the living
room phone. What is involved here is zero ocularization, while focaliza-
tion would seem to be spectatorial. However, with the title and the refer-
ence to Halloween in mind, the mise en cadre reveals nothing and, in so
doing, demonstrates its incapacity to locate the stranger. From the stran-
ger’s perspective, as from the Shape’s in Halloween, focalization would be
external. This series of shots is replayed backwards after the third phone
call, only this time they are justified by Jill’s presence as she moves down
the hallway and into the dining room and kitchen when investigating
a mysterious noise which turns out to be a false alarm, merely ice cubes
in the refrigerator [5:50]. Zero ocularization has given way to second-
ary internal ocularization, spectatorial focalization to internal. Another
descriptive syntagm occurs when Jill calls the Golden Bowl restaurant,
this time comprised of close-ups of the clock, the pendulum, the front
door and the door-chain unlocked [9:55]. Though it does not constitute
an attempt to locate the stranger, it nonetheless has the same antici-
patory function as the first series of shots. Indeed, a merge of the two
syntagms – a medium shot of the hallway, a close-up of the pendulum,
a medium shot of the dining room and a medium shot of the kitchen –
with the addition of a low-angle shot of the staircase railing – occurs
in the subsequent attack scene, right after their threatening potential
has been confirmed by Sergeant Sacker: ‘We’ve traced the call. It’s com-
ing from inside the house. [ . . . ] Just get out of the house’ [20:40]. This
time, the shots clearly emphasize the mise en cadre’s inability to locate a
threat that is no longer hypothetical but that has been identified within
the diegesis. This leads to the conclusion that the mise en cadre seems
to share both the stranger’s ubiquity and omniscience and the heroine-
victim’s limitations, establishing a paradoxical position in keeping with
the tension between Clover’s ‘assaultive’ and ‘reactive’ gaze. Typically,
much of the first act adheres to Jill’s perspective, offering many close-ups
and medium close-ups of the heroine-victim. The instability of point of
view concerns, then, the instability regarding focalization, depending
on whether we know as much or more than Jill (internal or spectatorial),
or less than the stranger (external).
These shots of the kitchen, dining room and hallway further evoke a
sense of threat through the usage of frame-within-the-frame composi-
tion: each shot includes at least one possible opening – off-screen space,
a door or the staircase – the threat could spring out from. In the second
series of shots, Jill has become aware of these threatening gaps, glancing
up at the staircase on the way to and from the kitchen [6:20, 7:15]. Many
shots of Jill use such composition, and the living room sofa has clearly
been positioned with its back to the staircase so that the latter can usu-
ally be seen in the background [3:15, 5:30, 7:55].
A fourth, less recurrent strategy involves a high-angle lateral full shot
of Jill when she calls the police [10:30, 15:35]. Again, it is borrowed
from a similar shot in Halloween that occurs after Laurie is attacked by
the Shape in the Doyles’ living room [77:45]. This shot fulfills two pur-
poses in terms of point of view and composition: as an instance of zero
ocularization, it suggests a form of omniscience, as if the voyeuristic
gaze were disembodied and could observe its victim through the ceil-
ing – indeed, the shot does not originate from the top of the stairs but
from nowhere – while its usage of frame-within-the-frame composition
conveys the sense that the heroine is trapped within a domestic space
that has suddenly become threatening and uncanny (note the presence
of the hearth to Jill’s right).
The first act derives much of its stylistic coherence from the repeti-
tion of these strategies and their combination. We have seen that both
the first and second strategies resort to frame-within-the-frame compo-
sition. The first two strategies are combined right after the false alarm
when Jill ends up not going upstairs to check on the children because
the phone has started ringing. This time, the series of shots includes
elements that are inside and outside – close-ups of the phone, the door-
knob and the front door light, followed by an establishing shot of the
house – which emphasize the mise en cadre’s inability to locate the stran-
ger [14:10] moments before Jill tells Sergeant Sacker, ‘He’s out there. In
the neighbourhood. He’s watching me through the windows’ [15:20].
Finally, the first, third and fourth strategies are combined in a slightly
oblique high-angle establishing shot of the house with Jill looking out
the window, giving the sense that she is both being watched and trapped
within the house [17:55] (Figure 1.1); this shot is coherent dramatically
as it precedes the moment when Jill tries to keep the stranger on the line
so the police can track his call.
Point of view remains unstable in the first act’s attack scene, even when
the stranger has been located upstairs. As Jill looks up at the staircase
and slowly heads for the front door, the high-angle full shot suggests a
potential POV-shot from the stranger’s perspective that turns out to be
a nobody’s shot – internal ocularization turns out to be zero oculariza-
tion – as a subsequent low-angle shot of the second-floor staircase rail-
ing shows the shadow of a door opening [20:55]. The final shots, which
cross-cut between Jill struggling to open the door and the stranger’s sil-
houette steadily moving out of hiding, deploy another strategy that is
also typical of the slasher: the stranger is evoked through metonymy,
thereby remaining depersonalized [21:10].
With the stranger’s identity revealed, point of view becomes fairly sta-
ble in the second and third acts. Yet they nonetheless employ slasher
conventions in the two scenes where Duncan stalks or is believed to
stalk Tracy. The first opens with a long shot from across the street of her
stepping out of a bar called Torchy’s, only unlike the similar outdoor
shots in the opening scene, this one pans right to reveal a close-up of
Duncan watching her: It is not the POV-shot it seemed to be, and primary
internal ocularization turns out to be secondary internal [37:05]; again,
Figure 1.1 When a Stranger Calls (1979; dir Fred Walton): Jill Johnson (Carol
Kane), framed by the window, the high-angle shot suggesting the invisible stran-
ger’s potential omniscience
this strategy is borrowed from Halloween, where a mock-POV-shot often

reveals the Shape gazing at its victims [48:30]. This association of the mise
en cadre with the murderer’s gaze informs the subsequent outdoor shots,
the posterior angles and movements (including pans, tilts and tracking
shots), indicating they are potential POV-shots [38:00]. In some instances,
camera movements even mimic a peeping Tom, though the mise en cadre
clearly does not correspond to Duncan’s point of view, for instance when
the camera pans right over a wall before tracking forward and panning
right to follow Tracy [38:10] and even more conspicuously when the cam-
era tilts up to the elevator floor indicator after Tracy has stepped inside
[40:25]. The tension produced by these strategies is defused when she
finds Duncan waiting for her outside her apartment; alerted by a cough,
she turns around and greets him familiarly – ‘Oh, it’s you’ – before a
reverse medium shot reveals him standing in a doorway [40:45].
The next scene that utilizes slasher strategies is, accordingly, the rep-
etition of the previous scene, the difference being that, this time round,
the hunter (Duncan) is unwittingly being hunted (by Clifford). In an
establishing shot of Torchy’s, Duncan can be heard coughing before
rack focusing reveals that this was an over-the-shoulder shot all along
[55:35]. Following on yet another establishing shot of Tracy leaving the
bar [56:55], a medium close-up of Tracy shows detective Cliff following
her in the background [57:35]. These two shots, both instances of sec-
ondary internal ocularization, raise the question, Who exactly is watch-
ing and following Tracy – Clifford or Duncan?, which informs the rest
of the scene, as the only diegetic indication of another presence is the
medium close-up of a person’s feet following her [57:55]. This instabil-
ity is confirmed when she is outside her apartment and Cliff appears in
the same doorway where Duncan appeared in the earlier scene [59:45].
All in all, the mise en cadre is much less voyeuristic than in the first
stalking scene, with more frontal shots than posterior shots, no doubt
anticipating that Duncan is inside and not outside her apartment. The
full shot of Tracy in the hallway of her apartment resorts to the kind of
frame-within-the-frame composition utilized in the opening scene, with
a closet door to the left, only this time the threatening potential of such
composition is immediately confirmed when the door opens and the
camera tracks forward to reveal Duncan hiding inside [61:05].
The film’s attempt to re-depersonalize Duncan at the end of the third
act is, accordingly, followed by an attempt to reintroduce the instability
of point of view of the first act, which evoked the stranger’s potential
ubiquity and omniscience. Establishing shots of the house suggest both
the passing of time and a potential threat lurking outside [85:15, 91:40].
A series of shots of the doorway, the kitchen and the children’s room
pursues the first act’s ambiguous play on focalization (is it spectatorial
or external?) [91:45]. Focalization is overall internal, with close-ups of,
and zoom-ins on [91:55], Jill, as well as eyeline matches associated with
POV-shots [87:40], hence primary and secondary internal ocularization.
Frame-within-the-frame composition emphasizes that domestic space
has, once again, become threatening: Jill checks the closet in her chil-
dren’s bedroom [90:05] before suspecting that Duncan is either lurking
in the hallway or hiding in their closet [92:45]. Duncan turns out to
have taken her husband’s place in bed [93:30], suggesting that he had,
in effect, momentarily regained the power of ubiquity by becoming a
disembodied voice impossible to locate: ‘You can’t see me’, he murmurs
[93:05]. In a sense, the murderer’s desperate attack on Jill and pathetic
end paradigmatically reflect the film’s desperate attempt to re-deperson-
alize the psychopath while maintaining in parallel the psychological
thriller: the psychokiller’s powers of omniscience and ubiquity have
been transferred onto Clifford who, after letting on that he would wait
till morning before calling the Lockarts again [91:10], ultimately turns
up to save Jill in the nick of time.
Stylistically, When a Stranger Calls deploys these slasher strategies in a
fairly coherent manner. It is only when considered in relation to the rest
of the film that they become problematic. Their usage, once the psychok-
iller is revealed to be a very sick man named Curt Duncan, can no longer
be justified by the narrative necessity to evoke the psychokiller’s powers
but can only be justified by the dramatic necessity to build up tension in
specific scenes. They are especially problematic when viewed alongside
the film’s ambiguous subtext: in effect, the re-depersonalization of the
psychokiller enables the film to steer away from the ambiguous stance
vis-à-vis the death penalty it has heretofore established, whereby Clif-
ford wants to take the law into his own hands by slaying Duncan, who is
clearly shown to be a sick man who ‘desires a full communication where
he can be understood by others’ and ‘wants connection in a world that
is constantly forcing him to disconnect’ (Bruhm 2011, 605).
Eyes of a Stranger
By comparison, Eyes of a Stranger does appear to be, as Robin Wood has

contended, a very ‘coherent’ film (2003, 175). The opening credits/pro-
logue establishes both the symbolic relationship between the male ‘look’
of the photographer and the ‘looked-at’ abject female corpse (Wood
2003, 178) and the play on point of view that informs the whole film:
the stable POV-shot through the photographer’s viewfinder [1:55] is, in

effect, preceded by five shots involving camera movements (tilts and
pans) from behind mangrove trees, these potential POV-shots suggest-
ing the possible presence of a peeping Tom within the diegesis [0:55].
The first act, which mainly depicts the stalking of Debbie Ormsley,
introduces several typical slasher strategies that convey the sense that
point of view is unstable. In the initial three-quarter posterior full shot
of Debbie walking out of the club she works in called Basin Street, the
tilt and pan suggest that the shot could be a POV-shot from the per-
spective of the stranger mentioned in the film’s title [3:30]. The film
then alternates between shots of Debbie walking home and the stalker’s
feet [3:45], much more systematically than the second stalking scene in
When a Stranger Calls, until she finally becomes aware that she is being
followed [4:25]. Because the relationship between pursuer and pursued
is firmly established in terms of space – Debbie hears the footsteps com-
ing from behind her – the two subsequent long shots of her are not
endowed with the potential for being POV-shots in spite of various cam-
era movements [4:10, 4:40]; that the threat’s not lying in front of her is
further confirmed by a false alarm when Debbie runs smack into an old
man [4:35], an event that is later inverted when Debbie backs into the
stranger in her apartment [13:50]. The use of zero ocularization – neither
Debbie nor the stranger are seen from each other’s perspective – is stable,
while focalization is spectatorial yet provides limited knowledge con-
cerning the stranger, so that, as in Halloween and the first act of When a
Stranger Calls, it could be argued that focalization is somewhat external
in relation to the stranger.
This is even more the case in the subsequent scene where the stranger
calls Debbie four times. This time, the mise en cadre alternates between
shots of Debbie in her apartment and shots of the stranger outside. As
in the stalking scene, the stranger’s face is carefully avoided through the
choice of angles, lack of light and use of profilmic elements. The follow-
ing shots are utilized: a posterior medium shot of his silhouette [5:25];
a long shot of the phone booth [5:35, 6:55]; a lateral medium close-up
[6:05, 6:20, 6:35] and a posterior three-quarter close-up with the phone
booth door frame hiding his face [6:55]; close-ups of his fingers dialling
Debbie’s number or inserting coins in the slot [6:15, 6:50]; a low-angle
frontal medium close-up with his face obscured by the back light [7:00,
7:40]; and a high-angle three-quarter medium full shot of the stranger in
the phone booth [7:10]. At the end of the scene, the return of the same
frontal low-angle medium close-up and long shot without the stalker
inside the phone booth indicates that the mise en cadre has lost track
of him [9:25]. The contrast between these shots and the well-lit frontal
shots of Debbie in her apartment foreground the part played by the mise
en cadre, which, in a sense, acts like the stranger’s mask and accomplice,
lending credence to his own claim of omniscience; he says to his pro-
spective victim on the phone: ‘I know you’re not wearing a bra, Deb-
bie’ [6:40]. Thus, the stranger is not depersonalized as such; nothing
on the diegetic level suggests a supernatural force. It is the mise en cadre
that depersonalizes him, all the while revealing his human form. This
is clearly the case in the two attack scenes: the stranger is represented
metonymically – via his shadow, silhouette and meat-cleaver-holding
right hand – when he attacks Jeff [12:45], but he is entirely shown when
he finally attacks Debbie. In so doing, the film leaves no room for doubt
that the person violating the female character is not a supernatural
entity but an ordinary human being.
The first act of Eyes of a Stranger effectively demonstrates that dep-
ersonalization is an aesthetic effect which conceals a violence that is
very much real and should be condemned, as news anchorwoman Jane
Harris does throughout the film. Similarly, the mise en cadre evokes
omniscience and ubiquity while revealing that the stranger actually
lacks these qualities. On her return home, Debbie is shown realizing
that her bathroom window is open in a medium full shot taken from
outside [5:15]. This potential POV-shot is followed by an establishing
shot of the facade of Debbie’s apartment building with the stranger
watching, which invites two mutually exclusive hypotheses: either
the previous shot did not correspond to his perspective or an ellip-
sis has just occurred [5:25]. The continuity in the music score would
tend to substantiate the first alternative (zero ocularization), while
the subsequent shot of Debbie dressed in different clothes watching a
horror movie on TV would tend to substantiate the second (primary
ocularization) [5:40]. The same potential POV-shot recurs the second
time Debbie goes to the bathroom and realizes the window is open
again [9:55], only this time, the subsequent shot confirms that it is not
from the stalker’s perspective when the camera tracks back to reveal
that he is now inside her apartment [10:05]. Retrospectively, then, the
shot through the window was undoubtedly an instance of zero ocu-
larization. In the end, the mise en cadre suggests the stranger’s poten-
tial omniscience and ubiquity only to provide an explanation for his
breaking and entering. Point of view becomes more stable towards the
end of the first act. Jeff’s scaring Debbie is shot in an unambiguous
POV-shot from Debbie’s perspective (hence, primary internal oculari-
zation) [11:35], while the medium full shot that pans left from Jeff to
the aquarium is a clear instance of zero ocularization that anticipates

the subsequent attack [12:25]; the mise en cadre likewise anticipates
Herbert’s final attack on Tracy Harris in the final act by pivoting right
round her [81:15].
The scenes with Debbie employ two other typical slasher devices.
A high-angle oblique full shot of Debbie on the phone sitting on her
couch, similar to those in Halloween and When a Stranger Calls, is used
twice with ironic intent [6:45, 8:30]: the first suggests the potential
victim’s vulnerability, overwhelmed by her domestic space (note the
kitchen space in the background), after the stranger has just let on
that he could see her, while the second occurs after the police officer
has downplayed her concerns: ‘Well, you’re the sixth complaint this
evening. Since those murders started, every weirdo in town has been
jumping on the bandwagon. Everyone from boyfriends playing jokes
to certified psychopaths.’ Ironically, the officer’s statement is first con-
firmed when Debbie’s boyfriend Jeff plays a prank on her [11:35] then
proved wrong when the stranger finally attacks. Frame-within-the-
frame composition is used abundantly, especially when the stranger’s
presence inside the apartment has been confirmed. Dangerous open-
ings are emphasized, like the bathroom doorway when Debbie looks
out the window [5:15, 10:05], the shower curtain when she walks into
the bathroom [9:35], a doorway in the hallway and the living room
closet when she investigates a strange noise [10:35, 11:05] and the
doorway when she is in her bedroom getting ready to leave with Jeff
[12:40, 13:05]; the living room closet becomes a particularly threaten-
ing background presence in the moments leading up to the attacks on
Jeff and Debbie [12:00, 13:20].
The second murder scene, whose ending is a replay of the Annie
murder scene in Halloween (1978), maintains the tactics of the first act
by utilizing the two strategies identified by Neale in Halloween (1978):
instability of point of view and frame-within-the-frame composition.
The scene opens on an oblique low-angle establishing shot which, like
the exterior shots in When a Stranger Calls (1979), could indicate a peep-
ing Tom looking up at the building [30:15]. The scene then alternates
between medium close-ups of Annette, registering her reaction to the
phone call, and long shots of her in the empty office [30:20]. If the first
long shot could briefly be mistaken for a POV-shot, the others are used
to emphasize that she is completely alone and thus potentially vulner-
able in an otherwise ordinary setting. From Annette’s perspective, both
focalization and ocularization are, all in all, internal, with an eyeline
match associated with what could be a POV-shot of the office [32:35].
Even though Annette tells her friend Susan that the caller knows both
her name and her workplace [33:00], the mise en cadre does not, at this
point, suggest Herbert’s potential omniscience and ubiquity; these are
only conveyed on the diegetic level because he knows when to call her
in her office and the elevator [33:50]. The mise en cadre continues to
alternate between close and long shots of Annette as she makes her
way from the elevator to her car. The composition of the long shots
still suggests vulnerability – the ceiling lights seem to bear down on
her [34:20] – but these shots also represent potential POV-shots. This is
especially true of a long shot through some metal railings that tilts and
pans to follow Annette’s movements yet proves to be a nobody’s shot
as she walks right into the foreground [34:35]; what could have been
primary internal ocularization is, in effect, zero ocularization. These
long shots constitute a series of false alarms that is confirmed when Her-
bert turns out to be hiding on the back seat of Annette’s car. Similarly,
the usage of frame-within-the-frame composition in the earlier shots –
when Annette is waiting for the elevator and calls her friend Susan, the
elevator to her right and the door to her left constituting threatening
openings [32:30] – foreshadows the lateral medium close-up of Annette,
trapped in her car [35:15].
The third murder scene contrasts with the first two insomuch as it
is not a stalking scene and depicts the limits of Herbert’s omnipotence
as he gets bogged down in the sand after dumping Annette’s body
[37:30], apparently proving Jane’s lawyer boyfriend David right by
making just the sort of ‘mistake’ male criminals ‘always make’ [37:00].
Though the first part of the scene is entirely depicted from Herbert’s
perspective, focalization is displaced onto a couple making love in their
car who are disturbed by the noise Herbert’s car is making, with shots
of the couple looking out their windshield matching reverse shots of
the car [38:45], hence secondary internal ocularization. The return to
the slasher is further confirmed when the mise en cadre depersonal-
izes Herbert by representing him metonymically through his car and
his switchblade-wielding hand that is singled out in close-ups [39:45,
40:10], as during the murder of Jeff; the only lateral medium close-up
of Herbert inside his car has him in the shadows [39:50], making use
of the profilmic as in the first act. Focalization is mainly internal from
the victims’ perspectives, the camera staying inside the car with the
female victim, with frame-within-the-frame composition emphasizing
her vulnerability [40:05]. Herbert is immediately repersonalized in the
subsequent full shot, which shows him walking away from their car
[40:15]. Structurally framed by the psychological thriller, this slasher
interlude is shown, more than ever, to depend on a specific arsenal of

formal strategies.
By the fourth murder scene, point of view has become almost com-
pletely stable. Events are, for the most part, seen from the killer’s per-
spective as he stalks the streets of Miami. Focalization is internal, and
ocularization is both primary and secondary internal: the mise en cadre
alternates between close-ups of Herbert peering out and shots of the
streets and his potential victim, the pans suggesting some of these shots
could be POV-shots [61:00]. Focalization remains internal in the strip
club scene, alternating between shots of the dancer and Herbert watch-
ing her [63:30]. However, the shots of the dancer include both nobody’s
shots and low-angle shots that are potential POV-shots from Herbert’s
perspective [63:35, 64:15], hence zero and internal ocularization; the
mise en cadre even mimics the psychopath’s gaze by tilting up over the
dancer’s body [63:45, 64:10]. The final part of this scene constitutes a
replay of the first act, this time mainly from Herbert’s point of view:
he is shown watching the dancer undress before taking a shower, again
resorting to close-ups of Herbert associated with POV-shots [64:40]. As
in the strip club, the camera tilts up the shower stall to mimic Herbert’s
gaze [64:50]. The scene’s attempt to evoke Herbert’s subjectivity places it
squarely on the side of the psychological thriller; the absence of frame-
within-the-frame composition is symptomatic of this abandonment of
the victim’s point of view, since conveying the latter’s vulnerability is no
longer in order. The scene violates its own terms at the very end in order
to obtain a typical slasher effect, this time in homage to Psycho: focali-
zation momentarily becomes external as a shot reveals that Herbert is
no longer outside [65:00], and then internal from the victim’s perspec-
tive, a shot/reverse shot showing her terrified face and a POV-shot from
her perspective of a silhouette looking in on her [65:05], hence internal
ocularization.
Point of view becomes, once again, unstable in the final scenes in
the Harris apartment, which are cross-cut by scenes of Kate exploring
Herbert’s apartment, because of Tracy Harris’s inability to see and hear.
The mise en cadre follows Tracy’s movements in the kitchen, alternat-
ing between medium close-ups and medium fulls shots in a manner
characteristic of internal focalization [69:50], but the viewer is given a
cognitive advantage, first, when David leaves a message on the answer-
ing machine confirming Herbert is undoubtedly the killer [70:15], and
second, when a medium close-up singles out the dead dog Tracy can-
not find [10:45]. In so doing, the scene emphasizes her vulnerability,
particularly when Herbert starts moving objects around to torment her
[82:45]. From Tracy’s perspective, Herbert is initially just as elusive –

and depersonalized – as a ghost or the 1978 Shape; like Debbie in the
first act, she unwittingly backs up straight into his arms [73:40]. The
tables are momentarily turned when Tracy manages to hide in a closet
after scalding Herbert with hot coffee [74:50]. The mise en cadre now fol-
lows Herbert as he looks for her [76:40], resorting to secondary internal
ocularization from his perspective. The third reversal involving point
of view is dramatized through shifts in ocularization. Herbert’s second
attack initially alternates nobody’s shots (zero ocularization) and close-
ups of the victim and the assailant (secondary internal ocularization)
without privileging one perspective over the other. After slapping Her-
bert, Tracy’s sight somewhat returns, and this sense of empowerment is
relayed through POV-shots from her perspective (primary internal ocu-
larization), three before she kicks him in his private parts and five as
she fires a gun at him [78:10]. The mise en cadre further emphasizes the
fact that the victim is now endowed with the capacity to see and assault
her assailant by pushing in from a medium close-up of her to a close-up
that is repeated four times [78:40]. Frame-within-the-frame composition
returns as the mise en cadre focuses on the potential victim, the kitchen
door and apartment door providing threatening openings before Her-
bert’s first attack [69:50, 71:05], and the bedroom and bathroom before
his final attack [79:30, 80:10]; Tracy’s leaning outside the bedroom door-
way further arouses expectations raised by the three-quarter close-up’s
similarity to the three-quarter medium close-up and close-up of Lau-
rie before the Shape’s final attack in Halloween [82:40]. Appropriately,
Herbert is shown watching from within a frame when his presence is
first revealed [72:05], recalling that he had also watched his previous
victims through windows (Figure 1.2). Thus, the film thematizes that
frame-within-the-frame composition reflects the sadistic psychopath’s
own voyeurism.
Eyes of a Stranger develops a shift from the slasher to the psychologi-
cal thriller that is coherent in terms of narrative, style and subtext. The
increasing stability of point of view stems not only from the killer’s
increased personalization but from his progressive disempowerment at
the hands of Jane and Tracy Harris. The film delivers a metafictional
critique of the slasher by revealing that behind the quasi-supernatural
depersonalized psychokiller lies a very ordinary psychopath and by
foregrounding the way the mise en cadre guiltily contributes to this
depersonalization. Appropriately, Herbert, like the film, comes to a
lamentable end in the very spot that started it all in 1960: a shower
stall [83:00].
Figure 1.2 Eyes of a Stranger (1981; dir Ken Wiederhorn): Tracy Harris (Jennifer
Jason Leigh), blind to the stranger (John DiSanti) whose voyeurism is now empha-
sized through the ironic use of frame-within-the-frame composition
Conclusion
When a Stranger Calls and Eyes of a Stranger announce the manner in

which subsequent psychological thrillers like Manhunter (1986; dir
Michael Mann), The Silence of the Lambs11 (1991; dir Jonathan Demme)
and Se7en (1995; dir David Fincher), as well as other genres like the
zombie movie, will appropriate slasher strategies in stalking scenes.12
As generic hybrids, they draw attention within themselves to elements
that distinguish the slasher from the psychological thriller: the slasher
involves a depersonalized psychokiller, which Dika sees as a character-
istic of the slasher, combined with an instability of point of view, while
the psychological thriller involves a personalized criminal combined
with a stable point of view; to put it simply, the depersonalized psycho-
killer implies a lack of psychology. This clear-cut opposition enables a
fairly coherent and progressive shift in the narrative structure of Eyes
of a Stranger, a more brutal and incoherent switch in that of When a
Stranger Calls. Accordingly, in the psychological thriller parts of these
films, focalization is clearly internal, whether from the perspective of
the investigator or the psychopath, whereas in the stalking scenes, focal-
ization seems imperfectly spectatorial. In this respect, the slasher draws
attention to a blind spot in Jost’s terminology when the film gives us
a cognitive advantage over the potential victim while remaining at a
cognitive disadvantage vis-à-vis the psychokiller. Seeing as the slasher
mainly follows the victim, it could make sense to name the mix of inter-
nal, spectatorial and external focalization characteristic of the slasher
‘unstable’ focalization. This instability of point of view is, in my mind,

the main stylistic feature of the stalking scenes, and arguably of the
slasher, a genre which, for the rest, greatly resembles the teen movie.
Several recurrent visual devices borrowed from Halloween (1978) and ear-
lier films have been analysed: potential POV-shots which initially indi-
cate the psychokiller’s presence only to reveal his presence in another
part of the frame or his absence within the frame;13 frame-within-the-
frame composition which reflects the potential victim’s limited point of
view and vulnerability; and the metonymical representation of the killer
via his feet, hands and weapons. Like the basic narrative of the slasher,
which is organized according to a series of murders, these devices are
repeated and often combined according to a cumulative effect, as Neale
has shown in Halloween, on the playful mode of ‘now you see the psy-
chokiller, now you don’t’. Camera angles and movements are, in this
respect, highly conspicuous, whether raising false alarms or anticipating
the psychokiller’s next move, to the extent that the camera’s capacity to
foreshadow the killer’s next move in Eyes of a Stranger even suggests that
the momentary cognitive disadvantage is nothing more than a lure. The
mixture of the slasher and the thriller in these films foregrounds that the
depersonalization of the psychokiller is, above all, an aesthetic effect:
the mise en cadre conceals the stalker just as much as a mask, heighten-
ing his potential omniscience and ubiquity. The diegesis and the mise en
cadre are, in this respect, particularly symbiotic in a film like Halloween,
where the Shape is a depersonalized, ghost-like entity, less so in hybrids
like When a Stranger Calls and Eyes of a Stranger, where the psychopath is
given some depth. In any case, the fact that the slasher and the psycho-
logical thriller offer opposite stances on a similar premise – a serial killer
is on the loose – suggests that the generic terms of identification are not,
as Clover would have it, exclusively narrative.
Notes
1 David A. Cook describes the ‘subjective tracking shots’ as Halloween’s ‘most
significant stylistic feature’ (2000, 235).
2 Carpenter himself admitted to having been influenced by the style of Suspiria
(1977; dir Dario Argento) (Lagier & Thoret 1998, 32), though diegetically, the
slasher is more obviously indebted to the Italian giallo.
3 Richard Nowell asserts that When a Stranger Calls ‘was not a teen slasher film’
but a ‘downbeat character study’ (2011, 136).
4 In fact, Eyes of a Stranger borrows just as much from horror movies and slash-
ers – the shower scene from Psycho, the colourful lighting in the first act from
Suspiria, the phone calls from When a Stranger Calls and various strategies
from Halloween – as from classic thrillers: Jane watches Tracy get attacked like
Jeffrey watches Lisa in Rear Window (1954; dir Alfred Hitchcock), while the
relationship between the TV anchor(wo)man and the killer resembles that in
While the City Sleeps (1956; dir Fritz Lang).
5 All references to specific scenes are rounded off to five seconds.
6 Tellingly, it is this scene which is parodied in Scream (1996; dir Wes Craven)
and that When a Stranger Calls (2006; dir Simon West) expands on, entirely
doing away with the rest.
7 The fact that Tracy knows where to find the gun suggests she may have some
knowledge of the situation.
8 Elements are finally repeated in the moments leading up to the final attack
scene: as in the first act, Jill looks out the window and a light passes over her
face [87:40] then moves into the kitchen [88:10].
9 For Altman, semantic elements include ‘shared plots, key scenes, charac-
ter types, familiar objects or recognizable shots and sounds’, while syntac-
tic analysis focuses on ‘plot structure, character relationships or image and
sound montage’ (1999, 89).
10 Steven Bruhm has pointed out that, unlike the stranger who is granted abso-
lute mobility thanks to his cell phone in When a Stranger Calls (2006), the
1979 Curt Duncan is nonetheless ‘locatable in a certain space’ and is thus
imagined as a singular, autonomous being (2011, 605).
11 Clover describes the film as ‘high slasher’ (1992, 233).
12 See my comparative study (2011) of Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Dawn of the
Dead (2004).
13 The slasher and horror movie also resorts to an arsenal of aural devices, some
of which I have analysed in Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and
2000s: Why Don’t They Do It Like They Used To? (2014).
2
Undermining the Moneygrubbers,
or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love Friday the 13th Part V
Wickham Clayton
I have written elsewhere about film form and aesthetics in the Friday the
13th film series and even about the particular strengths of this specific
entry in the series; however, there is still much to be said about Friday
the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985; dir Danny Steinmann).1 It may
not have been contemporarily nor retrospectively popular, but this film
still stands out as a unique and subversive entry in a successful and
exemplary slasher film franchise.2 Consistent with my other writing on
the film, I maintain that it is so innovative that it remains a prophetic,
as opposed to influential, harbinger of the abilities of the slasher to tran-
scend its base connotations as ‘low’ art, which it arguably appears to
have done within the last decade.
While it is an amusing pastime of film studies academics to almost arbi-
trarily and hyperbolically defend a particular text seemingly undeserving
of the accolade we bestow upon it (a practice I gleefully engage in regu-
larly), I can assure you – hand-on-heart and tongue-out-of-cheek – that I
truly believe Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning to be a great film and
have since I rewatched it during my initial preliminary research for my
PhD thesis in 2007. It works as a unique case study for genre familiarists
and as a complex, often uncomfortable viewing experience which exploits
convention and expectation to its advantage for non-slasher enthusiasts.
There is much to write about regarding A New Beginning’s unique and
original approach to style and narration, for which this chapter is insuf-
ficient in length to address. However, this can be seen to supplement the
similar argument in my thesis, observing different elements of the film.
Bearing Witness to a Whole Bunch of Murders most precisely looks at how A
New Beginning (a) initially obscures visual point-of-view coding to regularly
37
confuse and complicate the moment-to-moment perspectival experience

of the film, ultimately favouring that of the victim; (b) uses sound in the
death sequences, more specifically sound without a seen counterpart, along
with film editing, constituting a specific shift in the slasher towards favour-
ing alignment with victim perspective as opposed to that of an aggressor;
(c) complicates the temporal development of the franchise’s serialized nar-
rative, creating a fracture between long-time viewers of the series and new-
comers – ultimately disorienting, if briefly, series familiarists; (d) denotes a
significant counterpoint to slasher aesthetics which would not be organi-
cally implemented until much later in the subgenre’s development.
To my knowledge, I have done the only work to deal with this particular
instalment of the series academically in any depth. Primary resources for
my research are limited to theories surrounding the genre, comprehen-
sive production histories of the series, promotional and critical writing in
newspapers and magazines, and online user reviews. This, however, can
only establish a context for the film in terms of production and recep-
tion. Therefore, the bulk of my argument will, by necessity, come from
my own close analysis of the film’s narrative form and certain aspects
of film style. There will be multiple mentions of the term ‘incoherence’
within this chapter, and this is derived from Todd Berliner’s definition: ‘I
use the word “incoherence” here, and everywhere in this book, not in its
common metaphoric sense of irrationality or meaninglessness but rather
in the literal sense to mean a lack of connectedness or integration among
different elements’ (2010, 25). Furthermore, I am basing my approach to
reading and valuation on a variant of Berliner’s statement that
film commentators such as V. F. Perkins taught us that great movies

rely on proportion, thematic unity, and a harmonious marriage of
artistic devices. I hope that readers of this book conclude that, for
many great movies, the opposite is true. Many great artworks seem
on the point of some narrative, conceptual, or stylistic collapse yet
still they retain our trust in their underlying reliability (220–1).
This approach is of paramount importance to understanding why the

film works in a more intricate and complex manner than heretofore
acknowledged.
Background and context
Adam Rockoff (2002, 150) and Richard Nowell (2011, 249) both agree
that 1984 was a year in which the slasher film was at a low ebb followed
How I Learned to Love Friday the 13th Part V 39
by an upsurge in popularity after a period of decline. This is the year

that saw the spring release of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (dir Joseph
Zito) – the fourth entry in the series. The attempt to conclude the series
here demonstrates an acknowledgement of the subgenre’s downward
trend. The film proved a success, however, leading to the release of A New
Beginning.3 Many of those responsible for the making of the film dislike
it in retrospect. According to the film’s editor, Bruce Green, ‘Harry Man-
fredini (composer) is, to me, the hero of these movies. And without him,
quite frankly, a film like Part V might have been completely unwatch-
able’ (quoted in Bracke 2006, 142). Producer Tim Silver says, ‘I think
we all knew the film was not creatively satisfying. On the level of story,
the film didn’t work. It didn’t succeed’ (quoted in Bracke 2006, 143).
Actor Dick Wieand says, ‘It wasn’t until I saw Part V that I realized what
a piece of trash it was . . . I’m hearing ad libs looped on the soundtrack
that I don’t remember hearing on set. These kids couldn’t have been
very old at the time, and here they were saying stuff like, “Blah, blah,
blah . . . blow job!” It’s just a piece of crap’ (quoted in Bracke 2006, 143).
And according to Friday the 13th historian Peter Bracke, ‘A New Beginning
had already turned a sizeable profit. But soon the telltale signs of bad
word of mouth were on the horizon: Part V suffered a stiffer fall-off than
any of the previous instalments in the series. By its third weekend of
wide release, the film plummeted completely out of the top ten, eventu-
ally scaring up a respectable, if far from spectacular, final take of $21.9
million’ (2006, 143). Ultimately, the subgenre’s success picture of the
period was not A New Beginning but Wes Craven’s innovative supernatu-
ral slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street released five months earlier.
Viewers were apparently in the mood for fresh meat, with A Nightmare
on Elm Street earning $25.5 million (Grove 2005, 127) on its $1.8 mil-
lion (Kerswell 2010, 150) budget. I would argue that A New Beginning
pushed at and shifted the boundaries of the established slasher formula.
It seems, however, that viewers responded more strongly to the inven-
tion of a new formula rather than a wholesale subversion of the estab-
lished one.
If I may, I would like to revisit an observation made in my thesis regard-
ing the opening of the film. A New Beginning was the fifth film released
of a series which debuted six years prior. At the time it was one of, if not
the most prolific horror franchise going. The Friday the 13th series was
consistently financially successful, had a strong fan base due to regular
promotion in periodicals like Fangoria and had already contributed a
culturally iconographic image with the hockey mask worn by the pri-
mary and consistent antagonist, Jason Voorhees; Jason is the primary
antagonist in parts 2, 3 and 4 and is overtly discussed in the first film

(and arguably appeared). At the end of The Final Chapter, Jason is clearly
and explicitly killed. Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman), a young boy who
was terrorized by, and ultimately defeats, Jason, survives, though the
film implies the experience has traumatized him to the point where he
may very well become a killer himself. This is implied in the final shot
of the film, which I will discuss later.
A New Beginning picks up with Feldman, reprising his role as Tommy,
walking through the woods at night during a rainstorm. He watches
two people dig up Jason’s body, and Jason returns to life, kills them,
then strides towards Tommy and raises his machete to strike him. At
this point, older Tommy (John Shepherd) wakes up, seemingly in pre-
sent day, even though The Final Chapter, released the previous year, took
place in the present day, when Tommy is played by Feldman.
I write,
A New Beginning, on the other hand, leaps forward to the ‘present’ of

the film after Tommy awakes, potentially disorienting the franchise
viewer, because of his/her familiarity with and attachment to Corey
Feldman in the role of Tommy. The new viewer lacks this contex-
tual baggage, conceivably understanding the earlier sequence to
occur in approximately 1975, as the fashion is not time-specific,
and the only music playing is the orchestral score. This allows the
new viewer to shift from young Tommy to 17-year-old Tommy more
easily without being confused by the quantum leap between the
two films (2013, 195).
This temporal subversion places series familiarists at a disadvantage

while potentially going unnoticed to newcomers, or as I call them, ‘new
viewers’. It is also not an isolated incident – the film’s narrative frame-
work may seem superficially conventional (though there is deeper sub-
version at play); however, it consistently flies in the face of narrative
elements familiar to those invested in the franchise.
Narrative and serial subversion
A look at viewer reviews and IMDb message boards shows that a primary
locus of dissatisfaction for the film is the fact that (spoiler alert) Jason is
not the killer. Rockoff writes, ‘Not surprisingly, fans didn’t appreciate this
attempt to alter the essence of the series. Nor did fans of the Friday the
13th series appreciate the fact that A New Beginning’s killer was not Jason,
but an ordinary paramedic gone mad after his son’s murder’ (2002, 158).
And the entire film’s narrative is built upon the tension surrounding the
killer’s identity. This can be seen in promotional literature at the time;
in a pre-release Fangoria article, Steinmann is quoted as saying, ‘Whether
it’s the real Jason or not, that’s the focus of the movie. Who is doing
the killing? And for what reason?’ (quoted in Everitt 1985, 22–3). The
two primary and viewer-expected culprits are Jason, back from the dead,
and Tommy, apparently unhinged mentally following the confronta-
tion with Jason, made explicit at the end of The Final Chapter. It is ulti-
mately revealed that the Jason-in-disguise is, in fact, Roy the paramedic
seeking revenge for the death of his secret (to everyone but himself) son,
Joey. This turn of events was considered preposterous, as is exemplified
by Matt Reifschneider’s review of the film, saying ‘jump in the Mystery
Van folks cause we’ll get the full explanation at the end even if the clues
don’t add up!’ (2011, n.p.). This backlash may seem superficially reason-
able, but let us consider it critically for a moment.
First, had the killer been revealed as Jason, back from the dead, it
would have been satisfying to fans but would have rendered the nar-
rative structure – the whodunit framing – unnecessary. Jason has come
back to life multiple times in the series: first after his initial drowning,
second at the end of Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981; dir Steve Miner), after
which he has disappeared, and at the end of Friday the 13th Part III 3D
(1982; dir Steve Miner), which does end showing his dead body laying
on the ground with a hatchet in his head.4 After these resurrections,
it is not difficult to see how Jason could potentially survive a near cra-
nial bisection at the close of The Final Chapter. Even considering that
the fourth film is entitled The Final Chapter, A New Beginning suggests
a potential return of the iconographic villain. In spite of these hopes,
the ‘whodunit’ formula, revisited from Friday the 13th (1980; dir Sean S.
Cunningham), and to a lesser extent Part 2, would have been superflu-
ous. Viewers, having expressed a liking for Jason Voorhees, would want
to know, and comfortably view the film knowing, that Jason is alive and
well, so to speak. This also risks the film indulging in some sensational,
as well as highly formulaic, narrative points. In this way, revealing the
killer to actually be Jason at the film’s denouement would have explic-
itly undermined genre conventions of both the slasher and the murder
mystery.
Tommy is the second suspect, and the bulk of the narrative points
to him as culpable for the murders. Steinmann says, ‘It is a departure
from the other Friday the 13ths because we concentrate on one character,
Tommy Jarvis, who we are not too sure of. We don’t know whether to
sympathize with him or to hate him’ (quoted in Everitt 1985, 23). He

is conspicuously absent during most of the murders, and his traumatic
encounter with Jason as a child has left him mute, consistently wearing
a severe, intense gaze, managing to stand out from the other characters
in the film, who are either grandiose caricatures or thoroughly unassum-
ing. Therefore, Tommy is the most likely suspect as indicated location-
ally (within the narrative) and performatively. Furthermore, the viewer
familiar with The Final Chapter, released the previous year, would be
aware of an explicit indication that Tommy is likely to become a killer,
which is also linked aesthetically. The final shot of The Final Chapter is
Corey Feldman as young Tommy, now bald as a result of his identifi-
cational ruse which successfully distracts Jason, seeing his sister in the
hospital and giving her a hug. In medias hug Tommy opens his eyes and
looks at the camera, his face blank and expressionless. There is a sharp,
characteristically Manfredini musical sting, and the image freezes and
enlarges. In some ways, this is similar to the final shot in The 400 Blows
(1959; dir François Truffaut), which I have discussed in relation to A New
Beginning (2013, 160 n.12).5 In short, frame enlargements in place of a
zoom is a device which is utilized multiple times in A New Beginning.
In the case of Pete, for example, as the death blow occurs, the image
enlarges to mimic a zoom. The image enlargement is a conspicuous aes-
thetic device, and though it may have practical utility, potentially to
cover images of graphic violence in order to appease the Motion Picture
Association of America, it also repeatedly evokes a subtle cognitive link
to a viewer familiar with The Final Chapter, particularly significant as it
occurs upon the depiction of the death blow – Tommy’s suggested mur-
derous capabilities are stylistically echoed across subsequent murders.6
This link potentially validates what is unacceptable to the viewer
unfamiliar with previous entries – that Tommy could conceivably be
the killer. What the contemporary franchise familiarist potentially
expects – if Jason isn’t back from the dead, then the torch can be carried
on by Tommy, who is capable (we’ve been told in The Final Chapter) of
murderous acts – the viewer unfamiliar with the previous instalment
would reject based on ‘whodunit’ tropes. The overtly creepy person who
is conspicuously absent when the killer appears is most likely not the
killer; the answer to the mystery is rarely called in. Thus a deepening dis-
parity between the franchise familiarist and the new viewer is exposed,
and the film yet again favours the new viewer.
The killer, then, is revealed to be Roy, the paramedic who is trauma-
tized by having to attend to the mangled corpse of his (secret) son, Joey.
Although Roy gets four close-ups (one extreme) and two lines, he flies
under the radar because his relationship to Joey remains unknown until
after his unmasking. He also appears twice in the film before the final
reveal, demonstrating a significant enough presence to aid believability
for being the culprit. This stands in stark contrast to the appearance of
Mrs Voorhees of Friday the 13th, who essentially arrives, comforts Alice,
then says (and I paraphrase), ‘Hi, I’m the killer’, with no prior appear-
ances in the film. Roy has been introduced in the film previously, his
repeated appearances lend him narrative relevance and he ultimately is
linked to one of the characters that has already appeared, again in con-
trast to Mrs Voorhees. Stephen Neale addresses this type of narrative in
his discussion of the detective film, stating, ‘A coherent memory is thus
constructed across the separate instances of the story of the crime, the
story of its investigation, and the process of the text itself: the memory
constructed within the film duplicates the memory constructed by the
film’ (1980, 27). While there is no conscious investigation throughout
the film (though Tommy could be conceived as an unreliable investiga-
tor), we are still constructing a memory of the events based on narrative
depiction, and the text itself confirms or denies the accuracy of this
memory, constructing its own in the process, at the end. Roy’s ultimate
irrelevance, however, in the greater Friday the 13th narrative renders him
seemingly inconsequential to the franchise familiarist, and therefore,
in Neale’s terms, incoherent.7 That is not to say that the film is either
highly generic in terms of the ‘whodunit’ or generically subversive in
terms of slasher serials; the fact that Steinmann designed a film that frus-
trates its fan base (particularly in this regard), while easing new viewers
into its particular mode of the subgenre, isolates the film as a singular
text in itself, without sufficient reliance on (indeed, a subtle rejection
of) other films for context. It can be understood as a film in itself, which
frustrates easy reception while adhering to the most broad generic
tropes, establishing a range of underplayed expectational incoherencies.
However, the film works in other ways, particularly with its depictions
of characters – and their deaths – that again frustrate expected generic
pleasure and in some ways stand apart from established theoretical
models of the genre.
Not your average happy, horny teen
Where the first four Friday the 13th films provide what reviewer Janet
Maslin glibly calls ‘the now-familiar spectacle of nice, dumb kids being
lopped, chopped and perforated’ (1982, n.p.), A New Beginning slyly cir-
cumvents such trappings. While the bulk of the characters that blindly
wander to their deaths primarily consist of teenagers, they are not what
Sean Cunningham initially conceived as ‘young lovely kids’ (quoted in
Bracke 2006, 19). The film, set at Pinehurst Halfway House, contains
young people transitioning from a range of institutions, being guided
towards recovery from various unknown traumas or horrific pasts. While
their precise problems are not fully specified, certain tics are evident in
several characters. Vic apparently has problems dealing with anger; Joey
has an unhealthy reliance on food and obvious problems with reading
social cues and understanding personal interaction; Tina and Eddie both
engage in sex seemingly to the point of compulsion; and Jake, who has
a stutter, is almost cripplingly shy. So most of the people at Pinehurst
are either recovering from difficult past experiences or helping young
people in need – not exactly the usual happy, privileged kids.
Furthermore, there are characters that exist in order to complicate our
relationship with this group of young people. Vinnie and Pete, 1950s
teen biker throwbacks, appear in stark contrast to the others. Foul-
mouthed, brash and overly macho, they are travelling in a car that breaks
down nearby. They have no other link to the main cast and manage to
provide two teen killings, prior to the killings at the house, that the
viewer can enjoy with relatively little compunction. This does provide a
model to complicate the generic enjoyment of the other teen deaths, as
do the characters of Ethel and Junior – the neighbours. Ethel lives next
door with her son Junior, a grown man who seems to have mental and
emotional problems of his own. They largely appear to exist in order to
have more characters to provide ‘pleasurable’ murder set pieces. Apart
from being crude and brash, they vocally oppose the presence of the
house so close to their residence. Ethel, insensitively calling it a ‘house
of crazies’, verbally attacks the residents, and even Junior engages in
a failed altercation with Tommy. The viewer is invited to enjoy Ethel’s
demise as comeuppance for her verbal violence against the same young peo-
ple whose deaths we anticipate witnessing. Therefore, if we accept that
Ethel’s murder is emotionally uncomplicated for this reason, we must
also accept that either we can compartmentalize our emotions regarding
violence against these people, or assuming briefly that the enjoyment of
slashers hinges on sadistic, reductive pleasure, that pleasure is, in this
case, far more complicated. This is not to say that the emotional reso-
nance resulting from both the murders of Ethel and Junior are entirely
simplistic.
Despite Junior aggressively attempting to fight Tommy – and
losing – his death is laden with pathos. He returns home and angrily rides
his bike around the house, lamenting his metaphorical emasculation.
Inside, Ethel is preparing food, and she insults him, calling him ‘fuck-
wad’. We see in a shot mounted on the motorbike’s handlebars that
Junior is screaming and crying, apparently feeling humiliated. It is as he
is having what amounts to a literally childish tantrum that he is decapi-
tated by an artfully swung knife as he rides. Junior doesn’t die follow-
ing a cruel victory or an undeserved moment of happiness but as he is
expressing humiliation in a way that clearly evinces his stunted mental
and emotional development. This is also a tendency amongst the young
house residents throughout the film. Tina and Eddie die basking in their
respective post-coital glows (the almost compulsive nature of their cop-
ulation bringing the ultimate satisfaction of this engagement into some
question); Joey is killed after being admonished for getting chocolate on
clean sheets even though he was just trying to help; Jake is killed while
crying after Robin roundly laughs at him when he confesses his feel-
ings for her and Violet is too distracted to talk with him; and Robin is
killed after showing genuine remorse for hurting Jake’s feelings. In each
of these cases, Roy/Jason kills these already troubled characters at their
lowest emotional point, lending further pathos to these sequences, emo-
tionally complicating these genre set pieces. However, it is not only the
characters with emotional trauma that are the victims of emotionally
complex murder sequences. I will now focus extensively on one such
scene that I consider exemplary of this tendency and the most overt
demonstration of how Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning sneakily
undermines the moneygrubbing film genre box-tickers and simultane-
ously plays to expectation while subverting convention, even eluding
later retrospective genre theorization.
The death of Demon
Demon is arguably the most relatable character in the film, and he

appears for just under seven minutes of screen time. Demon is the older
brother of Reggie, the young boy who lives at Pinehurst with his grand-
father George who is the cook there; the grandfather is apparently Reg-
gie’s primary carer. Reggie’s grandfather doesn’t like him spending time
with Demon, for reasons that are not entirely clear – we do see Demon
smoking marijuana with his girlfriend, and he is dressed all in leather
in a hip, tough-guy get-up. Demon lives in a trailer park, in what seems
to be a free, bohemian lifestyle. But he’s not a tough-guy caricature – he
expresses sincere love and adoration for his younger brother and appears
to enjoy a comfortable relationship with his girlfriend. Portrayed with
cool affability and ease by Miguel A. Nunez Jr, Demon is one of the more
likeable and least pitiable characters in the film, and he is consistently

framed with a certain level of incoherence that complicates the experi-
ence of his death.
The scene begins with Reggie, Tommy and Pam arriving at the trailer
park. Reggie knocks on the door of Demon’s trailer. They have a brief
conversation through the door whereupon Demon immediately recog-
nizes Reggie’s voice, opens the door and hugs him tightly when they
see each other. Demon introduces Reggie to Anita, who is sitting in the
corner coolly smoking pot. This is a clear generic indicator that they
are likely to be victims of the killer and are linked to transgression, at
odds with the highly likeable introduction of Demon. He feeds Reggie
an enchilada, talks with him for a while, discusses his new rings and
gives one of them to Reggie. Demon offers Reggie a beer, allowing the
viewer a moment to immediately register both the generic transgression
of alcohol consumption linked to potential victims and the negative
implications of offering it to a young person, before snatching it away
from Reggie, demonstrating his clear awareness that this is wrong. After
Tommy’s altercation with Junior, which takes place in the middle of this
scene, Pam tells Reggie they have to go so that they can get Tommy back
to the house. Demon tells Reggie to stay safe, again demonstrating that
he cares for him, and as they drive away, Demon says to Anita, ‘I miss
him already.’ Within this portion of the scene, we see the presence of
generic indicators which are complicated by positive, likeable personal-
ity traits. This results in moment-to-moment transitionary phases where
the viewer may have the same broad expectation (that these characters
will be killed) but shifting feelings about this expectation.
This tendency continues throughout the scene. Anita offers Demon
a hit off of the joint, which he takes (again establishing transgression),
and then he begins to grimace with discomfort, which he attributes to
‘those damn enchiladas’ before running, using stiff, short steps, across
the trailer park to the nearby outhouse, a structure made of wood and
sheet metal. Inside, a close-up of his face reveals almost orgasmic relief.
At one point, Demon says, ‘This shitbox is gross,’ and it does indeed
seem, for such an erstwhile likeable character, an inauspicious location
for demise. Furthermore, the implication of the olfactory environment
makes the atmosphere of the scene even more unpleasant. Demon’s
specification of his journey’s culprit, the enchiladas, is a further unpleas-
ant detail that lends an ‘air’ of disgust.
While Demon sits in the outhouse, it begins shaking; looking scared,
he calls, ‘Who’s there? Stop!’ This sets up the false expectation of threat,
but after a moment the image cuts to outside, showing Anita laughing
and shaking the outhouse. Demon gets angry and shouts, ‘You’re gonna
get it, bitch!’ The use of the word ‘bitch’ in anger creates a potentially
negative response in the viewer regarding their attitude towards Demon.
Anita’s response – continued laughing and response of ‘Oh lighten up,
Demon, you’ll feel a lot better after you shit’ – demonstrates this mutual
antagonism as acceptable within the boundaries of their relationship.
After talking more, Anita teasingly tells Demon, ‘You better watch out
for the snakes that’s gonna crawl up that crapper and bite your ass,’ and
Demon gets a sweet, childishly scared look on his face as he nervously
looks down the hole he’s sitting on. Anita then begins to soothe him
by singing to him, a lyrically banal but lightly up-tempo soul-inflected
‘Ooh baby/ Hey baby/ Hey baby/ Baby baby,’ and Demon responds in
kind, singing ‘Ooh baby/ Ooh baby’ and so forth. They sing back and
forth, the image intercutting between them until Anita lightly and
sweetly tapers off. All of this, the comfortable and tender back-and-forth
dialogue and singing between Demon and Anita, as well as Demon’s
humanizing fear of something a little ridiculous and the relatively
unglamorous locale, appear designed to endear the viewer to Demon as
well as Anita.
After the silence, Demon listens then calls for Anita, and then the
shaking of the outhouse begins again. Demon says, again angrily, ‘I told
you this isn’t funny, now you’re gonna get it, bitch.’ Again, the use of the
word ‘bitch’ stands out in contrast to the loving interaction which has
just been shown and temporarily complicates the viewer’s relationship
to Demon, despite its earlier absolution. As he opens the door, he looks
down and sees Anita lying on the ground dead, with her throat appar-
ently cut. He quickly closes the door, apparently crying, and whimpers
‘Anita’, reminding the viewer of his tender and loving feelings towards
her, not only allowing an opportunity to lament her death but to fully
sympathize with him as he is being terrorized.
Carol Clover writes, ‘The death of a male is nearly always swift; even
if the victim grasps what is happening to him, he has no time to react or
register terror. He is dispatched and the camera moves on’ (1992, 35).8
However, what comes next does not adhere to this observation – here,
it is the girl who is quickly dispatched off-screen and the male who is
subjected to prolonged terrorization in the set piece, subverting broad
theoretical analyses of this subgenre.
Demon continues to scream as the outhouse continues shaking, and a
long pole, nondescript but sharp enough to penetrate the metal siding,
pierces the wall, missing Demon. The pole penetrates the wall again,
striking Demon in the leg. He screams in pain and is clearly crying, as
Figure 2.1 Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985; dir Danny Steinmann):
Demon (Miguel A. Nunez Jr), terrorized before dying in tears, like multiple men
in this film
his face is wet from heavy tear trails (Figure 2.1). A few moments later
(the temporal space between each appearance of the pole is relatively
protracted), the pole comes through the wall again and stabs Demon
through his chest, causing his swift death.
In the way this entire scene plays out, we are given a fairly nuanced
characterization of someone that appears for only a few minutes. This
is consistent with what Berliner describes as ‘narrative perversity’: ‘nar-
rative perversity means a counterproductive turn away from a narrative’s
linear course’ (2010, 10). In this case, the effort taken to imbue Demon
with pathos runs contrary to the presentation of a character to swiftly
dispatch for the sake of a generic set piece and hence functions as nar-
rative perversity. Additionally, the creation of pathos is subject to an
incoherence resulting from instances that occasionally undermine the
apparent goals of characterization: Steinmann endears the viewer to
him, while occasionally undercutting that likeability with moments –
handing Reggie the beer, calling Anita ‘bitch’ – that temporarily call
into question his likeability, providing a moment-to-moment shifting
cognitive appreciation for the character. Furthermore, as the scene ends,
there is a cut to Reggie and Pam arriving back at the house, remind-
ing the viewers briefly of Reggie’s relationship to Demon, aiding in the
transcendence of the murder set piece from generic to tragic. While
this may not have the full pathos provided by a whole film, or even
several scenes that dedicate themselves to characterization prior to the
character’s death, the potential emotional response to this sequence is

much more weighty and complex than the bulk of A New Beginnings’s
generic contemporaries.
Conclusion
The death of Demon, while interesting in its own right, is emblem-

atic of the formal narrative development that occurs throughout
Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning. I have observed this scene
on a microcosmic level, and I’ve approached other elements of the
film – victim characterization, narrative links to the previous films
and readings based on viewer familiarity – to highlight a number of
scenes and sequences which establish a heightened level of cogni-
tive complexity in order to achieve its effect. The film consistently
and subtly undermines generic expectations, as well as those estab-
lished by previous narratives in the franchise, to create a text that
is both firmly set within the parameters of the subgenre but infuses
the generic elements with incoherent narrative points to complicate
the supposedly simple pleasures of the subgenre without succumbing
to self-reflexive commentary. In other words, the slasher provides a
sufficiently flexible framework to create something complex without
having to resort to talking about the subgenre. Whether or not my
valuation of the film, and my criteria for valuation, are accepted by
the reader, ultimately I have attempted to stress how Friday the 13th
Part V: A New Beginning succeeds at developing complexity via narra-
tive perversity and formal incoherence to an extent that makes it a
Hollywood film of note and worthy of more extensive study than it
has received to date.
Notes
1 See my PhD thesis Bearing Witness to a Whole Bunch of Murders: The Aesthetics
of Perspective in the Friday the 13th Films, at http://roehampton.openrepository
.com/roehampton/bitstream/10142/302655/1/Clayton%20George%20
Wickham%20-%20final%20thesis.pdf
2 ‘Infamous’ maybe with regards to retrospective consideration.
3 See Grove (2005, 126), Rockoff (2002, 149–50), Nowell (2011, 233) and Bracke
(2005, 314).
4 His return is considered either at the coda of the first film, which could poten-
tially be a dream, or at the start of Friday the 13th Part 2. Considering the
first film’s coda as a dream makes temporal sense, as he appears as a child at
the end of Friday the 13th but as an adult at the beginning of Friday the 13th
Part 2. This explanation, while ambiguous, does establish a potential narrative
consistency between points in the serial narrative, unlike the opening to A

New Beginning, which, as we have discussed, is temporally disorienting.
5 I evoke this as a means of familiarization, not of explicit influence or
relationship.
6 See the overlay on p. 134 of Bracke 2006 for the MPAA demands.
7 ‘The risk for the audience is a loss of sense and meaning, the loss of a position
of mastery’ (Neale 1980, 26).
8 See Darren Elliott-Smith’s discussion of this with regards to Marcus Nispel’s
2003 remake of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in this volume, along with a
counter-argument to Clover’s assertion of the ‘feminized male’, which I also
feel applies here to a certain extent.
3
I Framed Freddy: Functional
Aesthetics in the A Nightmare on
Elm Street Series
Karra Shimabukuro
While past scholarship on A Nightmare on Elm Street focuses on the con-

cept of the Final Girl (Clover 1992; Christensen 2011), the monstrous
feminine (Creed 1993), the female as a double for the monster (Wil-
liams 1983/1996) and structural analysis of stalker/slasher films (Dika
1990), little has been written on the aesthetics of horror or slasher films.
Although the concept that ‘modern film techniques enable the direc-
tor to practice a kind of écriture (writing) in film’ (Bordwell 1989, 45) is
widely accepted, the concept of a franchise or series acting in a similar
way with different screenwriters and directors is not (45). If we apply
this concept to a franchise/series in order to look at what narrative is
written by the series as a whole, and what elements contribute to this
‘writing’, it is possible to examine the ways in which the narrative is
built across a series, expanding Bordwell’s concept that ‘a film’s stylistic
texture is pervasive, uninterrupted from first moment to last’ to include
a series (Bordwell 2005a, 36). Christensen states that ‘[t]he original A
Nightmare on Elm Street [1984; dir Wes Craven] helped establish Craven
as an auteur with a mastery of the macabre and initiated the sadistic
Freddy Krueger (then portrayed by Robert Englund) into the annals of
popular culture iconography’ (Christensen 2011, 23), allowing for anal-
ysis of the A Nightmare on Elm Street series as experimental or auteur film,
from its inception all the way up through the ‘end’ of the series with
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991; dir Rachel Talalay).
Bordwell lists six basic concepts of the modernist tradition, bor-
rowed from painting and applied to film. Applying these concepts to
the Nightmare series gives us parameters to discuss how practical and
aesthetic concerns fuse to form a ‘functional aesthetic’.1 It is Bordwell’s
51
application of a modernist aesthetic in addition to his concept of how

form influences function in film that allows us to consider horror films,
and in particular the Nightmare series, in a new light that bridges two
disparate fields – film aesthetics and historical background. Bordwell’s
first concept is ‘modernist artwork courts chance’ (1989, 55), and for the
early slasher films, the aesthetics of the film are often incidental, a happy
accident of casting, location and effects. Low budgets, an occasional lack
of script and a need to create technologies and effects as you went led to
a particular type of functional aesthetic, and A Nightmare on Elm Street is
no exception. These practical considerations also reflect that ‘[t]he mod-
ernist work retains overt traces of the process of its making’ (56).
The second concept is ‘modernist work seeks a formal and substantive
purity’ (56). Bordwell connects this to both a minimalist and a mod-
ernist approach. The example he uses is Warhol with his ‘content-less’
films, ‘shorn of plot’ and ‘emptied of human presence’ (56). But how
can this be applied, and what does that look like? I argue that it is an
emphasis on form over content with a focus on symbolism. Slasher films
as a genre depend upon symbolism, and the Nightmare series depends
on abstraction, particularly for the scenes set in the dream world. As the
series progresses, it moves from self-reference to metanarrative, making
‘you aware you’re watching a film’ (57) and satisfying the third modern-
ist concept of retaining overt traces of the creation process. Fourth, a
conscious focus on the film as film in the series represents the idea that
‘formal properties or specific aspects of the medium become the focus of
the perceiver’s experience’ (56). Fifth, the series’ self-classification as an
independent film, the reputation of New Line Cinema and the nature
of the horror genre work to criticize ‘dominant theories and practices
of art-making’ (57). And sixth, the fantastical nature of the narrative,
as well as the use of windows, doors and mirrors as frames ‘encourages
aesthetic distance’ (57) since the audience ‘cannot really imagine enter-
ing the depicted space’. By applying these six concepts to the Nightmare
movies, we can see how the movies have a narrative continuity formed
by the functional aesthetics of the films as a series.
The modernist artwork courts chance
For much of the series, the practical special effects were created on set
and on the fly. There was often little rehearsal, and with limited budgets
there were often no second chances for effects (Never Sleep Again: The Elm
Street Legacy, 2010; dirs Daniel Farrands and Andrew Kasch). Despite these
constraints, one thing that sets the Nightmare original series apart is the
Functional Aesthetics in the Nightmare Series 53
dedication to practical effects in order to further the narrative. Through-

out the series, specific special effects are highlighted over the spectacle
of high body counts.2 The majority of the effects in the entire Nightmare
series are practical effects. The first movie contains 80 effects shots in
just 92 minutes of film, accomplished in just 26 days of shooting. One of
the benefits of practical effects is their impact on the actors themselves
(2010; dirs Farrands and Kasch). Because the effects were something the
actors experienced, this was reflected in their performance. For example,
in the first film Glen’s death scene was a one-take shot. The rotating
room with the red-coloured water pouring down from the ceiling hit the
electric lights and electrocuted a crew member and threw the weight of
the room off. The room started to turn, out of control. For over 20 min-
utes the crew was upside-down and stuck. The practical effects literally
affected the production, which affected the narrative, because not seeing
Glen’s body raised the level of horror. Similarly, the focus on long track-
ing shots in the film influenced practical effects – the shot when Freddy
is on fire during the final showdown in A Nightmare on Elm Street was
completed in one take (2010; dirs Farrands and Kasch). This extended
shot helps to build suspense in the final showdown because it illustrates
that Nancy can harm Freddy with her booby traps, but at the same time
it shows Freddy surviving the not-survivable. At this point in the film
the audience does not know what to expect; the female character they
thought was the protagonist was killed early in the film, and the rules
of reality do not apply. Because this countering of expectations builds
suspense throughout the entire film, the uncertainty of whether or not
Freddy Krueger can even be killed in the climax elevates this tension.
For example, in the initial Nightmare, the close-up shots of Krueger’s
glove can be read as both practical for ease of shooting and as a way to
build suspense before revealing the bogeyman as a whole. A close-up shot
of the glove is a powerful image emphasizing violence and monstrosity
while requiring no special effects. The visual of the sparks a metal glove
makes when scraped against metal is a practical effect, but the associ-
ation of fire with Krueger has demonic connotations. The discordant
sound of the glove scraping across metal also emphasizes the unnatural,
discordant nature of Krueger. A simple close-up shot of the glove ends
up doing a lot of work in setting up Krueger’s horrific nature. However,
by the sequel, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985; dir
Jack Sholder), the glove reads more as a phallic symbol than a narrative
trope given the queer readings of this film, the symbolism that Bordwell
argues points to a modernist approach (1989, 56). Close-up shots of the
glove also appear more in this film than in others. While in the first
film the glove is indicative of the parents’ guilt, in the second film the
glove becomes a symbol of transformation. Practically, the glove is also
a recognizable icon of Krueger that was popularized in the first film, like
Jason’s hockey mask, Michael Meyers’ mask and butcher knife or Leath-
erface’s chainsaw. By foregrounding these icons, these instruments of
violence, the film emphasizes its purpose as a slasher film while also cap-
italizing on a recognizable image. Krueger is able to take control of Jesse
through the glove and eventually break through him using it. When
Jesse goes to Ron for help, it is the glove that first breaks through Jesse’s
arm, then Krueger’s head pushes out of Jesse’s chest before Krueger cuts
himself out of Jesse in order to kill Ron. This process happens in reverse
when Lisa kisses Krueger as a way to free Jesse. Because the glove is such
a recognizable icon, it in many ways becomes the focus of the narrative;
in this film Jesse’s possession by Krueger is the centre of the story, and
the presence of the glove on Jesse is evidence of how far this transforma-
tion has gone. Likewise, when Lisa is able to take the glove, the narrative
focus shifts to her – the audience follows the glove. The prop of the glove
begins to carry part of the narrative. Despite the initial ‘chance’ of the
appearance of these effects and images in the first movie, the fact that
they are forwarded in the rest of the films resituates these initial happy-
accident choices into a functional aesthetic for the series.
The modernist work seeks a formal and substantive purity
In the majority of the Nightmare films there is no visual difference in

the presentation of reality or the dream world, reinforcing the narra-
tive’s presentation that there is little difference between reality and the
dream world.3 The only visual clue to the audience that things are oth-
erworldly is the presence of fog and the softness of the images that fea-
ture the little girls jumping rope. Instead, quick cuts and pull-back shots
‘reveal’ which world the characters are in. For example, in A Nightmare
on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987; dir Chuck Russell), during the
group hypnosis scene, the entire group sits up as though they are awake
and the hypnosis didn’t work; however, once Will stands, showing he
is no longer confined to his wheelchair, the group realizes that they are
in the dreamscape. In order to confirm this, the next shot is one of Dr
Simms opening the door to find them all asleep. While the blurring of
the line between reality and the dream world is conveyed through cam-
era shots and framing, it also has the effect of focusing the audience’s
attention on the narrative, thus emphasizing the ‘formal and substan-
tive purity’ of the story.
The modernist work retains overt traces of the process

of its making
The success of A Nightmare on Elm Street resulted in a sequel with almost

double the budget of the original.4 The increase in budget can be seen
in the increase in location shots as well as the addition of model, pup-
pet and matte painting effects. For A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s
Revenge, the repertoire of effects expands to model work with the open-
ing scene showing a school bus that travels down a long, suburban street
before veering off into the desert where the land disappears beneath
them, leaving the bus barely balancing on rock spires, an effect that is
repeated in the coda of the film. The climax at the power plant features
several puppets: dogs with human faces as well as a ferocious rat and cat.
One of the reasons why the sequel had an increase in types of effects
was because New Line wanted a ‘more commercial piece’ (2010; dirs
Farrands and Kasch).
Dream Warriors again saw an increase in budget and an increase in
the size and scope of the effects, such as the use of puppets, animation
and latex make-up effects.5 These effects serve as signposts to the audi-
ence when characters have slipped into the dream world and empha-
size Krueger’s growing power. Krueger appears as a giant puppet worm
that haunts Kristen’s dream and devours her. Later Krueger possesses a
puppet (an effect achieved through a combination of claymation and
puppetry), transforming and growing in size to kill Philip. Puppetry is
also used in Joey and Jennifer’s deaths with the tongues that tie Joey to
the bed and when Krueger slams Jennifer’s head through the television.
This film also saw early integration of animation effects with the green
‘Wizard Master’ effects between Will and Krueger in the dream world
and when Nancy’s father’s spirit appears to her at the end to say good-
bye. This film also refined the use of latex make-up effects and how they
were used with Freddy. Not only is Freddy’s burn make-up more realistic
in this film but the souls of the children that Krueger has killed now
appear as faces in the burns on his chest (an effect carried into A Night-
mare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988; dir Renny Harlin) where a
large latex model was made of Krueger’s chest and naked actors pushed
their bodies against it to simulate the trapped souls). These same types
of latex effects are seen again in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream
Child (1989; dir Stephen Hopkins) with the baby Krueger puppet.
While Dream Warriors was successful enough for New Line to green-
light A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, practical consid-
erations soon impacted the film. Production began just as the writers’
strike hit, and the over-the-top effects were meant to distract from the
lack of script. Despite these hurdles, it went on to be economically suc-
cessful, and Harlin’s use of the Hong Kong style – ‘the general sense of
a narrative style couched in a hyper fast pace and foregrounded visual
style’ (Totaro 2000, n.p.) – anticipates this trend in Hollywood by sev-
eral years. We can see in Harlin’s directorial approach, his narrative and
visual style and his fast pace, support for Bordwell’s argument of how
cinema has stylistically changed post 1960. Harlin’s style shows ‘more
rapid editing’ (Bordwell 2002, 16), ‘bipolar extremes of lens lengths’
(17), ‘more close framings of dialogue scenes’ (18) and a ‘free-ranging
camera’ (20). The use of effects to compensate for a weak script (2010;
dirs Farrands and Kasch) may explain why so many scenes mirror earlier
films. When Joey is seduced by a naked woman in his dream (presum-
ably Krueger in disguise), this echoes Glen’s death from the first movie.
Visually as well as narratively, these scenes are similar because of Harlin’s
use of overhead shots. When Joey’s mother discovers his body, and then
again in Kristen’s room before the beach scene, the overhead shots are
all reminiscent of the first film. Narratively it also echoes the original
film: it is 42 minutes into the film before the audience realizes that the
protagonist is not Kristen but Alice, as in the first film where Nancy and
not Tina is the protagonist.
Each movie in the series represents a change in the cultural production,
moving from auteur film-making towards being a part of the Hollywood
studio apparatus. The Dream Child’s production value is by far the best out
of all the original films, while representing a return to the simpler tech-
niques from the first film. Most of the action takes place within the bare
walls of the asylum, and the emphasis is on the long hallways and the
practical lighting. The camera focuses on shots that mimic first person
as a format for revealing backstory. These simple effects are countered by
the use of matte paintings of a large Gothic asylum different from previ-
ous films. In addition to this, there is a return to animated and practical
effects as well as latex and model work. The climax with the Escher-type
stairs was accomplished with practical stairs and camera angles (2010;
dirs Farrands and Kasch). These returns to basic cinematic effects and
visual style can be seen as a result of real-world influences on production.
The Dream Child had a rushed production schedule, which led to some
out-of-the-box approaches by the director, Hopkins, such as storyboard-
ing much of the movie like a comic. This approach in turn leads to
Mark’s death scene, where he is sucked into his comics and killed in
that black-and-white world once he is transformed into 2D. The MPAA
(Motion Picture Association of America) also kept cutting scenes to the
point that the story was affected, with gaps in the narrative. The end
result is that the production as a whole is visually interesting but, as
with Dream Master, the over-the-top effects often read as a way to dis-
tract from the fact that there is not a lot of story. There is a lot of flash
but not a lot of substance (2010; dirs Farrands and Kasch). Both the
budget and the schedule of the series – the practical considerations – end
up having lasting effects on the aesthetics of the film.
In the modernist artwork, formal properties or specific

aspects of the medium become the focus of the perceiver’s
experience
While Hantke addresses trends and transformations in the subgenres of

the American horror film, and Dika’s work examines tropes in slasher
films, what is missing is an examination of aesthetic choices as tropes.
Within the genre of slasher movies there are certain visual tropes that
mark or identify the genre; there are often shots where blood squirts
towards the screen/audience, villains are often shot in shadows, and
fast cuts work to create mood and increase tension. In addition to these
tropes, the Nightmare series also used camera angles in order to present
events as distorted, representing visually the dreamlike state of the char-
acters. This can be seen in the first film in the alley where the low cam-
era angle when Tina first sees Freddy distorts how the audience first
perceives Freddy. This distorted effect is replicated later in the jail when
the overhead camera angle looking down on Rod and his murder serves
to both replicate Nancy’s view of the murder from above and distort it
by the angle and in how her view is literally barred by the windows. The
use of windows, specifically barred windows, becomes a trope specific to
the Nightmare series. Windows and doors become frames for the narra-
tive; they contain the characters and hence contain their actions. In the
first film Nancy is contained, trapped in her own house by the locked
doors and barred windows, necessitating that the narrative unfold
within. In later movies long camera shots first focus on the windows
and doors of the Elm Street house, moving closer in tracking shots to
use entering the doors or windows of the Elm Street house as a visual
metaphor for entering the narrative of the film.
By the third movie, Dream Warriors, the opening credits reflect an
awareness of film as art and film as film. That is, it reframes itself as an
artistic endeavour, calling to mind its auteur roots, with the opening use
of a Poe quote in the credits: ‘Sleep. Those little slices of Death. How I
loathe them.’ At the same time, it also illustrates a self-awareness of itself
as film, a point which becomes key in later movies. The fourth movie,
The Dream Master, repeats the artistic move of showing a written quote
before the movie and credits begin, this time a quote from Job, in all
caps: ‘WHEN DEEP SLEEP FALLETH ON MEN, FEAR CAME UPON ME, AND TREMBLING,
WHICH MADE ALL MY BONES TO SHAKE.’ The series skips this opening for The
Dream Child but returns to it for Freddy’s Dead, the same red lettering on
a black screen, only this time it’s a Nietzsche quote: ‘Do you know the
terror of he who falls asleep? To the very toes he is terrified, because the
ground gives way under him, and the dream begins . . . ’ The screen that
follows is a quote from Krueger in Dream Warriors: ‘Welcome to Prime
Time, bitch.’ These openings reflect self-awareness and a self-referential
trope which evolves into metanarrative by the time we reach Wes Cra-
ven’s New Nightmare (1994; dir Wes Craven).
In 1984, A Nightmare on Elm Street was made for $1.8 million. By the time
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: Dream Master was released in 1988, the budget
was $13 million and the franchise had officially become a big-budget Hol-
lywood studio series, although cast and crew continued to refer to it as
an independent film series, even A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream
Master, which went on to become the highest-grossing slasher film of the
1980s (2010; dirs Farrands and Kasch). In the four short years between the
two films, the franchise had moved from an auteur film to just another
cog in the studio system, with specific goals of making the series a more
commercial piece. The third movie represents a turning point for the series
from auteur to studio system film with the $13 million budget (despite the
production team referring to the entire series as a ‘small, independent
film’) and a purpose to ‘find a way to market Freddy to the masses’ and
become an economic success (2010; dirs Farrands and Kasch). The on-
location exterior shots of grandiose buildings such as Kristen’s house and
the mental hospital also indicate the series moving away from the small,
independent film. The use of stop motion skeletons specifically as homage
to Ray Harryhausen’s use of skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts (1963; dir
John Chaffey) references the visual style of classic movies: stop motion
animation is an art from the Golden Age of film, a specific visual art form
easily recognizable as art. It is also an art form unique to film, therefore
emphasizing the concept of film as art and film as film.
The modernist work criticizes dominant theories and

practices of art-making
In 1984, New Line Cinema was a small distributing company, not the
megalith that went on to produce the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It was
producing A Nightmare on Elm Street that ‘put New Line Cinema on the
map’ (2010; dirs Farrands and Kasch), and New Line is often referred to
as ‘The House That Freddy Built’ (Kerswell 2010, 152). The movie was
rejected by other studios, so New Line Cinema decided to release it on
their own (2010; dirs Farrands and Kasch). This singular decision resulted
in A Nightmare on Elm Street being marketed and viewed as an independ-
ent movie series while at the same time making New Line Cinema enough
money to become the megalith that made the Lord of the Rings movies, as
well as others. The first movie was written and directed by Wes Craven,
‘already well known as an independent voice in the 1970s wave of low-
budget, independent horror films’, and ‘Craven ha[d] already established
a critical reputation as a filmmaker’ (Kendrick 2009, 21).
While the narrative of the first film reflects its auteur background, the
economic pressures about studio survival and how this influenced artis-
tic choice can be seen early on. Craven wanted the first movie to end
with the sun shining and everything undone. However, Robert Shaye,
the producer, insisted on a different ending in order to leave the movie
open for sequels; he wanted a ‘hook’ (2010; dirs Farrands and Kasch).
These economic considerations would later become more and more
influential, and by Dream Warriors economic concerns were intruding
on the narrative. The movie had huge script requirements with a lim-
ited budget and not a lot of rehearsal. There were conflicting forces:
economic success versus artistic intent (2010; dirs Farrands and Kasch).
Acquiescence to more standard slasher film tropes can also be seen in
the use of nudity and sex in the Nightmare films. In contrast to the Hal-
loween and Friday the 13th franchises, Nightmare’s narratives do not revolve
around sexual transgressions or horror film as modern morality play.
While the first two murders in the first Nightmare film could be seen as
linked to sexual transgression, it is not explicitly shown on screen as such
and is not the focus of the narrative. It’s not until the third movie that
there is any nudity, seen in the dreamscape when the nurse seduces Joey
before transforming into Krueger. Joey is later killed in the fourth movie
because he’s seduced by the naked model trapped under his waterbed;
he gives in to temptation. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
reflects how much the series has moved towards more standard slasher
elements and Hollywood expectations. The movie opens with credits that
show bodies having sex, and Alice shown nude in the shower is the first
scene. She then walks naked down the hallway in an extended sequence.
The narrative and production design breaks with the traditions estab-
lished by the first five films with Freddy’s Dead. The opening with John
Doe on the plane and the subsequent sequence of falling and the Oz
references with the spinning house and Krueger on a broom establish

the movie as a Hollywood blockbuster, far removed from its auteur
roots. The narrative establishes this from the beginning, using ‘cutting-
edge’ effects (for 1991) from the beginning with the use of computer
print and the statement that the story is set ten years from now. These
moves attempt to establish the movie as foreshadowing the future, plac-
ing the effects and the narrative on the cutting edge of what is to come.
The result is a movie that is almost never grounded in reality. While the
youth shelter at the beginning of the movie is realistically portrayed,
once the action moves to Springwood nothing can be read as reality.
The narrative explanation of dream therapy as the only solution for
Krueger killing teens again is just an excuse for the use of 3D, called
‘Freddy Vision’ (2010; dirs Farrands and Kasch).6 The gimmick was used
to revive the series for the final chapter. The climax of the film makes
extensive use of the 3D effect with actors stabbing weapons awkwardly
at the screen and audience in order to make the effect work. Without the
benefit of 3D, rewatching the last part of the movie simply emphasizes
the clunkiness of it all. For the final moment, though, the destruction of
Krueger is all practical effect – he explodes underneath the animation of
the three dream demons, with the addition of pieces of Krueger flying
towards the screen to enhance the 3D effect. The choice of 3D in the
final film reflects the studio’s awareness of the popularity of 3D in the
1990s and their efforts to conform to Hollywood trends.
The modernist work encourages aesthetic distance
In the first movie, the house on Elm Street is simply the setting of the
action. In fact, as a place, it is almost inconsequential to the action and
the narrative. However, by the sequel, and throughout the rest of the
series, the house becomes the container, the frame, for the narrative. It
is the house itself that contains the story. In many ways, the Elm Street
house takes on many of the qualities of a haunted house; it is haunted
by Krueger as well as becoming a focal point for the evil. The shots of the
house, as well as the focus on the door frame and windows of the house,
reflect this. Certain types of shots, such as long shots of the house on
Elm Street and then pushing in for close-ups on the door, become stand-
ard to the series. The house becomes the literal frame for the narrative,
but the audience is always aware that it is a frame. In the first movie,
these push-in shots emphasize the fact that Nancy is trapped and con-
tained by the house. In Freddy’s Revenge, the house becomes the physical
embodiment of Krueger in the real world; the house is Krueger and vice
Figure 3.1 A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987; dir Chuck Russell):
Representation of the Elm Street house
versa. He is able to manipulate what happens in the house, using it as an

extension of his power in the dream world. The house also comes to act
as a portal to the dream world. Once characters walk through the door
of the Elm Street house, they move from the real world into the dream
world. The push-in shots on the house also indicate travel from reality
to the dream world. This is most clearly seen in Dream Warriors with the
opening credits as the audience sees Kristen building a model of the Elm
Street house (Figure 3.1). But in a reverse of how shots of the house have
been used in the first two films, the audience only sees extreme close-ups
of the house’s construction until the end of the credits when the camera
pulls back to reveal that it actually is the Elm Street house. Later, the use
of shots that push in then quickly pull back out are used to illustrate
that the characters have travelled with Kristen’s power into the dream
world. In The Dream Master, the house as touchstone is seen as Rick and
the other teens must go to the Elm Street house in order for Rick to give
the background on Krueger. The Dream Child ignores the concept of the
house, but Freddy’s Dead returns to the idea of grounding the action in
the house. As John Doe states at the beginning of the movie, ‘It’s not
fair; I was almost out.’ Once again, the house on Elm Street becomes the
frame of the narrative; it becomes the foundation of the story, the one
solid thing and the touchstone for reality.
The porous boundaries of windows, doors and mirrors are empha-
sized throughout the series; these structural elements become motifs of
the series. From the first movie, window frames are used to frame the
story. At the beginning of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Nancy is shown
looking out onto Tina’s yard, and then Tina is shown looking out her
window right before her death scene. Windows are set up early in the
film as entryways, as when Nancy opens the window of her bedroom to
let Glen in. The bars put on the windows in A Nightmare on Elm Street
in order to keep Nancy safe can be seen as also trying to block these
boundaries, literally barring the way in for Freddy rather than keeping
Nancy in. In fact, it is trapping Nancy in the house that results in the
horrific ending. Nancy can’t escape because of the bars, her father can’t
come in to try and rescue her, and the bars don’t stop Freddy from tak-
ing Nancy or her mother. For the final showdown between Nancy and
Freddy, Nancy is framed in the window, screaming for her father to help.
It is a piece of stained-glass window, used as a weapon, that allows Alice
to defeat (temporarily) Krueger at the end of The Dream Master, and it is
this same stained-glass window that Krueger rises up through, exploding
when he is restored in The Dream Child. And the stained-glass window
forms the floor of the battleground in The Dream Child where Jacob takes
back the souls Krueger has stolen.
Door frames serve to both frame the story, as the viewer peers in the
door to view the action, and to show the children as separate from their
parents. The concept of doors, windows and mirrors as portals or bound-
aries is also seen in the ending of Nightmare on Elm Street with Nancy’s
mom dragged through the window/portal in the door in the coda. In
Freddy’s Revenge, it is the shutting and locking of doors that result in the
high body count at Lisa’s pool party. In Dream Warriors, Nancy is able to
close a door, imitating Krueger, in order to separate Krueger from the Elm
Street kids, protecting them. In The Dream Child, Krueger slams doors to
keep Alice from learning information from Amanda that would lead to
his destruction. The climax requires Yvonne to find Amanda Krueger’s
body, and she must break down a wall and reveal a doorway in order to
do it. In Freddy’s Dead, it is a door that reveals Krueger’s crimes when his
wife looks behind a door to discover evidence of his crimes. Later, once
Krueger kills his wife, Maggie/Katherine opens the cellar door, and this
leads to her telling the truth about Krueger.
Mirrors serve to frame and reflect in the series, but mirrors also obscure
the boundary between ‘reality’ and the ‘dream world’. In Freddy’s Revenge,
once Krueger has broken through Jesse in the aftermath of Ron’s death,
Krueger waves to Jesse wearing the glove in the mirror. By A Nightmare
on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, mirrors have become a doorway between
reality and Krueger’s world, as seen in the opening nightmare where
Kristen sees Krueger in the mirror instead of her own reflection, recall-
ing the same visual between Krueger and Jesse. The climax of the movie
takes place in a blood-red hall full of mirrors (Figure 3.2), and Krueger is
Figure 3.2 A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987; dir Chuck Russell):
Climax in the hall of mirrors
able to pull the characters through the mirrors. In a large-scale practical

effect, the mirrors all shatter when Joey finds his voice and screams, sud-
denly freeing them all from the grip of the mirrors and the dreamscape.
This use of mirrors both frames and separates the action in the series
while also signalling to the audience that mirrors represent the potential
of the dream world.
Throughout the series, mirrors serve as portals between the real world
and the dream world much as doors and windows do. This concept gets
expanded in The Dream Master when the concept of the mirror is not
just used as a portal but also to reveal information about the narrative.
In the beginning of the movie, Alice’s mirror is covered in pictures to
the point that nothing of the mirror surface is seen; it is hidden. How-
ever, the mirror’s function changes as Krueger kills Alice’s friends and
the movie’s narrative moves forward. A side effect of her friends’ deaths
is that Alice comes to absorb aspects of them into herself, and this is
literally reflected with the mirror in her room. Each time someone dies,
Alice removes pictures from the mirror, physically removing the char-
acter from the narrative and revealing Alice’s true character at the same
time. By the climax, what the mirror reveals is Alice herself as the Dream
Master, and by the end of the movie, the coda reveals Alice seeing Krue-
ger’s reflection in the water of the fountain.
As the movies reflect technological advancements, both in the use
of effects and in the references within the film, the types of frames and
doorways expand. In Dream Warriors, Jennifer is killed by television, but
she is first compelled to approach the television because Krueger uses it
to speak. This idea of the television as another type of frame, both in
regards to visual style and as a narrative frame, is revisited in Freddy’s
Dead. Krueger is able to suck Spencer into the television and trap him
in a video game, another new approach in visual style and narrative
frame.7 Spencer travels back to the real world by flying back out of the
television screen so that the television acts as the same type of portal
between worlds that mirrors and windows had previously stood in for.
When Maggie uses ‘Freddy Vision’ to confront Krueger, it is the flash
of television static that indicates a shift in time and place as Maggie
watches the Krueger flashbacks. The visual presence of static serves as a
narrative break as well as a visual signal to the audience that something
has changed. In this way, Freddy’s Dead breaks with a previous conven-
tion of the franchise where the transitions between the real world and
the dream world were rarely signposted. This serves to break down the
barriers between the real world and the dream world while also illus-
trating to the audience that visually there was necessarily a difference
between the two. The use of frames, whether they are windows, doors,
mirrors or screen frames, manage to both create aesthetic distance by
calling attention to the frame while at the same time using the frames
to illustrate that there is no difference between what is inside or outside
of the frame.
Conclusion
Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis argue that the intertextu-

ality or transtexuality of sequels challenge ‘existing theory’ (2010, 3),
and they propose that a new approach must be applied to an exami-
nation of sequels (4). Rather than disparage sequels for their lack of
originality or for their blatant capitalism, they argue that if we are to
truly gain insight into these films and how they function, we must rein-
vent how we examine them. I would argue that this fresh approach is
also necessary to differentiate within the genre of slasher films. The
concept of ‘functional aesthetics’, the idea that practical considerations
can influence the ‘art’ of a film, is an idea that runs in the background
of many films, particularly genre films such as horror or slasher films.
A low budget can result in the special effects department having to be
creative, which impacts the look and feel of a film. What begins as a
practical consideration, such as the choice of Freddy’s glove, becomes
an icon for a franchise. While the A Nightmare on Elm Street series is
often discussed in the same vein as other slasher films, such as the Hal-
loween (1978; dir John Carpenter) and Friday the 13th (1980; dir Sean
S. Cunningham) franchises, its use of functional aesthetics across the
franchise sets it apart. Within the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, vis-
ual stylistic choices evolve into hallmarks, the icons of the film. A focus
on practical effects, quick camera shots along with shots that pull back
to reveal the different worlds the characters are in, as well as overhead
shots and the practical use of doors, windows, mirrors and television
screens to frame the action, all become hallmarks of the series. These
same functional aesthetics reflect the movie’s auteur history, an aware-
ness of itself as film and an evolution towards Hollywood blockbuster
and also represent a style unique to the Nightmare series. The use of
these elements in and of themselves is not unique to the Nightmare
franchise or the slasher genre. Each of these can be seen in other films.
What makes the Nightmare franchise unique is that these elements can
be seen as a through line within the series. While the emphasis on prac-
tical effects ebbs and flows throughout the series, it is always present, as
is the use of camera shots to reveal information to the audience as well
as frame the action. Although the use of doors, windows, mirrors and
television screens as narrative frames can be seen from the first film,
it is an element that is developed and refined throughout the series.
Used together, these elements create a look and feel that is unique to
the series and instantly identifiable as belonging to Nightmare on Elm
Street. This proposed approach asks us to examine not only the aesthet-
ics and elements of each individual film but also how these same ele-
ments function across films. This approach allows us to see how visual
style evolves throughout a movie and a series, to analyse a film on both
the micro and macro level. Discussing franchises and series in this way
also allows for a merging of theoretical approaches, since as Jess-Cooke
and Verevis rightly argue, current models are insufficient for examining
sequels. Using functional aesthetics to approach franchise films allows
us to analyse the individual films on their own merits, place these films
both within their own historical cultural moment as well as within a
larger evolution, and examine the ways in which these films both on
their own and as a series reveal the fears, anxieties and desires of these
particular moments in time. This interdisciplinary approach allows us
to have a more complete picture of what these films are and how they
function.
Notes
1 The application of this term to film is my own. While it is often used in archi-
tecture, the concept of functional or practical considerations affecting the art
of film is not one that has been thought of in this way.
2 As a franchise/series, A Nightmare on Elm Street has a lower body count than
other slasher films of the time, with Halloween averaging 18 dead per film
(‘Body Count – Halloween Films Wiki’ n.d.) and Friday the 13th averaging 11
(‘Friday the 13th Body Counts’ n.d.).
3 One possible exception is Nancy falling into her chair and into the dream
world in Dream Warriors, although that’s generally not read as such because
she’s already in the dream. The first time there’s a clear visual clue that a char-
acter has entered the dream world is in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream
Child, where Alice falls into the dream at the beginning of the movie.
4 From $1.8 million (Kerswell 2010, 150) to $3 million (158).
5 From $3 million to $5 million (‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
(1987) – Box Office Mojo’ n.d.).
6 Both The Lion King (1994; dirs Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff) and Beauty and
the Beast (1991; dirs Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise) were released in 3D in
1991. The 1990s saw a total of 11 3D movies released, including two short
films: T2 3D: Battle Across Time (1996; dirs John Bruno, James Cameron and
Stan Winston) and The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man (1999; dir Scott
Trowbridge).
7 One of the first examples, along with the three dream demons, of computer-
generated images (CGI).
4
Candyman and Saw: Reimagining
the Slasher Film through Urban
Gothic
Stacey Abbott
Describing Gothic literature as a ‘writing of excess’ (1996, 1), Fred Bot-

ting argues that the genre has historically been replete with ‘gloomy
and mysterious’ atmospheres, stock supernatural features and desolate
and alienating landscapes, signifying ‘an overabundance of imaginative
frenzy, untamed by reason and unrestrained by conventional eight-
eenth-century demands for simplicity, realism or probability’ (3). It is
through excess that the emotional affect of the Gothic takes hold. Kris-
tin Thompson argues that excess within the cinema emerges when there
is a ‘conflict between materiality of a film and the unifying structures
within it’, namely narrative and character motivation (1986, 132). She
suggests that ‘the minute a viewer begins to notice style for its own
sake or watch works which do not provide such thorough motivation,
excess comes forward and must affect narrative meaning’ (132). This
is particularly significant with regard to horror cinema, wherein the
emotional affect often generated by the aesthetic excess is, in fact, the
central purpose of the film, with story and style working together to
incite an emotional response. It is precisely at the point where style
spills out over the requirements of narrative that affect is generated,
whether that be fear, terror, disgust or laughter. While excess within
the horror genre takes many forms, the Gothic excess that Botting
describes has been translated into many horror films largely through
the genre’s adoption of the aesthetics of Expressionism, in which inter-
nal horror and terror is projected outward onto the films’ visual design,
constructed through an emphasis upon chiaroscuro, decaying and often
imposing set design, distorted imagery and canted camera angles and
intensive – sometimes abrasive – musical scores. As Claire Smith argues,
67
the cinematic art directors of classic horror cinema took into account
‘every element of the set to present chilling, ominous spaces. Structures
were stylised, shadows lengthened, and motifs exaggerated, transform-
ing the past into a place to be feared. Investing formal design elements
with a heightened symbolism, cinema’s Gothic architecture became a
revenant of a past age; an uncompromising reminder of the ravages of
time’ (Smith 2013, 104). From Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), to Dario
Argento’s Suspiria (1977), to Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001),
the cinematic horror genre has a well-established Gothic legacy.
The slasher film, however, can equally be described as a cinema of
excess, although it is rarely included in discussions of the Gothic, and
its excess has largely been attributed to the genre’s high body count
and elaborate scenes of murder. For instance, Nick Pinkerton traces
the ancestry of the slasher film back to the old dark house tradition of
films such as The Cat and the Canary (1927; dir Paul Leni), The Old Dark
House (1932; dir James Whale) and And Then There Were None (1945;
dir René Clair), due to ‘their slowly-dwindling casts of victims, often
gathered at a single, isolated location’ (2013, 133). While these films
do draw upon the tradition of expressionism in their depiction of hor-
ror, and Pinkerton does acknowledge a shared aesthetic tradition with
slasher films (in particular an emphasis upon the point of view of the
killer), the Gothic lineage he traces between these films and the mod-
ern slasher film remains focused more upon the body count than the
films’ aesthetic style. Similarly, Ian Conrich argues that what matters to
fans of the slasher film – the Friday the 13th franchise in particular – is
‘the character who is Jason’s next victim and the manner in which they
are despatched’ (2010, 174), comparing the genre to the French theatri-
cal tradition of Grand Guignol, which ‘foreground[ed] . . . moments of
torture, mutilation, surgery and execution’ (173). While this theatrical
tradition had its own Gothic overtones, as Conrich makes clear, like the
slasher film, ‘it was the style of the gruesome effects which managed
most dramatically to heighten the tension of the performance’ (175). As
a result of this clear emphasis upon the tortured and dismembered body,
little has been done to explore the Gothic overtones of the slasher film,
with many seeing the genre as the antithesis of Gothic. Bernard Rose’s
Candyman (1992) and James Wan’s Saw (2004), however, both demon-
strate a symbiosis rather than an opposition between their Gothic aes-
thetic and the elaborate death scenes of the slasher’s many victims. In
this chapter I will, therefore, undertake close analysis of both films to
consider how these films adopt and adapt a Gothic aesthetic of excess
as part of their construction of the slasher genre. While these films are
Re-imagining the Slasher Film through Urban Gothic 69
known for their iconic slasher-heroes/villains, Candyman and Jigsaw,

equally important to the reinvigoration of the genre are the films’ inte-
gration of the elaborate death scenes with a modern form of urban and
industrial Gothic, in which isolation and alienation of the genre is con-
veyed via the decrepitude of the urban ghetto and the abandoned indus-
trial wasteland of America.
Reframing the ‘Terrible Place’ via urban Gothic
In her groundbreaking study, Carol Clover identifies the ‘Terrible Place’

as one of a series of key tropes within the slasher film, arguing that ‘[t]he
Terrible Place, most often a house or a tunnel, in which victims sooner
or later find themselves is a venerable element of horror’ (1992, 30). The
Terrible Place is not simply a backdrop for the genre but a manifesta-
tion of that horror, equally monstrous in its construction as the genre’s
serial killers. As Clover argues, ‘[t]he house or tunnel may at first seem
a safe haven, but the same walls that promise to keep the killer out
quickly become, once the killer penetrates them, the walls that hold
the victim in’ (31). It is with this trope that I want to begin my analysis
of both Candyman and Saw, for it is through this notion of the Terri-
ble Place that the conventions of the slasher film connect most overtly
with the Gothic. The decrepit houses or labyrinthine tunnels that so
often characterize the Terrible Place in the slasher film are akin to the
haunted mansions, abandoned monasteries, crumbling mausoleums
and decaying graveyards of Gothic fiction. In fact, Clover’s argument
that what makes these ‘Terrible Places’ so terrible ‘is not just their Victo-
rian decrepitude, but the terrible families – murderous, incestuous, can-
nibalistic – that occupy them’ (30), holds equally true for the Gothic, a
genre often characterized by the monstrous repercussions of family, its
history and inheritance, as evidenced in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the
House of Usher (1839). As Chris Baldick argues, ‘[f]or the Gothic effect to
be attained, a tale should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in time
with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space’ (1992, xix).
The Terrible Place, and its history, is of central importance to both
Candyman and Saw, but in contrast to many other slasher films, often set
in isolated rural locations, such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974;
dir Tobe Hooper) and Friday the 13th (1980; dir Sean S. Cunningham)
or suburbia, such as Halloween (1978; dir John Carpenter) and Scream
(1996; dir Wes Craven), these films resituate the slasher within an urban
environment. As a result, they equate the Terrible Place with the city
through their mise-en-scène, both dripping with abject urban decay and
evoking a tradition of urban Gothic, dating back to such 19th-century

authors as Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Machen and
Bram Stoker. As Robert Mighall argues with regard to Gothic cities in
literature, ‘[f]or Gothic of a city rather than just in a city, that city needs
a concentration of memories and historical associations. Ideally these
would be expressed in an extant architectural or topographical heritage,
as these areas provide the natural home for ghostly presences of imag-
ined/projected meanings’ (2007, 57; italics in original). Both films call
upon such a ‘concentration of memories’, albeit in very different ways.
Candyman is set within Chicago and focuses upon the real-life housing
project Cabrini Green, a location with its own history of violence but
here infused with an aura of myth and urban legend. In contrast, the
two main protagonists of Saw – Adam and Lawrence – spend the entire
film trapped in a decaying warehouse bathroom in a rather anonymous
industrial estate in an unnamed US city. As Adam explains, ‘I went to
bed in my shithole apartment and woke up in an actual shithole.’ While
the space is anonymous, the film renders through its mise-en-scène
an actual history of industrial decline. Both films intermingle real and
imagined histories in their construction of the Terrible Place and posi-
tion their slasher hero/villain as indelibly interconnected with the sur-
rounding urban landscape as evidenced in how each film opens.
The beginning of Candyman brings together a selection of elements
that signal the film’s integration of the slasher and Gothic conventions
via a form of stylistic excess. The title sequence is comprised of three
sections. The first is a high-angle crane shot tracking the movement of
a multitude of cars on the highways that both divide and circumnavi-
gate the city. This sequence is overlain with Philip Glass’s intense, near-
religious musical score performed on pipe organ with accompanying
choir voices. The second section begins as the music abruptly ends on
a matching high-angle medium long shot of hundreds of bees, swarm-
ing and crawling over each other. The camera zooms in closer and then
dissolves to an extreme close-up of the bees filling the frame, while Can-
dyman’s voiceover delivers a direct address, seemingly to the audience:
They will say that I have shed innocent blood. What’s blood for if
not for shedding. With my hook for a hand, I’ll split you from your
groin to your gullet.
The third section, following the end of Candyman’s narration, begins

on a medium close-up of the bees flying into the air, followed by an
extreme long shot of the Chicago cityscape as it is enveloped in a swarm
of bees flying in unison around the urban high-rises, with an accompa-

nying high-pitched screeching sound before Candyman completes his
narration with the statement ‘I came for you’. Narratively, these opening
establishing shots of the city announce the film’s location while Candy-
man’s address positions us within the slasher genre, through his promise
of brutal murder and specific reference to the hook. The hook is consist-
ent with Clover’s argument that the slasher genre privileges pre-techno-
logical weaponry that promise more intimate death, what she describes
as a ‘primitive, animalistic embrace’ (1992, 32). This intimacy is evoked
through the directness of his address: ‘I’ll split you from your groin to
your gullet.’ But, in keeping with Thompson’s argument about excess,
the stylistic presentation of the sequence not only enhances these fac-
tors but adds layers of meaning to the promises being made. The shots
of the city accompanied by Glass’s score lend the imagery a mythic and
ecclesiastic quality, reinforced by the image and sound of the swarm
of bees overwhelming the city with near-biblical ferocity. Furthermore,
Tony Todd’s deep, commanding, though whispering voice seemingly
hangs over the city as he delivers Candyman’s lines. Here he is a disem-
bodied presence that dominates the landscape, promising intimacy and
brutality. His narration evokes romanticism and poetics in the evocation
of the splitting of the body from the groin to the gullet, the alliteration
possessing a musical rhythm. Candyman is more than a killer, and the
city depicted in this opening is more than a backdrop. The use of Glass’s
Gothic musical score over these images inscribes the city with a Gothic
sensibility that will be reinforced when the film moves to the narrative’s
central location, the housing project of Cabrini Green.
In contrast to Candyman’s grandiose opening sequence, Saw begins
in a confined and restricted setting, conveyed through the use of pro-
nounced darkness and a series of very tight close-ups. After James Wan’s
director credit fades into black, a small light appears floating in water
revealing the submerged face of a man, followed by the title card, which
appears and disappears into the blackness of the screen. The film cuts
back to the close-up of the light and then to the shot of the man as his
eyes snap open and he starts up from the water with alacrity, his sud-
den motion pulling the plug. A selection of close-ups reveals the light
slowly dropping down the drain and out of sight. This opening delib-
erately withholds information by shooting in low light and in extreme
close-up, narratively conveying the character’s lack of knowledge of his
whereabouts. But the style of this opening also evokes the emotion of
the situation, inciting confusion and anxiety through the darkness and
the claustrophobic nature of the framing. Style overshadows narrative
and character to provoke an emotional reaction. The evocation of con-

fusion persists, as the man, later revealed to be Adam and now filmed
in medium long shot, crawls out of a bathtub, stumbling around in the
dark calling for help. The lighting here is deliberately dim to reflect the
manner in which Adam is literally and figuratively in the dark as to his
location and what is happening to him. A voice speaks out from off-
screen, but the film does not cut to the source of the voice in traditional
shot/counter shot manner but maintains Adam’s restricted perspective.
No one can see the speaker. While Adam speaks in a high-pitched, pan-
icked voice, the off-screen speaker talks in a coldly monotone cadence,
cryptically answering Adam’s questions but providing no indication
as to his identity. Suddenly, after the speaker indicates that he thinks
he’s found something, the film cuts to a series of medium shots of the
overhead fluorescent lights as they turn on one by one, intercut with
handheld close-ups of Adam as he grimaces and turns away from the
sudden glare of the lights. Once his eyes have adjusted, the scene cuts to
a medium shot of the speaker – Lawrence – revealed to be another cap-
tive chained to the opposite wall of the room.
With the lights now on, the location is shown to be a grimy and run-
down industrial bathroom with rusted and moulding exposed pipes,
cracked white tiles lining the walls and a filthy, broken toilet. As Law-
rence’s eyes similarly adjust to the light – shown through the slight
rack focusing of his point-of-view shot of Adam – the final reveal comes
when the camera, trained on Adam, quickly zooms back and tilts down
to show a bloody corpse on the floor – halfway between the two men.
In a continuous shot, the camera spins around and cranes up to a high-
angle long shot of the corpse, followed by three punctuating close-ups
of the body’s bloody skull, a tape recorder in his left hand and a gun
in his right. The speed of the camera movement and the abruptness
of the cuts, matched by a screeching soundtrack, accentuate the vio-
lence of the imagery while also marking a shift from disorientation to
the frightening realization of the horror of their situation. The style of
this opening evokes the experience of Jigsaw’s victims, waking up in an
unknown location and being confronted with the horror of their pre-
dicament. The audience is positioned with the victims, rather than with
Jigsaw, as we have no more information about his identity than Adam
and Lawrence, and we experience the revelation of their predicament in
a visceral frenzy of stylistic juxtapositions: from dark to light; stillness to
the manic motion of the camera.
While the killers, Candyman and Jigsaw, are not identified in
the opening scenes, their presences are felt across both locations,
primarily through their distinct and disembodied voices. Candyman’s

voice hangs over the city, evoking through his melodious narration
the sense of a ghostly presence dominating the urban landscape while
simultaneously suggesting an intimate whisper. This effect is rein-
forced when he appears for the first time to Helen, the sceptical grad-
uate student who invoked him by repeating his name five times in
front of a mirror. As she walks through a parking garage, a deep voice
whispers her name. She turns to see who is calling her, and the camera
follows her gaze to reveal a man, filmed in extreme long shot, stand-
ing on the opposite side of the garage. The disjunction between the
seeming proximity of the voice conveyed through a sonic close-up and
the distance at which he stands from her suggests that he transcends
the body and haunts the urban spaces. The sequence is both unset-
tling and disorienting. The recording of his voice both overwhelms
the space and seems separate from it, as if from a dream which is rein-
forced by the accompaniment of the choir voices in Glass’s musical
score. Jigsaw’s voice similarly haunts the bathroom in which Adam
and Lawrence are trapped – as well as the subsequent locations where
he stages his games – via the recorded messages he leaves on cassette
for his victims. In contrast to Candyman’s oneiric voiceover, however,
these cassettes are tangibly present, allowing Adam and Lawrence to
rewind the recording to listen for clues, their sound quality belay-
ing the physical technology upon which his messages are recorded.
Jigsaw’s presence is further evoked through the manner in which he
controls the mise-en-scène of his games, carefully leaving instructions
and clues throughout the space for them to follow and decipher. Each
move is meticulously planned and executed. Significantly, the finale of
the film divulges his actual presence when it is revealed that he is the
body, believed to be dead, lying prone in the centre of the room for the
duration of the film. This revelation is staged in a bravado cinematic
moment as Jigsaw, out of focus and in the background of a medium
shot of Adam, stands up, stretches and removes the bloody skull pros-
thetic, all to the driving rhythms of the now-iconic Saw music, com-
posed by Charlie Clouser of Nine Inch Nails, known as ‘Hello Zepp’.
Through the aesthetic utilization of the voices of the killers as well as
their musical accompaniments, the films evoke very different engage-
ments with the Terrible Place, with Candyman offering a dreamy and
nightmarish experience of the urban while Saw privileges a visceral
experience, both exhilarating and terrifying. Significantly, both films
continue this reimagining of the Terrible Place via their mise-en-scène
as a means of connoting a repressed urban history.
Evoking hidden histories
Robert Mighall argues that urban Gothic ‘depicts what the city (civi-
lisation) banished or refused to acknowledge . . .’ (2007, 54), what it
has ‘reject[ed] or demonise[d]’ (61). This is conveyed in the mid-19th-
century Gothic, from penny dreadfuls such as The Mysteries of London
(G. W. M. Reynolds 1844) to Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1837–39),
where the ‘modern urban experience’ is presented as ‘dark and danger-
ous’, characterized by ‘urban squalor’ and stigmatized poverty (Warwick
2014, 102). Alexandra Warwick argues that the work of Charles Dickens
was responding, via his Gothicized visions of 19th-century London, to
the impact of the growth of the industrialized city upon the human con-
dition (103). The 21st-century Saw returns to these themes, but here it is
the decline of the American industrial landscape that is the hidden his-
tory suggested and demonized in the film’s urban mise-en-scène. Cen-
tral to the film’s evocation of this history are the locations of Jigsaw’s
games. They each require isolation and space, taking place in a series
of hidden apartments, basements and abandoned industrial warehouses
across the city. Even Jigsaw’s workshop is discovered in an old, decom-
missioned mannequin factory, filled with tools and equipment, evoking
a tangible but lost history of industrialism. The landscape of Saw is not
one of social decline or decay but a seeming mausoleum to the indus-
trial past, reinforced by Jigsaw himself, a mechanical engineer who is
dying from cancer.
While Saw constructs a Gothic past, Candyman’s vision of the city is
centralized around a Gothic present, namely the location of Cabrini
Green. As Aviva Briefel and Sianne Ngai point out, this location ‘drama-
tizes Candyman’s distance from earlier films by directly acknowledging a
type of social fear that seems furthest removed from the concerns of the
traditional horror film: the everyday reality of urban violence in low-
income neighborhoods’ (2000, 284). Cabrini Green was a well-known
housing project built between the 1940s and 1950s whose population
by the 1960s was almost entirely made up of impoverished African
Americans. In subsequent decades, the housing project became famous
for police shootings, gang violence and murder alongside the neglect
of the police, government and social services and was deemed a fail-
ing in social housing (Austen 2012). The social segregation of the Afri-
can American community is articulated in Candyman by Anne-Marie, a
resident of Cabrini Green, who claims that ‘white folk never come here
except to cause us a problem’. Furthermore, this segregation is repeat-
edly visualized via the overhead shots of the highway that separates the
university and high-rise condo locations from the urban deprivation of

the projects. Upon entering the housing estate, the horror of this urban
reality is, literally, painted on the walls in the form of the graffiti and filth
that covers the interior of the apartment buildings. Having traversed the
eight blocks that separates their comfortable middle-class existence from
‘Candyman Country’, Helen and colleague Bernadette enter the build-
ing with trepidation, navigating their way around the gang members
and (presumed) drug dealers that seek to intimidate them and climb the
stairs towards the apartment where a murder attributed to the ‘Candy-
man’ is purported to have taken place. The corridors are filthy and the
walls covered in colourful, yet threatening, graffiti alluding both to the
Candyman urban legend and to the bustling drug trade with tags such
as ‘Sweets to the Sweet’. As they move from the public corridors into the
derelict apartment/crime scene, the mise-en-scène becomes darker and
more ominous with lower lighting, broken glass strewn across the floor,
boarded-up windows and graffiti that no longer evokes personalized tag-
ging and drug trade but foulness and decay. As they enter the apartment,
Bernadette notes its rankness with her comment: ‘Jesus it stinks.’ The
aesthetic excess of the sequence transforms the reality of urban violence
into a Gothic ‘Terrible Place’, in which hyperbole drives home the hor-
ror of social deprivation and racial violence.
As they continue their exploration, Cabrini Green is reimagined as
a labyrinth of corridors and tunnels. Crawling through a window that
links two adjacent apartments, Helen finds herself in dilapidated and
derelict space. She moves through a series of linked rooms, connected
not via doorways but rather holes in the wall which serve as thresholds
to darker, more threatening spaces. The space becomes increasingly
inscribed with the Gothic as she penetrates deeper and deeper into
the heart of the building and Candyman’s domain, finally entering
a hidden room through the open jaws of a massive painted portrait
of Candyman howling. This image connotes both agony and feroc-
ity and positions Helen as being in the killer’s power, prefiguring his
invitation for her to ‘be my victim’. It also highlights her complicity
in becoming his victim, not only for invoking Candyman by repeating
his name but also by entering and appropriating this urban space for
her own purposes. She crosses the threshold of Cabrini Green, not to
shed light on the social horrors within but to debunk the urban legend
and appropriate it and the lived violence of Cabrini Green for her own
purposes – namely her thesis. As she explains to Bernadette, ‘Let’s just
go back. And we can write a nice little boring thesis, regurgitating all
the usual crap about urban legends . . . . We’ve got a real shot here,
Bernadette. An entire community starts attributing the daily horrors of

their lives to a mythical figure.’
Later, when Helen, now implicated in the brutal murders committed
by Candyman, including the murder of Bernadette, escapes the hospi-
tal and returns to Cabrini Green to confront him, the labyrinth seems
even more Gothic, with rooms filled with illuminated candles and walls
literally dripping with ooze. Eventually, Helen finds Candyman’s abode,
where the walls are covered with paintings of his origin story, telling
how he was first butchered and subsequently murdered simply for fall-
ing in love with a white woman. Here aesthetic excess is utilized to
visualize the tale of prejudice and express the history of racial violence
upon which the housing estate was built and which underpins Candy-
man’s monstrous identity as a killer, as well as his elevation to myth
both within this community and beyond. This operates in tandem with
the brutality of the two murders committed by Candyman, although
attributed to Helen. Both Bernadette and the psychiatrist assigned to
assess Helen’s mental state are ripped open from the ‘groin to the gullet’.
This is achieved with Candyman’s hook for a hand, his own monstrous
mutilation leading to the mutilation of others. Here the excess of the
bodily mutilation that is central to the slasher film is utilized to convey
the excess of a history of violence: brutality breeding brutality.
Constructing Gothic excess through visceral aesthetics
While the Gothic in Candyman mythologizes the slasher killer, in Saw

it reimagines the slasher murders. As indicated earlier, Carol Clover
argues that the slasher killer privileges either non-technological weap-
onry (knives, axes, ice picks, pokers) or electric tools (chainsaws, power
drills) that prioritize ‘closeness and tactility’ (1992, 32). Unlike conven-
tional slasher films, however, the weaponry utilized in the Saw films are
highly tactile and increasingly technological. Furthermore, rather than
inviting an intimate embrace between killer and victim, they tend to
be remotely operated and contingent on the victim’s inability to solve a
puzzle, which leads to the release of the mechanism. These are no simple
puzzles, however, but rather games in which the victims are forced to
test their instinct and drive for survival. Jigsaw is not present except in
the form of a puppet on a TV screen or as a voice recording explaining
the rules of the game. The intimacy is between the victim and the trap in
which they find themselves, but equally it is with the audience and the
victim. This is best exemplified by the reverse bear trap that is attached
to Amanda’s head, threatening to crack open her jaws if not removed in
time. Amanda, one of the few survivors of Jigsaw’s games, emphasizes the
physicality of her ordeal by explaining that she woke up with the taste
of blood and metal in her mouth. In the flashback, the trap is shown
to encase her head and she is taped down to a chair. The mechanism
comprises a bear trap, padlock, pulleys and trip wires. This is a highly
mechanical murder weapon, and Amanda’s discomfort and claustropho-
bia at being physically restrained by the machine is suggested by circling
camera movements and jump cuts to shots of Amanda from a range of
different angles as she struggles to open her mouth and release herself
from the chair. Her hysteria emerges through the film’s excessive and
mechanical aesthetics. This is intensified following the recorded message
explaining that she has limited time to escape the chair and find the key
to the trap (in the stomach of a man lying on the floor of the cell) before
the mechanism will be released and crack open her skull. Amanda’s sud-
den terror and manic desire to stay alive is conveyed through a burst of
dizzying, spinning handheld camera, sped-up motion, accelerated edit-
ing and abrasive industrial music as she struggles to release herself from
the chair and remove the mechanism from her head. A similar aesthetic
is used during the flashbacks to two further Jigsaw murders, one in which
a man must tunnel his way through tight coils of razor wire in order to
escape his cage and the other where a man covered in a flammable sub-
stance must use candlelight to decipher the combination to a safe which
contains the antidote to a poison circulating through his veins. Both
of these flashbacks are punctuated by a series of jump cuts to forensic
close-ups of the victims’ remains. While the exaggerated sound of the
chainsaw is used to instil terror in both the victims and the audience of
the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, here it is the circling camera movement,
overbearing music, fast-paced editing and extreme close-ups, characteris-
tics of what David Bordwell describes as ‘intensified continuity’, that are
being used to accentuate the visceral horror of the situation, construct-
ing ‘an aesthetic of broad, but forceful effects’ that positions the audi-
ence within the victims’ hysteria (2002, 24).
Conclusion
Candyman and Saw are as similar as they are different from one another.
They both reconfigure the slasher film for an urban location, utilizing a
cinema of excess to immerse the audience within a Gothic understand-
ing of the modern city, both real and mythic. In so doing, they reimagine
the conventions of the slasher genre to evoke a monstrous history of this
urban space. They are also decidedly different in their construction and
execution of the slasher genre, with the former employing the oneiric
aesthetic of the nightmare while the latter embraces an aesthetic of vis-
ceral horror. But rather than present a teleological distinction between
mind and body/dream, viscera/suggestion and graphic depiction that is
often used to distinguish the Gothic from the slasher film, both films
unite mind and body in their reimagining of the slasher genre and in so
doing highlight the ways in which the genres intersect. Helen’s night-
mare journey into Candyman country is marked by violent eruptions
of body horror while Jigsaw’s games invite his victims to balance their
intellectual and emotional desire to survive against their bodily instincts
for self-preservation. Mind and body, terror and horror are one in the
Gothic slasher film, united via a cinematic stylistic excess that immerses
the audience within an aesthetic experience of horror, both cognitive
and visceral.
Part II
Older, Darker and Self-Aware
5
Franchise Legacy and Neo-slasher
Conventions in Halloween H20
Andrew Patrick Nelson
The following scene unfolds about midway through Halloween H20:

Twenty Years Later (1998; dir Steve Miner). Keri Tate (Jamie Lee Curtis),
headmistress of a posh northern California boarding school, watches
wearily as a string of yellow school buses shuttles her students away
for a weekend of camping in Yosemite National Park. The source of
her unease is concern for her teenage son, John, whom she mistakenly
believes has departed with his classmates. (John has in fact secretly
stayed behind with three friends to have a clandestine Halloween party
in the school’s basement). Keri turns and immediately collides with her
secretary, Norma (Janet Leigh).
KERI: Dammit!
NORMA: Oh, Miss Tate! I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to make you
jump . . . . Well, it’s Halloween . . . I guess everyone is
entitled to one good scare.
KERI: I’ve had my share.
NORMA: Miss Tate? I know it’s not my place . . . . If I could be
maternal for a moment. I don’t like to see you like this.
I’ve seen you like this before and . . . we’ve all had bad
things happen to us. The trick is to concentrate on today!
Norma smiles broadly. Keri says nothing.
NORMA: What do I know? You just . . . take care of yourself, okay?

KERI: Thank you very much. I’ll see you Monday.
Keri turns back toward the school. Norma walks to a vintage Ford
sedan parked nearby. She turns back to Keri.
NORMA: Oh, Miss Tate! Happy Halloween!

81
Keri pauses, looks back, manages a smile and then continues into the
school.
This scene has multiple pleasures for fans of both the Halloween film
franchise and horror cinema in general. The exchange between Keri and
Norma mirrors, in part, an exchange from the first Halloween (1978; dir
John Carpenter) between the teenage Laurie Strode (Curtis) and Sheriff
Brackett. (Keri, of course, is Laurie, having faked her death and forged a
new identity). Norma’s car, California plate NFB 418, recalls one driven
by Marion Crane – also played by Janet Leigh – in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psy-
cho (1960), and several notes from composer Bernard Hermann’s iconic
score to that film are heard on the soundtrack as Norma approaches her
vehicle.1 And, finally, Janet Leigh is in fact the real-life mother of actress
Jamie Lee Curtis.
The first Halloween film in 17 years to feature Laurie Strode, Halloween
H20 disregards the increasingly supernatural events of the series’ three
most recent entries centred on Laurie’s daughter Jamie Lloyd (1988;
dir Dwight H. Little, 1989; dir Dominique Othenin-Girard, 1995; dir
Joe Chappelle) in order to offer a direct, albeit belated, continuation
of the events of Halloween and Halloween II (1981; dir Rick Rosenthal).
In these films, masked killer Michael Myers stalked the teenage Lau-
rie and her friends on Halloween night. In the second film, the killer
is revealed to be Laurie’s older brother, providing motivation for his
murderous quest. Twenty years later, Michael – whose body was never
found, we are twice informed – returns to kill Laurie, her son and any-
one who gets in his way.
H20 is one of a number of new American slasher films produced in the
wake of Scream (1996; dir Wes Craven), a revised and exceedingly self-
conscious take on the slasher formula that repeatedly referenced both
Halloween and the larger cycle of horror movies from the late 1970s and
early 1980s which it helped inaugurate. In addition to H20, other entries
in the late-1990s cycle of slashers include Scream’s first two sequels
(1997; dir Wes Craven, 2000; dir Wes Craven); I Know What You Did Last
Summer (1997; dir Jim Gillespie) and its sequel I Still Know What You Did
Last Summer (1998; dir Danny Cannon); Urban Legend (1998; dir Jamie
Blanks) and its sequel Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000; dir John Ottoman);
and Valentine (2001; dir Jamie Blanks). Although Curtis has stated that
she approached Dimension Films about the possibility of returning to
the Halloween franchise prior to the breakout success of Scream, it is not
clear whether the project would have moved ahead without the ensu-
ing revival of interest in older slasher movies like Halloween, or without
Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s interest in contributing to a new
Legacy and Neo-Slasher Conventions in Halloween H20 83
Halloween film.2 As such, H20’s layers of intertextual allusion are likely

to be seen as representative of the new slasher cycle initiated by Scream.
This cycle, many have argued, is distinguished from earlier slashers by
the persistent referencing of other horror films.3 This self-reflexivity is,
in turn, taken to be a manifestation of postmodernism. As Claire Per-
kins notes of scholarship on Scream and its sequels, ‘The films’ constant
awareness of themselves as horror texts connected to a historical web
of other horror texts is interpreted as an archetypal postmodern move
that acknowledges their status as popular, consumable media products’
(2012, 95–6).
Before labelling H20 an obvious instance of this type and calling
it a day, though, we would do well to consider both the address and
function of the picture’s intertextual references. These facets are, in
fact, connected. Consider the scene detailed above between Keri and
Norma. It is not difficult to imagine a viewer of H20 being unaware of
the allusions the film is making to Halloween and Psycho. It is plausible,
if not probable, that a majority of the film’s viewers, either in cinemas
in 1998 or watching on home video in later years, were ignorant to
some or all of the references. That the references are incidental to the
film’s plot – in the sense that whether a viewer does or doesn’t recog-
nize Norma’s car, or know about the off-screen relationship between
actresses Curtis and Leigh, is inconsequential at the basic level of nar-
rative comprehensibility – suggests that H20’s makers understood that
not all viewers would be familiar with Halloween specifically or horror
cinema generally. These intertextual touches are instead addressed to a
specific segment of the audience: fans.
Another crucial difference with respect to self-reflexivity between Hal-
loween H20 and other slashers of the period is the necessarily historical
treatment of its villain. The world of H20 is not one where masked killer
Michael Myers only exists in the movies, whether to inspire real-life
serial killers, as in Scream, or to escape into the ‘real’ world, as in Wes
Craven’s New Nightmare (1994). It is instead a world where Michael was
active for a single night two decades ago and then disappeared. However
traumatic that night was for those involved – Keri is now a functioning
alcoholic with a medicine cabinet full of antidepressants – Myers has
not attained the status of urban legend. His is not a story told by teen-
agers ’round the campfire late at night, as in I Know What You Did Last
Summer; taught in a college folklore course, as in Urban Legend; or made
into a movie, as in Scream 2 and 3. Michael Myers and the horrific events
of 31 October 1978 have been largely forgotten by all except Keri, who
lives in constant fear that her brother will return for her.
In ‘The Scream Trilogy, “Hyperpostmodernism,” and the Late-Nineties

Teen Slasher Film’, Valerie Wee notes that intertextual referencing has
been a convention of horror cinema since at least the 1950s (2005, 47).
For example, Donald Pleasance’s character in Halloween is named Dr
Loomis, a reference to Psycho’s Sam Loomis, who was boyfriend to charac-
ter Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh, mother to Jamie Lee Curtis, who
plays Laurie in Halloween, and so on. Yet as with the example cited above
from H20 – or others we could point to in the film, like a character being
startled by a teenager in a hockey mask, a reference to the Friday the 13th
series, of which H20 director Steve Miner helmed the second and third
installments – these references in the original Halloween are also inciden-
tal to its plot and are instead addressed to the film buffs in the audience.4
As Wee notes, horror cinema’s typical intertextual references ‘tend to be
either opportunistically derivative or tongue-in-cheek moments of sub-
text that often amount to little more than inside jokes’ (47).
Wee makes a distinction between these conventional allusions and
the type of self-reflexive commentary found in the Scream films, where
intertextual references suffuse the films to the degree that the references
function as text. She writes:
The films consist of multiple sequences in which characters engage in

self-conscious, highly self-reflexive, sustained discussions and com-
mentaries on the nature and conventions of the genre itself. The
characters in all three films obsessively and self-reflexively discuss
other media texts, particularly teen slasher films. They are all media-
saturated individuals who are self-consciously conversant in the signs
and codes of the classic slasher film. The Scream films, therefore, take
the previously subtle and covert intertextual reference and turn it
into an overt, discursive act (47).
Characters in Scream self-consciously discuss the conventions, or

‘rules’, of horror cinema in relation to the real-life murders occurring
around them, as the boundaries between reality and fantasy begin to
collapse. (In Scream’s final sequence, the villain stalks the heroes while
the final sequence of Halloween plays on television, and at one point
the soundtrack of Halloween emanating from the television effectively
becomes the soundtrack to Scream). Steven J. Schneider (1999) argues
that the characters in new slasher movies who take the self-reflexivity
of their situations seriously and attempt to use their ‘insider knowledge’
of the conventions of horror cinema to their advantage stand the best
chance of surviving.
In Scream and other neo-slashers, like Urban Legend, horror conven-

tions are overtly introduced and often discussed at length in advance
of their execution (so to speak), such that even the casual film viewer
will be in on the joke. For critics like Mark Jancovich (2002b) and Stef-
fen Hantke (2010), this laying bare of the device explains why horror
fans were generally antagonistic to Scream and the cycle of movies that
followed. What was previously subtle and covert (and comprehensible
only to horror film enthusiasts) became, in Wee’s words, an overt, dis-
cursive act. Halloween H20 stands apart from its contemporaries in this
respect, however, because it is less concerned to let viewers in on its
jokes and more interested in catering to fans of the franchise (or at least
of the original film and sequel). This stems, in part, from the aforemen-
tioned historical treatment of Michael Myers.
Following the film’s opening sequence, where Myers kills Marion
Whittington, nurse to the late Dr Loomis, in order to learn of Laurie/
Keri’s whereabouts, two detectives, Sampson and Fitzsimmons survey
the crime scene.
SAMPSON: So, whose house is this, anyway?

FITZ: Marion Whittington, Dr Sam Loomis’s nurse. He was
that shrink that died a few years ago. She lived here.
She took care of him.
SAMPSON: Oh, I remember him. I saw a thing on 60 Minutes on
him. Spent his life tracking down that Halloween guy
that butchered those kids up in Haddonfield, right?
FITZ: Michael Myers.
SAMPSON: Right. Hey, you don’t think Michael Myers . . .
FITZ: They never found his body.
SAMPSON: Yeah, but that was like 20 years ago.
The detectives proceed to Dr Loomis’s study. Its walls are covered with
Myers-related photographs and newspaper clippings. Fitzsimmons
says he’ll call Haddonfield as a precaution, noting that tomorrow is
Halloween.
SAMPSON: You tell them to look for a guy with a cane and
Alzheimer’s.
FITZ: The guy would be younger than I am, okay? I was
fifteen when he killed his sister back in ’63.
Between H20’s opening sequence, this expository dialogue and the ensu-
ing credit sequence that plays excerpts of Loomis’s dialogue about Michael
from Halloween (‘ . . . the blackest eyes . . . the devil’s eyes . . . purely and
simply evil’) as the camera pans over the content of Loomis’s study, H20
quickly gets viewers up to speed about who Michael is and where he is
going. It also establishes that characters in the movie already know about
Michael Myers – but only vaguely, as a killer who ‘butchered those kids’ on
a single night 20 years ago and then disappeared, never to be seen again.
Hence the scepticism – also shared by Keri’s son and her boyfriend – about
the possibility that Michael would return after all these years.
Schneider groups H20 with Scream, Scream 2 and I Know What You Did
Last Summer as examples of new, self-reflexive horror films in which the
protagonists’ knowledge of horror film conventions empowers them and
betters their chances of survival. Each film contains a moment where
‘humorous self-referentiality gives way to serious self-reflexivity’ (2004,
74). The moment Schneider identifies as the ‘self-reflexive turn’ in H20
comes in the film’s third act, when Keri, frantically seeking a place to
hide from Michael, opens a hallway door. The camera tracks around
behind her to reveal that the door she has opened leads to . . . a closet.
We cut to a reverse shot of Keri from inside the closet. ‘Oh, fuck!’ she
exclaims and looks desperately back over her shoulder. Cut to Michael
walking down the hallway. He notices blood dripping from the closet
door handle and begins to violently break down the door. Cut to the
same reverse shot from inside the closet. We see Keri sneak up from
behind and hit Michael over the head with a fire extinguisher, giving
her time to flee the scene.
Schneider reads this moment as typical of the new slasher cycle: a
character uses her ‘insider knowledge’ of the genre to defy its conven-
tions and gain an advantage over the villain (whose behaviour is some-
what predictable because it is dictated by those conventions). In this
instance, the intertextual reference is to the famous moment in Hallow-
een where Laurie tries unsuccessfully to hide from Michael inside a bed-
room closet – a mistake Keri doesn’t repeat. But this is not because of her
familiarity with horror movies or urban legends. Her inside knowledge
is instead based on personal experience.
The viewer’s ability to appreciate this moment in H20 is, of course,
dependent on understanding the reference to Halloween. Doing so is
arguably more consequential here than in the earlier exchange between
Keri and Norma because knowledge of the moment’s resonance with
Halloween shapes the viewer’s experience of the scene and explains a
character’s behaviour. It is thus not surprising that the film has taken
care to prepare viewers in advance for this moment. In an earlier scene
that is eventually revealed to be Keri’s nightmare, the camera floats
ominously through the deserted halls of the prep school and comes
to rest on the same closet door, which flies open. The scene is then
intercut with shots from Halloween of Laurie trapped in the closet and
being attacked by Michael.5 As in the Scream films, then, what would
otherwise be a fairly specialized intertextual reference is presented such
that anyone paying attention will later be able to connect the dots. This
is, however, not only a solitary example – all of the other intertextual
references in H20, including several others to Psycho, are of the ‘inside
joke’ variety – but also rather different from the self-reflexivity of Scream
because characters’ knowledge of horror cinema has no influence what-
soever on how the events of the film unfold. The shots from Halloween
in H20 are presented not as extracts from an artefact of popular culture
to be explicated in self-aware dialogue but as Keri’s subconscious recol-
lection of a traumatic moment in her past. Again, Keri’s insider knowl-
edge is based on her personal experience.
Kelly Connelly (2007) argues that Laurie Strode does not become
a ‘Final Girl’ (in the sense prescribed by Carol Clover in her seminal
essay ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Films’ [1987]) until H20
because, unlike in the first Halloween, where Dr Loomis came to her res-
cue at the last minute, Laurie/Keri now needs no male protector and is
able to defeat the monster herself by turning his masculine weapons
against him. While there is little question that Keri is now a much more
empowered hero than her shy (but nevertheless resourceful) teenage
self, the position she occupies in the narrative of H20 is more like that
of Dr Loomis in the original film. Like Loomis, she alone apprehends the
danger posed by Michael, even after a lengthy absence – 15 years in a
sanitarium in Halloween and a 20-year hibernation in H20. Keri deduces
that Michael has returned now in order to kill her 17-year-old son, John,
just as he killed his 17-year-old sister Judith Myers in 1963 and sought
to kill the 17-year-old Laurie in 1978. But also like Loomis, Keri’s unique
insight into the monster does not enable her to defeat him.
Keri does decapitate Michael with an axe at the end of H20, which
Connelly interprets as her ‘taking over her brother’s monstrous power’.
Connelly then asks, rhetorically, what Laurie will do with ‘her new-
found masculine power’ (20). Keri’s heavy breathing after decapitating
Michael is clearly intended to invoke Michael’s own signature muffled
respiration, yet the potential symbolic significance of this act is negated
by the events of Halloween: Resurrection (2002; dir Rick Rosenthal). In
the opening sequence of this film, a direct sequel to H20, we learn that
Michael switched places with a paramedic at the conclusion of H20 and
it was this man and not Michael that Laurie killed. Michael tracks Laurie
(again played by Curtis) to a sanitarium, where she is feigning insanity

in the hope of luring him into a trap. Michael obliges her. She puts up a
good fight but is finally killed by her brother.6
Laurie is right about Michael all along, but this knowledge does not
save her. Not only do H20’s intertextual references have a limited
influence on the machinations of its plot, Laurie’s personal narrative,
which culminates in the prologue to Halloween: Resurrection, conforms
to another of the most prominent conventions of the original slasher
cycle: the killer outlives his female adversary. As Wee (2006, 57) writes
of the heroines who do battle with Freddy Krueger over the course of the
A Nightmare on Elm Street series, ‘Although these heroic women must be
credited with ferociously fighting against the monster, the fact remains
that they all succumb and are destroyed in the subsequent film.’
Mystery surrounding the masked killer is a key component of the origi-
nal Halloween. The origin of Michael’s evil, the source of his uncanny
physical strength, and the motivation for his homicidal actions are
all left unexplained.7 Only in Halloween II do we learn that Laurie is
Michael’s younger sister, given up for adoption at age two. Questions
about Michael’s mysterious compulsion to kill his female relatives are
addressed over the course of the fourth, fifth, and sixth movies, cul-
minating in the out-of-left-field revelation in Halloween: The Curse of
Michael Myers (1995) that Michael has been subject to the control of a
secret druidic cult that is using him to fulfill an ancient prophecy. Put-
ting aside the relative merits and demerits of the franchise’s turn towards
the occult, we can at least say that its successive sequels were concerned
with maintaining the air of mystery surrounding Michael that was estab-
lished so effectively by the original film. Up to and including H20, the
series also defies many of the slasher clichés proffered by characters in
Scream. Those supposed truisms – about being punished for premarital
sex and so on – in fact derive less from the specific textual features of the
original slasher films than from academic interpretations of them, dramati-
cally simplified versions of which now circulate in popular culture. It is
true that Laurie’s two best friends in the original Halloween, Annie and
Lynda, are sexually active, and both are killed by Michael. Yet, as Andrew
Tudor observes, they are nevertheless ‘appealingly characterized – there
is no sense that their activities are inappropriate or immoral. They are
frivolous, perhaps, but hardly figures who can be seen as inviting their
terrible fates’ (1989, 202). Ideas like the ‘Final Girl’ or the slasher killer as
the ‘return of the repressed’ were initially external interpretations of the
original slasher movies, arrived at using psychoanalytic theory, but they
have since become accepted as internal properties of the genre. With that
said, other horror franchises like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the
13th began to self-consciously accord with, and even embrace, these ideas
in ways the Halloween series never did. Heroines in Halloween films also
have a much better survival rate than those in other horror series – Laurie
Strode survived through three films, and Jamie Lloyd lived through two –
which arguably influenced neo-slashers like Scream.
As in Halloween, mystery about the masked killer is a recurring feature
of the Scream films. David Church fairly contends that Scream ultimately
reinforces rather than subverts the cinematic ‘rules’ it foregrounds so
explicitly, making it ‘more of a parody than a complicated critique of
banal horror formulas’ (2006, n.p.). Looked at in the broader context
of the Scream trilogy, however, we see that the series in fact upends the
rule of the killer always catching up to his female opponent. As Wee
observes, the heroines not only survive but face new villains in each
subsequent installment of the series. Writes Wee:
This reversal is noteworthy and resonant because in doing so, the

trilogy preserves the significance and importance of the (female) sur-
vivors over that of the killer, while inverting the genre’s traditional
conventions. The female survivors ultimately displace the killers as
the recurring characters and effectively adopt the central narrative
roles. This effectively allows the female characters to develop and
evolve across the film’s various installments (2006, 57).
Laurie’s survival in both Halloween and Halloween II is a precedent

for the Scream franchise in this respect, but the Scream films in turn no
doubt influenced the ostensibly conclusive defeat of Michael by Laurie
at the conclusion of H20. Having erased all trace of the supernatural
from the franchise’s timeline, a return from decapitation seems impos-
sible even for the resilient Michael Myers. Yet return he does.
Franchise legacy dictates that Michael cannot be replaced as the vil-
lain of the series. Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982; dir Tommy
Lee Wallace) demonstrated that audiences had little appetite for a Hal-
loween-branded picture that did not continue the events of the first two
films, while the twist ending of Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning
(1985; dir Danny Steinmann) that revealed the Jason of the film to be
a copycat killer elicited outrage from fans of the franchise.8 And not
unlike the case of Halloween: Resurrection ‘undoing’ the potentially pro-
gressive conclusion of H20, Halloween 5 quickly negated the possibility
suggested in the coda of Halloween 4 that a female relative of Michael
could inherit his murderous legacy.
In place of mystery surrounding the masked killer – a key com-

ponent of both the original Halloween and its generic descendants
like Scream – H20 instead adopts a compensatory strategy of visibility.
Stylistically, H20 does harken back to Halloween in some respects. Unlike
sequels four through six, H20 was shot in the 2:35 widescreen aspect
ratio of the original. The wider frame is, like in Halloween, put to use in
a number of well-composed shots where characters in the foreground
are unaware that Michael is lurking behind them. H20 also has multiple
moments where a character believes she sees Michael in the distance
only to have him vanish from a subsequent shot from her perspective,
again replicating a feature of Halloween. Unlike in the first film, though,
the presentation of Myers in H20 does not develop in any systematic
way.
In Halloween, Laurie’s quick, obstructed glimpses of Michael in the dis-
tance give way to closer framings of him as he begins to kill her friends.
In H20, the first shot of Michael is of him emerging into a hallway in the
background while Marion is staged in the foreground. Our second look at
him, though, is a low-angle full shot of Michael from Marion’s perspec-
tive. Later shots of Michael standing in the distance or obscured by some
element of the mise-en-scène lack the threatening connotations of com-
parable framings from Halloween because we’ve already seen Michael
close up and know what he is capable of. These framings instead come
across as homage – as moments of subtext.
Rather than a straightforward example of the late-1990s slasher, it is
more accurate to describe H20 as an attempt to mediate between the
competing influences of the Halloween franchise and the self-conscious
neo-slasher cycle of horror films exemplified by Scream. H20 is replete
with fan-pleasing narrative and stylistic references to the original two
films, yet, because it concerns a diegetically historical villain, the picture
is unable to resort to the broader generic and pop-cultural self-reflexivity
characteristic of the neo-slasher, including any acknowledgement of the
enduring influence of the original film. No longer an enigmatic ‘shape’
whose obscured appearance matched his motives and actions, Michael
Myers in H20 is known, understood and, above all, clearly seen.
Notes
1 Although the two Ford sedans are similar, in H20 Leigh has actually upgraded
from a 1957 Custom 300 to a 1957 Fairlane 500. See entries from the Internet
Movie Car Database (IMCDb) cited in the bibliography.
2 For a representative account of Curtis’s stated involvement in the concep-

tion of Halloween H20, see Westbrook (1998). It is also worth noting that the
preceding entry in the Halloween series, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers
(1995; dir Joe Chappelle), released six years after Halloween 5: The Revenge of
Michael Myers (1989; dir Dominique Othenin-Girard), endured a troubled pro-
duction and was released to poor reviews, low box-office intake and disdain
from fans.
3 For accounts of intertextuality and self-reflexivity in Scream and its progeny,
see Tietchen (1998), Schneider (1999), Phillips (2005), Wee (2005, 2006) and
Petridis (2014), as well as Pheasant-Kelly in this volume.
4 Such references also signal the film-makers’ knowledge of cinema history.
Another example: Halloween’s Sheriff Brackett is named after Leigh Brackett,
screenwriter of the Howard Hawks film Rio Bravo (1959), which John Carpenter
remade as Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). Hawks is Carpenter’s favourite film-
maker, and his oeuvre is filled with references to the famous director’s work.
Characters in Halloween watch the Hawks-produced The Thing from Another
World (1951; dir Christian Nyby) on television, for example, and Carpenter
would remake that film as The Thing in 1982.
5 Schneider misremembers the presentation of this scene. In his transcription,
the footage from Halloween flashes ‘[t]hrough Laurie’s mind, and on the screen
in front of us’ at the moment she opens the closet, rather than in the earlier
dream sequence (84). He also has her muttering, ‘No way’ rather than ‘Oh,
fuck!’ It is likely that Schneider was writing from memory, prior to the film’s
release on home video and without the benefit of being able to consult the
film closely.
6 Connelly makes no reference to Halloween: Resurrection, despite its being
released five years prior to the publication of her essay.
7 See Nelson 2010 for more on Halloween’s refusal to provide a tangible explana-
tion for Michael Myers.
8 For a revised take on Friday the 13th Part V, see Wickham Clayton in this
volume.
6
Roses Are Red, Violence Is Too:
Exploring Stylistic Excess in
Valentine
Mark Richard Adams
By the time we get to the finale, where all the carnage takes place and
the blood flows, all the red in the film will hopefully make sense.
—Stephen Geaghan, Production Designer (from Studio

Extras ‘Valentine – Behind the Scenes’ 2001; no dir)
Following the unprecedented success of Scream (dir Wes Craven) in

1996, the next few years saw a resurgence of horror films, primarily in
the same postmodern slasher style as their progenitor. This neo-slasher
cycle would often utilize successful young actors known for their televi-
sion work and have a self-referential approach to the genre. Notable,
and memorable, films include not only the two initial sequels to Scream
(1997, 2000; dir Wes Craven) but also the I Know What You Did Last
Summer films, the semi-reboot sequel Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later
(1998; dir Steve Miner), and Urban Legend (1998; dir Jamie Blanks), as
well as numerous others. Released in 2001, towards the end of the cycle
of films, Valentine (2001; dir Jamie Blanks) is perhaps one of the least
remembered, potentially due to its lacklustre box office results, and is
perhaps most noted for its performance from cult television star David
Boreanaz.
In this chapter I will not only defend Valentine, a film regularly regarded
with derision, but argue that it is one of the more successful, under-
rated, and interesting films to come out of the post-Scream slasher cycle.
In spite of negative reviews, particularly by Elvis Mitchell who declared
that ‘[p]robably the biggest victim of “Valentine”, besides the audience, is
92
Exploring Stylistic Excess in Valentine 93
David Boreanaz’ (2001, n.p.), Valentine represents a visual feast of elabo-

rate imagery and colour, exploring a horror world not based on shadows
and darkness but on an excess of stylistic imagery: gigantic eyes, bleeding
noses, blood-red decorations, and heaped piles of bones. With a killer who
evokes a Valentine’s Day reimagining of Halloween (1978; dir John Carpen-
ter), and a music score that ranges from the sinister ditty to loud, operatic
horror, Valentine presents a horror world showcasing style, structure, and
both evocative and identifiable visual imagery. Thus, by focusing on visual
spectacle, and highlighting the historical and contemporary contexts of
Valentine, I will illustrate how, rather than being unstructured, neither one
thing nor the other, the chaotic nature of its component parts have com-
bined to create a film that is actually both disturbing and effective. Thus,
the stylistic discord and themes of excess actually help give Valentine a
unique and individual aesthetic that marks it out as an exceptional piece
of horror film-making.
Bright lights and fast killers in the

nineties – contextualizing Valentine
The aesthetic style of the horror film, more often than not, will reflect
the pervading trends within both the genre itself and the surrounding
media consumed by its intended audience. Thus the contemporary con-
text of Valentine needs to be explored in order to fully appreciate both
its position within the history of horror and its resulting legacy as we
look back over a decade later. This discussion, then, will briefly explore
the broader generic conventions of horror, the different cycles of horror
and the relevance of other forms of media, such as the television series
Sex and the City (HBO, 1998–2004).
Certain aesthetic styles and formal conventions can become associ-
ated with specific genres, and this is perhaps especially true of the horror
film. However, the notion of a ‘horror genre’ in itself is a difficult one
to summarize, as films that come under the label can differ in numer-
ous ways and can encompass chilling ghost stories such as The Others
(2001; dir Alejandro Amenábar) or grindhouse-style gore-fests such as
The Deadly Spawn (1983; dir Douglas McKeown). Thomas M. Sipos has
attempted to offer a strict genre definition based on the notion that
the genre invokes fear as a key principal, and it will always feature a
form of unnatural threat. Whilst it is a notable attempt to define hor-
ror, Sipos’ definitions are so rigid as to exclude many works considered
horror films, such as The Craft (1996; dir Andrew Fleming) or Nightbreed
(1990; dir Clive Barker), and thus come across as more an elitist attempt
at defining authenticity whilst ignoring the actual cultural use of the

‘horror’ label (2010, 7). Sipos finds it difficult to maintain his definition
in the face of horror films featuring ‘naturalistic’ horror killers, of which
Valentine would likely be classified, and even contemplates suggesting
that two separate ‘horror genres’ co-exist (22–3).
The futility of this line of thinking thus becomes obvious, and it is
clear that the definition of ‘horror’ is something that cannot be strictly
bound by specific features and rules. Indeed, Brigid Cherry argues that
it is ‘not simply that there is a range of conventions that offers some
degree of variation on a coherent, formulaic theme . . . but that this
genre is marked by sheer diversity of conventions, plots and styles’
(2009, 2). Further to this, Cherry suggests horror has ‘endured for so
long, from the earliest days of cinema to the present day, and derives
from so many different sources that it has fragmented into an extremely
diverse set of sub-genres’ (2). This diversity is reflected aesthetically in
styles and forms that vary between subgenres and are dependant on
the aims of individual films, as it can take very different stylistic fea-
tures to terrify an audience than to cause revulsion and disgust. Cherry
further highlights why genre plays an important role in discussing hor-
ror films, notably its continued box-office success (8), its flexibility and
adaptability ‘in its encompassing of the cultural moment’ (11) and thus,
ultimately, how it is ‘often “presold” by dint of its popularity and com-
mon cultural currency in other forms’ (13). All three of these strengths
of the horror genre, identified by Cherry, play into the production ethos
and resulting aesthetic of Valentine. This is due to its position at the
later end of the neo-slasher cycle of the late nineties, which came with
its own generic conventions and expectations. Valentine, unlike its con-
temporaries, draws less on the typical high school or college settings,
and borrows less from television shows such as Dawson’s Creek (The WB,
1998–2003), but looks towards more early-adult-orientated fiction, most
notably the previously mentioned Sex and the City. It is to the specific
aesthetics of the nineties neo-slasher, and Valentine in comparison to the
wider cycle, that this discussion will now turn.
The most remembered aspect of Scream, and to a lesser extent the
films surrounding it, are the numerous scenes ‘in which the film’s char-
acters engage in hyperconscious, self-reflexive, slasher-movie-orientated
discussions and observations’ (Wee 2005, 47). The audience is invited
to take part in this game as well, as events on screen echo the charac-
ters’ dialogue, the viewers’ own preconceptions of the genre and their
wider cultural knowledge. Valerie Wee demonstrates this succinctly
in discussing the use of Sarah Michelle Gellar in Scream 2, where she
makes a brief appearance as one of the Ghostface killer’s early victims.

Known for playing the superhero titular character of Buffy the Vampire
Slayer on television, the teenage audience would, Wee argues, ‘enjoy an
additional level of amusement in watching her play against type’ (50).
More significantly, Wee identifies how the style and form of the scenes
featuring Gellar resemble sequences from her television show, which
in turn ‘borrows many of its monster-stalking-unsuspecting-female
visual techniques from slasher films’ (50). Featuring voyeuristic shots,
spatial confusion, a cluttered mise-en-scène, low and dim lighting, Wee
highlights that it is now ‘almost impossible to distinguish between the
feature film’s style and aesthetics and the television show’s style and
aesthetics’ (50). This is also due, in part, to the increasing crossover of
behind-the-scenes talent, with those ‘most clearly associated with teen
culture were people who comfortably, and successfully, shifted between
television and film’, most notably Kevin Williamson, who both wrote
Scream and created Dawson’s Creek (53). Ultimately, Wee argues that the
‘stylistic and aesthetic convergence across media contributes greatly to
the heightened post-modern intertextuality of the 1990s teen text’ (54).
Coming later in the neo-slasher cycle, Valentine both follows in this pat-
tern but also works to attempt a different, alternative approach, as will
become clear further in this chapter.
It should also be noted that as well as wider media, the traditional for-
mal devices of horror are used to create both tension and parody and act
as an aesthetic-based self-referential play. Andrew Tudor describes this
process in regards to the scene where Tatum is attacked by Ghostface in
a garage and concludes that genre fans ‘know exactly what is happen-
ing; we are both willing victims of the technique and simultaneously
self-aware parties to its construction’ (2002, 111). Specifically, the fore-
grounding of the slasher and victim power dynamics through the use
of high and low shots, and Tatum mockingly taking on her role (‘No,
please don’t kill me, Mr Ghostface, I wanna be in the sequel’) presents
a particularly strong case for a self-aware formalism. Whilst it could be
argued that this ‘smart-alecky, tongue-in-cheek attitude . . . diluted its
own horror’ (Sipos 2010, 23), Tudor argues that this actually works in
the film’s favour, as ‘the simultaneous deferral and suggestion of immi-
nent violence achieved in the self-conscious movie references actually
stretches out the tension’ (2002, 112). The latter argument is more con-
vincing, especially as horror conventions and formal techniques have
always been something the genre has been aware of, with even the mid-
eighties slasher sequel Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986; dir Tom
McLoughlin) making a number of self-aware references.
The actual visual palette of the neo-slasher era, whilst not entirely
uniform, does have a number of consistent visual techniques, many of
which cross over with the previously mentioned television productions.
This era in horror tends to look towards dim lighting and soft shadows,
creating a visually brighter and crisper image than, for example, the later
‘torture porn’ cycle of horror which favours far darker lighting, washed-
out colours and the use of darker blues, greens and sickly yellows (see
the Saw series, Hostel [2005; dir Eli Roth], Train [2008; dir Gideon Raff]
and others). A naturalism, or at least an idea of naturalism, seems pre-
sent in the neo-slasher, especially the Scream series, and is arguably born
out of a desire to ground the more satirical elements in a recognizable
‘real’ world rather than the (perceived) stereotypical characterizations of
the eighties slasher.
As I have already noted, Valentine forgoes the high school conven-
tions of Scream and its ilk, and its aesthetic style follows suit to some
extent. Just as Wee identifies the Gen Y influence of teen drama on the
neo-slasher cycle, so Valentine takes fashion tips from the popular Sex
and the City television series. However, it does so without entirely doing
away with aspects of the wider neo-slasher craze, whilst also hearkening
back to more 1980s influences. This contributes, in part, to the almost-
contradictory aesthetic style of Valentine, which constantly threatens to
overwhelm the intended horror of the film.
The colours and sounds of Valentine
From the opening image of the Warner Brothers company logo, the
audience becomes very aware of the importance colour will play in the
film. The bright red glow evokes both the traditional theme of love asso-
ciated with Valentine’s Day and also the blood/death motif that is more
common with its use in horror. In a horror film set on Valentine’s Day,
it was perhaps inevitable that the colour red would be wielded to utilize
both its cultural meanings. The visual palette of Valentine tends towards
strong, contrasting colours, with red often used to highlight moments
of passion or murder, whilst blues and greens are usually reserved for
the tenser stalking sequences. These sequences work alongside a brightly
lit, glossy style that evokes popular television of the time and suggests a
glamorous lifestyle led by the main cast. It is the contrasting elements of
the film’s colour palette, and the eighties-influenced sound-scape, that
contribute to the unique aesthetic atmosphere of Valentine.
Colour has always been used as a means to convey messages to an audi-
ence, and in a horror film, the usual intent is to invoke fear or dread at
what is to come, along with repulsion at the gruesome demises that make
up the slasher genre’s raison-d’être. In discussing American melodrama,
Robert Kolker suggests that exaggerated images and colours ‘serve not
only to heighten the emotions but to allow us to step back from them’
(2006, 282). He suggests the artificial nature of exaggerated aesthetics
can distance the audience, which arguably contrasts with the intended
aim of horror. Kolker has also discussed how specific colour palettes can
effect meaning and convey specific emotional resonances and states of
mind, and in many ways these ideas can be applied to Valentine, a film
that is ultimately about a manipulative, murderous revenge plot with
implied sexual motivation (2006, 76–7). Whilst Kolker is correct to say
it can be distancing, stylized lighting and a strong use of colour can also
create an uncomfortable, discordant feel for the audience. Equally, the
meaning applied to a colour can be utilized in drawing the audience to
make certain deductions and create expectations. Jeffery Sconce’s work
on the paracinematic also offers the idea that foregrounding the artificial
nature of film, through a form of stylistic excess, can provide an audience
with pleasures other than those in the standard Hollywood forms (1995,
385–7). Thus Valentine’s use of excess in colours and imagery offers up, at
the very least, the possibility of a paracinematic enjoyment.
Following an opening title sequence that foregrounds reds, pinks and
other hot, intense colours, and establishes the duality of red as both
romantic and threatening, the first few scenes of the film drastically
reduce its use. Following the opening bombardment of colour, a clear
example of visual excess discussed further in this chapter, the first ‘nor-
mal’ sequence of the film works to ground the audience in a sense of the
familiar. Normality is established as we find Shelley Fisher attending an
uncomfortable date with the comical Jason Marquette. Shelley is played
by Katherine Heigl, who at the time was known for teen-science-fiction
drama Roswell (The WB, 1999–2001; UPN, 2001–02) and was likely iden-
tifiable to the key teen demographic and thus in keeping with the syn-
ergy of television and film within the neo-slasher era. The scene utilizes
a soft, yellow-tinged three-point lighting set-up that is associated with
conventional drama and plays out like many a date scene from the series
Sex and the City. The most notable use of red in this scene is in the top
worn by Shelley, which draws our attention to her, just as the overtly
large piece of green spinach stuck in her date’s teeth emphasizes the
comedic and unsavoury nature of the character. Other hints of red can
be seen in background details such as the wine and flowers decorating
the set, but generally the scene established a familiar sense of normality,
which contrasts with the lighting choices to follow.
The exterior shot that follows, establishing the teaching hospital,

has the first real use of atmospheric lighting, with the eye drawn to
the green shrubbery on the screen left, leading to the ominous green
glow on screen right, the eye naturally follows this notable colour across
the screen, emphasizing the importance of the location. Once inside the
hospital, the colour blue dominates the hospital scene, adding to the
sterile and cold feel of the sequence and contrasting with the two visual
styles previously seen. The blue backlight shining through the window
both draws the attention to Shelley and serves to illustrate that the
sequence takes place late at night. The powerful lamp she is using to
work with also emphasizes her position, although it does not actually
draw attention to the corpse she is studying. She is also framed by two
prominent, vibrant blue objects in the foreground: the bottle to the left
and an item of clothing to the right. More prominent blue can be found
in the top right, framing the overall image.
As the camera tracks in, the bottle and item of clothing frame the shot
entirely, emphasizing the corpse she is working on. Whilst other colour
features in a number of objects, these are used to break up the image
and only serve to emphasize the cold atmosphere of the sequence. As an
antithesis of the hot red colours, blue places the audience in a position
of expectation that continues throughout the sequence. Notably, when
Shelley first hears an unexplained noise, a number of red items become
more prominent in the shot. This sequence continues to make use of
traditional dark lighting to build dread and suspense, with the reveal
of the red Valentine’s card on Shelley’s locker coinciding with the film’s
first major jump scare. Towards the reveal of the Cherub-masked killer,
the lighting takes on a stronger mix of green, becoming less directly cold
and having a sicklier aspect which becomes most prominent when Shel-
ley runs out into the hallway. More browns and reds are found here, as
part of the set decoration and highlighting the encroaching danger. The
sequence climaxes with the Cherub’s nose bleeding, as it does when he
kills, then is matched with the blood flowing from Shelley’s body, both
vibrant and visibly matched together, one first dripping down screen
left, the latter down screen right. This sequence emphasizes the impor-
tance of colour throughout Valentine and acts as a microcosm of the rest
of the film. Sequences coded as normal, everyday and character-building,
such as the funeral, the detectives’ office or Kate washing her hair, tend
towards the more traditional drama lighting, whilst each murder set
piece utilizes its own colour scheme, often contrasting colder, darker
blues and greens with a prominent use of red in key objects and gore.
The more elaborate deaths and prominent narrative moments associated
with Valentine’s Day tend to follow the excessive imagery of the opening
sequence. Thus Valentine offers three different stylistic approaches that
both contrast and complement each other throughout the film.
As we have seen, the colour red is an important feature in Valentine,
although this is for a very different reason than originally intended.
Director Jamie Blanks had initially envisioned a film that went against
expectations by using very little of the colour red, where it would feature
in only the disturbing Valentine’s cards sent to the protagonists and
in the blood during the murder sequences. This idea was altered when
the primary location for the film’s finale featured extensive tartan-style
red-and-pink décor, thus contributing to the new excessive style and
use of colour found in the film (Blanks 2001, n.p.). This is an example
of pragmatic aesthetics, which Sipos suggests are a recurring aspect of the
horror genre (2010, 29). Pragmatic aesthetics, then, are where the film’s
form and style are affected by outside influences, primarily Sipos sug-
gests low budgets, but generally in a positive way. Thus, whilst the lack
of red in Valentine would have been an interesting creative decision, it is
the excessive use of red and colour that contributes to the excessive style
that makes the film more aesthetically successful. His argument, whilst
brief, is thus convincing, as the horror genre is notorious for low-budget
film-making and decisions being made for pragmatic reasons, often
having a beneficial aesthetic result. However, certain external influences
and limitations can also have a potentially negative impact, and this can
be discussed further in reference to the violence and murder sequences
of Valentine.
Despite passing uncut from the censors, the political climate of the
time meant Warner Brothers insisted on further cuts, which director
Jamie Blanks, in the film’s audio commentary, suggests he feels ambigu-
ous about. Certainly, the main impact is a potential degree of restraint
in the murders, traditionally the showcase moments in a slasher film,
which are at odds with the stylistic excesses found in the rest of the
film. Shelley’s death never visually shows her slashed throat, the arrows
that kill Lily are never shown in particular detail, and even the glass
going into the neck of Ruthie is not particularly explicit. However, there
is power to be found in the implication of violence, and with suita-
ble sound effects implying the grisly deaths, the film can maintain its
impact without the gore.
It is the murder of Gary that suffers the most from this editing, which
removes the scene of the excess it requires to truly work. The camera
stalks into Kate’s apartment, not quite a POV but to one side of the killer,
whose hand reaches into frame to grab a hot iron. Gary is revealed to
Figure 6.1 Valentine (2001; dir Jamie Blanks): Bird’s-eye view of Paige trapped in
the Jacuzzi as the Cherub attacks with a drill
have broken in and is trying on Kate’s underwear, angering the Cherub,

who strikes him and then burns his face. What follows is a single, side-
on shot of the Cherub stood over the off-screen Gary, who swings the
iron down at his victim. It strikes once, and he swings again. The scene
then cuts in what can only be described as an anticlimactic manner.
The build-up and editing of the scene has progressed to a point that we
expect multiple strikes. The violence is already off-screen, and thus the
implication of his being beaten to death is tied to seeing an increasing
number of strikes with the iron. Without these additional blows, the
scene lacks a satisfactory ending and is a moment where stylistic excess
was actually removed, to the detriment of the film. The hot tub death
of Paige (Figure 6.1), whilst no doubt benefitting from increased attacks
with an electric drill, still manages to succeed, in part due to the elabo-
rate nature of the sequence as well as the chaotic camera movements
and swift cutting that constructs the scene.
I have touched on the notion of excess in Valentine, but thus far I have
focused on establishing its general aesthetic and evidencing the approach
it takes to the use of colour. As I have shown, this is a sophisticated piece of
film-making, deliberately invoking successful elements of the neo-slasher
era alongside more traditional horror stylistic features. However, this does
not get to the heart of why Valentine is more notable than its contemporar-
ies, and thus far I have focused on its more traditional horror properties.
The pleasures of horror, it could be argued, lie in the communal viewing
and recognition and playing out of these tropes. Tudor argues that, whilst
this may be the case, horror fans’ pleasures can be broader and that ‘a
“good story”, characters for whom one can feel concern, verisimilitude,
striking settings, and so on . . . can be as important to audiences here as

anywhere else’ (2002b, 50). Thus we should not dismiss the pleasures of
horror as being entirely based on visceral shock, especially if recognizable
and sympathetic characters and actors are incorporated. I argue now, then,
that Valentine offers other pleasures to its audience, and whilst it does suc-
cessfully embrace conventional horror aesthetics, it is in its excessive and
exaggerated imagery that it truly succeeds.
The stylistic excess of Valentine
Stylistic excess, at its most basic, is an exaggerated or overwhelming use

of the tools of film to create imagery and sounds that go beyond those
necessary to create the intended effect for the scene (unless, of course,
that effect is intended to be excessive). Sipos argues that ‘all cinematic
elements should be mutually supportive (either reinforcing or intention-
ally contradicting one another) and aesthetically motivated’ (2010, 96; ital-
ics in original). However, whilst I agree in principle, I would suggest
that intent should not necessarily be a prerequisite for something to be
aesthetically successful, just as Sipos’ pragmatic aesthetics do not nec-
essarily have to be a conscious choice. It is the combination of both
intentional and unintentional production decisions, pragmatic changes
and studio-required edits that can influence a finished product. The
excess of Valentine comes from numerous different sources and at times
is unintentionally contradictory (such as the previously discussed death
of Gary). Thus Valentine is a film which finds its strength in its stylistic
excess, which contrasts ordinary, conventional horror film-making with
an orgy of colour, sound and a cluttered, exaggerated mise-en-scène.
I will return now to the previously mentioned opening sequence of
Valentine which, as a combination of montage and title credits, works to
establish the film’s backstory in a relatively brief time. This is achieved
through a sequence that alternates between short, moving shots of a
school yearbook over black, set to a childlike melody and flashbacks
to a school dance which is paired with a darker, foreboding tune. The
opening shot of the yearbook establishes a time frame of 1988 for the
sequence, as well as the location, and the shot is followed by the first
characters’ introduction via their personal photo. On the commen-
tary, Blanks informs us the photos are both of the child actor and the
actresses playing the roles, to help draw connections between the kids
and the main cast in as short a time as possible. The yearbook is shot
over black, lending it an ambiguous diegetic role, although the scrib-
bled writings in red over it suggest it belongs to the Cherub and displays
his frustrations and anger at the different characters. The red writing is
rough, almost childlike, and the words range from professions of love
to violent insults, thus initiating the viewer in how the film will utilize
the duality of the colour for both romance and murder. Jeremy is not
generally shown asking each of the girls to dance, but rather his ques-
tion tends to come over the yearbook, helping to link the concept of
his obsession in the yearbook with the character on screen. He becomes
more the focus when asking Dorothy, and the close-up shots of both
characters help draw a stronger emotional connection, allowing the
audience to feel sympathy for the character before the nastiness that
follows. When the bullies catch the two kissing, Dorothy accuses Jeremy
of attacking her, leading to an overt reference to Carrie (1976; dir Brian
De Palma) as a bowl of red punch is poured over him. As with that film,
this appears to be the point at which this quiet, nervous youth switches
to vengeful killer.
The sequence becomes violent, as the image jump cuts through the
sequence, each jump accompanied with a non-diegetic, almost metallic
sound effect suggesting a mental break as much as a physical assault. In
the foreground, youths cheer in slow motion as, obscured by them, the
bullies beat Jeremy. This scene of excessive violence transitions into the
film’s title; glowing red letters emerge to a childlike tune that contrasts
heavily with the violence before. The sequence features heavy use of red
lighting in the dance, blue under the benches where Jeremy and Doro-
thy kiss, and finally a more dominant, hostile red as Jeremy is beaten.
The Carrie reference, as well as playing a similar diegetic role, seems
excessive in the sequence and an unnecessary addition considering the
violent stripping and assault of Jeremy that follows.
Whilst the opening sequence uses editing techniques and a mon-
tage structure to summarize backstory, perhaps the most stylistically
excessive sequence of the film is the murder of Lily. The sequence
takes place within an art exhibition themed on the concept of Valen-
tine’s Day, which has been created by Lily’s overtly sleazy boyfriend.
The installation itself is a monument to excess, consisting as it does
of large, moveable wall panels depicting images and video of body
parts and intimacy, all of which is organized as a maze. The human
body is deconstructed into component parts, spread out through the
maze and often blown up to vast proportion. After rejecting a three-
some with her boyfriend and his assistant, Lily becomes lost in the
maze, an absurdity in itself as the exhibition space never feels as large
as it seems to become in the murder sequence. However, this works for
the film’s benefit, as the maze’s exaggerated body parts and themes of
romance serve to disorientate both the viewer and Lily. As she rushes
off through the maze, the screens depict mainly blue images, which
her warm orange top stands out from, and this allows the sequence to
start relatively calmly. The thumping, ambiguously diegetic music gets
louder, and we see more explicit nudity on the screens of the maze as a
loud voice utters coldly the words ‘love me’ over and over. Walls begin
to move as a female voice is mixed in, also uttering ‘love me’, building
upon a discordant excess of sound and music. The explicit images are
supported with extreme close-up images of eyes and lips, and more
reds and oranges, as Lily moves further into danger. After she moves
through another hallway, the voices begin to intone ‘love me . . . until
death’ and whole panels begin to switch off, leaving large black blocks
taking up portions of the screen. The camerawork becomes more fluid,
following Lily and moving with her, and the voices become threaten-
ing, telling her ‘don’t walk away from me’. Static is seen and heard, and
lighting begins to flicker blue and then red, causing disorientation for
both Lily and the audience (Figure 6.2). This reaches a crescendo as an
image of a man seems to block Lily’s way and all the noises suddenly
go silent, replaced by an exaggerated sound of an arrow flying through
the air. The Cherub is revealed, stood holding a bow with red arrows
in front of a flickering screen, whereupon he fires a further two arrows
into Lily, who falls through the artificial maze and into a very ordinary
stairwell within the building. The Cherub’s nose bleeds red as he fires
the final arrow and she falls down into a Dumpster.
This may read as very descriptive, but it is important to understand
the amount of excessive visuals and sounds on display in this sequence,
Figure 6.2 Valentine (2001; dir Jamie Blanks): Lily becomes lost in a maze of
coloured screens, noise and body parts
which is the film’s most successful and arguably most terrifying. The
sense of confusion and overwhelming noise affects the viewer as much
as Lily, and as audiences are used to a culture full of images of the body,
nudity and the ideology of romance and sex, this bombardment of col-
ours, voices, music and body parts works through making the familiar
into the chaotic. The Cherub himself, presented with a bow and arrow,
is an excessive portrayal of the Cupid character, and the arrows strike
Lily not once but three times. Once she has entered the maze, any sense
of realism, or of a real world beyond the area she is lost in, is absent, and
the film revels in its own stylistic excess. This is a sequence unlike any
you might find in Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer, and this
sequence both emphasizes and foregrounds the formal power of film.
More than any other, this sequence is about images, their meaning and
use in culture, about colours and soundscapes, and most importantly, it
illustrates that Valentine’s film-makers are aware of the power of excess
and are making deliberate use of exaggerated film-making techniques.
Conclusion
Whilst Valentine is certainly less well remembered than other neo-

slasher films, I would argue that it stands the test of time. Whilst the
teen-drama aesthetics of other neo-slashers provide a very precise tem-
poral location, Valentine’s less-usual formal choices, and its excessive
imagery, actually give it a more timeless quality. This also might explain
why the film was a box-office failure ($20.4 million domestic gross on
a $29 million budget [boxofficemojo.com]), as its intended audience
is not clear. It less directly relates to teenagers, the traditional horror
viewers, and its excessive style and gory slasher trappings are perhaps
less associated with the mainstream audience of Sex and the City. The
stylistic excesses that help give it a more timeless quality also threaten
to overwhelm the viewer and offer an unexpected experience. Indeed,
the excess of Valentine actually goes beyond the aspects of the film’s
form and can be found in numerous other examples. The contemporary
audience would have an excess of knowledge, with the killer’s identity
leaked very early on, the publicity focused on David Boreanaz as the
villain despite the film’s every effort to present this as a twist. The male
characters are greatly exaggerated, excessive portrayals of male egotism
and privilege, and each character embodies some form of sexism or sense
of entitlement. Boreanaz’s naturalistic performance, combined with the
slightly more melodramatic acting of the rest of the cast, feels like an
excess of realism amongst the exaggerated world he inhabits. Whilst I
have focused on the film’s form, Valentine exudes stylistic excess in every
aspect of itself, potentially including an excess of meaning that perhaps
requires future exploration.
Whilst it could be argued that Valentine is a superior example of inven-
tive slasher aesthetics, it is clear that the film is a sophisticated and
engaging film that deserves more attention than it has as yet received.
Valentine perhaps does not succeed as either a neo-slasher or as a horror
film in general if we judge it on its ability to make an audience jump,
but it does have aesthetic pleasures and can entertain. The contradictory
nature of Valentine, and the excessive formal features of the film, result
in a work that is not only enjoyable but an exemplary sensory experi-
ence that offers aesthetic excess as its chief pleasure and should thus
be primarily judged on these successes and not solely on its potential
failures as a horror film.
7
Puzzles, Contraptions and the
Highly Elaborate Moment: The
Inevitability of Death in the Grand
Slasher Narratives of the Final
Destination and Saw Series of Films
Ian Conrich
I have argued that the slasher film encapsulates a diversity of texts that
need to be differentiated rather than clumped together (see Conrich
2010). The influence of key slasher films such as the Halloween and Fri-
day the 13th series on modern horror cinema is unquestionable, but these
movies did not emerge from nowhere, nor did they cease to evolve.
Before the slasher film there was the pre-slasher, and after the slasher
there was what I have defined as the post-slasher, followed by the neo-
slasher, the grand slasher and the slasher revival. The high impact of
the grand slasher narrative on commercial cinema began with the Final
Destination series of films in 2000, and such productions can be seen to
include the Cube (1997–2004), Jeepers Creepers (2001–03) and Saw films
(2004–10), The Cabin in the Woods (2012; dir Drew Goddard) and by
extension Hostel (2005; dir Eli Roth), Hostel II (2007; dir Eli Roth) and
Hostel III (2011; dir Scott Spiegel).
Within this chapter I wish to focus on the Final Destination (2000–11)
and Saw series. In the grand slasher, death appears all-pervasive and gen-
erally cannot be escaped or defeated. The victims are part of a scheme
or preordained plan, and the deaths are often hyper-elaborate. These are
essentially survival horrors and puzzle films, in which death itself can
be manipulating a situation and in which victims have to second-guess
a system in which the horror that awaits can be protracted and tortu-
ous. Within the evolution of contemporary horror cinema, the grand
slasher emerged as a hybrid that borrowed from computer games and
106
The Inevitability of Death in the Grand Slasher 107
theme park rides, detective thrillers, action and disaster films and science
fiction. These elements will be approached within an chapter that con-
siders the grand slasher as a distinct development of the slasher film.
Identifying a subgenre
The slasher film has attracted significant discussion within the study
of the horror genre. It would appear to be one of horror film’s most
identifiable subgenres, but with the label ‘slasher’ employed freely. In
the early period of the subgenre’s emergence there was a greater range
of labels employed to describe the slasher film, which was then also
termed the ‘slice ‘n’ dice movie’, ‘meat movie’, ‘teenie kill pic’, ‘splatter
film’, ‘stalker film’ and ‘have sex ‘n’ die film’. An early academic study,
Vera Dika’s book Games of Terror (1990), viewed the films on which she
focused as part of a ‘stalker cycle’ and avoided the terms ‘slasher’ and
‘subgenre’. In fact, she saw the slasher as a larger body of work of which
her defined stalker films were a smaller group. Dika developed a struc-
turalist approach to her study that drew on John Cawelti’s work (1984)
on the form and function of the western and also engaged with the
narrative theories of Will Wright (1975) and Vladimir Propp (1968).
The problem with such a structuralist approach is that the conclusions
can be both reductive and prescriptive. Dika concludes that the stalker
film contains 17 narrative functions and that each film will employ the
functions and in order, repeating the intrinsic norms. Her study, which
she acknowledged was ‘designed to delimit a significant body of works’
(Dika 1990, 11), is too narrow in focusing on the period of 1978–81,
but within that she subsequently recognizes only nine films: Halloween
(1978; dir John Carpenter), Prom Night (1980; dir Paul Lynch), Friday the
13th (1980; dir Sean S. Cunningham), Terror Train (1980; dir Roger Spot-
tiswoode), Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981; dir Steve Miner), Graduation Day
(1981; dir Herb Freed), Happy Birthday to Me (1981; dir J. Lee Thompson),
Hell Night (1981; dir Tom DeSimone) and The Burning (1981; dir Tony
Maylam).
The other key early academic study is Carol J. Clover’s 1987 article
‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film’, which was republished
in a shorter version in her acclaimed 1992 book Men, Women, and Chain
Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. In contrast to Dika’s monograph,
Clover’s study is expansive in its parameters. Broadly employing the
term ‘slasher film’, she easily incorporates films such as Psycho (1960;
dir Alfred Hitchcock), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974; dir Tobe
Hooper), I Spit on Your Grave (1978; dir Meir Zarchi), A Nightmare on Elm
Street (1984; dir Wes Craven) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 (1986;
dir Tobe Hooper), whilst it appears that she was unaware of a range of
slasher films that were important for her study: films that include Happy
Birthday to Me, Campsite Massacre (1981; dir Andrew Davis), Fatal Games
(1982; dir Michael Elliot) and Sleepaway Camp (1983; dir Robert Hiltzik).
Clover’s study is highly valuable for identifying forms and functions of
the slasher film, but in a desire to establish these elements she ignores
the crucial cultural, historical and industrial contexts that essentially
make the films within her study different. Moreover, whilst the horror
genre is seen in many ways to be cyclical, the cycles are not repetitive
but evolutionary. Between different years and different decades there are
new cultural forms and fashions that compete and combine for atten-
tion. Popular film can be highly absorbent and can reflect, refract and
inspire new cultural variations on existing forms. The variations to a
film form should be as important as the repetitions and replications.
As I have written elsewhere, the slasher film can be traced back to
Halloween (1978). I have also argued that Friday the 13th (1980) was
essentially the start of the subgenre, in terms of the quantity of similar
productions that followed in its commercial wake:
The popular view is that the slasher films of the horror New Wave
began with Halloween (1978). The importance of the film is undeni-
able, yet the commerciality of Friday the 13th (1980) showed that the
success of Halloween was repeatable and it was only from this position
that there was an explosion in the number of slasher films produced.
But by 1984, this subgenre had collapsed and the fourth Friday the
13th film, in what was already then the longest running slasher series,
was announced to be the last – ‘The Final Chapter’ (Conrich 2010,
173).
I continued by identifying a distinct development in the subgenre,

with the release of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), which led to a popu-
lar culture phenomenon and a very successful series of Nightmare on Elm
Street films (1984–2010). I view the 1984 release as the start of a different
form of the slasher film and one that I have termed ‘post-slasher’ (see
Hutchings 2004, 207).
The demise of the slasher, however, didn’t neatly become the rise of
the post-slasher. Film Studies and Cultural Studies too often compart-
mentalize and contain developments. For instance, Film Studies often
views productions and history in terms of decades. Though as one dec-
ade ends and another begins, this does not mean there is a disconnection
in cultural production. Moreover, as one cultural form emerges it does

not halt the production of another. In other words, whilst one film form
is in demise, or loses its popularity, it most often crosses over with a
newer form that has greater appeal. Certainly, in the case of A Nightmare
on Elm Street (1984) it took time for the popularity of this post-slasher to
grow, and it was not until the box-office success of A Nightmare on Elm
Street Part 3: The Dream Warriors (1987; dir Chuck Russell) that the full
commercial value of the post-slasher was clear. The third A Nightmare
on Elm Street more than doubled the US and Canadian theatre receipts
of the first film (see Conrich 1997, 118). I would argue that by 1987
the slasher had finished, with the black-comedy April Fool’s Day (1986;
dir Fred Walton) perhaps closing the cycle. As with previous cycles in
the horror genre, comic versions on a popular theme tend to mark the
end of that phenomenon. Examples include the Abbott and Costello Meet
Frankenstein (1948; dir Charles Barton) and Abbott and Costello Meet the
Mummy (1955; dir Charles Lamont) films emerging at the end of Univer-
sal’s classical period of Gothic horrors.
Adam Rockoff includes April Fool’s Day in his book Going to Pieces:
The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978–1986 (2002). He encloses the
subgenre within a nine-year period in which the first A Nightmare on Elm
Street is viewed as coming ‘out of nowhere to give the slasher a much
needed bolt of adrenaline’ and is credited with ‘reviving a dying genre’
(150). Yet much of what the first A Nightmare on Elm Street spawns is
apparently beyond Rockoff’s time period for the subgenre, even though
an entire chapter of the book is devoted to these films, and it includes
Dario Argento’s Opera (1987). The subsequent chapter, titled ‘The Resur-
gence’, is devoted to the period post 1995 and the Scream (1996–2011)
and Urban Legend films (1998–2005). These too are discussed as slashers,
even though they are beyond the subtitle of the book and are not prop-
erly differentiated.
There is a similar problem in the last chapter of Peter Hutchings’ book,
The Horror Film (2004), which is titled ‘Slashers and Post-slashers’. Whilst
Hutchings employs my term, he only really discusses the A Nightmare
on Elm Street films as post-slashers, and he then approaches the Scream
films and the wave of horror productions that followed in its wake as
‘postmodern’ (211–17). Hutchings recognizes the difficulties in engag-
ing with the term ‘postmodern’. He references Andrew Tudor’s 2002 arti-
cle ‘From Paranoia to Postmodernism?’ and writes,
[w]hile for Tudor, ‘postmodern horror’ might just be acceptable as a

somewhat arbitrary descriptive label for a number of recent horror
films, the term brings with it theoretical and historical complications

that can lead to our understanding of the films themselves becoming
obscured. There is probably very little that could be added to Tudor’s
lucid account of the ways in which contemporary horror films should,
and should not, be seen as postmodern (Hutchings 2004, 211).
Worryingly, a 1998 forthcoming attractions flyer at Hutchings’ ‘local

multiplex’, which describes Urban Legend as a ‘postmodern horror film’,
permits him to ‘introduce a somewhat simpler . . . use of the term “post-
modern”’ (211), but he then includes the Final Destination films within
this category whilst simultaneously excluding the post-slasher A Night-
mare on Elm Street films. As I have argued previously, the A Nightmare
on Elm Street films are self-reflexive and exhibit a play on seduction and
subject-object relations which can be read in relation to the postmodern
writings of Jean Baudrillard (see Conrich 1997).
Pre-slasher, post-slasher, neo-slasher, slasher revival
There are significant complications in freely using the term ‘slasher’ to

cover a wide range of horror films over a period stretching more than 30
years. There have also been many challenges faced by writers wishing to
corral a group of films that exhibit crossover functions yet are not neatly
joined. In the process, the study of the slasher subgenre has become
somewhat predictable with key texts ignored. I would argue that prior
to Halloween (1978), there exist antecedents of the slasher subgenre, pre-
slashers that are part of its cultural heredity and in which characteristics
are passed from an ancestor to an offspring.
Films such as Psycho (1960), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
and Black Christmas (1974; dir Bob Clark) are significant pre-slashers,
relevant to the subgenre’s evolution but existing prior to its full devel-
opment as a recognized cultural form. Similarly, the slasher film has
not existed within a cultural vacuum, and horror cinema stands out
as a genre in which its film-makers are often very aware of previous
productions – both the known and the relatively unknown. Pre-slashers
include British films such as Cover Girl Killer (1959; dir Terry Bishop),
Peeping Tom (1960; dir Michael Powell), Tower of Evil (1972; dir Jim
O’Connolly), Flesh and Blood Show (1972; dir Pete Walker) and Italian
giallo films such as Mario Bava’s Sei donne per l’assassino (Blood and Black
Lace, 1964) and Ecologia del Delitto (A Bay of Blood, 1971). The relent-
less stalk-and-slash structure of these films, the sex crime and combina-
tion of nudity, sexual transgression and violence; and the gathering of
a group of individuals in a single location where they are murdered in

turn are all hallmarks of the slasher film, but these occurred in a period
prior to the release of Halloween and Friday the 13th. For instance, the
giallo terror-thrillers are not slasher films as such, but they are part of
the perceptible heredity of the initial films in the Friday the 13th series,
in particular, with even inventive methods of death imitated. Friday the
13th Part 2 would appear to have borrowed from Ecologia del Delitto the
idea of a double pinioning of copulating teenagers, with a skewer pass-
ing through the couple as one lies on top of the other.
The post-slasher emerged when the slasher cycle was becoming
exhausted. The A Nightmare on Elm Street films were the cultural force
in the post-slasher’s evolution; however, a study of this wider group of
movies has been lacking focus. Post-slashers include Wes Craven’s Shocker
(1989) and films in the Hellraiser (1987–2011), Child’s Play (1988–2013),
Puppetmaster (1989–2012), Candyman (1992–99), Leprechaun (1993–
2014) and Wishmaster (1997–2002) series. Significantly, the post-slasher
retains parts of the genetic identity of the slasher yet has evolved and
transformed, exhibiting new characteristics.
The post-slasher is hyper-real, with a blurring of illusion and
reality – famously between dream and reality in the A Nightmare on Elm
Street films – and the creation of alternative dimensions or fantastic
realms from which the killer can emerge or take the victim into a space
beyond. Such realms can distort physics, bending matter and altering
time – as in Shocker and the Hellraiser, Wishmaster or Candyman films, in
particular. Candyman can be summoned from beyond with the saying
of his name five times and whilst standing in front of a mirror; Pinhead
and his associates in Hellraiser are similarly summoned with the unlock-
ing of a mechanical puzzle box that opens a portal between Earth and
an extra-dimension; whilst Horace Pinker in Wes Craven’s Shocker is able
to circulate as electricity itself and via electrical goods and circuits, fol-
lowing his execution in the electric chair.
Whatever realism there was in the slasher – that can be seen as an
effect of the low-budget productions, camera technique and their use of
outdoor or existing locations – the generally larger-budget post-slashers
sacrifice realism for fantasy, with science fiction and the supernatural
introduced as major narrative developments. Leprechaun 4: In Space
(1997; dir Brian Trenchard-Smith), like Jason X (2001; dir James Isaac),
takes place on a spaceship, with the Leprechaun reborn via the penis
of a marine who had earlier urinated on the Leprechaun’s body. In the
Child’s Play franchise, the Lakeshore Strangler transfers his soul into a
Good Guy children’s doll that is subsequently animated and humanized
following a voodoo ritual. The Puppetmaster films also play with pedio-
phobia and the animating of the inanimate with a group of killer pup-
pets brought to life through an Egyptian spell.
Location-wise, the post-slasher is more creative and whilst often ini-
tially bound to a dreadful place, such as a home or abandoned building,
it employs the possibilities of the bending of space and time to transport
the narrative to situations that are otherworldly or surreal. As occurred
most explicitly in the first Candyman film and the Child’s Play series,
there is an exchange of guilt and blame between the killer and victim/s.
Helen in Candyman is unable to convince others that she is innocent
and that the killer is a supernatural entity. The ‘innocent’ Chucky doll
that is seemingly inanimate is also able to divert its crimes on to others
who take the blame. Such exchanges were much less frequent in the
slasher films, which were direct and transparent, with killing machines
such as Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th, or Michael Myers in Halloween,
efficient, cold and driven with no apparent desire to extend the pain or
play mind games.
The slasher film was preoccupied with an assault on teenagers – who
were often promiscuous or transgressive. The post-slasher is less selec-
tive, with victims ranging from children to adults. The killer in the
slasher also tended to be faceless – the features of this executioner hid-
den behind a mask, gas mask, hood or sackcloth. They were also devoid
of a personality. In contrast, the killers in the post-slasher, from Chucky,
Candyman and Horace to Pinhead and Leprechaun, are wise-cracking
entertainers or doomsayers who offer profound advice. Freddy Krueger
is arguably the killer-entertainer par excellence – as I have argued else-
where, he is ‘the confident performer, the host, the showman and the
comic. He is ostentatious, “courteous”, even courtly and is constantly
cracking jokes’ (Conrich 2007, 121). Similarly, Pinhead in Hellraiser is
a showman, but one whose immediate horrific attraction is his mon-
strous face covered in nails – ever-present signs of enduring pain – that
is emphasized in his name. Finally, the post-slasher decentres the white
male killer that dominated the slasher film. In their place, the post-
slasher offers killers who raise questions of race, gender, class and even
disability.
With so many of these films part of separate franchises and spanning
years, even decades, it would be wrong to position each series within a
single slasher definition or category. Taking the Friday the 13th films as
an example, the series stretches from the slasher films of Friday the 13th
parts 1 to 5 (1980–85), to the post-slashers of parts 6 to 11 (1986–2003)
and the slasher revival of the remake Friday the 13th (2009; dir Marcus
Nispel). I would argue that for this series the key evolution occurred
with part 6. As I have written,
with part 6, and the addition of a supernatural element – Jason dra-

matically revived from his tomb with a bolt of lightning – the series
dramatically entered the realm of post-slashers . . . Jason can now
be utterly destroyed – at the start of part 9 he is blown into pieces –
but appear increasingly indestructible and powerful. In part 9, Jason’s
heart is eaten by the coroner who becomes possessed . . . In part 8,
Jason is revived by a high electrical charge from a submerged cable,
and in part 7, he emerges from his watery grave thanks to the psycho-
kinetic powers of a young woman (Conrich 2010, 179).
Friday the 13th (2009) is part of an ongoing slasher revival, which has
been revisiting classic slasher films – as part of a wider horror remake
industry which is frequently turning to productions of the horror New
Wave of the 1970s and 1980s – recreating, modernizing, or enhancing
(for instance, through 3D) the earlier thrills. These remakes most nota-
bly include Halloween (2007; dir Rob Zombie), Prom Night (2008; dir
Nelson McCormick) and My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009; dir Patrick Lus-
sier), and there is here a form of back to basics that undoes the fantastic
realms of the post-slashers. However, the 2009 remake of Friday the 13th
updates the franchise to such an extent that it ‘breaks the conventions
of the series and is best viewed as detached from the preceding films.
Jason is now an expert archer, takes victims captive, and plans death
predicaments in the style of the Saw (2004–2009) movies’ (Conrich
2010, 186).
Between the post-slasher and the slasher revival there was both the
neo-slasher and the grand slasher. The neo (or new) slasher, like the
slasher revival, returned to the original films but largely as a point of
knowing reference and self-awareness. The neo-slasher was, in the main,
a short-lived cycle that included the Scream and Urban Legend films, I
Know What You Did Last Summer (1997; dir Jim Gillespie), I Still Know
What You Did Last Summer (1998; dir Danny Cannon), Lovers Lane (1999;
dir Jon Steven Ward), Cherry Falls (2000; dir Geoffrey Wright) and Val-
entine (2001; dir Jamie Blanks). Whereas the original slashers presented
the killer as a relentless force with little or no ambiguity as to his or her
identity and often no narrative investigation into the acts of murder, the
neo-slashers are essentially whodunits that are closer to Agatha Christie
or Scooby-Doo and can include an end-of-film unmasking and explana-
tion. If the narratives of the original slashers were motivated by who is
to be the next victim and how will they die, the neo-slashers offered an
additional narrative concern as to who is the killer.
The highly elaborate moment and the inevitability of death
Final Destination (2000; dir James Wong) was released a month after
Scream 3 (2000; dir Wes Craven), and within the evolution of the
slasher film it was the most hybrid form to date. Death itself was
now the killer and was responsible for elaborate and spectacular gore
sequences from which the next victim had no chance of escape. This
was the theatre of the Grand Guignol, which I had observed in the Fri-
day the 13th films (Conrich 2010, 174–5), but enhanced by a cinema of
action and disaster. The dramatic freeway accident at the start of Final
Destination 2 (2003; dir David R. Ellis) or the roller-coaster ride crash
at the start of Final Destination 3 (2006; dir James Wong) are indebted
to the kineticism and incredible set pieces of action films such as Bad
Boys (1995; dir Michael Bay) and Con Air (1997; dir Simon West), or
disaster films such as Twister (1996; dir Jan de Bont). In relation to the
scale and excess of these sequences, the multiplicity of deaths that can
occur in one moment, and the inevitability of death in the context of a
wider scheme, I would term these films ‘grand slashers’. The Saw series
that followed, the Cube series and, to a lesser extent, The Cabin in the
Woods and the Jeepers Creepers and Hostel films, also belong to any grand
slasher definition.
The original slasher films were built on body counts, with the Friday
the 13th films most visibly promoting a promise of a quota of deaths.
The trailers for the earlier Friday the 13th films flashed up on screen a
sequential series of numbers, accompanied by an image of a victim-to-
be, whilst the trailer for Friday the 13th Part 3 announced, ‘Jason – you
can’t fight him. You can’t stop him’ (Conrich 2010, 179). In fact, Jason
could be stopped, and whilst the trailers suggested the deaths were pre-
ordained, they were, within the films’ narrative, random. In contrast,
the Final Destination films establish the order of the screen deaths from
the beginning from the order in which each victim-to-be escaped death
temporarily in the opening sequence. Therefore, whilst the attraction of
the slasher was who would be the next victim and the method in which
they would die, and whilst the neo-slasher offered the additional attrac-
tion of guessing the killer’s identity, the appeal of the Final Destination
films has little to do with knowing which victim is next or what the
killer looks like. The Final Destination films instead foreground attempts
to prolong life, with the screen at times structured around the futile
creation of ‘death-free’ zones, but with the knowledge that the indi-
vidual cannot escape his or her grisly fate. The films promise that when
that moment of death occurs, it will be a highly elaborate sequence of
cause and effect, a fantastic arrangement that is rooted in a seemingly
innocuous situation. For instance, in Final Destination 2, a burst tyre
leads to a van careening off the road, across a field and into a stack of
plastic piping. The construction material smashes through the back of
the van, narrowly missing, Kat, the driver, who is next in Death’s preor-
dained list of victims. The film toys with the viewer, who, in knowing
that Kat is the next to die, expects a gory death at this point. But this is
delayed, and the viewer becomes preoccupied by the arrival at the scene
of an ambulance crew, news team, and a fire crew. The news team’s van
reverses and punctures its fuel tank on a protruding rock, which pro-
ceeds to leak gasoline. A firefighter using a pneumatic crowbar to free
Kat from her van accidentally sets off the driver’s airbag, which pushes
Kat’s head backwards, impaling her onto a protruding pipe. The ciga-
rette she was holding is dropped and is blown away by a small gust of
wind that leads to it setting fire to the news van’s leaked fuel. The news
van explodes, catapulting a stretch of barbed wire fencing across the
field, whereupon it slices and dices the next preordained victim, Rory,
into multiple body parts.
The spectacular deaths in the grand slashers function as moments
of fantasy horror, allowing for an extremely inventive Grand Guignol,
which on a level of design and orchestration far exceeds anything previ-
ously imagined within the subgenre. These moments are like a deadly
version of a Rube Goldberg machine or of the popular board game Mouse
Trap, with its elaborate chain-reaction mechanism in which a player is
snared. But they are best viewed as functioning as death games, contrap-
tions or puzzles in which there are only losers. Furthermore, within the
Final Destination films, many of the spectacular and highly kinetic death
sequences are often constructed around mobility – the airplane flight,
the roller-coaster ride, the speedway disaster, the train crash or the free-
way pile-up. Angela Ndalianis observes an increasingly interconnected
relationship between the entertainment industries and, in particular,
between contemporary horror cinema and the horror theme park ride,
or what she terms the ‘dark ride’ (Ndalianis 2012, 59). Within this trans-
media, Ndalianis writes most on the theme park rides and how they
develop from a relationship with film, yet what is worth emphasizing is
the reverse and that much of contemporary horror cinema has become
more action driven, in part inspired by the theatrics and kinetics of the
dark ride or thrill ride.
Video games are even more part of this transmedia relationship involv-
ing film, and Ndalianis focuses too on this development. She notes of a
group of high-technology games that they
present the player with geographies and landscapes in which densely

rich narratives and experiences unravel . . . The player makes choices
when journeying through game spaces. Some of these decisions are . . .
supported by skillful gameplay that allows for the successful completion
of tasks, solution of puzzles (Ndalianis 2012, 54).
The grand slasher is notable for being structured around a form of

game or puzzle, for which there are preset rules. Here, the effect of video
game culture on these narratives is most apparent in the Cube and Saw
series of films. Both franchises present situations in which characters are
required to navigate through a series of rooms containing ready-made
challenges, which are often triggered on entrance. This is most explicit
in the Cube films, which stress the narrative significance of space within
the series titles. In the Saw films, this room-by-room gaming structure
is clearest in Saw II (2005; dir Darren Lynn Bousman), while the first
Saw movie (2004; dir James Wan) is centred almost entirely on one
room, in which the dynamics of space are paramount and clues within
this enclosed structure are crucial to achieving an escape. The puzzles
encountered by the individuals require physical sacrifice and an endur-
ance of pain pushed to the limit. These are survival horrors but extreme
situations from which very few survive the incredible challenges. In
the Cube films, completion of the test tends to lead to another room
and another challenge, whilst the Saw films rarely allow success; death
seems especially inevitable in the latter and tends to lead to horrific self-
mutilation in an attempt to be free. As Jigsaw/John Kramer asks of his
victims, ‘How much blood will you shed to stay alive?’
As with many puzzles, the challenge is controlled and timed with
the intended victims having to understand a sequence or system
before the short period of time expires. This increases the tension,
the improbability of success and the expectations for gore, as com-
pletion of the game demands an individual’s immediate commitment
to potential physical sacrifice/damage. The slasher in these films has
become the games-master, coordinating the deaths from a position
of omnipotence. In the Final Destination films, Death is completely
unseen and only signalled or referenced through the active connec-
tions in the cause-and-effect process. In contrast, in the Saw films, Jig-
saw, the games-master, is present within much of the series, but often
he is displaced, represented by a tricycle-riding puppet called Billy,

positioned as a recording (audio and/or visual) from the past, broad-
cast from within another space, from beyond the grave, or represented
by what Matt Hills observes are ‘apprentices and emulators . . . who
continue Jigsaw’s work’ (2011, 117).
There is here an element of the whodunit within the Saw series, as
the viewer questions an individual’s ability to have orchestrated all the
death games. The investigative nature of the films, the kidnappings and
the engaged detectives, the plot twists and red herrings and the pieced-
together clues actually move the Saw series closer to detective fiction
(see Poole 2012, 31–2) or crime investigation television shows such as
CSI (CBS, 2000–present), with their stylized knowledge and demonstra-
tions of the process of an unusual murder. The tricks and twists are part
of the series appeal, with plots that are best understood by watching
multiple Saw films together. As with the other grand slashers, the exces-
sive moments of horror offer the spectacle of death that is most craved
by a mainstream audience.
The opening sequence to Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (aka Saw 7, 2010;
dir Kevin Greutert) reveals the confidence of not just the killer but also
the film-makers in placing this particular game of death in such a public
place. Unlike the previous dreadful places – the dark warehouse, aban-
doned home or industrial latrine – in which the victims are tortured in
the Saw series, this puzzle occurs in daylight in a shop window and in a
busy pedestrian precinct. As the challenge begins, a large crowd gathers
and watches for free a three-way Poe-esque struggle involving buzz saws
between an unfaithful woman and her two boyfriends. This spectacle of
death is placed within an arena of the consumer and the everyday, with
pedestrians staring – ‘What the fuck you looking at?’ shouts one of the
boyfriends to the crowd – or, as quite a few simply do, film the event on
their mobile phones. In the popular culture that surrounds the films, fan
websites record the deaths, listing in order of occurrence, popularity or
in terms of pleasure the spectacular episodes in the Saw and Final Des-
tination films. These horror franchises are not alone in garnering such
attention, nor are they the only horror films to have associated video
games, in which the consumer has a greater interaction with the fantasy.
Within contemporary culture and an increasingly multimedia intercon-
nected society, the boundaries separating the consumer and the par-
ticipant from the producer are less defined. The once seemingly simple
slasher narratives have evolved into grand slashers, hybrid horror forms
that have a central function within a mainstream culture drawn to ever
more incredible methods of death.
8
The Killer Who Never Was:
Complex Storytelling, the Saw Saga
and the Shifting Moral Alignment
of Puzzle Film Horror
Matthew Freeman
Suffering? You haven’t seen anything yet . . .
As of 2013, Lionsgate’s series of Saw films stands as the most commer-

cially successful horror movie franchise to date. Its seven entries, each
released yearly around the Halloween period beginning in 2004 and
ending in 2010, have grossed over $873 million at the worldwide box
office. Despite its commercial prominence in contemporary American
cinema, few scholarly works have ventured into the world of Saw and
its unique stylistic and structural identity. A small number of scholars,
most notably Kim Newman and Matt Hills, have attempted to position
this particular series in relation to broader generic or sociological con-
cerns, the latter examining the extent to which the films ‘can be inter-
preted as being “about” contemporary political and cultural contexts’
(Hills 2011, 107).1 For reasons presumably concerned with the cultural
distaste surrounding a series whose primary audience ‘must’ comprise,
as film critic Mark Kermode argues, ‘either people who appreciate its
lack of quality or glutton[s] for punishment’, (2011, 182) the Saw films
themselves remain largely bereft of any substantial critical investiga-
tion. The exception is Steve Jones’ work, which suggests that the lack
of critical attention paid to these films is emblematic of the ‘various
prejudices about popular violent cinema’ (2013, 2). Jones believes that
the ‘majority of detractors have failed to adequately engage with the
films’ content’ (2).
118
Complex Storytelling, Saw and Shifting Moral Alignment 119
Nevertheless, the Saw films are notable for their generically unconven-
tional narratological rhetoric – that is, the ways in which the narratives
of the films are organized to communicate their central concerns. The
Saw saga unfolds an overarching narrative that spans multiple films. The
plots are made ‘complex’ via an incorporation of narratological devices
befitting Warren Buckland’s characterization of the contemporary puz-
zle film, such as ellipses, multiple timelines, non-linearity and disguised
temporal reversals. Each of which, Buckland proposes, are designed to
mislead the viewer whilst establishing a structure that, in this case, arcs
and interweaves across the diverse temporalities of seven films. Perhaps
no other horror film series has ever sought to develop and (re)examine
its own history in quite the same way. What, then, might this reveal
about the film series’ emotional resonance within the context of the
horror genre? Specifically, what can the multi-film-spanning Saw saga
and its formal application of what Warren Buckland defines as complex
storytelling reveal about the role of what can be termed ‘puzzle film hor-
ror’ in contemporary horror cinema?2
The narrative theory on which this essay is based can be traced to
Russian formalism in the 1920s, itself providing the basis for extensive
narrative theory in film studies – including David Bordwell’s seminal
Narration in the Fiction Film (1985). Here, Bordwell explores the narratol-
ogy of film, outlining the principles and theories of its narrative. Bord-
well suggests that narration is broken into systems – namely, the fabula
and the syuzhet. The fabula is the story of the film: a cause-and-effect
chain of events that occur within a given space and time. The syuzhet,
meanwhile, is the plot of the film: the sequence of information that is
actually presented, potentially in an alternative order and with numer-
ous omissions. Bordwell argues that the film viewer constructs the fab-
ula from the syuzhet by employing schemas. Schemas are conceptual
frameworks that model different aspects of the world, such as persons,
actions, events and so forth. In turn, a schema of this nature allows the
viewer to go beyond the information given and ‘fill in the gaps’. If we
are told that a character is a thief, for example, then we can draw the
inference that he is cunning, and we can generate the hypothesis that
he is or has been wanted by the law. For Bordwell, then, spectators exe-
cute operations corresponding to filmic devices, constructing the story
themselves by actively making inferences and hypotheses drawn from
the portrayed events and other points of knowledge. This approach is
Bordwell’s favoured one, providing a very useful definition for narrative
in film that corresponds to his constructivist theory of narrative.
Of course, the form of stories being told in narrative cinema has

changed rapidly since David Bordwell’s theory was first written in
1985 – and such shifts have seen the study of narrative expand in the past
decade, meaning that, as Suzanne Keen notes, ‘understandings of narra-
tive that have been accepted for decades are being scrutinised from new
angles and for different purposes’ (2003, 5). Warren Buckland’s edited
collection entitled Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cin-
ema (2009) demonstrates this shift. Buckland explores a particular trend
of contemporary narrative cinema – complex storytelling – examining
‘the influence of this new storytelling epoch on contemporary cinema’,
detailing a number of the storytelling attributes that form the puzzle
narrative (2009, 1). For Buckland, the puzzle film ‘reject[s] classical sto-
rytelling techniques’ and is specific to contemporary cinema, the style
embracing a form of complex storytelling that is non-linear in structure
and may include narratological devices such as time-loops and frag-
mented spatio-temporal realities (1). Indeed, as noted above, throughout
Buckland’s collection, a thorough list of motifs and devices are identi-
fied with the intent of defining the narrative aesthetic of the puzzle film
in contemporary cinema – pointing to the role of ellipses, unreliable
narrators, multiple timelines, labyrinthine structures and causal rever-
sals, each designed to present a narrative of concealment and discov-
ery. Films such as Lost Highway (1997; dir David Lynch), The Sixth Sense
(1999; dir M. Night Shyamalan) and Memento (2000; dir Christopher
Nolan) are offered as examples of this trend.
Buckland’s collection draws heavily on Bordwell in order to ground
its analyses – adopting the Russian formalist terms ‘fabula’ and ‘syuzhet’
throughout. Crucial for Buckland is Bordwell’s assertion that ‘[d]epend-
ing on how the syuzhet presents the fabula, there will be particular spec-
tatorial effects. Armed with the notion of different narrative principles
and the concept of the syuzhet’s distortion of fabula information, we can
begin to account for the concrete narrational work of any film’ (1985,
51). Buckland’s collection is particularly useful in its clear identification
of how one might focus a study of the complex narrative in contempo-
rary cinema. My own form of narrative analysis used in this chapter is
similarly indebted to Bordwell’s constructivist theory, while Buckland’s
conceptualization of the contemporary puzzle film will provide a crucial
template for engaging with the complex narrative strategies of the films
examined. However, Buckland’s introduction acknowledges that its sub-
sequent chapters are not exhaustive in providing a corpus of texts, and
one of its shortcomings lies in its failure to consider the relationship
between the films analysed beyond the aesthetic form of their narration,
altogether ignoring the significance of genre in forming the spectatorial

effects of these films. This chapter will therefore examine the storytell-
ing devices of the Saw film series in order to comprehend the relation-
ship between the puzzle film and the particular structural tendencies
that collectively compose the horror film as a genre.
It is therefore important to note that these strategies are in no way
specific to horror.3 Instead, it is much more useful to comprehend the
strategies of the puzzle plot film as those that are utilized across a num-
ber of genres in order to distort narrative regularities, such as linearity
or cause and effect, albeit taking different forms with different effects
according to the formal attributes of the particular genre. Indeed, to
some extent it is crucial to the aims of this book that we approach horror
as a genre with distinct representational strategies. With this in mind, it
is first useful to outline how scholars have addressed the defining char-
acteristics of the horror film in formal terms. Barry Keith Grant suggests
that ‘vision in horror tales tends to focus down and inward, as in Poe’s
The Premature Burial (1844) or David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975)’ (Grant
2004, 18). According to Grant, the horror film ‘works by positioning
something as horrifying in contrast to the normal . . . world’ (18). As
such, Stephen Prince argues, ‘only horror goes straight to the deepest
unease at the core of human existence’ (2004, 2). For Prince, the hor-
ror film ‘ultimately is about, and poses, philosophical, metaphysical, or
ontological issues’, and it is because of this that ‘the genre corresponds
more profoundly with our contemporary sense of the world’ (9). Rick
Worland, similarly – and indeed significantly to the later discussions of
this chapter – argues that ‘in horror, the source of power is the super-
natural’ (2007, 23).
Feeding on this contemporary era of horror, the puzzle film must be
positioned in the broader context of postmodern cinema. Isobel Cris-
tina Pinedo (2004) characterizes the contemporary horror film (those,
according to Pinedo, produced since approximately 1968) as postmod-
ern. According to Pinedo, the postmodern horror film is exemplified by
films such as Night of the Living Dead (1968; dir George A. Romero), as
well as instances of the slasher film, including Halloween (1978; dir John
Carpenter) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984; dir Wes Craven). Pinedo,
however, does distinguish between classical and postmodern paradigms
of horror and describes the essential elements of the latter, such as the
repudiation of narrative closer and violent attacks on the body. One of
the most significant characteristics of postmodern horror that Pinedo
identifies is the violation and blurring of boundaries. These include both
physical boundaries, such as the surface of the body, which can be torn
and mutilated, and also ontological boundaries, evident in the distinc-

tions drawn between things that are living and things that are dead, or
things that are real and things that are unreal.
Every piece has its puzzle
In some respects, Buckland’s characterization of puzzle films is an

entirely logical framework to operate in the context of contemporary
horror films. Indeed, both Buckland’s exploration of narrative form in
such works and Pinedo’s characterization of the postmodern horror film
altogether accentuate the role of complex storyworlds – Buckland cit-
ing the former as that which ‘reject[s] classical storytelling’ in favour of
‘labyrinthine structures’ whilst Pinedo paints a picture of the latter as
that which similarly favours distortion of classical tropes: ‘[t]he universe
of the contemporary horror film is an uncertain one in which good and
evil, normality and abnormality, reality and illusion become indistin-
guishable’ (2004, 86). Contemporary horror cinema, that is to say, seeks
nothing if not to make a puzzle out of its own diegesis.
Some have previously cited an alternate term when referencing simi-
lar styles of the complex narrative. ‘Hyperlink cinema’, for instance, was
a term coined by Alissa Quart in her review of the film Happy Endings
(2005; dir Don Roos) for the film journal Film Comment in 2005. The
term refers to instances of cinema that play with time and the personal
history of characters, incorporating plot twists, interwoven storylines
between multiple characters, jumping between the beginning and end
(typically via flashback and flash-forward). Whilst the Saw saga does
incorporate aspects of this cinema, a useful characterization to begin
this analysis might be to view the saga in the context of structural quali-
ties of media other than those of cinema. The final entry in the series,
Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (2010; dir Kevin Greutert), strongly evokes the
structural template of the form of a novel with its chapterizing of the
narrative in its title. More importantly, however, the role of the puzzle
plot as theorized earlier by Buckland means not only a sense of mystery
to the story being told but also a sense of proposed completeness to
the overarching narrative along with a prescribed continuity: the fabula
must coherently connect pieces of the syuzhet, like a jigsaw puzzle slowly
being pieced together. The contemporary horror film, meanwhile, whilst
often making use of franchising techniques that extend the concept of
the film across multiple sequels, traditionally has not adopted such a
complex, unified narrative structure. The aforementioned Halloween,
Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street all became commercially
successful series, but few incorporated narratives that prioritized expan-

sive narrative continuity.4 The density of convoluted, plot-heavy mys-
tery unravelled across the Saw saga is in many ways a structural facet
of television rather than cinema. In broadening the cultural context in
which the Saw films were produced, it is difficult not to identify the
influence of televisual event series such as Lost (ABC, 2004–10), and to
lesser extents The Event (NBC, 2010) and FlashForward (ABC, 2009–10).
Each of these instances exploited serialized narration, teasing viewers
with a fragmented fabula that unpacked details of a complex mystery
via strands of syuzhet that were formed over many years of content.
Much like television’s Lost and indeed Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990–91) before
it, cinema’s Saw saga is a puzzle of both narrative mystery and form:
structured around twists, flashbacks and fragments of plot that not only
weave throughout multiple films but also unpack mysteries of the ear-
lier films (or, rather, episodes). Chronologically deceased protagonists
reappear in later films, their own role in the multi-film-spanning saga
re-examined from a multitude of alternate points of view, the syuzhet
flashing backwards and forwards whilst revisiting events from previous
films, all the while recontextualizing and reforming the viewer’s com-
prehension and understanding of the overarching fabula.
In Saw III (2006; dir Darren Lynn Bousman), for example, Amanda
Young, a troubled apprentice of the series’ primary antagonist, is seen
reading a letter. Both the content and author of this letter has particular
significance to the fabula. However, the narratological devices surround-
ing how this event is articulated to the viewer are shrouded in flaunted
attributes of the puzzle plot. Narrative content such as who wrote this
letter, why it was written and what it actually says is not disclosed to the
viewer until Saw IV (2007; dir Darren Lynn Bousman) and Saw V (2008;
dir David Hackl) – fragments of the information surrounding this part
of the syuzhet scattered across two later films. The narrative thus moves
forward by looping backwards, revisiting the unanswered loose ends
of its own history in order to answer the current mysteries of its pre-
sent. Such devices are repeated throughout the series, creating different
effects. The fabula of Saw IV, in fact, takes place at the same time as the
fabula of Saw III, though again the syuzhet of the former is structured so
as to conceal this revelation.
There are indeed multiple unexplained mysteries, together with unre-
solved plot threads and the primary antagonist’s own verbal insistence
that each and every one of these unanswered questions will somehow
coalesce together to form a grand and intricate resolution (a coherent
continuity which the marketers reinforced: ‘In the end’, read the tagline
for Saw V, ‘all the pieces will fit together’). Entire plot strands are left
dangling, such as the contents of a box left to Jill, the wife of antagonist
John Kramer, otherwise known as The Jigsaw Killer – a mystery resolved
only in a later sequel. Such devices owe a debt to the trajectory of a tel-
evision series – particularly the cases cited above, where the lingering,
serialized puzzle plots had been designed strategically to keep viewers
returning year after year in the hope that in the end, similarly, all the
pieces will fit together.
Jigsaw: An unsolvable puzzle
Working alongside this structural strategy of concealment and mystery

is Saw’s John Kramer, the series’ primary antagonist. Kramer is dead (or
at least dying) in each of the seven films in which he appears. The char-
acter, the viewer is informed, faces terminal cancer, an event that led
him to spend his remaining days ‘testing’ the will of those who have
chosen to squander the gift of life by placing such individuals in traps
designed to inflict pain in order for the sinner to rediscover the value
of his or her life. ‘Technically speaking’, Lawrence Gordon explains in
Saw, ‘he’s not really a murderer. He never actually killed anyone.’ Yet
he embodies a philosophy where his illness reveals how in confronting
death, one’s appreciation of life is tested. ‘Those who do not cherish
life’, insists Kramer, ‘do not deserve life.’ The sinners who perish in his
traps must not, Kramer would argue, value their lives enough. ‘Most
people are so ungrateful to be alive’, he tells one survivor. ‘But not you.
Not anymore.’
In the first three Saw films, Kramer occupies the status of Pinedo’s
postmodern horror villain in terms of techniques of characterization.
In Saw II (2005; dir Darren Lynn Bousman), he is a visibly deteriorating
cancer patient, requiring oxygen even to speak. In Saw III, the character
is on his deathbed – his unmistakable physical frailty serving as a strik-
ing contradiction to the apparent agency he maintains over the charac-
ters around him. Kramer, too, ultimately transcends his own mortality,
operating as the centrepiece behind the unravelling saga long after his
death in Saw III, where Jeff, Kramer’s latest sinner/victim, slashes his
throat. Whilst devoid of the supernatural backdrops constructed for A
Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Kruger and Halloween’s Michael Myers,
the John Kramer of the Saw saga is similarly projected with a frighten-
ingly mysterious force of the alive/dead dichotomy.
Indeed, it is useful to resituate Kramer in the complex postmodern
context of horror outlined earlier by Pinedo. Beyond his contradictory
physical presence as both weak and powerful, what also marks Saw’s John
Kramer as a postmodern horror villain is his paradoxical ability to tran-
scend death. Halloween’s ghost-faced killer Michael Myers returns from
the dead on multiple occasions during the Halloween series (1978–2002).
So too does Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th cycle (1980–2003). A
Nightmare on Elm Street also serves as an instance of this peculiar aspect
of Buckland’s puzzle film framework. Freddy Kruger, the antagonist,
functions as a postmodern horror film villain on account of his con-
struction as the destroyer of ontological borders that distinguishes real-
ity from unreality. Kruger is said to have been murdered in events prior
to those of the film. Yet Kruger is inexplicably alive throughout the film;
moreover, he is capable of entering the dreams of others, killing them
whilst they sleep, crossing over from one dimension to another. Mark
Edmundson writes: ‘Walk down into the basement of Nancy’s house and
you find Freddy’s boiler room. Walk a flight down from the first floor at
school and you’re there, too’ (1997, 55). A Nightmare on Elm Street often
exploits techniques of what Buckland cites as the puzzle film, adopting
different levels of reality, each fragmented in terms of space and time, in
order to project Kruger with a complex, somewhat contradictory, omni-
presence. He cuts across and distorts boundaries between the living and
the dead, between one space and another, in much the same way that
Pinedo describes.
After his death, Kramer’s continued presence during the course of the
remaining four Saw films is similarly ontologically complex, bordering
on the non-comprehensible in ways akin to both Michael Myers’ or
Freddy Kruger’s sustained immortality. Halloween writer/director John
Carpenter suggests as much, stating: ‘Michael Myers, the killer, [is] not
quite a human being. He’s teetering on the edge of something supernat-
ural. He’s a relentless force – he can’t really be killed. That was the idea’
(John Carpenter, author interview; conducted 10 July 2010). In Saw IV,
Kramer leaves a tape from beyond the grave: ‘By hearing this tape, some
will assume that this is over, but I am still among you. You think it’s over
just because I am dead. It’s not over. The games have just begun.’ It is
precisely this sense of ontological complexity, this inexplicable ability to
transcend death and still remain a force of active terror on the world of
the living that provides each of these monstrous characters with a shared
thematic underscore: each embodies the fear of the unknown. What dif-
fers in each example is how such ontological complexity is conveyed in
the context of the films themselves. In the case of Saw, it is precisely the
puzzle plot narration that permits the saga to build the characterization
of John Kramer as such an intricate agent of ontological contradiction.
Despite its puzzling incongruity, the ending of Saw IV serves to con-

struct an intentionally contradictory and paradoxical presentation of its
preceding narrative events, since the application of such jarring causal
reversals and irresolvable inconsistencies as Kramer’s continued grasp
over the living after his death denies the viewer a means of accurately
deciphering its ambiguity. Thus, the destruction of reality that Pinedo
argues as operating as a thematic objective in the contemporary post-
modern horror film – a destruction operating more generally ‘on the
principles of disruption, undecidability, and uncertainty’ – is articulated
in this case as a narrative puzzle (91). It becomes a shocking and abrupt
moment of postmodern uncertainty, one that ultimately escapes logical
comprehension. Moreover, the mysterious enigma of the intertwined
puzzle plots surrounding Kramer also borders, as Rick Worland suggests
of all horror cinema, on the supernatural and thus provides a useful
means of comprehending the formal function of the archetypal contem-
porary horror film antagonist.
The game comes full circle
Kramer’s ontological status as the obliterator of this living/dead dichot-

omy is perhaps most emphatically articulated during the final moments
of the first film, an ending that reconstructs John Kramer in Pinedo’s
mould of the postmodern horror archetype for the first time. This final
scene incorporates a twist ending, itself a key characteristic of the puz-
zle film. Jones notes that ‘numerous “torture-porn” films [such as Saw
(2004; dir James Wan), Hostel (2005; dir Eli Roth) and Captivity (2007;
dir Roland Joffé)] adopt narrative twists that redefine apparently stable
roles’ (85). In the case of Saw, this film’s preceding narrative establishes
a nondescript bathroom location, inside of which are two protagonists:
Dr Lawrence Gordon and Adam Faulkner-Stanheight. Both are the latest
victims of Kramer, the notorious Jigsaw. Their ankles chained to metal
pipes, the two men’s predicament invokes a number of schemas for the
viewer to interpret, all of which work to reinforce the assumption that
both Lawrence and Adam should be schematized as victims: they claim
to have no comprehension of why they were abducted; their confusion
suggests innocence; Lawrence’s wife Alison and daughter Diana have
also been abducted, again invoking innocence on their part through
misfortune. The narrative’s marked – if unseen – acknowledgement of
the man responsible for these abductions invites the viewer to hypoth-
esize a clear distinction between the villain (the unseen Kramer) and the
victims (Lawrence, his family and Adam).
The narrative initially makes use of multiple supressed ellipses, each of

which is cloaked in a non-linear structure that functions to conceal fabula
information whilst flaunting the schemas noted. As stressed already, one
of the common features that Buckland identifies as typical of the puzzle
film is the delight that such a film takes in disorientating or misleading
the viewer. Flashbacks conveying events from the characters’ respective
pasts, a strategy that will be examined in further detail shortly, are thus
threaded throughout the narrative of the story’s present, each of which
slowly reveals new content regarding the characterizations of Lawrence
and Adam. The viewer discovers that Lawrence is both a poor father to
his child and a cheating husband to his wife; Adam is a liar. The syuzhet,
structured as the past, thus recharacterizes these two characters, trans-
forming each from an innocent victim into a guilty sinner. The past, that
is, distorts how the viewer understands the present, the revisiting of his-
tory in turn shifting moral alignment wherein the communicative status
of the narration begins to be questioned as its victims re-emerge with a
new set of schemas: liars, cheats, manipulators. Jones hints as much in
his own work by opting to replace what he sees as ‘the inherently value-
laden “victim” and “sadist”’ descriptors with the comparatively vaguer
terms ‘protagonist’ and ‘antagonist’, rightly noting that ‘positions may
shift across the narrative’ (85). In adopting a narratological vision that
aligns with Grant’s suggestion that ‘vision in horror tales tends to focus
down and inward’ – the narrative of Saw itself looking inward at both its
history and inside its characters’ inner pasts – the syuzhet thus reframes
the fabula, altogether relocating the whereabouts of its evil. The location
and the narrative role of evil is a significant characteristic of horror cin-
ema. Consider the musings of horror film-maker John Carpenter, who
identifies a useful binary between two types of horror narratives:
In general you have two stories you can tell in horror. The stories have
to do with where the evil comes from, because most horror movies
are about evil of some sort. A destructive force, a thing – whatever
you want to call it. Or a killer. And it goes back to our beginnings as
creatures when we start telling each other stories. Imagine yourself
around a campfire, for instance. You’re listening to a medicine man
or a witch doctor or a priest or whoever is the storyteller, and he tells
you where evil is. Evil is out there in the dark. It’s beyond the river.
It’s the other tribe. It’s the other. The outside force that’s going to
come in and destroy us or kill us. That’s one form of horror. Then the
second is that you imagine the same scene – we’re gathered around
a campfire and we’re listening to the storyteller tell us – and he tells
us evil is in here, and he points to his heart or to his head. He says

evil is in every person. And that’s the inside. That’s a harder story to
tell. That’s a story that is more challenging to the audience; it’s a lot
easier to tell a story about the other. But when the evil is us, when the
evil is the self, then we’re all capable of evil – and that’s tricky. That’s
an alarming thing for audiences (Carpenter, author interview, 2010).
Jones argues that the shifting of moral alignment in such films occurs
when ‘protagonists become torturers after undergoing torture themselves’,
but Saw shows that it is more complex than this (2013, 87). The final
scene of Saw, indeed, adopts a narratological causal reversal wherein the
seemingly dead victim lying face down in-between Lawrence and Adam is
finally revealed to be John Kramer, standing up to display his intricate ruse
only once both protagonists have failed their respective games. The causal
reversal of this scene is similarly alarming for the audience on account on
its abolishment of assumed schemas. Kramer, a deranged philanthropist, is
reschematized along with Lawrence and Adam: the victims have become
the villains, and the villain, in turn, the victim. Through its adoption of
particular puzzle plot narration techniques – namely, non-linear narrative,
flashbacks, twists, causal reversals and misleading schemas – Saw trans-
forms from what Carpenter characterizes as the horror of the other to what
he also cites as the horror of the self. In Saw, the evil of the story lies in the
hearts of its victims; Kramer, however, the villainous other, lurking in the
dark, is the victim of death. In turn, the striking twist of this final reveal
serves to articulate Kramer as at once dead and alive, both dying from the
cancer that permeates his body and alive in a powerful, active way as his
presence dictates all surrounding narrative events. It is a contradiction
of rank that is only further emphasized by his representation as a dead
corpse – a revelation, itself disguised via uncommunicative, suppressed
puzzle plot cues, which transforms Saw from a horror of the other to a hor-
ror of the self. Just as Freddy Kruger epitomizes postmodern horror in his
ability to violate ontological boundaries – existing as both dead and alive,
crossing the demarcated spaces of the real and the imaginary as if no divide
existed – so too does Saw’s Kramer: dead, alive, dying, in control, Kramer is
himself a twist of ontological contradiction, challenging if not abolishing
distinctions between living and dead, right and wrong, villain and victim.
In the end all the pieces will fit together
The complex obliteration of these binaries can on one level be seen to

invert the (temporarily) utopianistic finales of earlier slasher films such
as Halloween, where an archetypal victim is clearly distinguished from,

and indeed ultimately emerges victorious over, a personification of evil.
In this sense, the regularly downbeat finales of the Saw films, wherein
protagonists repeatedly fail to escape from their respective traps, often
failing to defeat their antagonists, such as Agent Strahm, who is bru-
tally killed during the final moments of Saw V, reinforce Barry Keith
Grant’s assertion that ‘the American horror film is tied to a continued
process of debunking the myths of utopia’ (1984, 256). Functioning in
line with Grant’s assertion, the narratives of the Saw series – operating as
instances of the contemporary puzzle film as articulated via the thematic
attributes of the horror film – are thereby not designed to draw a clear
line of distinction between any particular binaries, nor do they strive
simply to collapse distinctions between such oppositions as good and
evil, victim and villain. Rather, they are designed, with varying strate-
gies and effects, to suggest that such distinctions do not exist. Through
the close incorporation of many of the narratological devices befitting
Warren Buckland’s characterization of the contemporary puzzle film –
with unreliable narrators, multiple timelines, a lack or overabundance
of cues, flaunted or suppressed narrative ellipses and unexpected causal
reversals, each designed to conceal, to disorientate and to mislead the
viewer – the moral status of the world in sight becomes a severe defin-
ing issue.
The Saw saga is indeed one complex flashback of shifting moral align-
ment, the non-linearity of its narration denying the viewer the ability
to accurately distinguish its past from its present or its heroes from its
villains. Denying the viewer an understanding of when an event is tak-
ing place in the story effectively distorts the meaning of that story, of
what is happening – entire scenes shifting context by their placement
(or not) in relation to others. In a sense, the world of the Saw films
exists in a perpetual past: just as Grant argues that the horror genre looks
only down and inward, so too does the narrative structure of the Saw
saga – the films regularly moving the narrative forward by moving the
temporal action backward, shifting the viewer further inward inside its
own history. Perspectives shift; there is no individual or reliable narrator
to guide the viewer comfortably through the narrative maze of the story.
The fabula events of the Saw saga are thus nothing if not a collage of sev-
ered, fragmented parts of distorted, multiple memories – each stitched
together, like a deformed tapestry. The horror of these films is not so
much of a visceral nature but rather of a cerebral one. The Saw films are
unravelling puzzle pieces of deception, dread, violence and betrayal. No
single narrative event depicted throughout the series, and indeed no
any one character, is quite as they appear: it is the attempt to piece this
puzzle together, a puzzle that frightens through its own refusal to allow
viewers the opportunity to grasp its own game of deadly torture – both
of the victims’ bodies and of the viewers’ minds – that most aptly char-
acterizes the true horror of the tale.
Notes
1 See also Kim Newman, Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen since the 1960s
(2011).
2 This coining of the term ‘puzzle film horror’ is intended as a direct extension
of Buckland’s earlier term, building on his work on the puzzle film in a way
that considers the significance of genre. See Warren Buckland (ed.), Puzzle
Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (2009).
3 Buckland never structures the collection in a way that foregrounds genre. As
such, the body of films studied in the collection suggests that the puzzle plot
transcends genre altogether.
4 These cases of Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street do sug-
gest some degree of continuity across multiple films, with a recurring killer
re-emerging and protagonists occasionally referencing the narrative events of
past films. However, each entry in these particular series typically introduced
new protagonists and did not require the viewer to be familiar with past films
in the series.
9
Resurrecting Carrie
Gary Bettinson
Few horror films have flirted with slasher-genre categorization as ten-

tatively as Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976). While some studies of the
slasher film have granted Carrie serious treatment, the film has so far
resisted assimilation to that genre.1 And yet, if Carrie is not wholly sub-
sumable to the slasher category, it nonetheless shares with it compel-
ling generic features. Further, De Palma’s movie has shaped slasher-film
norms in indelible ways. By highlighting patterns of imitation, innova-
tion and influence against what formalists call backgrounds, or ‘norms
of prior experience’ (Thompson 1988, 21), it can be shown that both
Carrie and its 2013 remake (signed by Kimberly Peirce) are integral to
the slasher genre’s inception and evolution. Formalist concepts can also
usefully illuminate aspects of artistic practice and generic evolution, a
premise exemplified in this chapter through the case of slasher cinema.
The Russian Formalist concept of historical backgrounds proves val-
uable to a taxonomy of films and film genres. ‘We could not see the
(individual) work in isolation’, Boris Eikhenbaum writes of the formal-
ist literary enterprise. ‘We had to see its form against a background of
other works rather than by itself’ (1965, 119). A dynamic, diachronic
approach to literature entails situating the individual artwork against a
ground of tradition, the better to perceive patterns of aesthetic change
or ‘mutation’ (Tynjanov 1929/2002, 67). For Victor Shklovsky, the chief
influence upon literature’s evolutionary dynamics is literature itself,
hence the formalists prioritized (at least initially) ‘the effect of literature
on literature’, or more abstractly, the influence ‘of work on work’.2 Lit-
erary change is explicable by a logic of shifting dominants: as a genre’s
intrinsic components struggle for primacy, its dominant devices vary
over time. When a well-worn device becomes automated, the artwork’s
propensity for aesthetic sensation (defamiliarization, or ostranenie)
diminishes and a competing device claims prominence. An artform’s
131
aesthetic evolution springs from the dialectical relationship among art-

works as formal devices periodically come into favour or fall into disuse.
A similar conception of aesthetic change is postulated by art historian
E. H. Gombrich. For Gombrich, an artform’s evolution can be expressed
by the formula ‘schema plus correction’ (1994, 17). According to this
principle, artists adapt existing formulas to new contexts, thereby trans-
forming them – hence the gradual evolution of a stylistic tradition’s
salient features. David Bordwell has argued for the value of Gombrich’s
principle to the study of film history (1999, 151–2; 2005, 79). Taking Bor-
dwell’s cue, I adopt Gombrich’s principle of stylistic change – and more
broadly the Russian Formalist conception of changing backgrounds – to
examine how Carrie’s screen adapters, compelled towards innovation
and distinctiveness, engage in a dialogic interplay that variously antici-
pates, exemplifies and refreshes slasher-film conventions.
Psycho, Carrie and proto-slasher schemas
We begin, as discussions of the slasher genre often must, with Alfred

Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Scholars have argued that slasher cinema
finds its heritage in this Hitchcock classic, and certainly the film informs
both Stephen King’s source novel (Carrie, 1974) and its assorted film and
television adaptations. King’s novel contains numerous evocations of
Psycho, thereby cueing the reader – and De Palma, the first film-maker to
adapt Carrie – to the material’s most pertinent background. Superficial
affinities with Psycho permeate the book. Like Hitchcock, King constructs
a major set piece around a shower scene, conjuring an abject blend of
eroticism and abrupt physical assault. A monstrous matriarch (Mrs Bates
/ Margaret White) becomes a locus of horror, puritanically menacing her
child. The idiom of the literary fantastic ambiguates the reality-status of
inexplicable phenomena. And, as Barbara Creed suggests, King makes
Carrie White reminiscent of Norman Bates by virtue of a ‘divided per-
sonality’ eliciting both pity and horror (1993, 78, 83). Other Hitchcock-
ian references punctuate King’s novel: an incidental character named
McGuffin and an accidental gas station explosion, paralleling a scene
from The Birds (1963; dir Alfred Hitchcock).3 In short, the novel’s allu-
siveness provides De Palma an ideal context within which to extend
the Hitchcockian themes he had mined in Sisters (1973), Phantom of the
Paradise (1974) and Obsession (1976).
King renders his novel’s background (Hitchcock chillers) and pri-
mary intertext (Psycho) tacit, but De Palma’s adaptation brings them to
the fore. Most overt is De Palma’s use of literal quotation. The school
Resurrecting Carrie 133
attended by the town’s teenagers bears the name Bates High. Psycho’s
violin sting (scored by Bernard Herrmann) is recruited among original
cues composed by Pino Donaggio. Such overt referencing led critics to
castigate De Palma as a mere epigone, capable only of pallid obeisance
to Hitchcock; hence the dismissal of Carrie as ‘derivative without being
creative’ (Monaco 1984; 165). Even sympathetic critics considered Carrie
broadly analogous to Psycho. Pauline Kael noted the two films’ stylistic
affinities, while The Washington Post dubbed Carrie ‘the Psycho of the
present generation’ (Kael 1976; Kakmi 2000). Stephen King, likewise,
labelled De Palma’s film ‘an homage to Psycho’ (quoted in Underwood
& Miller 1989, 72).
In interviews, however, De Palma rebuffs the Psycho comparison (see
for example Aisenberg 2011, 287). His rebuttal might appear disingenu-
ous, especially since Carrie’s use of literal quotation explicitly invites
analogy to Psycho. Yet Carrie is no mere replica of the Hitchcock classic.
In formalist parlance, De Palma deforms Psycho’s intrinsic norms (many
of which would later become extrinsic norms governing the slasher-film
genre), ascribing its devices new functions and repurposing its stylistic
schemas. From this standpoint, Carrie invokes Psycho principally as a
background text against which to register deviations. By reworking its
intertext so thoroughly, De Palma’s film recasts what today can be rec-
ognized as the prototypical norms of the slasher movie. Put differently,
Carrie – by reconfiguring Psycho’s slasher-film elements – defamiliarizes
slasher conventions before they had crystallized as conventions. Thus
De Palma’s film displays generic affinities to the slasher movie without
being wholly assimilable to that category.4
In key respects, Carrie exemplifies the slasher-film formula. Its climax
posits Margaret White as a grotesque killer in the slasher mould, advanc-
ing relentlessly and plunging a butcher knife into her victim with the
evangelical fervour of a zealot. The White family residence becomes (in
Carol Clover’s phrase) a quintessential Terrible Place, thick with Victo-
rian repression and tricked out with religious artefacts. Thunderstorms
deliver the pathetic fallacy, signalling imminent danger. Sexual awaken-
ing opens the door to victimization and slasher-style murder. All these
features hark back to Psycho and anticipate its postclassical progeny from
Halloween (1978; dir John Carpenter) to Scream (1996; dir Wes Craven)
and beyond.5
Yet De Palma subjects Psycho’s slasher-film elements to creative deforma-
tion. In De Palma’s hands, an inherited schema – for instance, the knife
as an instrument of mutilation and murder – is not simply replayed but
deformed. At the climax, when Margaret is impaled by a battery of kitchen
utensils, De Palma defamiliarizes and renews proto-slasher iconography. Sty-

listically, too, Carrie swerves sharply from its predecessor. Both films depict
the domestic home as an oppressive mausoleum, but De Palma situates
this monstrous domain at the heart of sunlit suburbia. (As such he supplies
both the anticipated generic schema and its revision.) He substitutes soft-
focus cinematography for Psycho’s hard-edged chiaroscuro. And whereas
Psycho (like countless subsequent slasher films) exploits acousmatic sound,
restricted framings, deep blocks of shadow and other repressive devices
designed to obscure the killer’s identity, De Palma roots the source and site
of horror within bourgeois suburban normalcy. In this respect, he deserves
credit for a strategy often attributed to Halloween and Stanley Kubrick’s The
Shining (1980): he inverts the horror genre’s traditional Expressionist and
Gothic mise-en-scène, modifying its iconic, easily pastiched elements.6, 7
This emphasis on ordinariness motivates the everyday objects marshalled
to destroy Margaret White, objects which imaginatively recast the knife
motif from Psycho. Further, De Palma’s emphasis on the everyday presages
the suburbanization of horror-film settings standardized by John Carpen-
ter’s Halloween. Viewed in this context, Carrie deserves to be acknowledged
as an important precursor to the late-1970s slasher cycle.
As these examples suggest, artists cannot but engage with antecedents
one way or another. Inheriting traditional schemata, the artist engages
in what Gombrich calls a ‘struggle against the schema’ (1989, 149).
Compelled to innovate, the new artist may fold the received device into
a pattern of schema-plus-revision, as De Palma does by furnishing both
the butcher knife and the array of weaponized utensils; the Gothic house
and suburban normality. In this way, he embeds novelty among familiar
elements, at once satisfying and refreshing audience expectations. Less
commonly, the artist might choose to reject the devices handed down
by tradition. This strategy is nowhere to be found in the work of De
Palma and his film-school peers (Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola, Lucas,
Carpenter, et al.), all of whom prefer innovating within generic frame-
works. ‘The real trick’, maintains De Palma, ‘is not to ignore the conven-
tions but to take them and then personalize them’ (quoted in Knapp
2003, 66). He cites as an example of genre repudiation Kubrick’s The
Shining, to which he imputes ‘contempt’ for generic tradition (66). If De
Palma favours schema revision over repudiation, the remakes of Carrie
that have emerged in recent years often reject formulas bequeathed by
De Palma’s film, as we will see presently. Indeed, the option of schema
repudiation is most likely to arise in remakes of film classics, as the direc-
tor tasked with adaptation seeks to establish distinctiveness, novelty and
contemporary relevance.
Alternatively, as the Russian Formalists observed, the artist may

repurpose an acquired device, changing its customary function. This
is De Palma’s strategy in quoting Psycho’s musical stinger. He employs
Herrmann’s violin cue not to intensify a knife attack (as Hitchcock does)
but to italicize Carrie’s telekinetic ‘flexing’, King’s term for the heroine’s
display of psychic prowess (King 1974/1989, 28). When Margaret White
rams a knife into Carrie’s back, De Palma rejects the option of quoting
Herrmann’s leitmotif; his goal is to modify the schema’s original func-
tion, not to replicate it. A lesser heir to Psycho’s stylistic schemas – that
is, a Hitchcock imitator worthy of the title – would emulate both the
form and the function of the appropriated device, but De Palma alters
the musical stinger’s function by deepening its subjective purpose, yok-
ing it to Carrie’s psychic outbursts.
Carrie’s prom sequence provides another instance of schema repur-
posing. As several commentators have noted, the scene borrows a
360-degree panning shot from Vertigo (1958; dir Alfred Hitchcock).
Critic Joseph Aisenberg, however, points out that De Palma ‘rethought
the shot, removing it from its original dramatic context about doubles
and duplicity’ (2011, 197). While De Palma retains something of the
original shot’s sense of delirium, he repurposes the schema to connote
the heady euphoria of first love, while auguring the helter-skelter may-
hem to come.8 Here again literal quotation is not commensurate with
plagiarism. As Shklovsky puts it, ‘The old form itself exists and remains
unchanged formally but changes functionally’ (1930). In any artistic tra-
dition or genre, evolution or mutation depends less on the invention of
new forms than on the ascription of new functions to existing forms.
De Palma avoids merely replicating a well-proven formula. He regards
Psycho’s successful schemas as a basis not for slavish imitation but for
imaginative exploration. Consequently, he pushes the contemporary
horror genre in fresh directions.
When artists fail to refresh traditional forms and functions, a device
becomes automated and ossifies. Consider Carrie’s shock coda. Here is a
further case of De Palma appropriating and recasting a schema already
in circulation. The sequence, depicting a bloodstained hand erupting
from Carrie’s desecrated grave, finds its source not in Psycho but in John
Boorman’s Deliverance (1972). Observes Carrie’s screenwriter, Lawrence
D. Cohen: ‘The last image of Deliverance is a hand coming up out of the
water . . . [De Palma] looked at that and thought, ‘Boy, I can do a hell of a
lot better’’ (quoted in Aisenberg 2011, 265). In such cases, the impulse to
recast existing schemas springs not only from the desire for distinctive-
ness but from a conviction that the schema can be ‘corrected’, that is,
put to better effect. De Palma reworks the device’s original function for
heightened shock value: a sudden blast of non-diegetic music synched
to unexpected character movement triggers the startle reflex, while the
dramatic situation is apt to evoke Poe’s supreme horror – the impossibil-
ity of dying. The result is a more visceral, physiologically stimulating
variant of the Deliverance schema, and it became instantly and widely
imitated. Suddenly horror films and thrillers affixed codas depicting the
monster’s sudden revival, fostering open-endedness and preparing the
way for interminable sequels. For Carrie’s contemporary critics, the coda
was ‘innovatory’ (Pirie 1977–78, 21), but by the late 1980s the formula
had fossilized. Because Carrie’s successors did little more than repeat the
device’s form and function (viz., a late-arriving startle effect), it degener-
ated into cliché. Thus the device, ‘having been poetic, becomes prosaic’
(Shklovsky 1973, 42).
Several points are worth noting here. First, this example attests to De
Palma’s de facto position as an innovator rather than an imitator of
forms. Second, it reaffirms the importance of historical backgrounds to
a genre’s evolution: in the late 1970s the startling coda was apt to elicit
surprise, but a decade later its efficacy had fizzled. If the horror genre was
to regain its narrative potency, it had to modify this well-worn schema.
Just as important, Carrie’s coda – its staging of the monster’s revival (itself
a variant on Psycho’s ‘She wouldn’t even harm a fly’ ending) – wrought
a generative effect on the incipient slasher film cycle. Its basic elements
subsequently became integral to slasher-film plotting: from Halloween
and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984; dir Wes Craven) to The Stepfather
(1987; dir Joseph Ruben) and Scream, the apparent invincibility of the
monster and the jolt-inducing climax hardened into a genre staple.9 In
this regard, Carrie comes forward as a major progenitor of slasher-film
convention.
Not least, Carrie’s high school prom sequence became a locus classicus
for the nascent teen-slasher genre. Allusions to this seminal set piece
permeate Hollywood genre cinema in general (recent examples include
We Need to Talk About Kevin [2011; dir Lynne Ramsay], Red Lights [2012;
dir Rodrigo Cortés] and Gone Girl [2014; dir David Fincher]), but its
influence is most strongly manifested within the youth-oriented slasher
film. Promoting Carrie’s prom-night sequence to an entire plot premise,
Prom Night (1980; dir Paul Lynch) transplants its adopted scenario into
explicit stalker-slasher territory. Subsequently, a strain of slasher films
offered homage to Carrie’s apocalyptic coup de théâtre, including Night
of the Creeps (1986; dir Fred Deller) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The
Next Generation (1994; dir Kim Henkel). By the mid-1990s, neo-slasher
movies such as Scream could make explicit reference to Carrie’s prom-

night massacre, appealing to the horror cognoscenti (Skeet Ulrich’s
movie-obsessed killer remarks, ‘Corn syrup – same stuff they used for
pig’s blood in Carrie’). The trend would endure in slasher entries such as
Jawbreaker (1999; dir Darren Stein), Dance of the Dead (2008; dir Gregg
Bishop) and the remakes of Prom Night (2008; dir Nelson McCormick)
and Carrie (2013; dir Kimberly Peirce).10
Carrie reborn
De Palma’s Carrie spawned a belated sequel (The Rage: Carrie 2 [1999;

dir Katt Shea]), a television movie (2002; dir David Carson) and a 2013
theatrical remake directed by Kimberly Peirce.11 The task befalling Pei-
rce’s official remake, as with any horror-film remake in contemporary
cinema, involves the aesthetic renewal not only of a set of habituated
genre conventions but of the original source film itself. To be distinc-
tive (rather than derivative), it must creatively recast De Palma’s Carrie,
a film that, like Psycho, has become consecrated as a horror-film mas-
terpiece. Peirce thus encounters a similar challenge as originally con-
fronted De Palma: she must imaginatively revise, yet not wholly subvert,
the salient features of a foregoing masterwork. By what strategies, then,
does Peirce’s film transform the tropes established by De Palma? What
pertinent backgrounds illuminate the remake’s aesthetic features? And
to what degree is Peirce’s Carrie apt for slasher-film classification and
comparison?
Almost by default, Peirce revises De Palma’s stylistic schemas by adapt-
ing them to Hollywood’s contemporary norms. Animated here is the
idiom of intensified continuity, characterized by Bordwell as the reli-
ance on close-up shots, accelerated cutting, extreme telephoto and
wide-angle lenses and prowling, sometimes arabesque camera move-
ment (2006, 121–38). In accordance with current norms, Peirce adopts
a breathless cutting rate of approximately 3.5 seconds; De Palma’s film
has an average shot length closer to six seconds.12 In addition, Peirce
substitutes De Palma’s practical special effects with contemporary digi-
tal imagery. She also seeks distinctiveness by reaching for modern-day
relevance. Most flagrant is the integration into the plot of 21st-century
technology, as with the smartphone video that captures and makes viral
Carrie’s locker-room persecution. But Peirce’s Carrie also seeks deeper
relevancy, steering critics towards particular lines of interpretation. If
detractors disparaged the remake as artistically ‘redundant’ (Woodward
2013) and ‘unnecessary’ (O’Sullivan 2013), they nevertheless found
it ideologically apropos. Subordinating aesthetic concerns to cultural

ones, critics judged the film’s value not against the background of other
films but against an extrinsic sociological environment. Numerous crit-
ics stressed the remake’s timeliness in the context of the ‘post-Colum-
bine era’, the escalation of teen violence and the new phenomenon of
cyber bullying among high school students.13
This kind of reading strategy is not new, especially as regards so-
called disreputable genres such as the slasher film. From the start, crit-
ics have sought to defend slasher films by arguing for their importance
as cultural texts (see for instance Trencansky 2001). A low-grade movie
is redeemed and its genre legitimated by virtue of its imputed cultural
resonance. Pat Gill, Robin Wood, Sarah Trencansky and others affirmed
the earliest films in the slasher cycle according to such culturalist and
social-reflection principles. Disclosing symptoms of the ‘ideological
horizon’ within the work is the province of sociological poetics (Bakhtin
& Medvedev 1991), a domain central to psychoanalytic, feminist and
Marxist studies of the genre. Attempts to appreciate the slasher genre on
primarily aesthetic grounds – for instance, by tracing historical patterns
of schema-and-revision, artistic replication and renewal, reigning norms
and shifting dominants – have been comparatively scarce. In the case of
Peirce’s film, its extrafilmic milieu provides critics both an interpretive
and a legitimizing frame. At the same time, this milieu’s socio-historical
specificity differentiates it from the context against which De Palma’s
version of Carrie has been read. At the broadest level, then, sociologi-
cal backgrounds, no less than filmic ones, frequently shape the critical
reception of individual films.
Other types of background allow us to both understand the motiva-
tion of particular devices and recognize the ways in which Peirce rough-
ens her source film’s schemas. One pertinent background is Hollywood’s
recent superhero or comic-book trend. The 2000s witnessed the expo-
nential growth of blockbuster franchises based on popular comic-book
properties – The Dark Knight (2008; dir Christopher Nolan), Iron Man
(2008; dir Jon Favreau), Spider-Man (2002; dir Sam Raimi), X-Men (2000;
dir Bryan Singer) and The Avengers (2012; dir Joss Whedon) are repre-
sentative titles. Since at least 2008, the comic-book blockbuster has
clinched its place at the economic centre of mainstream Hollywood pro-
duction. Kimberly Peirce, in promotional interviews, shrewdly shaped
critical uptake by situating her Carrie remake within this high-concept
superhero cycle: ‘It’s an amazing superhero origin story’, she insisted
(Macdonald 2013). Her attempt to sensitize critics to Carrie’s kinship
with comic-book movies may constitute a shrewd manoeuvre, but it is
not wholly disingenuous. A comic-book influence is discernible in Ste-

phen King’s original premise of adolescent anagnorisis and the heroine’s
discovery of her own preternatural abilities. (King’s childhood immer-
sion in comic-book fiction is recounted in his memoirs Danse Maca-
bre [1981] and On Writing [2000].) De Palma’s Carrie, emerging from a
mid-seventies Hollywood milieu bereft of comic-book movies, makes no
attempt to exfoliate from King’s superhero subtext. By the late 1990s,
however, The Rage: Carrie 2 could seed oblique references to comic-book
lore, addressing a comic-savvy demographic. In the wake of a string
of Batman movies, The Rage knowingly cited a DC Comics referent
(‘Arkham Asylum’) recognizable to its target youth audience. Similarly,
MGM’s television adaptation of Carrie animates a comic-book frame of
reference. Its opening title sequence depicts a shower of rocks hurtling
towards a peaceful community. The sequence derives from King’s novel
(1974, 37), yet it cannot but evoke a similar scene in DC Comics’ Small-
ville (The WB, 2001–06; The CW, 2006–11) pilot, aired the previous year.
Peirce’s Carrie, co-scripted by Marvel Comics writer Roberto Aguirre-
Sacasa, intensifies the source texts’ affinities with superhero fiction.14
In De Palma’s version, Carrie levitates beds and books, but in Peirce’s
remake she levitates herself, virtually flying across the school gymna-
sium. Peirce’s Carrie psychically sunders a suburban road in pursuit of a
fleeing vehicle, a moment redolent of the earthquake finale in Superman
(1978; dir Richard Donner). The prom scene in De Palma’s film (as in
Carson’s TV movie) depicts Carrie in a torpid, trancelike state as chaos
reigns around her, but Peirce’s Carrie actively wields her telekinetic
power, channelling psychic energy through purposive bodily move-
ment. If this mutant agency serves to amplify Carrie’s monstrousness,
it also enhances the impression of her superheroism and implicates the
viewer in a kind of vicarious pleasure elicited from the protagonist’s
deliberate (and justified) act of retribution against her persecutors. In
sum, Peirce expands the tacit superhero allusions found in her most
proximate intertexts, enabling Carrie to ride the crest of a burgeoning
comic-book movie trend. This strategy makes strong fiscal sense, but
it also helps Peirce’s Carrie claim distinctiveness and contemporary rel-
evance. The tactic demonstrates how a film-maker can plumb a preced-
ing work for tacit or fertile schemas, promoting them to major thematic
and compositional principles.
A still more pertinent background for Peirce’s Carrie is the cycle of Hol-
lywood slasher movies that coalesced in the early 2000s, many of which
remade slasher titles from the 1970s and 1980s. Examples include The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003; dir Marcus Nispel), Freddy vs. Jason (2003;
dir Ronny Yu), Seed of Chucky (2004; dir Don Mancini), Black Christ-
mas (2006; dir Glen Morgan), When a Stranger Calls (2006; dir Simon
West), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006; dir Jonathan
Liebesman), Halloween (2007; dir Rob Zombie), The Hitcher (2007; dir
Dave Meyers), Prom Night (2008; dir Nelson McCormick), Friday the 13th
(2009; dir Marcus Nispel), The Stepfather (2009; dir Nelson McCormick),
My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009; dir Patrick Lussier), Sorority Row (2009; dir
Stewart Hendler), Halloween II (2009; dir Rob Zombie), A Nightmare on
Elm Street (2010; dir Samuel Bayer), Curse of Chucky (2013; dir Don Man-
cini) and Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013; dir John Luessenhop). This back-
ground cycle can in turn be traced to the years immediately following
Scream, a nostalgic period encompassing belated sequels (Halloween H20:
20 Years Later [1998; dir Steve Miner], The Rage: Carrie 2) and a contro-
versial Psycho remake (1998; dir Gus Van Sant). These youth-oriented
movies, though backward looking, functioned as a breeding ground and
showcase for newcomers on the cusp of stardom (Michelle Williams,
Josh Hartnett, Anne Heche, Vince Vaughn). They also accompanied and
piggybacked on a trailblazing wave of grisly youthpics including I Know
What You Did Last Summer (1997; dir Jim Gillespie), The Faculty (1998;
dir Robert Rodriguez) and Urban Legend (1998; dir Jamie Blanks). This
saturation of slasher-film remakes and horror movies provides a highly
specific background against which to classify – and determine the inno-
vativeness of – Peirce’s remake of Carrie.
My contention is this: Peirce’s reworking of De Palma’s Carrie ulti-
mately pushes her adaptation towards the traditional slasher-film format
and Psycho – towards, that is, the very contexts that De Palma sought
to deform and renew. Prima facie this argument might seem puzzling.
For one thing, Peirce dispenses with De Palma’s literal quotations of Psy-
cho. Jettisoned is the repurposed Bernard Herrmann leitmotif. The high
school and stockyard locales are no longer named for Psycho’s schizoid
protagonist. Nevertheless, Peirce revamps De Palma’s schemas in ways
that amplify the proto-slasher elements that he had deformed and defa-
miliarized. If De Palma’s alteration of Hitchcock’s devices precludes his
Carrie from neat assimilation to the slasher mode, Peirce’s revision of De
Palma’s devices reinstates slasher-film conventions even while dispens-
ing with De Palma’s overt allusions to Psycho. Thus the Carrie remake is
subsumable to – and self-consciously a product of – the contemporary
background of slasher-film remakes sketched above.
As per her source texts, Peirce’s dramatis personae is comprised of typi-
cal slasher-film stereotypes: the football jock, the slutty cheerleader, the
ostracized loner, the domineering guardian, the apathetic high school
principal and so forth. More so than in previous incarnations of Carrie,

Peirce’s film also foregrounds the genre’s Final Girl and psycho-slasher
archetypes. Carol Clover defines the Final Girl by a set of recurring
traits – intelligence, courage, agency, ‘abject terror’ and, ultimately, sur-
vival (1992, 37–64). For Clover, the slasher-film heroine both derives
from and radically transforms the figure of Lila Crane (Vera Miles) in
Psycho (40). Clover notes that Final Girl and killer often share certain
affinities, chiefly in terms of gender confusion and sexual repression (4,
49). Moreover, both figures possess an almost ‘superhuman’ capacity for
survival (Tudor 1989, 68; Clover 1987, 196). This affinity is amplified in
Carrie. In all adaptations of King’s story, the victim-heroine-killer triad
consists of interchangeable roles. In De Palma’s version, Sue Snell is the
nominal Final Girl, but Carrie herself – who corporeally returns from
the grave and, like Mrs Bates, at once embodies and defies death – also
lays claim to this role; she, like Sue, can be seen as a victim and ‘survi-
vor’. Indeed, Carrie White is all things: heroine, victim and psychokiller;
vanquished monster and Final Girl. This befits Carrie’s omnipotence
within the text, epitomized by her telekinetic ability that manifests, in
Noël Carroll’s phrase, an ‘infantile delusion of the omnipotence of the
will’ (1990, 172). Subsequent adaptations of Carrie tweak the Final Girl
motif. At the climax of the television version, Carrie not only survives
the prom-night holocaust but flees town with Sue Snell; the text thereby
furnishes two Final Girls. The Rage: Carrie 2 sets forth a Final Boy. By
contrast, Peirce’s remake hews to slasher-genre convention, positing Sue
as the lone adolescent to survive the sympathetic monster’s rampage.
But what – or who – constitutes the monster in Carrie? Certainly
Carrie White is the chief agent of destruction, but she is also, as noted
above, a victim of abuse and the prime figure of audience sympathy.
I have already suggested that De Palma’s depiction of Margaret White
anticipates the psychokiller figure of slasher movies. Characteristically,
Peirce elaborates this aspect of De Palma’s film to conform more closely
to slasher-film formula. She identifies Margaret as a putative slasher-
killer at the outset, thanks to a foreboding flashback-prologue extant in
King’s novel but absent from De Palma’s adaptation. Alone in childbirth,
Margaret – disoriented and instinctively driven to infanticide – thrusts
a large pair of scissors towards the newborn Carrie, the blades pausing
inches from the infant’s head.15 Thereafter Peirce recurrently identifies
Margaret with slasher-style objects, motivated by the character’s profes-
sion as a seamstress. The outsized scissors become a recurring element
and find a heritage in slasher entries such as Schizoid (1980; dir David
Paulsen), The Burning (1981; Tony Maylam), Child’s Play (1988; dir Tom
Holland) and Taking Lives (2004; dir D. J. Caruso).16 Sewing tools provide
an occasion for self-mutilation, as Margaret mortifies her own flesh in
a pique of repressed fury. The pounding needle of a sewing machine
receives ominous close-up treatment. And a butcher knife is motivically
attached to Margaret, put on display more insistently than in De Palma’s
film. In all, Peirce amplifies the psycho-slasher traits of De Palma’s Mar-
garet White and correspondingly magnifies the presence of slasher-film
iconography.
Just as traditional slasher films posit affinities between psycho-slasher
and victim, so Peirce’s plot highlights parallels between Margaret and
Carrie. This doubling strategy inevitably implicates Carrie in her moth-
er’s homicidal psychosis. Peirce’s flashback prologue sets up a parallel-
ism absent from De Palma’s film – now the plot’s opening phase creates
a homology between Margaret’s unexpected childbirth and Carrie’s first
menstruation. Both women are united in ignorance of their own bodies,
squirming in their own blood – a reminder of their familial bond and a
harbinger of the bloodletting that unites them at the denouement. Dur-
ing the prom scene, parallel editing also implies rhyming situations: as
Carrie accidentally (and prophetically) cuts her hand on the prom king
and queen ballot form, Margaret’s lacerated fingers claw at the door of
the closet that entraps her. Here again Peirce links the pair formally by
the bodily excretion of blood and indulges in a display of overt symbol-
ism (both agents have blood on their hands).
So much parallelism presages Carrie’s psychological development. By
tracing an arc from victim to slasher-killer, she becomes like her mother,
echoing the central relationship between Norman and Mrs Bates in Psy-
cho. Now slasher iconography and imagery attaches itself to Carrie. A
promgoer is propelled into a glazed door by Carrie’s mutant energy, the
victim’s helpless body bursting the glass. Carrie smashes her nemesis,
Chris Hargensen, into a car windshield; Hargensen is sliced and mangled
like so many slasher-film victims, glass shards wedged into her face. The
climax pits mother and daughter against each other in a grim physical
agon. To survive, Carrie must assume the role of slasher. She repels Mar-
garet’s butcher knife telekinetically, and – as in De Palma’s film – propels
an arsenal of levitating, piercing objects into Margaret’s body. The arc
traced by Carrie, from victim to killer, gains a degree of ambivalence
from the film’s proximate backgrounds. Against the background of the
slasher movie, this psychological shift is apt to look monstrous. Against
the background of the superhero film, however, it appears empowering,
even heroic – the heroine masters her inchoate powers and gains supe-
riority over her oppressors. This clash of backgrounds helps sustain the
equivocal response to Carrie fostered by King’s novel and the remake’s

cinematic predecessors.
Seeking distinctiveness, Peirce embraces some inherited schemas and
refuses others. Her proclivity for gruesome violence can be understood
not only against the background of the resurgent slasher-film trend but
also in dialectical relation to the adaptation of Carrie produced for tele-
vision. The latter is a domesticated version wholly devoid of slasher-film
imagery, its violence sanitized for television broadcast. Counterpoint-
ing this most immediate intertext, Peirce exploits the permissiveness of
mainstream cinema to achieve distinctiveness and conjure more viscer-
ally horrifying effects. As corollary, she manoeuvres Carrie – the abstract,
malleable structure available, as Tzvetan Todorov might say, to a multi-
tude of possible realizations (1997, 7) – closer than previous adaptations
of King’s novel to slasher-film territory.
Coda
By analysing the film adaptations of Carrie diachronically, I have tried

to reveal patterns of artistic imitation and innovation. I’ve argued that
these patterns are best illuminated by reference to a set of appropriate
historical backgrounds. A cluster of formalist concepts – backgrounds,
norms, devices, functions – provides a useful frame by which to per-
ceive the artistic evolution of a particular schema, a general structure
(for example, the story of ‘Carrie’) or a genre (such as the slasher film).
Backgrounds not only enable the formalist critic to elucidate aesthetic
transformation; they also directly shape the film-maker’s artistic choices.
We have seen that particular backgrounds influence both a film-maker’s
uptake of certain schemas (for example, Peirce’s appropriation of super-
hero elements) and her or his reworking and repudiation of reigning
norms (as in De Palma’s refusal to replicate Psycho in toto or to mimic
the gross-out spectacle of contemporaneous horror movies such as The
Exorcist [1973; dir William Friedkin] and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
[1974; dir Tobe Hooper]). Considered this way, the slasher genre’s evolu-
tion is dynamic and dialogic. As film-makers react to norms bequeathed
or recently formed, new and traditional formulas jostle for primacy.
Further, the different backgrounds appropriate to a given work per-
mit us to recognize that innovation is partly relativistic. Considered
synchronically against the background of recent horror remakes,
Peirce’s Carrie looks fairly pedestrian and typical. But if perceived rela-
tive to foregoing adaptations of King’s novel, it begins to look quite
inventive – Peirce’s film reworks rather than imitates its inherited
schemas. Contrasting De Palma’s and Peirce’s adaptations is not, there-

fore, a teleological attempt to prove artistic decline or generic exhaus-
tion. My inquiry has chiefly settled on the dynamics of aesthetic change
and stability rather than on aesthetic value.
Finally, I have sought to demonstrate Carrie’s contribution to the
slasher genre, a contribution that deserves wider acknowledgement.
De Palma’s film (and King’s novel) constitutes a significant antecedent
to the slasher-film mode. Its generative influence is perceptible in the
meshing of youthpic and horror tropes, the centrality of a potent teen-
age heroine, the inventive variation on horror-film weaponry and so
forth. No less demonstrable is its explicit legacy to the slasher genre of
prom-night mutilations, impossibly resilient monsters and heart-stop-
ping codas. In terms of historical influence, Carrie ranks alongside other
proto-slashers such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. And with Peirce’s
remake, King’s tale of female victimhood and empowerment stakes its
most direct claim yet to slasher-film assimilation.
Notes
1 See for example Clover 1992.
2 The first quotation comes from Medvedev and Bakhtin 1991, 28. The latter
phrase derives from Ferdinand Brunetière by way of Victor Shklovsky and
Boris Eikhenbaum (Eikhenbaum 1965, 118).
3 See King 1989, 220, 166.
4 Though De Palma’s Carrie shares characteristics with the slasher film, it is not
(as Vera Dika points out) subsumable to the ‘stalker’ strain of horror cinema
(1990, 86). Dika’s stalker subgenre centrally coheres around the figure of a
psychotic killer whose scopic drives the narration evokes through elaborate
point-of-view structures. Representative titles include Halloween, Friday the
13th and Prom Night. Like the slasher genre, the stalker film finds its genesis in
Hitchcock’s Psycho, according to Dika (18). Despite their shared heritage, the
stalker and slasher genres are complementary rather than interchangeable
categories.
5 Carrie also prepares the way for De Palma’s subsequent and less oblique for-
ays into slasher-film territory as well as for his elaboration of recognizable
Hitchcockian motifs; see for prime example The Fury (1978), Dressed to Kill
(1980), Blow Out (1981), Body Double (1984), Raising Cain (1992), Femme
Fatale (2002) and Passion (2012).
6 Jonathan Crane, for example, suggests that the slasher genre’s penchant for
mundane locales was pioneered by Halloween (1988, 380).
7 The increasing tendency to situate the monstrous in broad daylight finds
proximate antecedents in The Exorcist (1973; dir William Friedkin) and The
Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974; dir Tobe Hooper). A cognate tendency
occurred in 1970s neo-noir, with genre reworkings such as Chinatown (1974;
dir Roman Polanski) recasting the monochromatic visual schemas of their
ancestors, leading critic Jim Hoberman to characterize the new trend as

‘sunshine noir’. More distant predecessors include Hitchcock’s Shadow of a
Doubt (1943), Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1946) and the paranoiac Cold War
science-fiction thrillers of the 1950s and 1960s.
8 De Palma subjected this visual schema to further revision in Body Double
(1984) and Carlito’s Way (1993).
9 According to its creators, Friday the 13th fashioned its shock ending after Car-
rie’s groundbreaking coda; see the 2006 documentary Going to Pieces: The Rise
and Fall of the Slasher Film (dir N/A). Even De Palma offered a pastiche of Car-
rie’s epilogue, delivering the startle effect at the climax of Dressed to Kill.
10 De Palma’s Carrie also initiated a slasher-film vogue for telekinetic protago-
nists, exemplified by Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988; dir John
Carl Buechler) and Australian cult item Patrick (1978; dir Richard Franklin,
and its 2013 remake; dir Mark Hartley).
11 It also inspired a notorious stage musical, performed on Broadway in 1988
and revived in 2012.
12 De Palma’s deployment of split-field diopter shots, split-screen images, slow
motion, sinuous tracking shots and other suspense-ratcheting techniques
prolong and deform the action, thereby contributing to this lower shot
average.
13 For example, see Chang 2013, O’Sullivan 2013, Dargis 2013.
14 Aguirre-Sacasa’s script is also signed by Lawrence D. Cohen, screenwriter of
De Palma’s Carrie.
15 This gesture is echoed at the climax, but now Carrie repels the weapon by
means of telekinesis.
16 As ever, a notable precedent exists in Hitchcock: in Dial M for Murder (1954),
Grace Kelly’s adulterous heroine foils an assailant by driving a pair of scissors
into his spine.
Part III
Form versus Theory
10
Reframing Parody and
Intertextuality in Scream: Formal
and Theoretical Approaches to the
‘Postmodern’ Slasher
Fran Pheasant-Kelly
As a pivotal slasher film of the 1990s, Scream (1996; dir Wes Craven)
is distinctive from earlier productions of the genre in its multiple allu-
sions to other films and art forms that had preceded it. Its uniqueness
arises from the fact that even as it is composed of fragments of previous
‘texts’, these are reframed to generate a set of revised aesthetic and narra-
tive characteristics for the genre, which, in turn, provide a template for
subsequent slasher films (though the genre underwent further change
following the September 11 attacks [see Wetmore 2012]). Moreover,
although these often-blatant intertextual references are directed towards
a knowing audience, the film is genuinely horrific because its gruesome
scenes of death not only offer homage to the conventional slasher but
also accentuate to the extreme the genre’s abject aspects. In short, it
displays both visual and intertextual excess while its numerous cross-ref-
erences signal a more pervasive cultural shift from authorial perspectives
to one that privileges other texts as source material, and, even though
the names of directors associated with the horror genre crop up regularly
throughout the film, these are for reasons of self-referentiality. Further,
as Valerie Wee points out, while the use of intertextuality reflects an
already firmly established postmodern trope, it occurs to such an extent
in Scream that it becomes the film’s text. As Wee contends, ‘The Scream
films, therefore, take the previously subtle and covert inter-textual ref-
erence and transform it into an overt, discursive act’ (2005, 47). Such
aspects become progressively more apparent throughout the franchise
as each film recirculates its textual fragments. In considering theoretical
149
and formal approaches to analysing Scream, this essay moves beyond

Wee’s analysis to consider the film more holistically. It not only takes
account of its postmodern characteristics and revised characterization,
as others have already done, but also considers its aesthetic devices, par-
ticularly those that intrinsically horrify. Moreover, it suggests that even
though Scream could be viewed as a composite of previous slashers (and
therefore not original at all), one might argue that, in fact, it distances
itself from them. Mark Jancovich implies this when he states,
Scream presents itself as a clever, knowing, ironic reworking of the

slasher movie, which is presented as moronic and unselfconscious. It
also endlessly references Halloween as a central text within the slasher
movie. However Carpenter had little or no sense of making a slasher
movie, and many critics at the time saw it as a startlingly clever,
knowing and self conscious play with the genre. Carpenter could not
have seen Halloween as a slasher movie because there was no such
category at the time (Jancovich 2002, 8).
It is therefore also suggested here that Scream moves beyond parody,

since, as implied by both Wee and Jancovich, its qualities, though
clearly alluding to previous slasher films, are both divergent from and
autonomous of them. Moreover, the film lacks any overt humour. As
Wee comments, ‘I do not believe the films themselves are comic par-
odies of the slasher genre. While characters in the Scream films offer
ironic observations about the conventions of slasher films, the films
themselves remain “straight” slasher films’ (2005, 57). Indeed, whereas
Scream and its sequels are both ironic and reflexive, they differ from
their successors, such as Scary Movie (2000; dir Keenen Ivory Wayans),
which, contrastingly, does contain scenes of spoof and comedy. In this
way, Scream arguably corresponds with Jean Baudrillard’s (1994) concept
of the simulacrum – in other words, it is a copy of an original that has
come to replace it (Allen 2011, 177). Engaging with the work of Dyer
(2007), Allen (2011) and Baudrillard (1994), this chapter debates the
theoretical and formal implications of Scream as a pivotal postmodern
slasher of the 1990s and its impact on, and implications for, subsequent
films of the franchise and genre.
Previous slasher conventions and iconography
An examination of the revisionist nature of Scream warrants considera-

tion of its predecessors. In this respect, Rick Worland outlines the generic
Reframing Parody and Intertextuality in Scream 151
evolution of the horror film, from the early ‘horror movie’ through to
the classic horror of the 1930s, a phase which extended chronologi-
cally to the 1960s and subsequently to what he refers to as a stage of
refinement. For Worland, the latter might include, for example, con-
scious experimentation in visual style as was the case with Hammer Hor-
ror’s colour rendition of Dracula (1958; dir Terence Fisher), a film that
entailed graphic detail and overt sexuality as well as changes to narrative
and characterization. Worland lists a fourth stage of evolution, which he
describes as ‘baroque’ and which is ‘characterised by increasing stylistic
adornment and self-consciousness in which the genre’s classic conven-
tions are sharply revised or inverted’ (Worland 2007, 19). It is in this
category that he positions Scream and suggests that these revisions gen-
erate a film that ‘is about almost nothing except the often-simplistic
formula of the slasher cycle of the early 1980s, including a notable scene
in which a character smugly lists the trite conventions of those earlier
movies’ (20).
Insofar as the slasher is specifically concerned, a film considered to
be the forerunner of the genre is Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), which has a
singular female victim who is doubly transgressive (she is sexually active
before marriage and also embezzles a significant sum of money from her
employer) and is consequently killed off early in the narrative. Slasher
films of the 1970s and 1980s retained elements of Psycho’s relationship
between the victim and her transgressiveness but remoulded the for-
mula to incorporate a number of additional codes and conventions.
Typically, these included ‘a group of young, often teenage, characters
as potential victims; imperilled, sexually attractive young women being
stalked by a knife-wielding, virtually indestructible¸ psychotic serial
killer; and scenes of unexpected and shocking violence and brutality’
(Wee 2004, 44).
Carol Clover elaborates more fully on the criteria and iconography
that made the slasher a distinctive entity, stating that the vital compo-
nents of the genre during the 1970s and 1980s include key characters
such as a killer, a number of victims (rather than the singular victim of
Psycho) and the ‘Final Girl’. The killer is often either mother-fixated or
has childhood issues and ‘is permanently locked in childhood’ (Clover
1992, 28). Otherwise, he displays issues of gender confusion or sexual
disturbance (28). Central to Clover’s explanation is the concept of the
Final Girl, a masculinized female who is the lone survivor of a series of
murders, the latter especially directed at victims who are sexually active.
As Clover explains, ‘Where once there was one victim, Marion Crane,
there are now many’ (32), and she adds that ‘post-coital death, above
all when the circumstances are illicit, is a staple of the genre’ (33). Paul
Wells adds that consequently, the ‘monster may be read as a moral force,
excessively punishing the young for immoral and amoral acts’ (2000,
79). The killer uses an array of weapons but those preferred include
‘knives, hammers, axes, ice picks, hypodermic needles, red hot pokers,
pitchforks and the like’ (Clover 1992, 31). In other words, weapons are
primitive and non-technological. Furthermore, the mise-en-scène of the
slasher film involves what Clover terms the ‘Terrible Place’. For her, ‘[t]
he Terrible Place, most often a house or tunnel, in which victims sooner
or later find themselves, is a venerable element of horror’ (30). She goes
on to add that ‘[t]he house or tunnel may at first seem like a safe haven,
but the same walls that promise to keep the killer out quickly become,
once the killer penetrates them, the walls that hold the victim in’ (31).
A final element of the slasher film is shock, with both the protagonist
and the viewer encountering sudden and unexpected graphic images
of bloodshed that trigger disgust, so that there is a ‘rapid alternation
between registers – between something like “real” horror on one hand
and a camp, self-parodying horror on the other – is by now one of the
most conspicuous characteristics of the tradition’ (41).
Theoretical approaches to Scream: Intertextuality,

parody and postmodernism
These codes and conventions are subject to both intertextualization and

deconstruction in Scream and its sequels. The first of the Scream fran-
chise tells the story of a group of teenagers who seem obsessed with
the cinematic traits of the horror film, and their discussion centres
upon the ability to survive murder attempts by knowing these rules.
Indeed, this trajectory underpins the entire narrative. The film begins
with the brutal murder of Casey Becker and Steve Orth, and subse-
quently the spectator learns of a prior brutal murder in the same town,
that of the mother of Casey’s fellow student, Sidney Prescott. Sidney’s
father is away for the weekend, and she too almost becomes a victim of
the killer, who is known as ‘Ghostface’, on account of the fact that he
wears a white ghostly mask. (The mask itself is derived from a painting
by Edvard Munch, known as The Scream [1893] and therefore consti-
tutes an interimage as intertext). Ultimately, it transpires that two of the
students, Stu Macher and Billy Loomis, are responsible for the murders,
Billy also being Sidney’s boyfriend. Alongside these unfolding murders,
career-obsessed journalist Gale Weathers follows events with her camera-
man and asserts that the man detained on Death Row for the murder
of Sidney’s mother is innocent and that the killer is still at large, which
proves to be the case (although her interest is purely motivated by career
ambition). Ultimately, however, Gale and Sidney outwit the killers and
together with Randy Meeks (a film geek and, it later transpires, a self-
proclaimed virgin) are the sole survivors of their peers.
The claim for Scream as a postmodern text is widely acknowledged
(Hutchings 2004; Magistrale 2005; Worland 2007), although Pamela Craig
and Martin Fradley caution against according a special status to the film
(2010, 83). Even so, they do acknowledge that ‘there is still much about
the Scream cycle that is regularly presumed to be emblematic of teen hor-
ror in the last decade’ (84; italics in original). Its recognition as being
postmodern arises from its self-referentiality and attention to intertextual
details. According to Julia Kristeva (who coined the term), intertextuality
normally entails ‘the transposition of one or more systems of signs into
another’ (Roudiez in Kristeva 1980, 15). As Kristeva further explains,
The new signifying system may be produced with the same signify-
ing material [ . . . ] or it may be borrowed from different signifying
materials: the transposition from carnival scene to the written text,
for instance. In this connection we examined the formation of a spe-
cific signifying system – the novel – as the result of a redistribution
of several sign systems: carnival, courtly poetry, scholastic discourse
(Kristeva 1984, 59).
As Graham Allen also notes, ‘The act of reading [ . . . ] plunges us into

a network of textual relations. To interpret a text, to discover its mean-
ing [ . . . ] is to trace those relations [ . . . ] Meaning becomes something
which exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and
relates’ (2011, 1). Film adaptations from literary sources and remakes
of old films epitomize postmodern intertexts, whilst, as Susan Hayward
(2000, 201) notes, cinematography and film music may introduce yet
other intertextual dimensions. In the case of Scream, the extra-diegetic
inclusion of, for example, Red Right Hand (1994) by Nick Cave and the
Bad Seeds, has several implications: it is itself adopted from a line in
Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), while the reference may also be a play on
the horror film title The Bad Seed (1956; dir Mervyn LeRoy), a film men-
tioned elsewhere in Scream.
Such intertextuality and conscious copying can result in various forms
of simulation, including parody, pastiche or homage, and it is the first of
these to which Scream is usually allocated. As Fredric Jameson explains,
theories of pastiche, simulation and intertextuality are interrelated and
pivot around postmodernism’s tenet of authorial demise whereby ‘the

disappearance of the individual subject, along with its formal conse-
quence, the increasing unavailability of personal style, engender the [ . . . ]
practice today of what may be called pastiche’ (1991, 16). If pastiche,
which Richard Dyer distinguishes from other forms of imitation (includ-
ing homage, plagiarism, forgery, travesty and parody), entails a recreation
‘that imitates other art [as opposed to reality or life itself] in such a way
as to make consciousness of this fact central to its meaning and affect’
(2007, 4), then Scream moves beyond this. While the film regularly copies
iconic moments from other horror films and artworks, its excessiveness of
narrative and visual form, and associated irony, arguably situate it beyond
paradigms of pastiche or parody. Essentially, its self-consciousness, made
apparent through ‘self-reflexive details in the text’ (Dyer 2007, 56), or by
what Dyer describes as ‘discrepancy, by something inconsistent or inap-
propriate’ (58), is taken to extremes and serves as the film’s text itself.
Neither does it entail comedy as one might encounter in parody.
Rather, Scream’s allusiveness is more akin to a heightened or advanced
level of intertextuality that some scholars refer to as the ‘hyperpost-
modern’ and which is essential to the text itself. Indeed, Wee dismisses
claims that Scream functions as parody and likewise argues that its hor-
ror sequences are genuinely horrific and lack humour. Furthermore, she
distinguishes the later phase of postmodernism exhibited by Scream
and its sequels from a cycle of films labelled by Jim Collins as a phase
of ‘early postmodernism’. For Wee, this distinction arises from the fact
that the intertexts of Scream are pervasive to the extent that the film is
wholly constructed of them. She explains that this advanced form of
postmodernism, which she labels as ‘hyperpostmodernism’, is discern-
ible in two ways:
(1) a heightened degree of intertextual referencing and self-reflexivity

that ceases to function at the traditional level of tongue-in-cheek sub-
text, and emerges instead as the actual text of the films; and (2) a pro-
pensity for ignoring film-specific boundaries by actively referencing,
‘borrowing,’ and influencing the styles and formats of other media
forms, including television and media videos – strategies that have
further blurred the boundaries that once separated discrete media
(Wee 2005, 44).
Wee further notes that, even as Scream acknowledges the conventions

of the slasher film, it subverts them. For her, the film reinterprets the
slasher villain/monster and, whereas traditional villains are psychotic,
indestructible maniacs and rejected and marginalized misfits, Scream

reimagines the character in the form of attractive individuals who
appear initially harmless. Scream also revises the concept of the Final
Girl, a character type who was originally distinguished by her virginity
and prudishness and instead entails a female protagonist who is sexu-
ally active. Contrary to usual slasher conventions, she escapes death
and manages to overcome the villains while the virgin is instead a
male (Randy Meeks). In addition, Wee defines a second Final Girl, Gale
Weathers, who departs even more from the norm articulated by Clover
in that she is attractive as well as being career obsessed, selfish and vain
(2006, 59). Neither of these two revised Final Girls is marked as boyish
or virginal, and together they triumph over their persecutors, emerging
as stable, well-adjusted individuals.
Therefore, even though Scream alludes to a significant number of
films, artworks and music as intertexts, it nonetheless gives rise to an
innovative product that is markedly different to its component parts.
Jameson describes this relocation of historical cultural fragments into
the present as a ‘cannibalization of all the styles of the past, (and) the
play of random stylistic allusion’ (1991, 18). He also suggests that this
‘turn to the past’ (18) has a tendency to involve an element of nostalgia,
but because this aggregation culminates in a ‘new’ product, it is a poten-
tial simulacrum in which ‘the past is therefore modified’ (18).
Jean Baudrillard expands on the differences between simulation and
simulacrum, explaining that the reformulated ‘copy’ exists at a number
of representational levels. In its simplest mode, the simulation is an obvi-
ous imitation of the real, but when it ‘blurs the boundaries between reality
and representation’ (Lane 2009, 84; italics in original), then it becomes a
second-order simulation. If the simulation assumes autonomous impor-
tance, rather than being solely a copy of a defunct or extinct original, then
Baudrillard, like Jameson, suggests it is a simulacrum. One might therefore
argue that, despite the fact that ‘stylistic allusion’ is conscious and specific,
rather than ‘random’ ( Jameson 1991, 18), the significance of Scream, as a
copy that does not neatly fit into categories of parody, homage or pastiche,
constitutes uniqueness akin to Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum.
Aesthetic approaches to Scream: Intertext, metatext and

abject visuals
‘I only eat popcorn at the movies,’ says a mysterious telephone caller,

as he phones Casey Becker whilst she is alone at home, thus setting the
tone of Scream as a film which makes persistent metatextual connections
to the horror genre. The unknown caller also enquires about Casey’s
favourite ‘scary movie’ – and thus perpetuates the metatextual refer-
ences within the film. It achieves this signalling in several ways: first,
several films screened within its diegesis (for example, Halloween [1978;
dir John Carpenter] and Frankenstein [1931; dir James Whale]) enable
Craven to insert signposts and interimages as intertextual devices (the
notion of interimaging – that is, the reference to one image by another –
being embedded theoretically in the term ‘intertextuality’). Second, the
characters’ knowing dialogue persistently draws attention to horror-film
conventions, with particular mention of the slasher genre; and third,
the complex relationship between interimages, intertexts and the narra-
tive’s ‘real’ scenarios promotes moments of abject horror and often act
as tension-building strategies. In other words, Scream’s intertexts and
interimages do not operate in humorous ways but synergistically serve
to intensify its horror aspects. The first-mentioned film is Halloween, thus
establishing a key trope of Scream, that of ‘the guy with the white mask
who walks around and stalks babysitters’. There are numerous other hor-
ror films cited within the text, including Friday the 13th (1980; dir Sean
S. Cunningham), The Exorcist (1973; dir William Friedkin), Basic Instinct
(1992; dir Paul Verhoeven), Candyman (1992; dir Bernard Rose), The Fog
(1980; dir John Carpenter), Terror Train (1980; dir Roger Spottiswoode),
Prom Night (1980; dir Paul Lynch), The Howling (1981; dir Joe Dante), The
Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976; dir Charles B. Pierce), The Bad Seed
(1956; dir Mervyn LeRoy), The Silence of the Lambs (1991; dir Jonathan
Demme), The Evil Dead (1981; dir Sam Raimi) and Hellraiser (1987; dir
Clive Barker). A party game involves guessing the number of sequels to
certain of these. In addition, key characters, such as Leatherface from
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974; dir Tobe Hooper) and stars associ-
ated with horror films, including Jamie Lee Curtis, are foregrounded.
Despite its postmodern inflections, however, the film takes on a more
conventionally frightening tenor when the aforementioned telephone
caller asks Casey her name, his reason being ‘because I want to know
who I’m looking at’. The film therefore exploits the classic slasher sce-
nario of a vulnerable, attractive female alone at home, the threat accen-
tuated because the house has numerous, expansive glass windows, thus
readily rendering Casey the object of an unseen onlooker. Additionally,
long shots within the house emphasize Casey’s vulnerability and alone-
ness, whilst close-ups simultaneously indicate her sense of entrapment.
This cinematography illustrates Clover’s point concerning the home as
a ‘Terrible Place’ and the way in which ‘the same walls that promise to
keep the killer out quickly become, once the killer penetrates them, the
walls that hold the victim in’ (1993, 31). However, the film also varies
from the slashers to which it first refers, since Halloween, The Exorcist
and Friday the 13th each unfold in suburban locations. Here, the location
is remote and semi-rural and therefore heightens a sense of the female
protagonist’s vulnerability. Thereafter, the film continues with its meta-
textual references about watching scary movies; for instance, the caller
tells Casey that ‘you should never ask who’s there’. He subsequently
asks Casey to name the killer in Halloween. Casey answers a question
wrongly and the caller instructs her to turn on the patio lights, revealing
her now-slain boyfriend centrally framed amidst a graphic, unexpected
scene of profuse bloodshed. The killer then hurls a chair through the
window, thereby transforming the usually safe home into a site of terror
in the same vein as previous slasher films.
Later there is mention of ‘splatter movies’, and modes of death are
consistent with previous slashers, since the first two, those of Casey
and Steve, entail disembowelment. Yet, unlike earlier slashers, there is
overstated response and unnatural attention to these modes of death,
which are almost gleefully discussed by the teenagers at their school
immediately after the murders. Akin to conventional slasher films,
knives and pre-technological weapons predominate, at least initially,
although guns are used in the closing sequence. For instance, Casey
uses a knife to protect herself against the killer, to no avail, and much
like the blonde female protagonist of Psycho (and also similar to Marion
[Janet Leigh] played by a well-known actress), she is dispatched early
in the film, though in this case, within its opening minutes. Moreover,
the nature of Casey’s attack is horrific and protracted, and the viewer
is often afforded her perspective through point-of-view camera shots.
Conversely, for reasons of cuts requested by the BBFC (British Board of
Film Classification), scenes that feature corpses and profuse bloodshed
are brief and mostly framed in long shot. Consequently, the spectator
only transiently witnesses Casey’s body, which is hanging from a tree in
the garden, in a centrally framed long shot from her mother’s point of
view. Significantly, the horror effect is amplified by the cinematography,
with a rapid zoom from long shot to fractional close-up.
Following the deaths of the two teenagers early in the film, the nar-
rative focus switches to Sidney Prescott. When the school bus drops her
at her home, a long shot of the building’s exterior reveals its remote,
rural location, and we subsequently learn from a news bulletin report-
ing on the teenagers’ deaths that Sidney’s mother also died in tragic
circumstances. Therefore, aside from its parodic, intertextual moments,
the film displays an underlying tenor of fear and terror. Edits between
the house’s interior and exterior show the sun setting ominously, and the
silence outside further accentuates its remoteness. When the telephone
rings, Sidney answers, and we hear the same voice that had earlier spo-
ken to Casey, thereby heightening tension. As the caller continues to ask
Sidney questions identical to those that he asked Casey in the opening
scenes, the viewer begins to expect the same outcome, especially when
he enquires about her favourite ‘scary movie’. At first, Sidney, mistak-
enly believing she is talking to Randy, responds by saying, ‘I don’t watch
them . . . what’s the point . . . they’re all the same . . . some stupid killer
stalking some big-breasted girl who can’t act and who’s always running
up the stairs when she should be going out of the front door’, thereby
reflexively recounting typical aspects of the horror film. Ironically, how-
ever, this is exactly what Sidney does when the killer appears in her
home. Further intertextual details abound and, aside from the epony-
mous ‘scream’ reference to Munch, include the surname of Billy Loomis,
Sidney’s boyfriend (which refers to Sam Loomis, both Marion’s lover in
Psycho and the name of the psychiatrist in Halloween). Gale Weathers
also comments that she should be in New York covering the ‘Sharon
Stone stalker’ referring to the film Basic Instinct. When Sidney discusses
the identity of her mother’s murderer with a friend, Tatum Riley (Rose
McGowan), she suggests to Tatum that the killer could still be out there,
to which Tatum replies, ‘Don’t go there, Sid, you’re starting to sound like
some Wes Carpenter flick.’
There is also self-referential discussion regarding the film’s classifica-
tion, which is compared to Billy and Sidney’s increasingly restrained
sexual relationship. Billy expounds this analogy by stating, ‘two years
ago we started off hot and heavy, nice solid R-rating on our way to an
NC-17. And now things have changed and lately, we’re just sort of edited
for television’. Sidney responds by asking him if he will ‘settle for a
PG-13 relationship’. Similarly, when the teenagers visit their video rental
store, they compare the killer’s attacks to the ‘standard horror movie’,
and when discussing the possible whereabouts of Sidney’s now missing
father, Randy Meeks comments, ‘His body will come popping up in the
last reel or something, eyes gouged out, fingers cut off, teeth knocked
out.’ The dialogue between characters therefore acknowledges the formu-
laic tropes of the slasher film and simultaneously deconstructs them. At
Stu’s party, the teenagers watch horror films and begin to critique them
with comments such as ‘the blood’s too red’, and they discuss conven-
tions that the film itself confounds. Randy comments that ‘Jamie Lee was
always the virgin in horror movies, that’s why she outsmarted the killer,
only virgins can do that, don’t you know the rules?’ Randy then proceeds
to list the ‘rules’ of horror narratives, including ‘you can never have sex,
you can never drink or do drugs, and never say “I’ll be right back”.’ The
party itself subsequently becomes the site of a massacre, beginning when
Tatum goes to fetch beer from the garage. When she encounters Ghost-
face, Tatum believes it is a party trick and implores him, in a theatrical
manner, ‘Please don’t kill me, Mr Ghostface, I want to be in the sequel’,
before he brutally kills her. The nature of her death is especially grue-
some, although it has a subversively comic element in that she tries to
escape through a cat-flap in the garage door but becomes trapped half-
way through. When Ghostface raises the electronic garage door, Tatum
remains entrapped and is therefore decapitated as the garage door rises,
providing brief, shocking imagery. This shock element recurs later when
Sidney suddenly encounters Tatum’s suspended body.
An ironic element involves the fact that Gale Weathers is secretly film-
ing the party, having concealed a camera in the sitting room where the
teenagers are watching horror videos. The footage from the camera is
being played back, almost simultaneously (with a 30-second delay) on
a screen in Weathers’ van parked outside the house, thereby creating a
‘movie within a movie’ and adding to the film’s metatextuality. Moreo-
ver, there are continuous parallels made between the films the teenag-
ers are watching on-screen at the party and the unfolding actuality of
the surrounding diegetic world. It is this connection between intertext,
interimage and ‘real’ narrative that contributes to the film’s unique
character. For instance, as Randy watches the killer in Halloween prepare
to attack his victim on-screen, Randy shouts, ‘Behind you!’ Ironically, at
the same time, Ghostface is creeping up behind Randy, the entire scene
simultaneously being viewed by Gale Weathers’ cameraman, Kenny,
who has been joined by Sidney, desperate to escape the masked Ghost-
face, and they too are shouting, ‘Behind you!’ In another intertextual
reference, Billy tells Sidney that ‘we all go a little mad sometimes’, a
line of dialogue spoken by Norman Bates to Marion in Psycho. The fake
blood on Billy’s shirt, following a pretended attack by Stu (narratively, as
a cover for the fact that they are the murderers) is, he tells Sidney, ‘corn
syrup, the same stuff they used for pig’s blood in Carrie’.
Insofar as weapons are concerned, knives remain the favoured mode of
killing, although towards the film’s finale, Sidney deviates from slasher
conventions by electrocuting Stu with a television set – she pushes it
over onto his face as he is lying injured on the floor, so that the viewer
witnesses his convulsing body in an overhead medium shot. Sidney kills
Billy too, first by stabbing him with an umbrella and then shooting him,
thereby reinventing modes of death by utilizing technological weapons.
Conclusion
In summary, this essay suggests that even though Scream is widely con-
sidered to be a postmodern text in its overt intertextuality and interim-
agery, ostensibly, as implied by Jancovich (2002) and Wee (2005), there
is a substantial difference from the earlier slasher. As Jancovich (2002)
notes, Scream was marked by irony, cleverness and knowingness, and
often positioned itself in opposition to its predecessors. In other words,
even though it simulates other films, it is at the same time often anti-
thetical to them, and, even though it is a copy, it has come to replace
the original. Scream cannot be entirely divorced from its component
intertexts. Yet, arguably, it differs markedly from them in both form
and substance, achieving this by integrating intertext and interimage
within diegetic sequences to afford genuinely tense instances that are
neither homage, pastiche or parody. Rather, they contribute to a discrete
and defining moment in the evolution of the slasher genre. If Scream
established uniqueness in its narrative and visual style, it changed
the tone of following slashers. While its sequels parodied the original
Scream, subsequent films such as the Scary Movie franchise spoofed and
rendered comedic the slasher genre, although this trend was short-lived,
soon to be replaced with ‘torture porn’ and slasher remakes in the new
millennium.
Note
The author would like to thank Pritpal Sembi for his insightful comments and
advice.
11
Crises of Identification in the
Supernatural Slasher:
The Resurrection of the
Supernatural Slasher Villain
Jessica Balanzategui
As has been indicated earlier in this book, it is commonly accepted that the
slasher subgenre is constituted of a triad of relatively distinct cycles – the
classic period following the release of formative slasher Halloween (1978;
dir John Carpenter); a period of rampant sequelization and repetition dur-
ing the mid to late 1980s; and a resurgence in the late 1990s following
the release of the extremely self-aware, semi-parodic Scream (1996; dir Wes
Craven). However, another influential cycle is largely overlooked in these
tripartite historical trajectories of the subgenre. At the turn of the millen-
nium, soon after the popularity of the slasher was renewed by Scream, an
assemblage of films emerged which reconfigured the syntactic mechan-
ics of the classic slasher through positioning the supernatural as a central
narrative feature. Self-consciously situated as a sincere alternative to the
cycle of playfully nostalgic slashers ignited by Scream, these films employ
the supernatural to embellish the ambivalent processes of identification
embedded in the classic slasher: the tug-of-war for visual and narrative
power between the killer and the Final Girl or Boy. Thus the supernatu-
ral slasher elaborates on the formal and aesthetic vacillation between per-
spectives involved in the classic slasher’s complex processes of audience
engagement.
Through an analysis of three formative supernatural slashers – Fallen
(1998; dir Gregory Hobblit), In Dreams (1999; dir Neil Jordan) and
Frailty (2001; dir Bill Paxton), I aim to demonstrate the specific ways in
which these films self-reflexively draw to the surface the crisis of iden-
tification that underpins the classic slasher formula.1 While these films
161
explore the deep structural mechanics of the slasher subgenre, they do

not necessarily feature the iconography of a killer with a knife, axe or
other ‘slashing’ weapon (although Frailty does retain and magnify this
semantic feature). Through the conceit that the killer is or has access
to the supernatural, the focus tends not to be on the gory nature of the
murders – the traditional slasher’s central semantic spectacle – but on the
syntactic tensions which underlie the killer’s complex relationship with
the protagonist. The supernatural is employed to engage the viewer in
an overtly disorienting oscillation between the perspective of the hero/
ine and the villain. This interplay of perspectives obscures the viewer’s
access to the ‘true’ narrative fabula – as is structurally heralded by a col-
lapse in the whodunit quest – and complicates the binary between good
(hero/ine) and evil (killer). In so doing, these films embellish the flux of
identification which often functioned as a deeply engrained syntactic
element of the classic slasher yet was rarely explicitly explored in the
narrative.
As is well established in discourse on the slasher, the classic narrative
almost always constellates on a surface level around the perspective of
the Final Girl or Boy – the final character to confront the killer and the
only one to finally defeat him (at least until the next sequel).2 However,
in a disruption to the audience’s simple engagement with the Final Girl/
Boy protagonist, threaded throughout such films are eye-level tracking
shots and similar aesthetic devices which represent the killer’s perspec-
tive, forcing the audience to assume the viewpoint of the murderer as he
stalks his victims. As Jeffrey Sconce elucidates in his discussion of slasher
films, ‘no other genre so explicitly foregrounds the issues of vision and
power . . . . Nowhere are the politics of seeing and not being seen more
palpable and even downright bloody’ (1993, 110), yet the processes of
identification which underwrite this interplay of visual power ‘remain
difficult to isolate, describe and predict’ (110).3 The supernatural slasher
explores the wavering of visual power inherent to the classic slasher,
rendering the struggle for scopic mastery a central component of both
the narrative structure and the audience’s mediation of it.
The supernatural as instrument of ‘new sincerity’
To date, the supernatural slasher subgenre has remained largely unex-

plored: the only detailed examination of this type of film is Matt Hills’
and Steven Jay Schneider’s work, which is grounded by the thesis that
these films are preoccupied with a popularized form of Cartesian dual-
ism ‘in which mind and body are separable, and in which the killer’s
Crises of Identification in the Supernatural Slasher 163
evil force or “soul” has an immaterial essence which ultimately betrays

its self-identity’ (2007, 73). Indeed, this uncanny splitting of mind and
body is a central theme of the supernatural slasher, yet I suggest that it
is not this anxiety in and of itself which is primary to the supernatural
slasher’s mechanics. This theme is instead a product of the supernatural
slasher’s self-aware magnification of classic generic contradictions and
represents the manner whereby these films seek to position themselves
in relation to, and against, the ironic slasher films which had reignited
both popular and academic interest in the genre in the late 1990s.
Supernatural slashers establish an oppositional dialogue with the
parodic postmodern slasher cycle sparked by Scream in that unlike these
ironic revisions, they approach the subgenre with a ‘new sincerity’: a
term introduced by Jim Collins to describe nostalgic reworkings of clas-
sic genres, a category of film which flourished throughout the 1990s.4
New sincerity films set out to revise the semantic and syntactic under-
pinnings of traditional genres in an attempt to explore and in some
ways ‘demythologize’ the formula’s inner logic. Yet in so doing, new
sincerity relies on the audience’s awareness of the classic form, treating
the originary genre as an ‘urtext’ and imbuing it with ‘a quasi-sacred
function as [a] guarantee of authenticity’ (Collins 1995, 152). The super-
natural slasher seeks to restore the relevance of the slasher not through
processes of irony but by reinvigorating the overworn and predictable
mechanics of the classic form through a supernaturally charged fluid-
ity which serves to unsettle traditional generic dichotomies – in par-
ticular the Manichean binary of the stalker killer and the Final Girl/
Boy – in turn probing many of the contradictions and ambiguities that
were latent in the classic slasher. Centring on either stalker killers with
supernatural powers or the supernatural entwinement of the killer and
the hero/ine or a combination of both these devices, supernatural slash-
ers adapt the classic slasher form with dramatic earnestness. Echoing
the syntax of the classic slasher, they seek to embroil audiences in an
identificatory vacillation between vulnerability and power, exaggerating
a mechanism that was tacit in the traditional form so as to render this
perspectival interplay more unpredictable and subversive.
Thus the narrative twist constituted by the revelation that the stalker
killer is a supernatural being or has access to an otherworldly realm
emerges from the supernatural slasher’s manipulation of generic expec-
tations. By building upon and embellishing classic slasher tropes, super-
natural slashers draw to the surface the anxieties that were a latent
feature of early slashers and render them central conceits. Through draw-
ing these disorienting contradictions to the foreground, supernatural
slashers thus render the underlying foundations of the classic form

overt before subverting and renewing them. Klaus Reiser suggests that
‘illegitimate (con)fusion is one of the prime threats in the slasher . . .
the feminine men, the masculine women, the spectator in a monster,
the male spectator identifying with a woman – they are prime examples
of . . . improper fusions, who are defined as monstrous, then punished
and expelled’ (2001, 388). In the classical slasher, these ontological dis-
ruptions are centred on the following syntactic tensions:
1 The interplay of gazes between the Final Girl/Boy and slasher vil-
lain, aesthetically rendered through shifting camera identification in
which audiences alternately assume the perspective of each character –
a device which serves to play out both the opposition and covert
entwinement of these two figures.
2 The dual association of the villain as both realist figure yet also as an
unstoppable force who exists beyond the normal order of society and
humanity.
3 The increasingly central position of the villain as the main point of
interest in the narrative: during the period of repetition and sequeli-
zation throughout the 1980s, the killer gradually came to hold ever
more narrative power, edging towards the realm of anti-hero while
retaining the function of villain within the narrative.
Conflating and exposing all the above ambiguities, the supernaturally
charged slasher villain usually has the power to invade the subjectivities
of other characters, rendering this figure a monstrous multiplicity who
looms over the film’s entire diegetic world rather than a solitary human
stalker, even as he continues to function as such in key sequences.5 He
thus resists semiotic legibility by functioning as both a ‘real’ serial killer
and as a vaporous, fluid entity simultaneously. This supernatural ele-
ment also ensures that, unlike in the classic slasher, the villain cannot
be punished and expelled during the climax; most supernatural slashers
tend to contain a final acknowledgement (often in the form of a narra-
tive twist) that the otherworldly realm embodied by the killer cannot be
repressed or displaced, let alone vanquished.
Overarching all of these mechanisms is the crisis of identification
which structures the supernatural slasher. The villain’s supernaturally
charged gaze typically empowers him to invade or penetrate the subjec-
tivity of the protagonist in some way, meaning that it becomes unclear
to the viewer where the true boundaries lie between the villain and his
victim/s – a particularly important turning point in a subgenre in which
such boundaries have long been signalled by particularly distinctive
shifts in camera identification. The positioning of the viewer in a liminal
gulf of indiscernibility between the killer and the hero/ine aestheticizes

these films’ fretful expression of the instability and incompleteness of
human knowledge. That the supernatural slasher pivots on wavering
modes of perception exposes the cycle’s anxious preoccupation with
the collapse of symbolic scaffolding like singular identities, binary
oppositions and metanarratives, anxieties characteristic of the liminal
period of the millennial turn. Jeffrey Weinstock points to a renewed fas-
cination with the supernatural in American cultural production around
the turn of the millennium, a movement of which the supernatural
slasher is part. Weinstock suggests that the supernatural re-emerged at
the turn of the millennium as a vehicle through which to express ‘a
general postmodern suspicion of metanarratives accentuated by mil-
lennial anxiety’ and to interrupt ‘the presentness of the present . . .
[indicating] that, beneath the surface of received history, there lurks
another narrative, an untold story that calls into question the veracity
of the authorized version of events’ (2004, 5). This crisis in coherent
meaning is rendered narratively in the supernatural slasher through the
disastrous failure of institutions of authority to comprehend and con-
tain the supernatural killer (crystallized by the collapse of the whodunit
quest); the frightening imbalance of scopic power between the killer
and his victims; and the ultimate collapse of these symbolic configura-
tions altogether.
The supernatural in the classic slasher
While rarely an overt or significant feature, the supernatural crept at the

edges of the classic slasher: seminal stalker killers such as Michael Myers
and Jason Voorhees are vaguely defined entities who function like non-
human spectres in their irrepressibility and in the way that they silently
stalk their victims from the shadowy corners of the frame.6 In fact, as
Bernice Murphy points out in her discussion of Halloween, aesthetically
Myers functions very much like a ghost: she points to an interview in
which Carpenter names The Innocents (1963; dir Jack Clayton) as a major
influence behind the construction of Myers’ visual mechanics (2009,
145). In the successive sequels of classic slashers which proliferated
throughout the 1980s, this implicit suggestion of the villain’s supernatu-
ral Otherness is increasingly exaggerated, as the stalker killer relentlessly
returns despite being vanquished in previous incarnations of the fran-
chise. By the later sequels of classic slashers, it is not uncommon for the
villain to finally take on an overtly supernatural aspect; for instance, in
Jason Lives!: Friday the 13th Part VI (1986; dir Tom McLoughlin) Voorhees’
corpse is reanimated after being hit by a lightning bolt. However, this

transition from implicit to overt supernatural elements functions pri-
marily as a plot device to facilitate the stalker killer’s continual return in
subsequent sequels and as a concomitant aggrandizement of the killer’s
unrelenting powers, reinforcing classic slasher elements rather than rep-
resenting a meaningful shift in thematic preoccupations. As Hills and
Schneider point out, ‘the apparent indestructibility of such slashers is
linked to the seriality of “their” horror franchises, given that these mon-
sters are typically the only recurring element that works to secure a fran-
chise’s identity’ (74).
Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) represents a turning
point in this regard, introducing a supernatural narrative framework
that is central to the ideological and aesthetic mechanics of the film.
Demarcating a dramatic end to the classical period, Nightmare’s super-
natural villain, the now-iconic Freddy Krueger, is a former child killer
who was burned to death by furious inhabitants of Elm Street and
returns as an evil spectre to torment and murder the children of those
who killed him – he is thus literally a serial-killing ghost. Freddy com-
mits these murders by invading the teenagers’ nightmares and killing
them in the world of their dreams, which also causes their death in the
diegetic real. Emphasizing the pivotal shift in semantics from a physi-
cal to an ethereal supernatural killer, the film plays up the desperate
and ultimately fruitless attempts of the haunted teenagers to gain help
from their parents, who are unable to assist their children because they
cannot see Freddy and thus do not believe in or are simply unable to
understand his existence. The film thus accentuates some tensions lurk-
ing in the subliminal depths of classic slasher films, in particular the
anxiously determined significance of the stalker killer’s pervasive power
over the film’s visual field – a construction which often sees the viewer
and the stalker killer entwined in their scopic mastery over the film’s
other characters, or ‘victims’ – and the subsequent climactic struggle for
visual power between the killer and the Final Girl. As Kyle Christensen
aptly points out, in Nightmare, Final Girl Nancy finally defeats Freddy by
turning her back on him and refusing to return his gaze, thus rejecting
and defusing his visual mastery over her (2011, 41).
The characterization of Freddy as a spectral force thus renders the tug-
of-war for visual power between the killer and the Final Girl the central
thematic thrust of the narrative. This mechanic exposes the extent to
which an underlying slippage between the stalker killer and the pro-
tagonist has long been a relatively latent but compelling feature of the
classical slasher, even while a Manichean binary is upheld as the central
element of the plot. As Reiser puts it, related to the ‘fluid and ambigu-
ous characterization in the slasher film is a similarly unhinged audience
identification’ (374). The disruption of omniscient third-person camera
angles was an aesthetic innovation of the classic slasher which worked
to interrupt the audience’s straight-forward engagement with the char-
acters on screen. The viewer is often forced to assume the perspective
of the stalker killer – as in the infamous opening shots of Halloween –
despite the fact that on a narrative level we are positioned into identifi-
cation with the hero/ine, who is also the killer’s most prized prey.7 The
centrality of the supernatural in Nightmare draws into the foreground
this uncanny fluidity in identification: in Nightmare, the killer liter-
ally exists only inside his victims’ minds, troubling the villain/victim
dichotomy and the audience’s relationship with it. Yet, in repositioning
the semantic and syntactic make-up of the classic slasher and drawing
these contradictions into the open, Nightmare signalled an end to the
Golden Age of the classic slasher. The parodic self-reflexivity embod-
ied by Freddy Krueger became the legacy for the new phase of repeti-
tive slasher films, rather than the reinvigorating of classic tropes that he
heralded. In addition to the Nightmare sequels, the supernatural would
subsequently feature in late-‘80s slashers such as Child’s Play (1988; dir
Tom Holland) and Shocker (1989; dir Wes Craven) to enact a parodic
play with and embellishment of the oversaturated genre’s form. Yet the
supernatural was rarely sincerely deployed in slasher films of the late
1980s and early 1990s.8
‘Let me tell you about the time I almost died’: Fallen
The supernatural revisions of the classic slasher which emerged

around the millennial turn extend Nightmare’s embellishments to the
classic form, complicating the interplay of gazes characteristic of the
classic slasher by rendering the flux of visual power a central source
of visual and narrative tension. Fallen was perhaps the first bona-fide
supernatural slasher of the late 1990s in which the supernatural is
used to explore the subgenre’s syntactic contradictions. In Fallen, the
killer is an ancient demon named Azazel who has the ability to inhabit
human bodies and to switch ‘vessels’ via physical contact. The stalker
killer is thus no longer connoted by the presence of a particular char-
acter but could be signified by virtually any of the bodies displayed
on screen, as enhanced by the film being set largely on busy city
streets populated by many seemingly anonymous – but potentially
possessed – characters. The only clear visual cues the viewer is offered
of Azazel’s presence are representations of his non-human gaze: echo-

ing the unmounted first-person shots which represent the killer’s per-
spective in classic slashers, Azazel’s gaze is depicted through floating
shots which align the audience with his perspective as he stalks his
victims. The supernatural monstrousness of this gaze is underscored
through a distorted aspect ratio and an acid-wash sepia hue. Further-
more, instead of being filmed at eye level, the powerful fluidity of Aza-
zel’s perspective is rendered through dizzying high-angle shots which
soar above the characters he pursues – a dramatic amplification of the
stalker killer’s scopic mastery – before drifting quickly towards the face
of the person whom Azazel is about to possess. In conjunction, con-
secutive shots of these previously anonymous human faces suddenly
contorting into ominous, penetrating stares, often directly into the
camera, function as the third-person indicator that it is now through
them that Azazel’s gaze is manifested.
Fallen’s narrative is thus constellated around the uncanny ocular power
of the supernatural killer and the processes which align the audience
with his vertiginous perspectival position. In Fallen, this literally float-
ing gaze can only be pinned down to a particular person momentarily.
Because Azazel moves fluidly from person to person, his gaze stalks the
protagonist, detective John Hobbes (Denzel Washington), almost con-
stantly without him being aware of it, paralleling the voyeuristic gaze of
the viewer. While being central to the film’s sustainment of narrative ten-
sion and paranoia, this mechanism also draws forth viewers’ awareness
of their own relationship to the tense contradiction established between
the killer’s sweeping visual power and the seeming narrative allegiance
with his victims. This tension is pivotal to the film’s narrative structure,
which is centred on a noir-like first-person narration performed by Den-
zel Washington. Throughout most of the film, the viewer is naturally led
to assume that the narration represents the inner thoughts of protagonist
Hobbes, the character Washington plays, a link further reinforced by the
shots of Hobbes wandering the city looking pensive which frequently
accompany the narration. However, in a narrative twist, we learn that
Washington’s narration has in fact represented the voice of Azazel from
the opening moments of the film. Hobbes tries to vanquish the demon
during the film’s climax – moments of which also make up the film’s
first scene – by venturing to an abandoned cabin in the woods and lur-
ing his colleague, the demon’s current vessel, after him. Hobbes kills his
colleague and also poisons himself, so that Azazel has no choice but to
inhabit one of these dying bodies and also be doomed to extinction.
However after taking possession of Hobbes’ dying body – through which
he performs the film’s narration – Azazel does not die but inhabits a cat
that has been lurking in the woods that surround the cabin.
Thus, enforcing a collapse in the clear narrative dichotomy between
the killer and his victim, the audience learns in the final moments that
we have been guided through the events on screen not through the
voice of the hero, Hobbes, but through his killer, Azazel. The viewer is
impelled to recognize the two conflicting modes of identification which
have been in play throughout the film: the experience of Hobbes, the
central character, as he tries to uncover the mysteries of the demonic
force and the musings and observations of his killer – the demon himself.
This climactic realization reinforces that it has been Azazel’s perspective
which structures the entire film and not Hobbes’: the scenes depicting
Hobbes wandering the streets accompanied by Azazel’s narration thus
retrospectively take on a decidedly predatory tone, as it becomes clear
that Azazel has been reflecting on Hobbes’ experiences after stalking
him for the duration of the film, and the audience has been complicit in
his relentless pursuit. The sense of complicity is enhanced by the nature
of the narration, which directly addresses the audience. For instance, the
film opens with the line ‘Let me tell you about the time I almost died’,
playing on the generic expectation that Hobbes functions as a Final Boy.
Yet at the end of the film this line is repeated and takes on a renewed,
sinister significance as the audience realizes they have not been listening
to a Final Boy’s confessional account of his brush with death by a serial
killer but that of an ancient killer’s own near-death experience at the
hands of one of his victims.
Clearly, Fallen dramatically augments the dynamic interplay of gazes
typical of the slasher film, to the point that the film’s overarching nar-
rative twist involves a disruption to the audience’s engagement with
the characters due to the multiplicitous diffuseness of the killer’s gaze.
Central to this uncanny fluctuation of visual power is a challenge to
the whodunit narrative which underpinned slasher films of the 1990s.
In the film that laid the template for the classic slasher’s form, Hal-
loween, ‘whodunit’ was not a pertinent question, for the identity of
the killer is clear from the opening scene. Myers’ mere presence in the
film’s quaint suburban setting constituted a subversive unsettling of
the boundaries between safe and unsafe spaces at the time of Hallow-
een’s release. However, in the slasher films that followed Halloween in
the early 1980s, the emphasis began to shift away from the presence of
a serial killer in suburbia to mystery-inflected narratives exploring who
exactly this figure may be and what underlies his motives. Such films
include Friday the 13th (1980; dir Sean S. Cunningham), Prom Night
(1980, dir Paul Lynch), Terror Train (1980; dir Roger Spottiswoode) and
Happy Birthday to Me (1981; dir J. Lee Thompson). This thematic shift
involves a level of generic hybridity, as the slasher began drawing on
plot elements from the mystery and detective genre to flesh out the
narrative and amplify anxieties about the identity of the killer. As a
result, viewers and protagonists became tasked with solving the mys-
teries of the killer’s existence by uncovering the clues surrounding
each of the murders. However, following the release of A Nightmare on
Elm Street, the whodunit plot became largely displaced by the ‘larger-
than-life’ stalker killers, the personas of which were popularized and
inflated in the franchises which came to dominate the subgenre by the
mid to late 1980s (the Nightmare franchise, for instance, was consti-
tuted of six sequels by 1991; Friday the 13th was followed by ten sequels
and Halloween by seven).
When the subgenre was renewed in the late 1990s, the mystery plot
was restored as a central component of the self-reflexive, postmodern
slasher. Such films include the Scream franchise (1996, 1997, 2000 and
2011; dir Wes Craven), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997; dir Jim
Gillespie) and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998; dir Danny
Cannon), Urban Legend (1998; dir Jamie Blanks) and Urban Legends:
Final Cut (2001; dir John Ottoman) and Cherry Falls (2000; dir Geof-
frey Wright). Usually the answer to the ‘whodunit’ question delivered
at the climax of these films reveals a seemingly harmless person who
had been hiding in the community unscrutinized: his (or less often,
her) monstrosity lurking beneath a mask of normality. As Valerie Wee
says of Scream: ‘While still psychologically disturbed maniacs, Scream’s
villains are not misfits or outsiders, nor are they the uncharacterized
monsters typical of earlier slasher films. Instead, the killers in Scream
are seemingly normal, attractive, popular people, often “insiders,” boy-
friends or friends who initially appear harmless until they go on a kill-
ing spree’ (2006, 55). These self-aware slashers achieve a sense of play
through renewing and updating the whodunit quest typical of slashers
of the early 1980s. The mystery plot quite literally becomes a game
in the postmodern slasher, as encapsulated in the Ghost-Faced Killer’s
dialogue in the opening scene of Scream in which he repeatedly insists
that he just wants to ‘play a game’ in response to his victim Casey’s
desperate inquisitions. Thus, the postmodern slashers place the who-
dunit game at the centre of their ludic and self-reflexive deconstruction
of the subgenre, as viewers are tasked with deploying their intertextual
knowledge of the slasher formula in order to resolve the mystery of the
killer’s identity.
Yet, in Fallen, anxieties about the existence of the serial killer are
renewed with a new sincerity through an undermining of the who-
dunit quest. In a further manipulation of generic expectations, at first
it seems clear that the film is centred on a whodunit narrative: the plot
initially details Hobbes’ (literal) detective work following the execu-
tion of serial killer Edgar Reese. After Reese’s death, a series of murders
strongly reminiscent of Reese’s own crimes start to occur, and as Hobbes
continues to investigate, it becomes clear that a serial killer connected
with Reese remains on the loose. Initially it is implied that the killer may
be a member of the police force (a narrative feature not uncommon to
both slasher and detective films). However, Hobbes soon learns that this
whodunit mystery cannot be solved by locating a single person respon-
sible for the crimes, as the murders are committed by the demon Azazel
and not his human vessels. At this point in the narrative, the whodunit
quest is abandoned altogether, as the narrative shifts to Hobbes’ struggle
to comprehend this otherworldly reality that has long lurked alongside
his previously secure sense of normality – a gradual recognition of dual
layers of reality which, as we have seen, also structures the viewer’s expe-
rience of the film itself.
This narrative turning point is represented by a set piece midway
through the film, when Hobbes comes to fully acknowledge the super-
natural nature of the killer. Through a chain of physical contact, Aza-
zel makes his way into Hobbes’ communal office in the police station.
Occupying the body of one of Hobbes’ colleagues, Azazel starts to sing
the song associated with Reese from the film’s opening title sequence,
The Rolling Stones’ ‘Time Is on My Side’, which Reese had defiantly
sung prior to his execution. Through a rapid exchange of physical con-
tact, the song is passed between a number of Hobbes’ colleagues, each
of whom starts singing exactly where the previous character stopped
in an inter-person musical continuity. While singing, each character
casts a penetrative stare in Hobbes’ direction before abruptly resuming
their business – oblivious to the preceding moments – as soon as Azazel
moves to another body. Baffled, Hobbes follows this chain of would-be
serial killers onto the street, where he is bombarded by a succession of
random strangers glowering at him as they are consecutively possessed
by Azazel. This set piece represents the moment that the whodunit quest
disintegrates, crystallizing the film’s baroque embellishment of slasher
tropes via the plot device of the supernatural killer.
The film sincerely plays out the anxiety that the stalker killer
could be hiding behind the apparently normal face of anyone in the
community – the central thrust of whodunit slashers – by pushing this
conceit to extremes. Yet by suggesting that the killer could literally be

anyone and shifting the responsibility away from the people themselves
and onto the demon, the film does away with the relevance of discover-
ing ‘who’ is responsible, while undermining the illusion that the mon-
strous deviance represented by the killer can be punished and expelled.
No matter how many of Azazel’s human vessels are killed or appre-
hended, the demon will always move on to another person to continue
his crimes. Almost any character we come across, from an apparent extra
filmed in wide-shot, to one of Hobbes’ friends and colleagues, could be
the current vessel for Azazel. Fallen thus subverts the playful and cathar-
tic whodunit plot central to ironic slashers, instead embellishing the key
anxieties of formative slashers – the killer’s uncontainable Otherness,
his unknowability and his eerily omnipresent gaze – with renewed sin-
cerity. Ultimately, in Fallen, the killer does not represent a momentary
threat to the community which is excised once the whodunit puzzle is
resolved: he overtly threatens the symbolic order.
‘I’m not obsessed, I’m possessed’: In Dreams
Like Fallen, In Dreams employs the supernatural to unsettle the whodunit

game, as a police investigation into a series of child abductions and murders
is rendered impotent due to the killer’s supernatural abilities. As in Fallen,
bound up with this challenge to the whodunit plot is a disorienting flux in
identification between the killer and the Final Girl – who, like Hobbes, dies
at the end of the film while the serial killer lives. However, In Dreams founds
its self-reflexive new sincerity on a different generic emphasis: the unsta-
ble gender identification underlying the entwinement of the killer and his
Final Girl victim and the struggle for visual power which structures this
relationship. Ambiguous gender categorization is a common semantic ele-
ment of the classic slasher villain’s monstrosity (a trope ignited by Norman
Bates and his alter-ego ‘Mother’ in influential precursor to the slasher sub-
genre Psycho [1960; dir Alfred Hitchcock]), and, as Clover famously argues,
an unsettling of gender stereotypes tends to be a defining feature of the
Final Girl figure as well. Clover positions Laurie of Halloween as the arche-
typal Final Girl, suggesting that this figure tends to be coded visually and
in name as a ‘masculinized’ female character, which empowers her to fight
back against the slasher villain, whose own masculinity is undermined or
damaged in some way. Thus, as Reiser alludes to in the quote presented ear-
lier, the slasher’s vacillating processes of audience identification are often
underwritten by ambivalent gender categorizations that position both the
villain and Final Girl as disruptions to traditional gender binaries.
In an intriguing interaction between generic processes and academic

critique, it is highly likely that the gender politics which function as a
submerged ideological tension in classic slashers become dramatically
embellished in slasher films of the mid to late 1990s due to the populari-
zation of Clover’s influential 1992 argument. Indeed, in its new sincerity
approach to the slasher’s generic conventions, In Dreams plays upon the
ways in which unstable gender categorization underpins the interplay of
perspectives between the protagonist, Claire (Annette Bening) and Vivian
(Robert Downey Jr), the serial killer who murdered Claire’s daughter, whose
name signals his gender ambiguity. Rendering the audience’s own fluctua-
tion between the perspective of the killer and his victim central to the film’s
narrative structure, Claire and Vivian are connected telepathically, sharing
dreams and memories. Their psychic connection is visually reinforced by
the parallels in their appearances: both have striking green eyes and bright
red hair. This visual likeness is interrupted by a swap in primary cues of
gender: while Vivian’s hair is long and flowing – often worn in a pony-
tail – Claire’s is extremely short. Thus in a self-aware exposure of the deep
structural tensions which underpin the classic slasher, Vivian and Claire’s
supernatural ability to transgress the boundaries of their own identities is
visually expressed by their unsettling of gender signifiers.
The killer and Final Girl’s parallel disruption of the borders of both
identity and gender is crystallized in a key set piece midway through the
film. After hysterically explaining that she sees the serial killer’s thoughts
and memories inside her own head, Claire is committed to a mental insti-
tution. She soon learns that she has been confined within the same room
that Vivian once inhabited as a teenager: as well as seeing his memories
of the room, she pulls back the wallpaper to discover notes and rhymes
that Vivian scrawled on the wall, the very same expressions she has heard
him utter in their shared dreams. At this point, the film splits into a par-
allel depiction of two different time periods. In an elaborate amplifica-
tion of the fluctuation in perspective between the killer and Final Girl,
consecutive scenes detail both Vivian’s escape from the mental institu-
tion over a decade ago and Claire’s replaying of his escape in the film’s
diegetic present, guided by Vivian’s memories. The paralleled depiction
of each character’s escape represents a struggle for visual and narrative
power, as the film shifts rapidly between Claire’s and Vivian’s perspec-
tives. Yet while aestheticizing their adversarial relationship, these escape
scenes also underscore Claire and Vivian’s connection as abject outsiders:
Claire uses her visions of Vivian’s escape to her advantage, mimicking his
actions and escaping from the very same room of the mental institution
in which he too was once confined. Central to this uncanny vacillation in
perspectives is Vivian’s gender ambivalence. As we see, Vivian escaped the

hospital by dressing up as a female nurse and convincing a security guard
to drive him outside of the hospital gates, seducing the guard with a con-
vincing performance of seductive femininity. Copying Vivian’s escape,
Claire also masquerades as an ultra-feminine seductress in order to hitch
a ride with a guard, an act which she paradoxically performs by deepen-
ing her vocal register to sound more like Vivian. Once she has escaped the
institution, Claire and Vivian’s perspectives indiscernibly melt together.
Guided by Vivian’s memories, which now appear to us as Claire’s point
of view in the diegetic present, Claire makes her way to the abandoned
cider mill where Vivian has been hiding with his latest captive, another
young girl.
While Hills and Schneider position films such as In Dreams that focus
on the psychic connection between the killer and protagonist as outside
the supernatural slasher sub-genre—they describe such films instead as
“clairvoyant murder mysteries” (73)—I contest this distinction. As is
crystallized by this pivotal set-piece, In Dreams engages in the same
processes of generic self-reflexivity as supernatural serial killer films
like Fallen (which Hills and Schneider consider part of the supernatural
slasher cycle), utilizing the psychic connection conceit to embellish the
classic slasher’s flux of visual power. In fact In Dreams shares much in
common with Eyes of Laura Mars (1978; dir. Irvin Kershner), an influen-
tial precursor to the classic slasher written by Halloween’s John Carpen-
ter, which similarly revolves around the psychic connection between
the female protagonist (an early final girl) and a serial killer. Thus, like
Halloween, which was released in the same year, Laura Mars established
a template for subsequent slashers by hinging upon the gendered inter-
play of gazes. As Lucy Fischer and Marcia Landy point out in their essay
on Laura Mars, ‘its dense and allusive surface proposes it as a veritable
discourse on the issues of violence toward women, and the psycho-sex-
ual dynamics of sight’ (1982, 11), themes rendered overt via the plot
conceit that the psychic protagonist, Laura, is a photographer. Writing
in 1982, Fischer and Landy suggest that Laura Mars is significant for
its self-aware consideration of the flux of visual power which under-
pins early stalker killer films: ‘given this emphasis on photography and
sight in a voyeuristic mad-slasher movie, the spectator is invited to
assume a certain self-consciousness on the part of the film-makers’ (5).
While in most late-seventies horror films the implications surround-
ing the male killer’s scopic power tended to be ‘masked by codes of
seamless editing, in Laura Mars the control of the male gaze is brought
to the surface, as part of the actual plot’ (9). Laura Mars thus overtly
works through the gendered vacillations of vision and power involved

in stalker killer narratives, crystallizing a dynamic which would go on
to become an embedded syntactic device of the classic slasher through-
out the 1980s. In its new sincerity deployment of the supernatural, In
Dreams revisits and extends the themes of Laura Mars, drawing out the
slasher’s ambiguous gender politics and implicating them in the tug-
of-war for visual and narrative power between Final Girl and slasher
villain. By sincerely restoring the concerns of early slasher films, In
Dreams, like Fallen, also interacts with the contemporary ironic slasher:
at the key set piece in which Vivian and Claire’s perspectives bump up
against each other and eventually overlap, the whodunit thread is cast
aside as the killer’s identity is confirmed, and it becomes clear that the
only way to locate him is via the psychic connection he shares with
Claire. The outsider status of both killer and Final Girl is reinforced via
their shared perspective, and from this scene onwards the audience’s
own vacillation between identification with the serial killer and the
Final Girl becomes the primary aesthetic and narrative device which
structures the film.
The final act of the film, in which Claire tries to convince Vivian to
relinquish the child he has abducted, also riffs on the themes of classic
slasher films. Echoing the narratives of formative slashers, it is suggested
that the villain’s fractured identity and gender confusion is the result of
childhood traumas ignited by unhealthy family dynamics: like Norman
Bates, Vivian dresses up as his abusive, controlling mother and performs
her role, shifting monstrously between identification as Vivian and
‘Mother’. At the climax of the film, both Claire and Vivian tumble into
the waters of the dam outside the cider mill after an extended police
pursuit sequence – in a subversion of generic expectations, the Final
Girl dies while Vivian lives. The film ends with a final reinforcement of
Vivian and Claire’s uncanny entwinement: having been confined to a
mental institution for the criminally insane, Vivian’s hair is now cut in
the same pixie style as Claire’s, and Vivian is seen gazing at his reflec-
tion in a dusty, broken mirror. The final scene is a direct reversal of the
Nightmare on Elm Street scenario: as Vivian lies down to sleep in his cell,
Claire’s spectre haunts his nightmares, violently biting his lip (afflicting
Vivian with a physical injury in the film’s diegetic ‘real’) before scrawl-
ing ‘Sweet Dreams, Vivian’ in blood across the walls of his cell. In Dreams
thus histrionically embellishes the submerged syntactic contradictions
of the classic slasher, as the complex fluctuation of visual power between
the killer and Final Girl – underwritten by their destabilization of gender
signifiers – becomes the crux of the narrative.
‘We don’t kill people; We destroy demons’: Frailty
Frailty also bases its narrative twists upon the manipulation of the slasher
film’s generic formula, and, as in Fallen and In Dreams, this renovation of
classic semantics and syntactics is achieved through a supernatural plot
device which destabilizes coherent processes of audience identification.
Echoing Fallen, the film is structured around retrospective first-person nar-
ration delivered by the man we are led to assume is the Final Boy – Fenton
Meiks. In the film’s diegetic present, Fenton has come to a police station to
disclose that he is the son of an infamous serial killer known as the ‘God’s
Hand Killer’. Fenton sets out to explain to a police officer the circumstances
surrounding the murders and the involvement of him and his younger
brother, Adam. Most of the film is presented as Fenton’s flashback, with the
retelling of Fenton’s story to the police officer serving as a framing device
that facilitates the retrospective first-person narration which overarches the
film. The film centres on the child Fenton’s struggle with his father’s seem-
ingly crazed belief that he has been chosen by God to destroy ‘demons’
disguised as normal people. Armed with an axe and a list of names appar-
ently given to him by God, Dad (who remains unnamed) recruits his two
sons to help him abduct and murder people in the purpose-built cellar
beneath their house before burying their bodies in the rose garden nearby.
Thus much of the film is apparently structured around Fenton’s perspec-
tive, detailing his struggle to convince Adam of his father’s madness, as the
younger child believes in his father’s supernatural visions. Playing out the
Final Boy scenario, Fenton eventually kills his father with the same axe his
father had been using to commit serial murder.
The tug-of-war for visual power takes on overtones of an Oedipal
power struggle in Frailty. Fenton does not believe in his father’s super-
natural visions, and the audience, like Fenton, does not see any signs
of the supernatural when his father touches the heads of his victims
and starts convulsing, apparently arrested by visions confirming that he
has apprehended a demon and not an innocent person. This disagree-
ment over the ‘correct’ perspective makes up the film’s central narrative
tension. Fenton is convinced that his father is insane and repeatedly
attempts to enact an escape with his younger brother, while Dad comes
to think that Fenton must be a demon because he does not share his
visions. As a result, Dad confines Fenton in the cellar for over a week
with no food, until the starving boy falsely admits that he has seen a
vision from God and now understands his father’s mission. When Dad
attempts to test Fenton’s conviction by capturing a local man and order-
ing Fenton to kill the ‘demon’, Fenton turns on his father and kills him
instead. Adam proceeds to grab the axe from Fenton and kills the cap-
tured man, upholding his father’s belief.
The struggle for visual power that structures the film takes on fur-
ther significance at the film’s narrative twist. During the final scenes,
the audience learns that in fact we have not been sharing the perspec-
tive of Final Boy Fenton but that of Fenton’s younger brother, Adam,
who always believed in his father’s visions and became the new ‘God’s
Hand Killer’ after Fenton murdered Dad. Adam has been intentionally
manipulating the police officer to whom he has been telling his story
into identifying with Fenton, whom he has recently murdered. Through
this process of false identification, Adam leads the police officer to the
rose garden near his childhood home, ostensibly to show him the evi-
dence of his father’s murders. Yet in fact Adam has led the police officer
to this burial ground to kill him: from the beginning of the film, Adam
has believed the man to be a demon responsible for the murder of his
elderly mother, flashes of which the audience also witnesses when Adam
touches the officer and experiences a vision of the crime. Adam’s vision
of the police officer’s evil deed is the first such vision the audience is
privy to, appearing at the film’s climax. This sudden destabilization of
identification is particularly disorienting because the police officer has
until this moment functioned as the audience’s proxy, sharing our iden-
tification with ‘Fenton’s’ story. Thus the audience’s identification with
the characters we were led to believe represented the side of ‘good’ is
swiftly overturned – it is suggested that, as per Dad’s suspicions, Fenton
was indeed a demon, as was the police officer with which the audience
has been aligned for over three-quarters of the film.
This sudden subversion in identification also shifts the way we per-
ceive the narrative world the film had previously established. Because
the audience shares Adam’s vision of the police officer’s monstrous
crime, we are suddenly impelled to consider that Dad’s visions may also
have been genuine and not a symptom of insanity. The possibility is
raised that through Adam’s manipulation of perspective, we have been
unwittingly sharing the ‘demonic’ Fenton’s visual deficiencies through-
out the film rather than assuming the privileged position of a good char-
acter who sees the ‘truth’. The suggestion that Dad may not have been
a serial killer but was working for God and has been killing demons, not
innocent people, unsettles our engagement with the narrative. As Hills
and Schneider suggest, the film holds out ‘radical possibilities for unset-
tling . . . Manichean oppositions’ (83), although they contend that ulti-
mately with the narrative twist this subversive uncertainty is ‘contained
via notions of divine order’ (84). However I suggest that the ideological
structure previously established in the film is too swiftly inverted for the
viewer to wholly submit to Dad and Adam’s belief in ‘demons’ – after all,
up until the final moments, the film, as narrated by ‘Fenton’, functions
as a cautionary meditation on the dangers of religious zeal and placing
faith in supernatural visions. Furthermore, only enough visual evidence
is presented to suggest the existence of the supernatural reality in which
Adam believes, but not to confirm it. The final scene, in which Adam is
revealed to be a sheriff, only serves to heighten the discomfort involved
in this indiscernibility: as is reinforced in the final shot, which lingers
on Adam standing awkwardly in his sheriff’s uniform, staring off into
the unseen space off-camera. The Manichean binary between the evil
serial killer and the good Final Boy collapses entirely, as the audience
is left in a perspectival gulf in which we are unable to clearly identify
with any of the characters. As a result, the viewer is offered no coherent
grasp of the nature of the ‘true’ narrative fabula. Frailty thus pushes the
flux in audience perspective that underlies the classic slasher formula
to extreme limits in an exploration of the complicated way in which
perspective is constructed in the subgenre.
Conclusion
As these three examples indicate, the supernatural slashers that emerged

at the millennial turn are founded on the embellishment of the deep
syntactic tensions of classic slasher film, employing this self-reflexive
device to manipulate audience expectations based on familiarity with
slasher tropes. Instead of pivoting on the playful whodunit puzzle typ-
ical of ironic slasher films of the late 1990s, the supernatural slasher
revolves around the complex interplay of perspectives and the tug-of-
war for visual power that was a compelling but implicit element of the
classic form. While exploring the inner workings of the classic slasher,
this elaborate flux of identification between the killer and protagonist
aestheticizes the supernatural slasher’s challenge to the concept of a sin-
gle ‘correct’ narrative and layer of diegetic reality. Thus, in a contem-
porary restoration of the overarching anxiety of formative slashers, the
supernatural slasher film positions the serial stalker killer as a wholesale
disruption to straightforward symbolic functioning.
Notes
1 Other supernatural slashers include The Faculty (1998; dir Robert Rodriguez) –
although this early incarnation of a supernatural slasher also shares much in
common with the ironic cycle – Final Destination (2000; dir James Wong), The
Cell (2000; dir Tarsem Singh), Jeepers Creepers (2001; dir Victor Salva), Session 9
(2001; dir Brad Anderson), Ghost Ship (2002; dir Steve Beck), Gothika (2003; dir
Mathieu Kassovitz) and Identity (2003; dir James Mangold).
2 Carol Clover defines the Final Girl – a central component of the slasher film’s
form – in her influential text Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992).
3 Sconce’s chapter is framed around the horror genre in general, but he focuses
his discussion around slasher films such as Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare
(1991; dir Rachel Talalay) and slasher/docu-drama hybrid Henry: Portrait of a
Serial Killer (1989; dir John McNaughton).
4 Collins introduces the term in ‘When the Legend Becomes Hyperconscious,
Print the . . . ’ (1995), his discussion of postmodern westerns and the specific
ways in which they engage with the classic western formula.
5 In each of the films discussed – and in most slasher films in general – the killer
is characterized as male, even if he is an otherworldly demon, as in Fallen.
6 While it was in fact Jason’s mother, Pamela, who is revealed to be the killer
in the first Friday the 13th, Jason himself has displaced Pamela as the recurrent
villain of the franchise. In fact, through campfire stories and the repeating of
local legends, the character of Jason looms over even the first film, and he is
dramatically materialized late in the film in the infamous ‘jump-scare’ scene
in which his deformed body suddenly erupts from the lake to drag Final Girl
Alice into the water.
7 The recent film Maniac (2012; dir Frank Khalfoun) takes this device to its logi-
cal conclusion, constructing the entire film from the stalker killer’s point of
view, forcing viewers to maintain his perspective throughout.
8 A stand-out exception to this is Candyman (1992; dir Bernard Rose), a pre-
cursor to the supernatural slashers of the millennial turn which also utilizes
the supernatural to enact a collapse in villain/victim dichotomies through
the conceit that victims themselves summon the killer while looking into the
mirror.
12
‘Come on, Boy, Bring It!’:
Embracing Queer Erotic Aesthetics
in Marcus Nispel’s The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Darren Elliott-Smith
Marcus Nispel’s 2003 aesthetically polished remake of Tobe Hooper’s

iconic original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) was essentially a
box-office success, taking approximately $80 million during its US the-
atrical release period. Produced by the bombastic auteur Michael Bay’s
production company Platinum Dunes, the remake arguably stimulated
a trend of horror remakes in the first decade of the 2000s, including
House of Wax (2005; dir Jaume Collet-Serra), The Hills Have Eyes (2006;
dir Alexandre Aja) and My Bloody Valentine (2009; dir Patrick Lussier).
Much has been written on the plethora of remade horror films from
the implied ‘canon’ over the years, leading Steffen Hankte to conclude
that the ‘the much-lamented glut of remakes [ . . . ] entrench the origi-
nals even more deeply within the canon of horror cinema’ (2007, 197).
Conversely, Thomas Leitch (1990) argues that remakes often offer
more of a ‘reboot’ to certain horror film franchises – particularly for
new audience bases:
[R]emakes also seek to please both audiences who have seen the films
on which they are based and audiences who have not, but their task is
complicated by the fact that instead of advertising the original films,
they are competing with them [ . . . ] remakes most often address this
problem by adding a twist to their exposition, teasing knowing audi-
ences as they bring new audiences up to their level of background
knowledge (140).
180
Queer Erotic Aesthetics in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 181
As such, Leitch concludes that ‘remakes typically invoke the aura of

their originals rather than their memory’ giving rise to ‘the fundamental
problem of remakes . . . to mediate between two apparently irreconcil-
able claims: that the remake is just like its model, and that it’s better’
(142). It is not my intention that this chapter be a study of the remake
phenomenon that has, for want of a better term, infected the horror
genre of late.1 While it offers a substantive aesthetic analysis of Nispel’s
film in relation to a shift in contemporary horror style as immersed in
what Nathan Lee calls ‘the high-gloss rhetoric of corporate entertain-
ment’ (2008, 25), I want to argue initially that, despite the film’s often
disjointed intertextual references to Hooper’s original (notably the open-
ing nod to its vérité style using the same narrator, John Larroquette), the
remake’s tone, themes and aesthetics significantly have more in com-
mon with Bay’s slick, commercialized, hyperkinetic stylistic tendencies
in that they have been ‘updated in their capacity for gore and contem-
porary pacing’ (Lizardi 2010). More centrally, I also want to use this
focus on aesthetics to question whether Nispel’s remake’s ideological
significance is also altered as a consequence. Lizardi goes on to suggest
that such remakes foreground a ‘hyperemphasis of the original’s ide-
ologies [that] speaks to the contemporary societal context under which
they were produced and received’ (114). While this extends to the film’s
visual reimagining of an ‘MTV-sanctioned counterculture’, whereby the
ragtag gang of misfits in Hooper’s original are swapped for ‘a vanload of
beautiful people adorned with corporate product placements’ (Keursten
2005), it also highlights a self-referential awareness of the place of the
slasher subgenre in both cultural and film theory. The era in which the
original is both set and produced is also significant for the heavy theo-
rizing around certain ideological issues with gender conflict (the rise
of second-wave feminism) and political uncertainty (Watergate scan-
dal). Here the hyperstylization of Nispel’s remake (also set in that same
period) that combines both the director’s and Bay’s authorial presence,
collides with the hyperemphasis of the horror film’s academic and ideo-
logical critique. This works towards an updating of the original film’s
mythology, a commercializing of its aesthetics and, arguably, a ‘queer-
ing’ of its monstrous patriarchal structures (in which a now all-pervasive
matriarchy persists) and of the subgenre’s erotic objectification of the
female body, supplanting this with that of the fetishized male victim.
Central to this chapter’s queer interpretation of The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre’s (2003) aesthetics is the film’s move away from Carol Clover’s
(1992) description of the traditional slasher film’s visual treatment of

the death of female victims as exclusively eroticized. Clover maintains
that typically women in slasher horror films are brutalized and forced to
suffer in visually spectacular and often erotic ways, whereas
the death of the male is nearly always swift; even if the victim grasps
what is happening to him, he has no time to react or register terror.
He is dispatched and the camera moves on. The death of the male is
moreover more likely than the death of the female to be viewed from
a distance, or viewed only dimly . . . or indeed to happen off-screen
and not be viewed at all (35).2
Conversely, Nispel’s remake arguably seems driven more by the erotic

objectification and dismemberment of its male victims via prolonged
and fetishized slaughter, over its female victims. It is on the film’s erotic
aestheticizing of the abduction and torture of its male victims – Andy,
Morgan and Kemper – that this chapter places its focus. The Texas Chain-
saw Massacre (2003) marks a distinct move in horror remakes towards
the erotic objectification of the male body and a continued embrace
of, albeit ‘closeted’, queer aesthetics. In particular, horror remakes made
during the first decade of the 2000s, such as The Amityville Horror (2005;
dir Andrew Douglas) and the aforementioned House of Wax, both high-
light a trend for prolonged imagery in which their central male pro-
tagonists’ (respectively starring Ryan Reynolds as George Lutz and Chad
Michael Murray as Nick Jones) shirtless torsos are erotically fetishized
and objectified. Yet Nispel’s film arguably stylizes the implied erotic and
ecstatic suffering felt by its male victims in scenes of bodily evisceration
and penetration and as such moves towards an appreciation of an (un)
pleasurable masochistic jouissance that offers up the film for queer appre-
ciation.3 I have written extensively on the emergence and development
of what I term ‘queer horror’ aesthetics in film and television since 2000
in relation to both ‘closeted’ and explicitly queer horror texts.4 However,
in this chapter I want to focus on Nispel’s film as what Harry Benshoff
(1997) would call ‘closeted’, that is, the text in which homosexuality
does not make itself explicitly known but can be read or alluded to.
Harry Benshoff’s seminal work on homosexuality in the horror film
considers several ways in which (mainly male) homosexuality ‘intersects
with the horror film’ whereby ‘monster is to “normality” as homosex-
uality is to heterosexual’ (2). Monsters in the Closet (1997) includes an
analysis of gay and lesbian representation within the genre; a discus-
sion that, yet again, centres on the monster figure as a queer metaphor;
a consideration of whether the queer auteur (with James Whale as his

prime example) infuses his/her sexuality into the text explicitly or
implicitly; and finally, and perhaps most importantly for Benshoff, the
associational function that homosexuality adopts within the ‘closeted
text’. It is this last function that Benshoff’s study seems to dwell upon, in
that the representation of homosexuality in horror is historically ‘allu-
sive . . . it lurks around the edges of texts and characters rather than
announcing itself forthrightly’ (15). Benshoff’s work again is largely
confined to the problematic of the symbolic and connotative ‘represen-
tation’ of alternative sexuality and draws on Alexander Doty’s (1993)
reservations that
connotation has been the representational and interpretative closet

of mass culture queerness for far too long [ . . . ] this shadowy realm
[ . . . ] allows straight culture to use queerness for pleasure and profit
in mass culture without admitting to it (15).
While I would suggest that Nispel’s remake clearly holds erotic appeal
for the gay male spectator, it is clearly more akin to Benshoff’s concept of
the ‘closeted text’ in that its potential queerness (visualized via the film’s
presentation of the male body as erotic and penetrable, the supplanting
of the spectacular death of the female victim with the male, and male
torture as masochistically experienced and therefore both tinged with
eroticism) needs to be teased out of the shadows via a queer reading.5
Masculinity and the masochistic pleasure of the slasher
This is not to suggest that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) does not
work as a ‘straight’ slasher film in terms of its ‘traditional’ appeal to
spectators according to the majority of Clover’s tropes as set out in her
study of the subgenre: Men, Women, and Chain Saws. In it she addresses
the (implicitly straight) adolescent male’s connection with horror film
spectatorship to suggest a subversively radical – and I would argue,
somewhat queer – element in his relationship with the female victim-
heroine: the Final Girl (the subgenre’s surviving female figure). She sug-
gests that the male viewer escapes his biological sex to identify with
the screen female where ‘the boy can simultaneously experience for-
bidden desires and disavow them on grounds that the visible actor is,
after all, a girl’ (1992, 18). Since even the Final Girl is terrorized in these
films, this identification is posed as masochistic. To clarify, masochism
is defined as pleasure taken from the subject’s own pain, humiliation or
submission. Laplanche and Pontalis summarize the Freudian perspec-

tive on masochism as ‘a sexual perversion in which the satisfaction is
tied to the suffering or humiliation undergone by the subject’ (2004,
244). In horror-film criticism, masochistic spectatorship is considered
a passive mode of looking that emphasizes moments of shock, fear and
terror, which is in contrast to other theories of sadistic and active look-
ing associated with the masculine gaze. The horror film offers a ‘safe’
way to experience terror via identification with the suffering character
on screen before returning to actuality. However, I would argue that
masochism also lies at the heart of the (un)pleasures felt by the gay male
spectator of horror and thus problematizes these approaches.
Clover draws specifically on Freud’s theories of feminine masochism in
order to explain the young male spectator’s (here his sexuality is unspec-
ified) identification with the heroine’s experience of fear and pain:
we are, as an audience, in the end ‘masculinized’ by and through the

very figure by and through whom we were earlier feminized (59).
Clover concludes that feminine masochism refers not to ‘maso-

chism in women, but to the essence of masochistic perversion in men
[which becomes . . . ] mixed up with a sense of degradation’ (215–16).
Clover’s analysis of the horror film’s shameful association with feminine
masochism extends mainly to the slasher horror subgenre which, she
states, often codes certain male characters as feminine and thus feeds
into their portrayal of homosexual panic. Her study contains only brief
considerations of the stigma attached to ‘effeminacy’ (which for Clover
stands in for ‘receptive homosexuality’) for the presumptively straight
male spectator (217–24).
Her discussion of homosexuality does not extend beyond a footnoted
reference to Leo Bersani’s ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ (1987), where she
admits to her study’s limitations in terms of homosexual masochism,
professing to ‘leave the psychoanalytic validity of these claims to
others . . . nor am I prepared to comment on cultural practices over the
broad range’ (225). Though Clover’s study continually praises the (argu-
ably queer) radical nature of slasher horror for its potential for transgen-
der identification, and its denaturalizing of fixed gender binaries, it fails
to discuss how the gay spectator is positioned in relation to the films
that she analyses.
In ‘Masculinity and the Horror Film’ (1993), Peter Hutchings agrees
with Clover that the traditional view of the slasher horror film as a misog-
ynist text is inadequate. The male spectator is claimed to be capable, at
an emotional/psychical level, of ‘shifting back and forth between victim

(conventionally feminine) and victimiser (conventionally male)’ (86).
This oscillation opens up space for the patriarchal male to empathize
with the victim’s trauma and disempowerment and the suffering of the
monster. The excitement experienced by the male spectator of the hor-
ror genre is understood as masochistic, and, further still, the spectator
exhibits a ‘willing subjection’ to being scared. Yet Hutchings’ discussion
is somewhat limited to a conventional depiction of the victim-as-female
and the straight male viewer’s (over any significant discussion of gay
spectators) experience of a temporary feminization. Since femininity is
identified as ‘powerlessness’ (and, by extension, homosexuality is asso-
ciated with femininity), the male spectator must also suffer horror as ‘a
feminising experience’ (91).
Hutchings suggests that men who view horror experience it as a tem-
porarily disempowering occurrence, in their shifting identification from
female characters and Final Girls to male victims and their struggle
against an equally feminized yet very male monster, ‘the male specta-
tor experiences horror cinema as a series of pleasurable subjections, as
multiple fantasies of disempowerment’ (91). For Hutchings, horror film
is simultaneously both alluring and repellent in its representation of
death. It proffers a fantastic visual representation, whereby masochistic
viewers can indulge their ultimate masochistic fantasy in safe images
of symbolic death: ‘death functions as the ultimate passivity of subjec-
tion: death becomes the fantasy solution to masochistic desire’ (90).
Hutchings sees (heterosexual) male spectators’ temporary masochistic
experience of horror as an opportunity to reaffirm their masculine iden-
tity and the power structures available to them in a patriarchal society.
These momentary incidences of willing subjection and of uncomfort-
able yet arousing fantasies of the ‘castration’ of their power only serve
to reconfirm their own status within a culturally gendered hierarchy.
Thus, the return of power becomes another source of jouissance for the
male spectator as a kind of re-tumescence of the phallus and the power
it signifies after the temporary masochistic and flaccid moment (91–2).
How, then, does this work for the gay male spectator? Hutchings sug-
gests that the idea of passivity, if taken to its sexual and horrific extreme
of penetration itself (by extension from knife to penis), is not necessarily
erotic for the heterosexual male subject. It is the return to this subject’s
perceived activity in displaying his control over his own submission that
provides the jouissance and the ‘re-engorgement’ of power. For the gay
man, however, it may be precisely the willing submission or penetra-
tion (in sexual terms) that can provide erotic excitement. The gay male
subject can be simultaneously aroused by his own penetrability; con-

trary to the masochistic fantasies of heterosexist male disempowerment,
he may not experience the flaccidity of a supposed submission of power
and a re-erection of power after the event. Instead, he may experience
pleasure or stimulation throughout such an ‘ordeal’.
Admittedly Hutchings’ ‘male subject of patriarchy’ here is one with-
out a defined sexual orientation – his consideration of the male specta-
tor of horror is a general one which refers to the male spectator but
implies heterosexuality. What I want to suggest is that the gay male
spectator experiences both pleasure and jouissance in his disempower-
ment and also in the re-establishment of heteronormative power after
the masochistic moment. However, many gay men may also experience
(un)pleasure in penetrability and in the masochistic moment and the
disempowerment it supposes.
Despite the usefulness of his approach for this chapter’s analysis of the
queer aesthetics and pleasures of Nispel’s film, Hutchings’ view main-
tains the well-trodden binary opposition of female/victim versus male/
monster and continues to suggest that the male subject identifies with
the victim in taking the feminine position. I want to question whether
Hutchings’ and Clover’s masochistically infused approaches still apply
for the gay male spectator of Nispel’s film and ask whether via the pro-
cess of supplanting the erotized female/victim with the eroticized male/
victim, if the dynamic is altered by this. The analysis will involve queer
interpretation of the film’s extended scenes of male torture, objectifica-
tion and humiliation, focusing centrally on Andy’s romanticized cap-
ture and dismemberment and later scenes in which his body is treated
erotically as ‘meat’ and on Sheriff Hoyt’s suggestive use of his pistol in
his oral-phallic threats towards Morgan. Additionally, the film also sup-
plants Hooper’s original Leatherface’s desire to wear a clearly female
mask with his longing to obtain a male one (in this case Kemper’s).
As already outlined, in Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) it
is the fetishized spectacle of male slaughter that takes the place of the
eroticized death of women, thus relegating the death of the film’s only
female victim to an off-screen, implied event. For example, in one par-
ticular scene, it is the prolonged, sexually coded torture of Morgan with
a loaded pistol by Sheriff Hoyt that takes precedence in terms of both
screen time and space more than the blunt, off-frame shooting of hippy
hitchhiker Pepper. Lizardi also recognizes the film’s shift in attention
towards the suffering of the male figure but points out that the majority
of the film’s screen-time torture is given over to the film’s subgeneric
archetype Final Girl, Erin:
It should be noted that most of the males in this version do suffer in a

physical sense along with the females. They are beaten, maimed, but
in a psychological sense and in the length of torture, the Final Girl’s
experience has no comparison (119).
Lizardi cites James Weaver’s quantitative study of the trend for female
victims in horror films from 1991 that finds ‘scenes portraying the
death of female characters were significantly longer than those involv-
ing male characters’ (1991, 390). Lizardi concludes that while ‘the
length of female torture scenes make this phenomenon important to
study [ . . . ] it is what transpires in the scenes that make them culturally
significant’ (118). While the length of suffering endured by Erin in The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) clearly runs for more screen time than
that experienced by any other characters, I would suggest that rather
than overemphasize the relevance of the film’s final scenes of survival,
as is often the case, that attention should be paid equally to those scenes
of explicit evisceration in the central portion of the film that largely
focus on the male body as the films’ truly interesting elements. The pres-
entation of gore is indeed an area in which the remake differs drastically
from Hooper’s original, which relies on suggestive violence – the shot
often cutting away from the penetration of bodies or the overt splat-
tering of viscera and sinew via chainsaw. This is something which Frost
(2009) also points out:
Hooper’s film became reliant on not actually depicting scenes of

extreme violence or gore; instead the narrative attacked the audience
psychologically. In both Nispel and Liebesman’s [Texas Chainsaw Mas-
sacre: The Beginning (2006; dir Jonathan Liebesman)] films the intended
affect does not replicate the original film’s ability to induce palpable
terror; rather, set pieces of extreme violence, torture and mutilation
attempt to evoke physical repulsion from the audience (66).
It is here that I take issue with Frost’s reading of the film’s violence as
entirely ‘repulsive’ and suggest that its depiction is perhaps more com-
plex than he suggests. The spectacle of killing men in Nispel’s film is,
while obviously repellent, also largely presented as an erotic penetration
fantasy, with the victim’s macho masculinity both fetishistically valor-
ized and threatened in equal measures. One could be mistaken for read-
ing the extinguishing of the film’s coding of masculinity as oppressive,
heterosexist and imbued with machismo as a radical move. Taking from
Clover’s equation of ‘killing with fucking’ (1992, 177–8), this would
suggest that the murdering of machismo instead symbolizes rather more

of an erotic fantasy, of killing/bedding and/or becoming the macho male
in a collapse of both identification and desire. Before outlining in more
detail how this is most clearly exemplified in the dismemberment, cap-
ture, torture and eventual death of Andy, the film’s ‘hot jock’ archetype,
I want firstly to consider Nispel’s alteration in aesthetics to one that
embraces a hyperstylized, knowingly retro aesthetic that is almost por-
nographic in its façade of louche seventies eroticism.
Retro-queer aesthetics
Nispel’s film opens with a clear visual reference to the opening images
of Hooper’s original, in its borrowing of a vérité-style verisimilitude.
Replete with its faux-black-and-white film grain and its shaky handheld
cine-camera, the film is bookended by ‘archive’ footage of seemingly
real police evidence cine-camera reels of the discovery of 33 dead bodies
at the Hewitt family farm. Despite this allusion to Hooper’s film, and
its intertextual use of Larroquette’s aforementioned voiceover narration,
this adoption of actuality aesthetics seems less of a nod to the iconic
original and more a reassuring method by which to appeal to a con-
temporary audience’s familiarity with the visual language of the ‘reality
horror’ film trend that enjoyed somewhat of a renaissance in the early
2000s. Nispel’s film furthers its initial striving for fidelity and validity in
its referencing of Hooper’s original via its deployment of the same cin-
ematographer – Daniel Pearl. Before long, however, the remake’s truly
polished aesthetic makes itself known. Frost outlines this shift towards
an Instagram-style filter which connotes an evocative re-presentation of
the past as an ‘historic façade . . . [complete with] the beautiful imagery
of sun-drenched fields and sweaty, tanned, toned youth who epito-
mized the polished and sleek style that will be carried throughout the
rest of the narrative’ (Frost 2009, 66). Mark Kermode furthers this point
in his view of the film’s visual drenching in nostalgia porn by suggest-
ing that Nispel’s remake has a ‘contradictory time-warped tone’ (2003,
13). Erich Kuersten (2005) describes the film as a ‘period piece’, and this
indeed is true, albeit a heavily fetishized, woozily erotic, almost self-
consciously quoted visualization of a reimagined seventies hedonistic
counterculture – a style that is far removed from the recession-driven,
washed-out reality of 1970s America. Kuersten comments on the overall
erotically aesthetic charge of the film’s mise-en-scène and its youthful
protagonists who ‘are bronzed and sculpted and sprayed with a thin
sheen of oil to represent a barely noticeable sweat’. Though the vanload
of sweltering youngsters can be explained due to the narrative excuse

of a heatwave, there is a suggestion that all of the film’s characters are,
rather animalistically, ‘in heat’. It is interesting to note the significance
of such a period for Western gay male culture. The 1970s is a period just
prior to the onset of a global epidemic of HIV and AIDS and is often ret-
rospectively viewed by a gay male culture as a hedonistic time of louche
gay male sexuality that was also naïve and unconcerned with such
matters. When first introduced to the gang in their ‘Mystery Machine’-
style van, having crossed the border from a drug run in Mexico into the
United States, an (assumably) high Pepper and Andy are shown passion-
ately necking in the back, while Erin and Kemper more chastely discuss
the possibility of marriage while driving, in a rather hackneyed attempt
to encode Erin as the conservative and abstinent Final Girl archetype.
Despite Erin’s seeming ‘moral piety’, Kuersten (2005) agrees that Jessica
Biel’s Erin is ‘dressed far too down for uptight Christian Texas’ and con-
cludes that ‘by the power vested in her [ . . . ] booty-licious [ . . . ] tight
hip huggers and wet t-shirt tied, she assumes command not just of her
van mates, but of any remote rural site she happens to be in’ (139).
Ryan Lizardi (2010) comments that Nispel’s remake only heightens the
threat of abnormality and transgression from sexual and cultural norms
from Hooper’s original. Its ‘addition of sex and drugs in the form of two
pounds of marijuana the young main characters have purchased in Mex-
ico and the picking up of a hitchhiker who engages in illicit sexual activi-
ties with one of the main characters [Andy] even though they “didn’t
know each other yesterday”’ (118), only further cements the slasher film’s
well-worn tropes in place as its sexually transgressive characters are pun-
ished for their deviation and the only female figure to abstain from this
manages to survive. In fact, though Lizardi acknowledges the film’s overt
eroticism and foregrounding of male suffering, he sees the film as more
conservative than Hooper’s original, instead ‘adopting a more hopeful
outlook’ not present in the original (121), citing Erin’s ability to save her-
self (and maternalizing herself more so in the act of simultaneously rescu-
ing a baby), over Sally’s damsel-in-distress-style last-minute rescue at the
hands of a passing male motorist. However, what is often overlooked in
the analysis of Nispel’s remake is the extent to which the original’s erotic
elements and its tendency towards a patriarchal, castrating threat (most
notably symbolized by the ghoulish, blood-sucking mummified living
corpse of Grandpa) are both further ‘queered’ by a flipping of gender. In
Nispel’s version the monstrous patriarchy of Hooper’s film is replaced
by an overwhelmingly matriarchal presence. The Hewitt farm does con-
tain its fair share of castrating and castrated males (among them the
threateningly phallic Sheriff Hoyt, the elderly amputee Old Monty and
the facially disfigured Leatherface himself). Yet the film is also abundant
with matriarchal figures including the ‘dead grandmother’ of Hooper’s
original who is revitalized as Luda May Hewitt (seen ironing Hoyt’s pants
in a show of real power existing behind whomever wears the trousers and
later admonishing almost all of the men in the family) and the mysteri-
ous trailer park pairing of Henrietta and the Tea Lady.
In Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), Judith
Halberstam champions the queer tendencies of the horror film, stating
that the most radical aspect of the genre ‘lies in its ability to reconfigure
gender not simply through inversion but by literally creating new cat-
egories’. She describes Hooper’s Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) as a mon-
strously queer figure with a ‘fluid gender’ (139) and the films’ obsession
with skin (torn, broken, penetrated, rotting) which serves as a metonym
for the human and thus also as a symbol of sexual identity within mon-
strosity. The same can be said of the rebooted Leatherface in Nispel’s film,
to some extent. While it is perhaps the case that in the final scenes of
Nispel’s film Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski) is subjected to more bodily
torture at the hands of Erin (and his own clumsiness), he is unmasc-ed
not only in his being wounded and penetrated by phallic weapons but
also in the literal unmasking of the figure himself – allowing audiences
to see beneath the ‘borrowed skin’ to his truly deformed face. In doing
this there is a suggestion that Nispel’s film attempts to elicit sympathy
for its monster who is now a sufferer of a skin disease. Moreover, Leath-
erface’s compulsion to wear Kemper’s face not only suggests his desire
to be ‘normal’ and to look ‘like a real man’ but also perhaps reveals an
erotic desire for masculinity. His ‘drag’ is simultaneously queer and nor-
mative, depending on one’s interpretation. On the surface one could
argue that Leatherface desires to ‘fit in’ with a seemingly heteronorma-
tive culture that privileges male/female coupling and traditional mascu-
line attractiveness. But, as Kuersten points out,
. . . it’s only the men we see getting hooked and abused, kept alive
in Leatherface’s dirty basement to be tortured, skinned, and defiled.
It’s Kemper’s face Leatherface wants to try on, not Erin’s. This actually
only further reduces her power, as her sexual hotness holds no value
either on the Texas flatlands or in Leatherface’s dank, drippy base-
ment workshop (2005).
It is with supplanting of the original’s plethora of female victims in

the remake with male ones that arguably provides the film’s queerest
iteration. Andy’s capture, subsequent torture and death are, arguably, at

the centre of the film’s queer appeal and perhaps demonstrate its pro-
pensity for queer aesthetics.
Packing the meat and bringing out the boys
Andy is erotically coded from the opening moments in the film, mak-
ing out with Pepper; his tanned skin is perpetually sheened in sweat,
the ever-setting golden sun only adding to this sexually charged
bronzeness. Andy is visualized as an erotic doppelgänger to Jessica
Biel’s equally objectified Erin. In their matching clothing, both wearing
clingy sweat-drenched vests that reveal their midriffs, they are clearly
visually paralleled and divide the frame (and the spectator’s attention)
in terms of erotic appeal. Andy is often shown spitting and stretching
in a self-consciously macho, narcissistic way, often drawing attention
to his lithe torso as the focus of attention. Yet it is Nispel’s decision to
swap the gender of the character that is brutally ‘hooked’ in the infa-
mous scene in Hooper’s film from female (Pam) to male (Andy) that
provides the clearest indication of the film’s shift towards the erotic
masculine spectacle. Erin and Andy are discovered trespassing by Old
Monty in the Hewitt residence while searching for the lost Kemper. The
appearance of the wheelchair-bound amputee Monty prefigures Andy’s
soon-to-be fate yet also provides one of the film’s more camp moments
of theatricality. In an attempt to summon Leatherface to attack the
intruders, Monty rhythmically bangs his stick on the creaky wooden
floor of the house, pronouncing to Andy, ‘You’re so dead, you don’t
even know it!’ before finally bellowing, ‘Come on, boy, bring it . . .
bring it!’ Frost also recognizes the excessive camp in this moment, writ-
ing that, ‘Nispel unveils his monster with tremendous theatricality and
fanfare, recasting the character’s mythological status within the horror
genre’ (2009, 69). Sure enough, Leatherface arrives replete with whirl-
ing chainsaw in hand and proceeds to chase Andy into the backyard
behind the house. Cross-cutting between shaky handheld point-of-
view camera (from both Andy and his pursuer), fixed aerial shots and
multiple frenetic tracking shots, the scene is both brutally unnerving
but also curiously romantic. Its mise-en-scène is passionately evocative
of a dusk-set romance. With the sun still setting, the yard is basked in
a warm amber light, casting long shadows as Andy is chased through
seemingly never-ending reams of white linen hung out to dry. This
effectively operates as a makeshift maze, whereby this erotically coded
‘kiss-chase’ sequence plays out. As the pace of editing quickens between
oblique cross-cuts, the chase is brought to a sudden end with an abrupt

cut to a poetically slow-motion shot of the low-swinging chainsaw sev-
ering one of Andy’s legs at the knee. The scene’s amorous tone con-
tinues with a cut to a medium shot of a billowing sheet being sprayed
and spattered with blood – a suggestively ejaculatory ‘money shot’
caught in part-silhouette on the drying bed linen. These images are
then followed by what seem like almost post-coital shots of the severed
limb itself and of Andy reeling in pain. Frost suggests that this scene
works as ‘an impressive set-piece of visual nastiness’ but stops short
of praising its erotic symbolism, instead arguing that, ‘the sequence
doesn’t attempt to evoke any other reaction from its viewer apart from
physical recoil. We are not invited to care about the fate of Andy, he
is just another body to dissect and decimate’ (67). While I agree that
Nispel’s decision to up the ante on gore in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(2003) configures the body as ‘meat’, my interpretation of this scene in
particular opens up the film for queer erotic consumption that draws
us towards its sensual aesthetics while also repelling us in disgust. In
support of this, the wounded Andy is then lifted up and carried over
Leatherface’s shoulder in a wonderfully seductive ‘fireman’s lift’ pose,
implying the torture happens elsewhere, indoors – in private.
This feminizing of Andy gives further evidence of the remake’s queer
shift in attention from female to male victims and erotically coded tor-
ture and killing. In a later scene, we return to a semi-conscious Andy,
sitting on the floor of the Hewitts’ dripping, grimy cellar. After being
lifted once again, Leatherface impales Andy from behind in the centre of
his back onto a swinging meat hook, while he prepares the ‘curing’ of
his amputated leg. Here the film blends the efficiency of butchery with
the camp-innocence of nursery rhyme (namely Jack and Jill) as Leather-
face seals Andy’s raw leg stump with salt and wraps the wound in brown
paper and string. Andy is clearly objectified symbolically here and lit-
erally: we are encouraged to view him as erotically objectified ‘meat’
package (his slicked, muscled torso now drenched in sweat and dripping
with water and hanging centre frame like a Michelangelo sculpture) and
more practically as another processed animal product. The erotic sym-
bolism of his continued torture is furthered in later scenes where Andy
attempts to free himself by bravely lifting himself off the hook into
which he is impaled. Draping his arms across an overhanging beam, he
is positioned in a homoerotic Christ-like crucifixion pose. What follows
is a sequence of failed efforts whereby Andy weakens in his attempt to
prise free of the hook and falls back onto it – thus being repenetrated
a number of times, by his own hand, to an ambiguous look of ecstatic

pain. The scene is rendered even more comically tender in that Andy is
suspended above a dusty piano, his toes tinkling on the out-of-tune keys
in the attempt to keep himself upright. This provides a discordant but
poetic musical accompaniment to the suffering.
Yet this almost comically rendered self-penetration is not enough,
and upon being discovered barely still alive by Erin, and having been
introduced to masochistic pleasure, a crying Andy begs her to ‘finish
it’, nodding towards a large kitchen knife to do so. This she does, stab-
bing him in the side – again Christ-style – allowing him a masochistic
‘release’ via a few pints of ejaculatory blood that spills all over a hysteri-
cal Erin. Erin’s shrieks of pain and disgust perhaps also work to reiterate
Kuersten’s point that she is largely outraged by the fact that her ‘hotness
holds no value’ here.
It is clear, then, that Nispel’s film is mired in a post-millennial media
valourization of ‘beauty aesthetics’, Keursten concurs that while the
‘original seems to lecture the viewer [ . . . ] for forgetting about the pig
killing white trash that made their dinner so affordable; the remake on
the other hand, covertly indicts the indictors. The reason the free love
party is over is because those damned socialists had to invite all those
dumb ugly townies’. Indeed, Erin’s survival and acceptance of her nor-
mative maternity in her rescue of a child seems to mark out the remake
as more conservative than the original. Lizardi concludes that this is often
the case of contemporary horror film remakes: ‘The emphasis on the
return to a normal, hegemonic position in the remakes is culturally sig-
nificant, as it comes about at a time of tenuous US relationships with
outside cultures and people’ (117).
While Nispel’s film clearly concludes with a drive towards neocon-
servativism, it nevertheless also allows for queer spectators to interpret
the ‘signifying elements of the originals to make an allegorically sym-
bolic statement abut contemporary social roles and gender relations’
(118) and particularly the appreciation and erotic consumption of the
male body by gay men. If one reads against the remake’s hegemonically
normative closure, this might offer more of an ironic interpretation of
the slasher horror formula, complete with its Final Girl and its destruc-
tion of the ‘queer’ monster, revealing it as an overly clichéd and perhaps
misleading finale. By overlooking the central scenes of male torture and
their erotic potential and in turn overemphasizing the symbolic value
of the film’s normative conclusion, one also runs the risk of suppressing
its queer appeal.
Notes
1 For a more extensive overview of the trend in horror remakes post 2000, see
for instance: Nathan Lee, ‘The Return of the Return of the Repressed! Risen
from the Grave and Brought Back to Bloody Life: Horror Remakes from Psycho
to Funny Games’, Film Comment 44 (2) (2008): 24–8; Steffen Hantke, ‘Academic
Film Criticism, the Rhetoric of Crisis and the Current State of American Hor-
ror Cinema: Thoughts on Canonicity and Academic Anxiety’, College Litera-
ture 43.4 (Fall 2007): 191–202. More specifically, in relation to Nispel’s remake
itself see: Craig Frost, ‘Erasing the B out of Bad Cinema: Remaking Identity
in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’, Text Theory Critique 18 (2009): 61–75; and
Ryan Lizardi, ‘“Re-imagining” Hegemony and Misogyny in the Contemporary
Slasher Remake’, Journal of Popular Film and Television 38 (3) (2010): 113–21.
2 Wickham Clayton addresses this element of Clover’s argument with regards
to Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985: dir Danny Steinmann) in his
chapter of this volume.
3 ‘Jouissance’ is defined here as an increased enjoyment or pleasure that is con-
nected to Jacques Lacan’s concept of desire and has sexual aspects developed
in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–60). He builds on Freud’s discovery of a
contradiction found in the pursuit of pleasure that separates out ‘on the one
hand . . . an absence of pain and unpleasure, and on the other . . . the experi-
encing of strong feelings of pleasure’ (Freud 1930, 76–7). Whereas Freud sees
desire as a drive where the subject seeks a reduction of tensions to a low level,
Lacan argues that the two elements of pleasure are diametrically opposed. His
jouissance can be seen as connected to an increase in tension and the com-
pounding of desire, a sexually based concept with potentially self-immolating
consequences: ‘It starts with a tickle and ends up bursting into flames’ (1991,
83). This influences Leo Bersani’s own utilization of the term throughout his
works: ‘sexuality would not be originally an exchange of intensities between
individuals . . . a condition in which others merely set off the self-shattering
mechanisms of masochistic jouissance’ (Bersani [1987] 2010, 41).
4 This extends from queer rereadings of classic horror films such as Carrie (1976;
dir Brian De Palma), the emergence of ‘gaysploitation horror’ in the works
of David DeCoteau and other significant ‘out’ gay male directors and more
experimental works such as the queer zombie porn films of Bruce La Bruce. See
Darren Elliott-Smith, Queer Horror Film and Television: Sexuality and Masculinity
at the Margins (I. B. Tauris 2015 forthcoming). I argue here that contempo-
rary queer horror film and television texts post 2000 often reveal more about
LGBTQ subcultural anxieties than heteronormative ones.
5 I want to define ‘queer’ along the same lines as Benshoff (1997), in that it
represents ‘an oxymoronic community of difference [ . . . ] unified only by
a shared dissent from the dominant organization of sex and gender [hetero-
sexuality]’ (256). A queer approach to textual analysis seeks to investigate,
and therefore trouble, the ways in which the structures of heteronormativity
pervade culture. Queer interpretations of a seemingly ‘normative’ text aims to
engender an understanding of the visual field and themes of heteronormative
film and, with it, the assumptions through which compulsory heterosexuality is
re-secured.
13
Beyond Surveillance: Questions
of the Real in the Neopostmodern
Horror Film
Dana Och
Introduction
While discussions of postmodern horror films were well established by

the late 1990s, two big moments in relation to postmodern horror occur
in the second half of the decade. They are the highly self-conscious post-
modern horror of the metaslasher franchises – such as I Know What You
Did Last Summer (1997; dir Jim Gillespie) and Scream (1996; dir Wes Cra-
ven) – and the mainstream emergence of the docu-horror into American
cinema through the overwhelming success of the independent film The
Blair Witch Project (1999; dirs Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick). The
role of surveillance in these two types of film can help us to understand
a larger shift regarding the vital role of technology and paranoia in the
neopostmodern horror film. At the centre of this chapter is a considera-
tion of how the neopostmodern horror film becomes the location to
explore the discomfort that happens when surveillance, something that
used to be terrifying, is now part and parcel of the status quo.
The focus of this chapter will be contemporary horror films that cen-
trally rely upon technology and realism, even when dealing with the
supernatural, through their claims of historical sources, use of surveil-
lance aesthetics and/or claims of documentary status. While a sense of
the self-reflexivity of genre conventions visible in the metaslasher can
still be seen, recent neopostmodern films like the highly self-conscious
genre mash-up The Cabin in the Woods (2012; dir Drew Goddard), the
Dogma 95-esque You’re Next (2011; dir Adam Wingard) and the found
footage Trash Humpers (2009; dir Harmony Korine) are more concerned
195
with interrogating or complicating the relationship to ‘authenticity’ and

the real. If post-9/11 media in general can be understood in terms of a
re-emergence of realism as a way to reassert authenticity and encourage
faith in the status quo, as evidenced for example in the ‘gritty reboot’
trend in superhero films, this trend has also served as testament to the
ways in which genre cinema has had to compensate for the failure of
Americans to deal with direct representations of their national trauma
(Wetmore 2012, 2–3).
I contend that the extension of the nature of fear within a generalized
surveillance aesthetic is a key shift between the postmodern and the
neopostmodern horror film. According to Isabel Pinedo (1996), post-
modernism in contemporary (post-1968) films is identified by five main
traits:
(1) there is a violent disruption of the everyday world [experienced

most clearly post 1968 with the spectacle of the mutilated body; the
act of showing], (2) there is a transgression and violation of bounda-
ries [nothing is as it seems; blurs boundaries between subjective and
objective realities], (3) the validity of rationality is thrown into ques-
tion [postmodern can’t overcome the irrational], (4) there is no narra-
tive closure, (5) there is a bounded experience of fear (20).
Tania Modleski argued in 1986 that postmodern horror in the con-

temporary horror film concentrates, likewise, on open-ended narratives
but is also marked by minimal plot/character development and the audi-
ence’s difficulty in identifying with the underdeveloped and unlikable
characters (2009, 622). More recently, Jody Keisner builds upon these
definitions to locate the postmodern horror as part of the contemporary
everyday world with ordinary victims. She claims that ‘horror movies
have become postmodern, in part, because of their questioning of real-
ity; they push viewers to consider their own notions of what is real’
(2008, 416). What is most interesting about Keisner’s claim here is the
highly subjective nature of the objective. She does not argue that horror
films allow the audience to question the real or reality but rather that the
viewers consider ‘their own notions of what is real’, a rhetorical move
that highlights the centrality of the viewer’s experience of the film. For
her, there is a propensity towards sexualized violence and, for the first
time, a paranoid world view. Likewise, Michael Fuchs argues that the
complex ‘metagames’ played by postmodern horror films (post 1978)
shift the fears of the audience from the monster towards the present
incarnation of ‘the most fundamental fears of society’ (2010, 72). This
Questions of the Real in the Neopostmodern Horror Film 197
fundamental fear currently resides in the realization that ‘control over

the media equals control over the world’ with a concomitant anxiety
emerging over whether there is any difference between fiction and ‘real-
ity’ (2010, 88–9). The delayed emergence of the paranoid world view
is key to note because Keisner and Fuchs are the critics writing most
recently, a fact that highlights how paranoia’s and realism’s intensifica-
tion help to delineate the shift into the neopostmodern mode, as well as
the movement away from body horror playing such an essential role.1
The neopostmodern is, of course, not a complete break with any
point in the genre’s history but rather a rearticulation of priorities and
discourses that emerge in specific formalistic ways. Horror films – and
horror-film criticism – have long been interested not only in watching
and being watched (see Peeping Tom [1960; dir Michael Powell], Psycho
[1960; dir Alfred Hitchcock] and the opening shot of Halloween [1978;
dir John Carpenter] for seminal examples) but also in the indecipherable
space between the real and the fantastic. Thus, while John Edward Mar-
tin in ‘Skins and Bones: The Horror of the Real’ may immediately assert
that ‘modern horror, to be efficient, must be real’ (2013, 224) in contra-
distinction to the Gothic tradition or the representation of the super-
natural, the lines between these subgenres and modes have never been
completely clear and are especially not clear now.2 For example, what
is Paranormal Activity (2007; dir Oren Peli) if not Gothic but with sur-
veillance? The major shift in the form of the Gothic, supernatural and
horror is that rather than the character’s point of view (and the killer’s
point of view) anchoring the film as the point at which the confusion
between what is real and what is subjective converge, here the technolo-
gies of surveillance are operating more autonomously.3 This centrality
of technology as the access point into the horror film, though, allows
for neopostmodern horror films to serve as a location for destabilizing
the hegemonic regime whereby surveillance is now supposed to produce
assurances of safety in its various roles as security theatre in media and
across areas of real life, whether in the form of red-light cameras, airport
scanners or GPS in smartphones.
As a genre across international industries that is usually produced
quickly and cheaply, horror has traditionally not been taken seriously
for its politics by censorship or ratings boards (see Strayer 2014); these
factors play into its reputation as being a location where a more unme-
diated and direct representation of recent history and contemporary
anxieties emerge. The long-standing debates over whether horror as a
genre should be understood as supporting or critiquing the status quo
can intensify when considering the differences between Hollywood and
independent-sector film-making. Innovation in horror films usually

occurs on the margins or on the fringe, but like most counterhegemonic
practices, stylistic elements can be severed from their original purpose
and repackaged into a new hegemony (or, to pick up on my earlier termi-
nology, an expanded moral universe).4 These tensions are very visible in
two of my three main film examples. Thus, Trash Humpers, as the book-
let that comes with the DVD informs in typewriter script with crossed-
out words and hand-written edits, is ‘a new type of horror’ . . . ‘a film
unearthed from the buried landscape of the American nightmare’ that
‘follows a small group of elderly “Peeping Toms” through the shadows
and margins of an unfamiliar world’ (‘Trash Humpers Press Notes’ 2010,
1).5 The film pushes so far to the edges that there is barely any semblance
of a story. Rather, the semiotics of found footage and horror-film tropes
(muted colour palette, disturbing masks of old people that render the eve-
ryday horrific, violent children, a non-procreative sexuality that mani-
fests as humping trees, shrubs and garbage cans while fully clothed) signal
overtly the ways that the neopostmodern horror film depends most fully
on the spectator’s experience of watching and interpreting the data of the
film, an experience that transforms pretty quickly from being shocking to
being so boring that many viewers may actually miss the murder when it
occurs on the edges of the frame two-thirds of the way through the film.
This new type of horror concentrates almost exclusively on the spec-
tator’s experience of themselves watching the film and attempting to
scan the image to understand it by placing it into existing discourses.6
Despite its difficulties, being shelved for two years by MGM before being
bought for distribution by Lion’s Gate, The Cabin in the Woods, as a Hol-
lywood production, represents a more controlled and palatable version
of similar interests. Though the film can be argued in relationship to
its critique of mainstream values, it is recognizably a descendant of
the metaslasher for how its overt signalling of horror codes allows for
more typical scenarios to play out, such as Jules’ eroticized seduction
of the wolf head in the cabin (see extensive discussion of this scene in
Donaldson’s blog posting ‘Cabin in the Woods: Can the Male Gaze Be
Ironic?’[2012]). While the films have many differences, both rely on the
viewer recognizing the ways in which surveillant discourses shape ideas
of truth, authenticity and the real; however, as Roscoe and Hight argue
in relation to how factual discourse is always implicated in a defini-
tion of the rational as supporting the political status quo, ‘one poten-
tial effect of the appropriation of the codes and conventions of factual
discourse is an (even if partial) subversion of this particular political
agenda’ (2001, 71).
The chimera: postmodern transforming into

neopostmodern
Just as there is a continuum of styles, codes and tropes between inde-

pendent and Hollywood horror films, so too is the neopostmodern an
extension of the postmodern rather than a break from it; its unique-
ness resides in the specific role that technology plays and the way in
which the spectator’s role shifts in relation to the formal qualities. In
the neopostmodern, the technology replaces a depth of characterization
and the film’s spectator plays an active role in scanning and interpret-
ing information from the footage. Knowledge does consequently play
a main role in both forms; however, the previous pleasure of the post-
modern was located in the possibility to master the knowledge (even if
undercut) and the generic form. To explain, the metadiscourse of the
postmodern slasher depends on acknowledging and empowering its
spectator, who has internalized the iconography, blocking and musical
markers of the horror film. But this recognition and mode of knowing
can then evoke a sense of Foucault’s panopticon and self-surveillance.
An emblematic moment of this is in Scream when Randy watches Hal-
loween on the television with a large group of his friends while offering
metacommentary on the cinematic and narrative tropes; this works to
acknowledge and highlight the self-conscious self-surveillance of the
horror genre for the spectator. The scene not only highlights the oft-
quoted rules (sex=death, no drinking or drugs, never saying ‘I’ll be right
back’) and their relationship to a self-censoring of behaviour but also
simultaneously serves as testament to changing representations of real-
ism and generic verisimilitude. In other words, the actual quality of the
image itself layers into the meaning of the scene. Halloween plays on a
standard 4:3 television within the mise-en-scène of Scream: the TV and
living room curtains create a series of frames within frames. The shot/
reverse-shot rhythm between the teenagers watching the film and the
film playing on the television with its own series of shot/reverse shots
highlights the theatricality of Halloween, especially as its muted palette
stands in relief against the quite brightly lit shot of Randy and his ten
friends (clothed in casual wear with colours ranging from muted browns
and jeans to bright sea-foam green, sky blue and canary yellow). The
soundtrack, at first, functions as the suturing element because the music
of Halloween is mixed equally with the sound from the party, that is,
until Randy hits pause on the film.
As Randy stands next to the television, the difference between these
horror realisms is rendered immediate. What was accepted as realism
in Carpenter’s film appears so muted as to basically be black and white;

Halloween’s verisimilitude is outdated next to the colour palette of 1996.
Likewise, the self-surveillance of the panopticon is explained explic-
itly by Randy as well as implicitly referenced for an assumed cinephile
spectator who should recognize that Halloween famously opens with a
handheld point-of-view shot that inextricably linked this type of shot
to a sense of surveillance in horror cinema. The teens acknowledge the
presence of these types of surveillance only to mock them and reject
them as outdated. The pleasure, not to mention the confidence of the
nineties and the high postmodern, can be seen through their masterful
understanding of codes and discourses. Even if the power to survive the
end of the film is frustrated for numerous characters, Sidney knows full
well that she needs to kill the monster twice when she finally breaks the
previous codes of the genre by shooting him with a gun, a prop that is
usually verboten in the horror film as an acceptable part of its iconogra-
phy and repertoire of tools.
Sidney’s simultaneous breaking of the genre’s codes whilst also abid-
ing by them is actually set up in earlier scenes, such as when this shift-
ing of realism and its relationship to the cinema in general and horror
in particular become visible through the artifice of the paused image of
Michael Myers’ knife frozen at the point of insertion in Randy’s back.
The image highlights the simultaneity of two codes because the audi-
ence is able to both accept image as image and image as real. Scream
exudes qualities associated with the postmodern horror film while ren-
dering visible and rational the modes that mark generic verisimilitude
and the moral universe it operates upon: it simultaneously expands
that regime of generic discourse and reifies a new moral universe. It is
this new moral universe with its shifting expectations of realism that
emerges more fully in the neopostmodern horror where a generalized
aesthetic of surveillance dominates and old rules governing victims and
survivors no longer hold.7
New media and the surveillance aesthetic
This moment of multiple reals operating as codes represents a tipping

point in high postmodern where the predominance of visible discourses
necessitates a new type of realism and the authentic to emerge that can
re-engage spectators and their investment in the larger representational
system. The shift to concerns of the real, widely identified post 9/11
as evidenced in arguments like Kevin Westmore in Post 9/11 Horror in
American Cinema (2012) and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas in Found Footage
Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (2014), has increasingly
resulted in a re-establishing of the boundaries between objective and
subjective reality; for horror films, though, the larger societal shift mani-
fests in ways that more so allow for an extension of the supernatural
into the documentary realism associated with vérité and surveillance
footage. In fact, the supernatural figure or ghost often no longer even
needs to take a human form, a development that further denies the
killer POV-shot that had marked so many of the postmodern/classic
slasher horror films. To be clear, the handheld camera and its relation-
ship to notions of the real and surveillance do not disappear from the
neopostmodern horror film, but this surveillant gaze is no longer linked
to a character. The aesthetic has moved into a realm where it is simply
semantic code carrying with it a number of assumptions. Rather, the
interest in paranoia and the real results in a formal shift in the form of
the film whereby the victims’ point of view is also mediated either by a
camera or by a static framing of CCTV or nonprofessional home video
surveillance of a camera on a stand, Xbox Kinect or Skype technology.
Each of the main neopostmodern film examples, while highly inter-
ested in the observed body and its relationship to deviance, moves
beyond the simplified surveillance structure to open larger questions
about, on the one hand, the implications of the act of viewing and,
on the other hand, the larger socio-political function of normalizing
a self-conscious surveillance aesthetic as the defining element of what
constitutes the real. By severing the subjective point of view within the
eye of the character or the monster in favour of promoting technol-
ogy as mediator between character and spectator, the forms of the films
themselves reveal the shift of mode into the neopostmodern. As the
perspective changes to the depersonalized/mediated footage, there is a
concomitant movement away from individual mastery through close
identification with a character and towards, at most, a hope for mastery
through an understanding of technology and/or the spotting and iden-
tifying of threat in the midst of vast amounts of raw footage.8
John Fiske’s discussion of ‘videohigh’ and ‘videolow’ in the ‘Video
Public Sphere’ can help to unpack neopostmodern horror’s usages of
these different modes of images and discourses, in particular videolow
and videohigh, to engage with and complicate the reality effect. Hol-
lywood cinema is associated with videohigh, marked as the films are
with high production values, professional sound mixing and polished
continuity editing. Hollywood carries with it the authority of official
discourse, but it also carries with it knowledge that the creators and edi-
tors have the skills and the capital, economic and social, to shape the
discourse. However, ‘in the domain of the low (low capital, low technol-
ogy, low power), video has an authenticity that results from its user’s
lack of resources to intervene in its technology’ (Fiske 1998, 387). A
second discourse, then, with a different type of authority than official
discourse, fights for acknowledgement through videolow, which is the
low-grade image associated with the ‘democratization’ of video tech-
nology. At times, videolow has been associated with VHS, cell camera
footage and CCTV surveillance. Regardless, videolow is usually marked
by a grainy appearance, non-continuity editing (long takes, jump cuts,
etc., as this is ‘raw’ footage and thus supposedly closer to ‘the real’ and
the ‘unmediated’), ‘bad’ framing, low-grade colouration, pixilation, lack
of focus, a lack of three-point lighting and so on.9 Fiske argues that the
use of videolow contained, at least initially, something potentially radi-
cal and liberatory because it gave normal citizens the ability to broad-
cast their versions of events. Furthermore, ‘this authenticity of videolow
allows the weak one of their few opportunities to intervene effectively in
the power of surveillance, and to reverse its flow’ (1998, 388; italics added).
Yet even though he was writing early in the development of new media,
Fiske already saw that videolow could be co-opted and turned into the
hegemonic: ‘videolow does not always oppose videohigh; indeed, often
the two work complicitly’ (388). In cinema, just as with the nightly
news programming, videolow can be folded into videohigh productions:
‘they [the media] use their viewers’ ubiquity to extend their monitoring
reach and intensify our system of surveillance, to capture the immediate
and the authentic, and to pull their viewers into an alliance with the
station’ (389).
Indeed, as Levin argues, surveillance footage (which would be a form
of Fiske’s videolow) has quickly become co-opted into all forms of enter-
tainment media at both the thematic and the formal level as a way to
naturalize truth claims. While questions and thematics of surveillance
and paranoia intensify post 9/11, Levin identifies what I am referring to
as the neopostmodern trend as beginning to emerge systematically in
the 1990s, especially in relation to Dogma 95 (which forbids genre films)
and Blair Witch Project: ‘The lure of this fascinating recasting of rite as
thriller idiom was precisely the undecidability, the unreadability of the
genre: is it vérité or isn’t it?’ (2002, 584).
To counter and control this radical undermining of veracity through
the widespread use of a handheld aesthetic, surveillance footage emerged
as the new location of ‘the real’: ‘surveillance images are always images
of something (even if that something is very boring) and thus the turn
to surveillance in recent cinema can be understood as a form of semiotic
compensation’ (585; italics in original). Surveillance, crucially, is used as

a way to try to reassert ‘the real’ and indexicality to the photographic
image that was opened to question through the postmodern attention
to surface.10 Types of images are deeply associated with their typical dis-
courses, so it is no surprise that ‘if the unproblematic preferentiality of
cinematic photograms is under siege, it makes great sense to start appro-
priating a type of imaging characterised by definition (at least according
to a certain popular understanding) in terms of its seemingly unprob-
lematic, reliable referentiality’ (585). As the use of this surveillance foot-
age progresses, though, so does its very visibility as the latest form of
the panopticon: ‘in an elegant exemplification of the internalization
of a culture of surveillance, late twentieth-century urban street literacy
simply requires that one take for granted that such places always have
a panoptical apparatus and – this is key – that this device is not simply
a closed-circuit TV but is actually sending its images to a VCR’ (586).11
With this, the naturalization of the surveillance is established as well
as its claims to the real, allowing for the reassertion of a belief in the
indexical reality of any given image potentially.12
As citizens have become aware of a constant surveillance in ‘real’ life,
media works to justify surveillance in mainstream genres, especially
post 9/11 and post Snowden, by claiming its presence as protection (it
helps us to document, understand, monitor and manage threat), see, for
example, the television show Person of Interest (CBS, 2011–present). Even
though the use of originally vérité, then surveillance, footage started on
the edges of cinema, in the independent sector, and indeed in the horror
film, these types of images and styles progressively become mainstream
and part of the moral universe for how, according to Levin, they are
combined with videohigh to create a sense of empowering, pleasurable
omniscience and control in the spectator who identifies with the pup-
petmaster behind the scenes watching the footage rather than the hap-
less or helpless target of the surveillance.
Mediated vision: Style and the neopostmodern horror film
Thus, surveillance techniques have quickly become a part of the dis-

course of power’s moral universe, leaving no area beyond its purview.
For the vanguard of neopostmodern horror, though, a chance currently
still exists to express an unease with the expanded moral universe and
its repercussions. The sense of surveillance can vary wildly across films,
to be sure. For example, a handheld camera is often used in both You’re
Next and Trash Humpers, but neither film feels it is necessary to explain
the motivation for its presence within the film itself. Like the use of
the handheld camera in Festen (1998; dir Thomas Vinterberg) from
the Dogma 95 movement or the use of vérité as style in Kids (1995; dir
Larry Clark) or Homicide: Life on the Streets (NBC, 1993–99), the hand-
held camera creates a sense of the real but, more importantly, because
of generic expectations of the long tradition of the killer POV-shot in
horror, there is also still a sense of surveillance. Extra-diegetic knowledge
in Trash Humpers allows the viewer to know that supposedly the film
is comprised of found-footage VHS tapes (though extra-diegetic knowl-
edge also undercuts this claim because fans know that it is Rachel and
Harmony Korine beneath two of the masks in the film, even though
they are never removed). While a handheld aesthetic is primarily miss-
ing from The Cabin in the Woods, the film immediately reveals that the
college students are under constant surveillance by not only showing
cameramen in military-style gear after the opening scenes but also by
narratively espousing how the bodies of the students are being manipu-
lated and monitored at all points by scientists.
The post-9/11 films that make claims to the real, whether using either
a similar found-footage trope, approximation of documentary aesthetics
or surveillance, often place that footage and/or documentation into the
hands of the characters themselves. If early horror films found a profound
paranoia and distaste to the notion of constant surveillance (for example,
a text like Peeping Tom links sexual perversion and psychotic tendencies
to scopophiliac pleasure), the horror films of this moment depict the cul-
ture as not only comfortable with the surveillance but as being confident
in its ability to protect us. For example, the comfort with surveillance is
evident with the willing recording of self and a pleasure in document-
ing all trips, parties and events, a tendency that exudes confidence and
an innate sense of worth and belief in one’s own mastery of technology.
Indeed, the characters’ belief in themselves as professional (as capable of
producing videohigh) plays into various of the films, as the characters
are frequently identified as industry professionals and/or film-makers in
training (Diary of the Dead [2007; dir George A. Romero], The Blair Witch
Project, The Bay [2012; dir Barry Levinson], You’re Next). If horror fans such
as those depicted in the Scream franchise can master the ins and outs of
the horror genre’s rules and ideologies, surely then these characters with
media production credentials should also be marked as insiders. Yet, the
‘found’ nature of most of these films already guarantees the failure of their
attempts to master the medium and the knowledge regime.
This ‘professionalization’ and chance of survival, then, in these texts
shift once again to the spectator, who is often forced to scan long takes
for multiple levels of information to gauge whether the supernatural

is real. For example, in surveillance shots from Paranormal Activity, the
viewer must take in multiple levels of information for the meanings
and pleasures of the text to occur: black-and-white footage, the location,
the time stamp and how it is moving forward, and the natural move-
ments of sleep from the aberrant movements of a haunting. Not unlike
a security expert scanning casino or mass transit feeds, or a monitor of
CCTV from streetlight cameras in any given city, the spectator must
actively scan the images to find what element is worthy of a reaction.
The technology carries with it the only possible sense of mastery, but
that sense of mastery is minor at best when identifying a ghostly pres-
ence, a poltergeist or an intruder and does nothing to actually dissipate
or control it.13
With these examples in mind, it is clear that the viewer neither needs
to see the camera, mounted or carried by a person, nor the producer/
person monitoring the footage for the surveillance aesthetic to domi-
nate. However, bringing together numerous theories of surveillance into
a specifically neopostmodern mode of horror involves recognizing that
paranoia and an accompanying sense of powerlessness are playing major
roles. Paranoia no longer seems unfounded but rather a basic reaction. It
works both for and against power relations in interesting ways. Paranoia
plays a large role in, as previously mentioned, normalizing widespread
surveillance as the means to protect American society, but it also plays a
large role in normalizing stricter self-surveillance techniques as citizens
are paranoid about how wide the net of government-sponsored surveil-
lance and anti-terrorist tactics will spread.14 Both You’re Next and The
Cabin in the Woods feature successful (initial) attempts by their para-
noid characters to fight back against the various human and fantastic
monsters. For example, in You’re Next, the scheming family members do
not realize that their chosen ‘uninvolved witness’ to the crimes, Erin,
had been raised on a survivalist compound until she explains that her
father’s paranoia resulted in a non-traditional upbringing. In The Cabin
in the Woods, the stoner Marty is likewise very paranoid; eventually,
though, the corporate puppetmasters realize that it is his marijuana that
is making him immune to their attempts to manipulate his physiologi-
cal and psychological experiences of ‘reality’.
With these two characters, then, paranoia does appear to be linked to
survival and self-preservation as well as to a profound distrust of author-
ity and society. Ultimately, their distrust and paranoia does not, and
cannot, actually save them. A sense of defeatism and hopelessness marks
the neopostmodern horror film, an element epitomized in the various
denouements of the films, whether it is in the attempted killshot deliv-

ered to Erin by a well-meaning police officer who assumes that she is
the murderer when he sees her kill her villain boyfriend Crispin at the
end of You’re Next (a killshot that is reminiscent of the one delivered
to Ben at the conclusion of Night of the Living Dead [1968; dir George
A. Romero]), in Marty and Dana’s refusal to sacrifice themselves to the
ancient gods to save humanity at the end of The Cabin in the Woods, or
in the unnamed woman in a mask stealing a baby at the end of Trash
Humpers with no rhyme, reason or forewarning.
The stress on surveillance aesthetics and their link to paranoia are so
markedly the focus of these films because of the various ways that they
have, like the postmodern films before them, de-invested from charac-
ters and characterization. The Cabin in the Woods explains this situation
by asserting that biochemical engineering has shifted the personalities
of the characters; on occasion, the characters themselves comment on
how uncharacteristic their own behaviours are. You’re Next embraces a
shallowness to character by setting the film with a large, dysfunctional
upper-middle-class family gathering together for a special wedding anni-
versary celebration and meeting one another’s partners for the first time.
This shallowness of character and disinterest in characterization allows
for the combination of generic elements to predominate. The masked
killers are simply hired hands who are murdering for money, shifting
our focus from interest in monstrosity, character depth or interpersonal
narratives towards reading the surface clues for the conspiracy. Finally,
in Trash Humpers, the characters remain masked the whole film, much
of which consists of videolow VHS footage of the characters humping
trees and garbage cans. These characters have no names. They have no
personalities. They have no faces. They are completely anonymous.
They are the detritus of society. Thus, all three of these films refuse any
significant investment in characterization. While two of the films rely
heavily on literal masks, the third, The Cabin in the Woods, highlights
how the characters we see have no relationship to the ‘real’ characters
due to chemical manipulation. Theirs is a different sort of mask than
the other two films, but it is a mask nonetheless. Regardless, with no
access to characterization or depth, the investment in psychoanalysis
and repression is severed.
Without characters serving as audience surrogate, the surveillance
aesthetic ascends as the major mediator between the film’s narrative
and the spectator; however, access to that supposedly higher level of
omniscience and knowledge does nothing to save anyone, not even the
diegetic puppetmasters. As previously mentioned, You’re Next heavily
features a handheld aesthetic, though its presence is not narratively

motivated in any clear way. The surveillance aesthetic finally appears
to be justified about midway through the film when the father of
the besieged family realizes that the masked killers have been hiding in
the house watching the family for days. Furthermore, the ‘shakiness’ of
the camera begins to stabilize shortly thereafter when it is revealed that
various family members play a central role in orchestrating the murder-
ous attacks. With this revelation, the film itself begins to operate as a
videohigh prearranged performance of a film script that is failing due to
the incorrect performance of one character. A final revelation by Erin’s
boyfriend, though, establishes that she was intended to serve as wit-
ness in absence of ‘real’ surveillance footage to prove the innocence of
the involved family members. Suddenly, her act of spectatorship – and
indeed our own as spectators of the film – have been anticipated and
thus compromised because manipulated. In retrospect, the handheld
aesthetic is a reflection of Erin’s intended function as human surveil-
lance camera and operator. Power is impossible to ignore in the end,
because the final credits consist of police polaroids of the murdered bod-
ies, including Erin herself, who was killed by the police as the presumed
perpetrator (‘Suspect?’ is handwritten on her picture), appropriately
placed on a floor plan of the house, implicitly asking whether the act
of viewing and judging can ever really understand motivations or what
‘really’ happened and whether there is a larger design or plan to the
construction of a reality.
It would seem a logical extension that a movement away from a deep
characterization would result in a predominance of body horror, a link
visible in many feminist explorations of postmodern horror, includ-
ing the aforementioned works of Pinedo and Keisner. However, in the
move to the neopostmodern also occurs a shift in priority away from the
graphic punishment of the body. While some graphic violence may still
work itself into the films, it is more common that the violence occurs off-
screen, on the edge of the screen or in transient ways that test the view-
ers’ ability to discern what they are seeing. Other ways it occurs are with
an overwhelming darkness to the frame that leaves the horror mostly
unseen other than as vague visible movement but without clear details or
even close-ups of impact or penetration of weapons. The darkness of the
initial attack of the Zombie Redneck Torture Family on Jules and Curt in
The Cabin in the Woods makes the details of Jules’ murder and decapitation
difficult to see and take pleasure in, especially when put in relief against
the brightly lit white walls and lab coats of the corporate puppetmasters
watching back at headquarters.15 Later, the difficulty in discerning the
violence and body horror intensifies when the battle royale level of vio-
lence is achieved once all the supernatural monsters are released simul-
taneously and disembark on a killing spree as they exit the elevators. So
much action and killing occurs simultaneously that the level of informa-
tion (of course, visible at various points on surveillance/CCTV feeds) is
simply too much to comprehend. In You’re Next, the denying of body
horror again takes a few different forms as murders take place off-screen
with the dead bodies revealed as just another minor element of the fram-
ing in later scenes. Interestingly, one longer scene where Erin fights with
a masked killer in the basement uses a camera flash rhythmically going
off to illuminate the scene, but with the image and violence only becom-
ing visible for milliseconds at a time. Finally, Trash Humpers has only one
murder in the film; however, this murder is shown obliquely and then
the dead body is only ever at the edges of the frame as they dispose of
it. As the actual violence becomes sidelined or marginalized within the
narrative and the actual frames of the film, the spectator’s desire to see
the violence instead often becomes the main focus of the film. As Heller-
Nicholas argues in relation to found-footage films where the camera is
revealed to be ‘faulty’: ‘at their best, found footage films hold the capacity
to undermine the dominant and often sadistic supremacy of the gaze by
exposing this inadequacy to fully see’ (23).
Conclusion: Horror beyond horror?
While many popular discussions of horror trace the interest in docu-

mentary aesthetics and surveillance to 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, this
is an oversimplification that tends more towards a grounding of the aes-
thetic to postmodern horror and an American tradition. Indeed, as Alex-
andra Heller-Nicholas argues, the roots of the documentary aesthetic
and/or found-footage horror traces not just back to the well-known
phase of Cannibal Holocaust (1980; dir Ruggero Deodato), Henry: Portrait
of a Serial Killer (1986: dir John McNaughton) and Man Bites Dog (1994;
dirs Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde) but has long
been part of horror (see in particular Section One of Found Footage Hor-
ror Films ‘Expanding the Prehistory: 1938–1998’). While it is nigh near
impossible to identify clear breaks while we are in the midst of the era
of which we speak, it appears likely that the shift to neopostmodern-
ism (or a post-postmodernism of surveillance horror) happened in the
late nineties, though many will likely pinpoint the moment as a defini-
tive break circa the historical trauma of 9/11. The roots of this shift in
representation, though, were already happening in fits and starts very

visibly in the mid to late nineties even in the USA. The insistence on
the veracity of events does seem to have seen an uptick in the post-9/11
era, as an obsession with needing to believe becomes evident. If The
Blair Witch Project’s use of documentary aesthetics and truth claims is
understood as a response to the high postmodern nature of the meta-
slasher, we end up seeing the text as an appeal to a desire for an active
spectator again who must relearn the rules of watching horror films.
That film stands as most notable for the way that the viewer of the film
must become the surveillance expert, searching the frame for clues, sift-
ing through the material to find evidence and facing a new type of fear
that acknowledges the futility (like the slashers before it) of the old rules.
And, indeed, at this point in the neopostmodern horror, there is no
question that the supernatural is real, but also, crucially, that the char-
acters’ and spectators’ mastery of technology gives them no advantage.
In a post-9/11 world, the only power that seems to exist is whether the
spectator can scan the surveillance or found documentary footage well
enough to identify the threat, even though they are helpless to fight
back. As we move into the two dominant strands here (the documentary
handheld found footage and the static surveillance footage epitomized
by Paranormal Activity’s fetishistic – but ultimately futile – erecting of
technology throughout the private domicile), these texts have often lost
the explicitness of body horror and with it the predominance of the
eroticized male gaze. The profound sense of helplessness and paranoia
are actually more the concentration of the text than the explicit vio-
lence of the body as meat; if one of the functions of body horror was
to promote and normalize a sense of the dehumanization of victims
(frequently female victims), at this point the dehumanization is taken
for granted. These texts are moving away from body horror and towards
a different imagination of where the horror resides. All bodies are meat;
everyone is meat; even the monsters are prisoners of this system (The
Cabin in the Woods). Thus, while some violence to the body still may
happen, it is distanced, nostalgic and often off-screen.
As the films shift from concentrating on the destruction of bodies
to implicating the viewer’s desire to see violence, the larger sense of
the neopostmodern horror film comes into focus. While the concerns
of these films are neither uniquely American nor unique to the horror
genre, as a consideration of transnational genre or art cinema examples
can attest (see, for example, the oeuvre of Michael Haneke), surveillance
horror remains significant for the movement of these concerns into the
mainstream. If at earlier points in the genre psychoanalysis and repres-

sion were often of central concern, there seemed an imagination that
the individual still mattered within society. Now the neopostmodern
horror seems to dwell on a disturbing lack of knowing how or why this
footage is being taken. These three filmic examples build to show that
there is a sense of radical alienation produced as an effect of dominance
and ubiquity of the panopticon in a surveillance society. In fact, the
films themselves are all on the cusp of functioning as horror, reflecting
back on a confusion in terms of genre and showing that the rules that
we implicitly believed controlled generic verisimilitude have broken.
Notes
1 While this larger part of the argument cannot be developed here, the shift
away from body horror is very important to note. Pinedo, building upon the
work of Philip Brophy and Pete Boss, argues that ‘the postmodern genre is
intent on imagining the fragility of the body by transgressing its boundaries
and revealing it inside out’ (1992, 21). The movement away from graphic
depictions of violence towards the body in horror films in favour of making
the violence hard to see is a significant shift in the knowledge regime.
2 Indiscernibility played a major part in postmodern horror as well, though its
presence has always been part of the horror tradition. American horror, in fact,
since the post-Universal or classical phase, has been associated with a high
degree of socio-historical verisimilitude and the markers of realism, yet its rela-
tionship to the repressed materializes in markers (and monsters) whose repre-
sentations go beyond the possible. But even with this said, it is widely held that
the fantastic markers during the classical stage of horror are understood through
their relationship to a socio-historical reality. Thus, Magistrale can move easily
between discussions of the surreal and real in Expressionist horror film:
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari [1919; dir Robert Weine], Nosferatu [1922; dir F. W.
Murnau], and Metropolis [1927; dir Fritz Lang] still fascinate a contemporary
viewer with the excursions into the realms of the surreal and psychologi-
cally aberrant. At the same time, however, these films of the early 1920s were
painfully realistic in recalling the unprecedented violence and trauma that
occurred during World War I, where the combatants who somehow man-
aged to survive often returned to civilized life as living spectres, the walking
dead who were more shadow than substance (2005, xiii; italics added).
For Magistrale, the supernatural is marked heavily by the real. Moving beyond
the more fantastical monsters (vampires, werewolves and the like), the
‘human’ monsters often still appear to have supernatural capacity or greater
than possible intelligence and foresight. A particularly amusing example is in
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989; dir Rob Hedden) when
Jason Voorhees decapitates a boxer with one punch to the head.
3 As Wetmore argues, the found-footage films and pseudo-documentaries that

invest the viewer in the camera operator as a character who is experiencing
the horror directly are marked by a ‘false self-reflexivity’ that is ‘designed to
enhance verisimilitude and convince the viewer what he or she is watching
is genuine’ (2012, 65).
4 For example, the rush to remake the 1970s horror films in the 2000s
attests to the ways that previously highly disturbing material can be main-
streamed and aestheticized in a pleasing way, as evidenced in the conven-
tional sexualization of the 2010 advertising campaigns for the remake of I
Spit on Your Grave (dir Steven R. Monroe). See a side-by-side view of the post-
ers for the two versions of the film at http://www.examiner.com/article/
february-8-2011-dvd-blu-ray-i-spit-on-your-grave-1978-original-and-remake.
5 Korine’s film is so on the fringe of mainstream film-making that it was dis-
tributed by Drag City, which is more well known as an indie music label, and
could be bought on VHS with hand-decorated packaging.
6 The extreme distancing of the audience from the story and characters results
in the film operating more like Man Bites Dog (1992; dirs Rémy Belvaux, André
Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde), in that the series of ambiguous moments
makes clear how documentaries (like narrative Hollywood films) are ideolog-
ical (see Roscoe 2006). If the complicity of the film crew has already been well
established in the horror genre, albeit as heroes or villains, this film moves
attention to editing and story construction as also worthy of deconstruction
in terms of how it positions the spectator.
7 The kernels of the neopostmodern mode come to fruition in Kevin William-
son’s latest creation, the TV series Stalker (CBS, 2014–present) which ‘CBS presi-
dent Nina Tassler described to ad buyers in New York on Wednesday as the
scariest drama the network has ever aired’ (http://insidetv.ew.com/2014/05/14/
cbs-fall-trailers-stalker-madam-secretary-more/). In addition to attesting to the
breakdown of generic boundaries, a slippage visible in the article headline
(‘CBS fall trailers include “scariest show” in network’s history’), the main char-
acter’s voiceover lays bare this generalized paranoia and failure of mastering
the rules: ‘Social media is the number-one reason stalking cases have tripled in
the last decade. Anyone can be a stalker. Anyone can be a victim.’
8 This ability to discern threat in the image extends to a hope that we can use
technology to master narratives or find clues, a trope that not only shows up
in films themselves but emerges in transmedia extensions. Fincina Hopgood
discusses at length the ways that The Blair Witch Project used the Internet to
deliberately extend the mythology of the Blair Witch through falsifying his-
torical documents.
9 Connections here exist to early location shooting post WW2 as well as cinéma
vérité and documentary traditions not to mention various international New
Waves and exploitation cinemas.
10 This step beyond the postmodern, or adjustment necessitated by the post-
modern, lends credence to talking about this trend as constitutive of the
neopostmodern.
11 The VHS aesthetic of Trash Humpers is relevant here, as there is no sense of
a film-maker being present taking the footage but rather that the VHS tapes
simply exist as if constant surveillance is simply taken for granted now.
12 While the presence of surveillance footage has helped to reclaim the realist
claims of all Hollywood images, in horror it is important to remember that
the handheld camera never experienced the same destabilizing effect as the
rest of cinema. The big difference that does happen, though, is severing the
handheld from needing to be associated with individual characters, whether
victims or monsters.
13 On the television show Ghost Adventures (Travel Channel, 2008–present), the
hosts actually spend most of their time trying to anger ghosts so as to find
evidence that they are real (which they inevitably do through rewinding
and replaying after the fact), though it is equally clear that documenting the
ghostly presence does not equate to dissipating it.
14 Relevant here is not only Snowden-era revelations and mainstreaming dis-
trust of Facebook privacy settings, for example, but also discussions of the
militarization of American police forces and the ways that they are mobilized
in the war on drugs (see Last Week Tonight [HBO, 2014–present] from 17
August 2014 for discussion of college students rightly being paranoid about
smoking marijuana in dorms because of SWAT teams).
15 Indeed, this frustration also occurs just a couple of scenes earlier when the
male characters at headquarters line up to watch Jules disrobe and have sex
yet are denied their sexualized looking and sent back to their work stations
with an audible disappointed groan.
14
The Slasher, the Final Girl and the
Anti-Denouement
Janet Staiger
Wes Craven’s 1994 film Wes Craven’s New Nightmare presents a Bettel-
heimian thesis about why children desire to keep hearing horrible fairy
tales. Telling the stories staves off their realization. A fantasy of anxiety
prevents actual anxiety and its consequences. Moreover, the successful
resolution of the tale reassures the child that he or she can securely pro-
gress through the surrounding violence.
Although I agree with the thesis of New Nightmare, the purpose of
this paper is not to justify a fascination with horror, terror or images of
violence. Rather, it is first of all to focus on what the stories are in these
horrible fairy tales, in this case, New Nightmare’s formula – the ‘slasher
film’. Before we can consider the effects of texts (especially ones that are
involved with repetitive reception behaviour such as occurs for devotees
of violent fairy tales and slasher movies), we must have a fairly accurate
description of those texts. Then we are in a better position to speculate
about the cultural functions of that represented violence. Moreover, in
discussing cultural violence, I want to underscore the point that effects
of representations of violence in fictional narratives are not equivalent
to effects of experiencing violence in the real world. All indications are
that watching violence in movies is an extremely complex cognitive
and affective event. Additionally, the connections between watching
violence and any subsequent behaviour are even more uncertain. But
assuming some relations might exist is one reason to consider what
exactly it is that we are watching.
Many scholars have discussed the slasher film, providing important
observations about the functions of these films within our culture (Tudor
1989; Dika 1990; Carroll 1990; Paul 1994). However, I want to inves-
tigate a highly influential analysis: Carol Clover’s description in Men,
213
Women, and Chain Saws (1992, also see Tudor 1989, 197). Clover has
provided a remarkably strong argument about how young men relate
to one of this era’s most powerful cultural rituals – the enjoyment of
representations of violence and terror.1 As I shall suggest below, funda-
mentally I will not be disagreeing with some of her major theses. Clover
writes that what she wants to suggest is that ‘male viewers are quite pre-
pared to identify not just with screen females, but with screen females
in the horror film world, screen females in fear and pain’ (1992, 5).
This masochistic aesthetic, Clover argues, is connected with transitional
fantasies about childhood and adulthood, femininity and masculinity.
Although I shall be discussing problems with Clover’s description of this
formula, my revisionist observations will actually provide support for
her basic thesis of a much more complicated identification and desire
pattern than earlier critics using psychoanalytical theory presumed
about these films. Clover’s important contribution is her opening up
of possibilities of theorizing cross-gender identification and same-sex
desire among the audience members, and, thus, I will be appreciatively
revising her work.2
The problem
Clover places much emphasis on Halloween (1978; dir John Carpenter)

as the prototypical slasher film. In fact, Clover sets up her slasher for-
mula based on Halloween as a revision of two earlier and influential hor-
ror films: Psycho (1960; dir Alfred Hitchcock) and The Texas Chain Saw
Massacre (1974; dir Tobe Hooper). Unfortunately, Clover’s description of
the standard slasher formula is arguably not accurate for Halloween. This
is Clover’s formula:
1 The killer is a psychotic product of a sick family due to an event
occurring in the killer’s childhood.
2 The film begins with focalization around the killer’s point of view
(later shifting to the primary female victim/heroine).
3 Victims are (almost exclusively) teens/young adults and sexually
active.
4 The locations of the killings are ‘not-home’.
5 The weapons used are ones involving physical proximity (not guns).
6 The last chase/attack is registered as explicit horror.
7 The ‘Final Girl’ has specific features:
t Not strongly feminine, not sexually active, and looks for killer
t Either resists until rescued or kills the killer
t Outlives any significant male
The Slasher, the Final Girl and the Anti-Denouement 215
8 The killer is ‘evacuated’ from the narrative.

9 The community returns to normal.
In the case of Halloween, features 1, 7, 8 and 9 are debatable. For fea-
ture 1, no one in the film postulates that the cause of Michael Myers’
slaughtering of his sister is because he views her engaged in sexual
activity. If critics attribute that cause to his actions (as some have), it is
because from the era of Psycho on, some movies have presented as the
source for a serial killer’s activities such a psychoanalytical thesis. The
text of Halloween, however, does not stipulate that as the initiating rea-
son for disorder. In fact, the major male protagonist with some cultural
authority to make such a declaration explicitly rejects such a discourse.
Dr Loomis, the psychiatrist treating Michael, repeatedly indicates that
Michael is not psychologically disturbed. Loomis declares that ‘evil’ has
escaped, and no one debates him.3
Features 7, 8 and 9 are equally questionable for Halloween. The stalked
teenage babysitter, Laurie, does manage to elude Michael, finally stab-
bing him, and, turning, leaves him for dead. However, Michael rises, as
the viewers’ tensions return to high anxiety seeing that she does not
see him behind her. Then Dr Loomis arrives to rescue Laurie, shoot-
ing Michael multiple times until Michael falls out of the window and
onto the lawn outside. Viewers can relax; the threat is gone. Dr Loomis
walks to the window and peers out, but Michael has risen again and now
vanished. Images of houses and darkness down the street and sounds
of Michael’s breathing ‘end’ the text. It might be said that the killer is
‘evacuated’ from the narrative, but Michael is also up again to haunt and
terrorize as he has been for the last hour of viewing time. The commu-
nity is definitely not back to normal. Unconquerable evil and violence
are out there as the audience leaves the theatre.
These problems with Clover’s formula continue and amplify as I fol-
low through the rest of the films that Clover includes in her list for
the formula. Table 14.1 shows my reading of the 26 films discussed by
Clover as belonging in the slasher genre against her assertions of the for-
mula. The chart also includes an extended sample of five more films that
nominally fit within the group, for a total of 31 films released between
Halloween and the publication of Clover’s argument.4
Much can be said about this chart, but I shall point out only three
important observations as they relate to representations of violence and
theories about viewers of these films. These observations involve the
cause for the violence (formula feature 1), the gendering of the Final Girl
(formula feature 7) and the lack of narrative resolution for these films
(formula features 8 and 9).
Table 14.1 The formula
1) The killer is a psychotic product of a sick family due to an event occurring in killer’s childhood.
2) The film begins with focalization around the killer’s point of view (later shifting to the primary female victim/heroine).
3) Victims are (almost exclusively) teens/young adults and sexually active; number of victims.
4) The locations of the killings are ‘not-home’.
5) The weapons used are ones involving physical proximity (not guns).
6) The last chase/attack is registered as explicit horror.
7) The ‘Final Girl’ has specific features:
a) Not strongly feminine
b) Not sexually active
c) Looks for killer
d) Resists until rescued
e) Kills the killer
f) Outlives any significant male
8) The killer is apparently ‘evacuated’ from the narrative; number of times rises after seemingly vanquished.
216
9) The community returns to normal.
Victims The Final Girl’s Characteristics Killer Rises
Date Film 1 2 3 # 4 5 6 7a 7b 7c 7d 7e 7f 8 # 9
1960 Psycho y n n 2 y y y - - - - - - y - y
1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre 1 y n y 4 y y y n n y y n y n - n
1979 Alien - n n 5 y y y y y y y y y y 1 y
1980 *Terror Train y y n 9 y y y n y y y n n y 3 y
*Silent Scream y n y 4 y y y n n y y y n y 1 y
*Prom Night y n y 6 y y y n n n y y n y - y
1981 Hell Night y n y 6 y y y n y n y y y y - y
The Burning n n y 9 y y y [no final girl] y 1 y
He Knows You’re Alone y n y 9 y y y n y n y n n y 2 n
1982 Slumber Party Massacre 1 ? n y 11 y y y n n n y y y y 3 y
1986 Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 y n y 4 y y y n n y y y y y - n
*April Fool’s Day y n y 7 y y y n n y y n n y - y
1987 Slumber Party Massacre 2 n n y 6 y y y n n n y y y n 3 n
1988 *Sleepaway Camp 2 y n y 18 y y y n n n y n n n - n
1991 Silence of the Lambs y n n 4 y y y y y y y y - y,n - n
*additional slasher film beyond Clover’s list
Victims The Final Girl’s Characteristics Killer Rises
Date Film 1 2 3 # 4 5 6 7a 7b 7c 7d 7e 7f 8 # 9
Halloween
1978 Halloween 1 n y y 5 y y y y y y y n n n 3 n
1981 Halloween 2 n y n 10 y y y y y y y n n y 1 y
1988 Halloween 4 n y n 13 y y y n n n y n y y 1 n
1989 Halloween 5 n n n 10 n y y n y y y n n n 3 n
Friday The 13th

1980 Friday the 13th 1 y n y 9 y y y y y n y y y y 3 n
217
1981 Friday the 13th 2 n n y 9 y y y n y y y n ? n 3 n
1982 Friday the 13th 3 n n y 12 y y y n n y y y y y 2 n
1984 Friday the 13th 4 n n y 13 n y y n n y y y y y 2 n
1985 Friday the 13th 5 y n y 20 n y y n n n y y n y 3 n
1986 Friday the 13th 6 n n y 18 y y y n n y y y n n 3 n
1988 Friday the 13th 7 n n y 15 y y y n n y y y n y 6 y
1989 Friday the 13th 8 n n y 17 y y y n n y y y n y 2 y
A Nightmare On Elm Street

1984 A Nightmare on Elm St 1 n n y 17 y y y n n y y y n y 2 y
1985 A Nightmare on Elm St 2 n n n 2 n y y n n y y y n n 3 n
1986 A Nightmare on Elm St 3 n n y 7 y y y n n y y n n n 1 n
1988 A Nightmare on Elm St 4 n n y 6 n y y n n y y y n y - n
1989 A Nightmare on Elm St 5 n n y 3 y y y n n y y y n y 2 n
1991 Freddy’s Dead (Night 6) n n y 3 y y y n n y y y n y - y?
The slasher
Neither Michael Myers in Halloween nor Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on

Elm Street is postulated by the texts as created by a childhood trauma.
No rational explanation of Michael has been provided by the series up
through Halloween 5. Dr Loomis keeps insisting he is ‘evil’, the ‘bogey-
man’, the ‘devil’; he also displays superhuman abilities. For Nightmare,
Freddy is revealed in Part 3 to be the bastard child of a nun raped by a
hundred maniacs. As the series continues, the solution to Freddy is not
psychoanalytical therapy but to be sent either to hell or back into his
mother’s womb. This is probably because Freddy is already dead, hav-
ing been burned by the parents of children he killed prior to the start
of Part 1.
Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th might fit the formula if I count
that the reason he murders is because of the trauma of the death of his
mother. Mrs Voorhees is killed because she is the killer terrorizing the
teens in Part 1. Her motive is revenge for Jason’s earlier death. When
Jason was a child at Camp Crystal Lake, teen counsellors were engaged
in sex instead of watching Jason swim, and he drowned. When his
mother is killed at the end of the first Friday movie, Jason rises out of the
lake as an adult male to revenge her and begin his reign of terror. The
solution to stopping Jason, like Freddy, becomes more and more occult
as the series continues, reasonably so since both killers are undead.
These supernatural solutions include, in the Friday series, one girl ‘rais-
ing’ her own dead father whom she accidentally caused to drown in the
lake. Her dead father then pulls Jason back into the lake to save her. In
a couple other parts, Jason rises like Frankenstein’s monster because of
electrical currents reviving him.
In fact, in the three archetypical (and highly financially successful)
slasher series, psychoanalytical discourse does not operate as the textual
discourse for the disorder present. Although the events causing disorder
relate to family kinships, the monster is created as doubly unnatural – a
serial killer and unearthly. A typical psychoanalytical causation is pos-
tulated in most of the other slasher films but even then not uniformly.
Clover separates the slasher formula from the occult formula in her
book. I would argue that the separation she suggests needs reconsidera-
tion.5 Moreover, a supernatural metaphysical discourse thus justifies the
invincibility of the monster, which is, as I will suggest below, exception-
ally important in the affective experiences operating for the viewer of the
film. Masochistic repetition of surprise and terror is part of the game, and
the fantasy of perpetual threat functions well for the viewer. For now, I
Table 14.2 Textual explanations for causes of disorder
R Rational Explanation
O Occult Explanation
Sex of
Date Film Killer(S) R/O Cause for Disorder
1960 Psycho M R Son’s abnormal
relation with mom
1974 Texas Chain Saw M, M, M R Family
Massacre
1978+ Halloween (1, 2, 4, 5) M O Dr Loomis: Michael

is ‘pure evil’
1980+ Friday the 13th (1–8) F, M O Revenge (except for
5 which is R)
1984+ Nightmare on Elm M O Revenge
Street (1–6)
1979 Alien n.a. R Need to reproduce

1980 *Terror Train M R Trauma at first sex
experience
*Silent Scream F R Pregnant girl jilted
by boyfriend
*Prom Night M R Brother sees sister
killed, revenge
1981 Hell Night M, M R Family dynamics
The Burning M R Camp caretaker
burned by campers
He Knows You’re M R? Unclear
Alone
1982 Slumber Party M R Rapist turned
Massacre 1 violent
1986 Texas Chain Saw M, M, M R Family
Massacre 2
*April Fool’s Day F R Practical joke
1987 Slumber Party M O? Maybe male juvenile
Massacre 2 delinquent or
R? maybe girl
hallucinating
1988 *Sleepaway Camp 2 M R Aunt dressed boy as
a girl
1991 Silence of the Lambs M R Cross-dresser needs
skins
* Additional slasher film beyond Clover’s list
Table 14.3 Heroes/heroines and endings
Sex Of Surviving Final Is/Are The Killer(S)

Date Film Victim(S) Dead? How (Try To) Stop
1960 Psycho F, M N Police capture
1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre 1 F N Sally resists and flees
1979 Alien F Y Ripley shoots out of ship

1980 *Terror Train F, M Y Girl kisses so conductor can hit
*Silent Scream F, M Y Stabbed by self when female
pushes him
*Prom Night F, M Y Hit by hatchet
1981 Hell Night F Y Car runs him into spokes
The Burning M, M N Stabbed, burned
220
He Knows You’re Alone F, M Y Fight, rescued by cops
1982 Slumber Party Massacre 1 F,F,F Y Three girls fight off
1986 Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 F Y Seduces with sexuality, fights off
and flees
Runs (but just a practical joke)
*April Fool’s Day F, M Y Burns him with a torch
1987 Slumber Party Massacre 2 F N Only killer remains
1988 *Sleepaway Camp 2 none N
1991 Silence of the Lambs F Y, N Gunshot; Lector escapes
1978+ Halloween 1 F, M N
Halloween 2 F, M Y (But retracts in #4)
Halloween 4 F, F, M N
Halloween 5 F, M N
1980+ Friday the 13th 1 F Y, N Mother dead, but Jason rises
Friday the 13th 2 F, M? N
Friday the 13th 3 F Y, N Jason may be, but mother rises
Friday the 13th 4 F, M Y But Tommy seems traumatized
Friday the 13th 5 F, M, M Y, N Jason is still alive via Tommy
Friday the 13th 6 F, M N
Friday the 13th 7 F, M Y
Friday the 13th 8 F, M Y
1984+ A Nightmare on Elm Street 1 F N

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 F, M N
221
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 F, M, F N
Freddy’s Dead (Nightmare 6) F, F, M Y (But retracts in #7)
*Additional slasher film beyond Clover’s list

will also point to the formula’s feature 8 in which I have listed the num-
ber of times the killer ‘rises’ or ‘reappears’ after having apparently been
‘evacuated’. As any viewer of this subgenre knows, the grand moments
of the film occur through anticipating where, when and how the killer
will kill (Dika 1990, 22). Not only can death come from anywhere, but
during the concluding confrontation, the monsters will not stay ‘down’.
Why should they? They are incapable of being defeated by the normal
methods.
The Final Girl
Laurie in Halloween is Clover’s Final Girl, but she is saved by the sig-
nificant, rather feminine male, Dr Loomis, who is, admittedly, equally
unsuccessful in putting Michael to rest.6 In reviewing the 31 slasher
films, I found that usually a woman is placed in the position of being a
final victim.7
However, these women are not uniformly ‘masculinely feminine’ nor
are they virgins or uninterested in sex. Often they are the direct cause of
the temporary cessation of attacks, but they are occasionally rewarded
with a co-surviving male for heterosexual coupling or other male (or
female) helper.
The conclusion? Women are usually the victims and the heroines, but
they are not always ‘Final Girls’ in the strong sense that Clover implies.
They may be quite feminine. Boyfriends, fathers or father figures, even
other women and children, often support and aid them. They learn from
those people so that they do take control of their battle with the killer.
And they are rewarded not just with survival but also with romance.
Clover’s thesis is that the Final Girl may be a source of safe male iden-
tification to avoid an explicit homosexual scenario if the final protago-
nist were a male. This thesis still likely holds, but the Final Girl learns
much from masculine authority/parental figures, occasionally is saved
by them and is often rewarded with apparently heterosexual coupling.8
Still, the ambidextrous male viewer may just as easily move away from
his identification with the Final Girl in the moments of closure when
she ‘returns’ to her gender and sexual orientation assignment of norma-
tive heterosexual female.
The anti-denouement
The impact on horror films of Carrie’s surprise ending is now being rec-
ognized.9 In Carrie (1976; dir Brian De Palma), the sudden shocking
appearance of Carrie’s hand rising from her grave is the image from
the film that I retain most powerfully and which I will label ‘the anti-
denouement’. As William Paul (1994, 409–30) points out, this device
has precedents. For example, at the end of Psycho, the face of Norman’s
mother reappears over his, mocking the psychological discourse sur-
rounding the protagonist, querying (and queering) the classical distinc-
tions of gender for this male. Like the conclusion of Psycho, Carrie’s
hand undermines the resolution of the movie, as Paul puts it, keeping
‘anarchy in a suspended state’ (1994, 419).
Yet Carrie’s tactic deviates from Psycho. The smash success of Jaws
(1975; dir Steven Spielberg) the year prior to Carrie created what James
Monaco calls the ‘Bruce esthetic’: ‘a well-timed series of technical fris-
sons’ (1979, 50).10 Indeed, the slasher formula as a whole owes as much
to Jaws as to Psycho or Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Slasher movie vio-
lence is not a spectacle of gore but of shock. This is an aesthetic of heart
attacks, not the visual investigation of the demolished body.11 The killer
kills, surprisingly often off-screen, and the plot moves rapidly to the
next ‘setup’. Such a ‘pounding’ on the spectator, but expectation of rep-
etition, is critical in the affective tension of the slasher movies. But it is
not just for affective reasons that the anti-denouement seems so ‘right’
for these movies. In a generation of cynicism or rebellion, a ‘paranoid’
time as Andrew Tudor puts it, or a ‘resistant’ time as Paul has it, to create
closure, to adopt any discourse as final, seems impossible. Closure is also
just not quite as psychically useful, as I shall argue below.
Thus, I describe as an anti-denouement a tag-on critique by the text
that rejects a brief resolution which may present the killer as ‘evacuated’
from the diegetic world. Such an anti-denouement occurs in the proto-
typical Halloween as the narration proceeds beyond the view and hear-
ing of Dr Loomis to suggest Michael’s continued presence somewhere
(but where?) in the world. Although Dr Loomis is neither surprised nor
sceptical that Michael lives, the narration makes sure that the viewer is
positioned also to believe and feel the threat. These anti-denouements
become formulaic in part surely to set up the possibility of a sequel.
However, they also function well as continuations of the terrible fun
of the slasher film, as evidenced by the escalating number of times the
killer rises in these films.
The returnable slasher
A formula for the slasher movie exists, or if not as a rigid formula at

least as a set of possibilities and constraints for critically characterizing
quite a few horror films produced between 1978 and 1992. Dennis
Giles (1984/1996), Morris Dickstein (1980), Steve Neale (1981), James
B. Twitchell (1985) and Barbara Creed (1993) have produced important
work on fantasy and the film viewer, also like Clover from a psychoana-
lytical perspective. In analysing the horror genre, Giles focuses in on
horror operating through fetishism, from the expectation but dread of
what is not being seen. He writes, ‘The fetish both re-presents and hides
what the subject really wants to see but is also the symptom of fear of
looking. . . . It is essentially a defensive vision’ (1984/1996, 47).
It is worth emphasizing that Michael, Jason, Freddy and many of the
other slasher killers are horribly disfigured.12 For Jason it is due to cor-
ruption from water; for Freddy, from fire. The faces of these killers are
hidden in shadows or by masks.13 The masks, however, are only slightly
metamorphized from what they really cover. Just note how similar visu-
ally Jason’s hockey mask is to that of a skeleton, to the finally corrupted
body. The inside and the end are present on the surface. Part of the pro-
cess of the chase and destruction is the increasing revelation via the body
of the killer of the end process of what he is creating – death.
We do not look or look long at the bodies of the slasher victims because
we do not need to. They all converge and are displaced onto the killer
who is also the already killed. It is also worth emphasizing that none of
these killers has been properly buried. Michael comes out on Halloween,
the eve of All Saint’s days when ghosts and bogeymen can roam. Jason
was not laid to rest in the ground but lies unburied at the bottom of
Crystal Lake. Freddy’s remains, too, are not in hallowed ground. They
were thrust in a sack and hidden somewhere in a junkyard of old cars.
This rising of the dead invokes more than fetishism and a fantasy in
denial of castration. Here I believe the need to master the meanings of
transitions in aging, and of seduction and death, is operating. As Dick-
stein reminds us, Freud argues in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that ‘chil-
dren create games around the very things they most fear, as a way of
subduing those fears and gaining control. Horror films are a safe, routi-
nized way of playing with death, like going on the roller coaster or para-
chute jump at an amusement park’ (1980, 69). Twitchell also claims that
horror films ‘establish social patterns not of escape, but entry’ (1985, 7).
For Twitchell the entry for the classical horror film is into sexual repro-
duction and avoidance of incest.
Clover seems, like Twitchell, to stress the scenario of seduction
through the vision of violence as actually an erotic desire. Creed’s posi-
tion is different. She argues that we need a fourth Freudian fantasy
beyond the three of birth, seduction, and castration, and that fourth
fantasy is of death. She suggests that horror films are ‘a mise-en-scéne
of desire – in which desire is for the abject’ (1993, 153–4), desire to
investigate the terrible place where we are going which the monsters
who have already crossed the threshold make manifest.14 Giles’s earlier
work reinforces Creed’s theoretical view by arguing that ‘fantasy is the
mise-en-scene of desire, [but] also produced by the subject’s defenses
against desire’, hence, the contradictory, ‘compromised’ text that is
produced in its ‘revised, “civilized” form’ (1984/1996, 41). What is this
threshold in these films but what adulthood represents: sexuality, yes,
but also its attendant anxieties which are so often coupled with the
vision of death.15 Creed’s view is that we need a fourth scenario of the
fantasy of death for horror films. I would suggest that in the slasher
films, likely viewers conflate the fantasy of seduction with a fantasy of
death, a possibility which Freud (1919/1955) in his later years attended
to so fruitfully in his theories of aggression, the death principle and the
uncanny.16
But beyond this game of transition and fantasy of seduction and
death are the incessant repetition and refusals of closure. Why so much
of this? It seems to me that Neale and Creed have part of the answer to
this. Neale (1981) points out that when a child identifies with an aggres-
sor, the child is identifying with omnipotence, with an adult assumed to
be omnipotent, ideally the mother, even a mother as the phallic mother.
Creed (1993, 10–11) notes, however, that some of these monsters may
not be the phallic woman but the castrating woman.
This is also the possibility with the Final Girl as responding aggressor/
heroine. Thus, when Final Girls take up the battle against the killer, they
offer just such a sadistic position for the spectator: an identification with
the castrating woman.17 Yet, I would point out that in becoming these
aggressors, the Final Girl also becomes non-normal, a monster and,
while adult, contradictorily also associated with the abject, the other
side of ‘now’, a terrible place of loss and death. Ironically, the fantasy of
making the original monster capable of resisting castration, sexual dif-
ference and death is ultimately reassuring.
If such a revulsion from sadistic aggression is part of the answer of
why these films resist closure, another part is the masochism that Clo-
ver emphasizes, and it is that masochism that also explains the anti-
denouement. It is much more pleasurable in this game to investigate but
then stave off closure to the fantasy of death. It may be a mise-en-scéne
of desire, but it also must be defended against. As Peter Brooks suggests
about plots, to have closure is to accept death. Closure provides sadistic

gratification, but it also implies aggression and the end of the pleasures
of masochism. As Clover (1992, 222) mentions (and then forgets), end-
ings sometimes are not as psychically important as middles.18
This anti-denouement strategy pairs well with what the text creates as
the cause for the disorder – the supernatural. This causal thesis provides
the defence for the subject. It is not just me that is not omnipotent; no
mortal could control such a monster – that is its wonder. In fact, cross-
ing over the threshold does not yield death but the undead: a monster,
but one capable of continuing to roam the earth in a scenario of desire
and power, displayed through violence.
Finally, the seriality of the killer overdetermines the anti-denouement.
No one seems to have paid much critical attention to the fact that the
killers are always serial killers.19 They repeat the crime. No killing is suf-
ficient to satiate their desire. It is not just one killing, but violence (read
seduction and its conflated term death) as a repetitive occupation.
Clover writes much about the ambiguity of gendering – of how the
male killer is a feminine male, the Final Girl a masculine female. Moreo-
ver, Clover claims, ‘The helpless child is gendered feminine; the autono-
mous adult or subject is gendered masculine; the passage from childhood
to adulthood entails a shift from feminine to masculine’ (1992, 50). I am
arguing that to avoid the scenario of final death, to continue the mise-
en-scéne of desire, is to delay, to put off complete transition to adult-
hood, to the all-powerful, to sexual activities that then solidify sexual
difference and orientation. To keep the story going is to keep in play
childhood, sexual ambiguity, liminality and, for the viewer, a roller-
coaster of identifications and desires. These slasher movies are not about
growing up, but staying young; of not giving up the fantasies of Santa
Claus, the bogeyman and the undead; of keeping the game in play; of
never finally becoming the adult across the abyss who is subject to the
final acts of, or effects of, violence. As long as the fantasies of desire for
the undead, of passage through and beyond the ravages of violence,
need to be in play, the formula will work. Thus, this is an aesthetic for
young men, for young men, as well as young men, and may help explain
its pleasures for young women as well. These films reassure that we can
walk unharmed through the nightmares of violence.
Notes
I appreciate the response of the audience at the 1995 Society for Cinema Studies
Conference to an earlier draft of this essay.
1 Clover focuses on young men, and Jody Keisner (2008) also argues that these
films are for male viewers. Although at one point Clover begins to question
the dynamics for women, she digresses and does not return to the topic. On
problems with this presumption, see two important studies: Rhona J. Beren-
stein’s (1996) valuable critique of the idea that spectators for horror films are
mostly men and Isabel Cristina Pinedo’s (1997) analysis of the pleasures of
these films for women.
2 I would strongly emphasize that psychoanalysis is not the only way into
these texts.
3 Robin Wood claims repression of incest is the source of Michael’s psychosis
and argues that Dr Loomis’s explanation that Michael is evil is ‘surely the
most extreme instance of Hollywood’s perversion of psychoanalysis into an
instrument of repression’ (1985, 218). James B. Twitchell (1985) goes so far
as to argue that all horror films are about incest (although he considers Hal-
loween a terror film, not horror). We need, I think, to distinguish between the
surface claims of the text and an ideological analysis of the text’s meanings.
I am pointing out here what the text claims. Indeed, all the occult explica-
tions in Halloween and the other films may well be reducible to repression,
but, as I shall suggest below, I agree with Berenstein (1996) that incest is not
the trauma behind every manifest content in the horror or terror film.
4 Although some value exists in looking at these chronologically (and the films
do become intertextual with one another), for ease of comprehension of this
essay, I have redistributed this data to group the three major series that Clo-
ver includes in the subgenre.
5 This seems to be the ‘male’ inversion of the ‘female’ infestation in Clover’s
occult formula. These are not the same formulas, however; the formulas
should be relabelled to acknowledge the supernatural in both. In fact, as
Tudor suggests, a ‘paranoid’ horror seems to dominate in this era, with sci-
entific experts rebuked in favour of supernatural explanations for monsters
(1989, 102–4, 185–224).
6 Kelly Connelly (2007) also discusses that Laurie does not act in a fully
empowered way until Halloween H20 (1998; dir Steve Miner).
7 Several content analysis studies of these films substantiate this. Gloria
Cowen and Margaret O’Brien (1990) report that of the total number of men
and women in 56 films coded, 51 per cent of those attacked were male; 49
per cent were female. However, 90 per cent of the males did not survive
compared with 81 per cent of the females. Cowen and O’Brien conclude that
neither sex was more likely to be victims, but females were more likely to
survive the attack. Cowen and O’Brien’s evidence also supports Clover’s gen-
eralization that the surviving women are ‘more androgynous’. However, sur-
viving men, while not ‘hyper masculine’ (as Clover also asserts), were more
attractive than male non-survivors. This research is supported in the work
of James B. Weaver III (1991) and Fred Molitor and Barry S. Sapolsky (1993).
Molitor and Sapolsky’s work suggests that the coupling of sexual activity and
(subsequent) violence is infrequent in these films, and sexual violence is rare.
8 However, it is not equally clear that Clover’s (1992, 63) cultural claims about
the ridiculing of masculine males and the privileging of masculinity in the
female body still holds. Sarah Trencansky (2001) comes to similar conclu-
sions about 1980s slasher films.
9 Tania Modleski (1986, 160) and Tudor (1989, 94) mention this shock end-
ing. Modleski does not try to explain the phenomenon; Tudor suggests it
is a result of our lack of belief in the success of human intervention (1989,
102–4).
10 Bruce was the crew’s name for the mechanical shark. Also note that this aes-
thetic was part of the 3D horror film of the 1950s.
11 In fact, it may make more sense to divide horror between ‘slasher’ violence
and ‘gore’ violence. ‘Gore’ violence is often (must be?) accompanied by jokes.
Such a division might expand on Carroll’s (1990) approach to the aesthetics
of horror.
12 Carroll (1990, 17–22) notes the physical disfigurement of many monsters,
arguing that the disfigurement constitutes the territory we fear to enter. They
are also excessive linguistically: Michael and Jason as essentially non-verbal;
Freddy is overly verbal, a master of the pun.
13 Continued by the post-early-1990s films; see ‘Ghostface’ in Scream (1996; dir
Wes Craven).
14 This differs from Linda Williams’ (1991) treatment of horror as an instance of
the fantasy of castration. Giles (1984) is also asserting that horror is involved
with the fantasy of castration.
15 Note how sexuality has been habitually tied to death: the ‘petit mort’.
16 Here I want to particularly underline the importance of being more flex-
ible in describing the functions of horror films for spectators. See Berenstein
(1996) on this issue as well as Deirdre D. Johnston (1995), who argues horror
films have at least four different psychological functions for adolescent view-
ers. No single fantasy scenario likely exists for all horror or terror films; no
single fantasy scenario may be operating by itself in any specific formula.
17 Or the phallic woman, depending on how the specific text is constructing
the Final Girl’s aggression.
18 Clover notes that endings are often misremembered and generically over-
determined (1992, 223n). Ironically, Clover has significantly misremembered
the endings to these movies.
19 Moreover, killers create killers. A common conclusion to even the rational
slasher films is the continuation of violence, a cycle of violence, with the
killer passing on through the trauma of the event his/her compulsion to a
child. See Don’t Go in the House (1979; dir Joseph Ellison) and Friday the 13th,
Part 4 (1984; dir Joseph Zito).
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Filmography
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948, USA, dir Charles T. Barton)
Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955, USA, dir Charles Lamont)
Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man, The (1999, USA, dir Scott Trowbridge)
Amityville Horror, The (1979, USA, dir Stuart Rosenberg)
Amityville Horror, The (2005, USA, dir Andrew Douglas)
And Then There Were None (1945, USA, dir Rene Clair)
April Fool’s Day (1986, USA, dir Fred Walton)
Assault on Precinct 13 (1976, USA, dir John Carpenter)
Avengers Assemble [also The Avengers] (2012, USA, dir Joss Whedon)
Bad Boys (1995, USA, dir Michael Bay)
Bad Seed, The (1956, USA, dir Mervyn LeRoy)
Bay, The (2012, USA, dir Barry Levinson)
Bay of Blood, A [also Reazione a Catena, Ecologia del Delitto, or Twitch of the Death
Nerve] (1971, Italy, dir Mario Bava)
Beauty and the Beast (1991, USA, dirs Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise)
Birds, The (1963, USA, dir Alfred Hitchcock)
Black Christmas (1974, Canada, dir Bob Clark)
Black Christmas [also Black Xmas] (2006, USA/Canada, dir Glen Morgan)
Blair Witch Project, The (1999, USA, dirs Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez)
Blood and Black Lace [also Sei donne per l’assassino] (1964, Italy/France/Monaco,
dir Mario Bava)
Blow Out (1981, USA, dir Brian De Palma)
Body Double (1984, USA, dir Brian De Palma)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (The WB, 1997–2001; UPN, 2001–03, USA)
Burning, The (1981, USA/Canada, dir Tony Maylam)
Cabin in the Woods, The (2012, USA, dir Drew Goddard)
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (1919, Germany, dir Robert Wiene)
Campsite Massacre [also The Final Terror] (1983, USA, dir Andrew Davis)
Candyman (1992, USA, dir Bernard Rose)
Cannibal Holocaust (1980, Italy, dir Ruggero Deodato)
Captivity (2001, USA/Russia, dir Roland Joffé)
Carlito’s Way (1993, USA, dir Brian De Palma)
Carrie (1976, USA, dir Brian De Palma)
Carrie (2002, USA, dir David Carson)
Carrie (2013, USA, dir Kimberly Peirce)
Cat and the Canary, The (1939, USA, dir Elliott Nugent)
Cell, The (2000, USA/Germany, dir Tarsem Singh)
Cherry Falls (2000, USA, dir Geoffrey Wright)
Child’s Play (1988, USA, dir Tom Holland)
Chinatown (1974, USA, dir Roman Polanski)
Con Air (1997, USA, dir Simon West)
Cover Girl Killer (1959, UK, dir Terry Bishop)
Craft, The (1996, USA, dir Andrew Fleming)
240
Filmography 241
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS, 2000–Present, USA)

Cube (1997, Canada, dir Vincenzo Natali)
Curse of Chucky (2013, USA, dir Don Mancini)
Dance of the Dead (2008, USA, dir Gregg Bishop)
Dark Knight, The (2008, USA/UK, dir Christopher Nolan)
Dawson’s Creek (The WB, 1998–2003, USA)
Deadly Spawn, The [also Return of the Aliens: The Deadly Spawn] (1983, USA, dir
Douglas McKeown)
Deliverance (1972, USA, dir John Boorman)
Dial M for Murder (1954, USA, dir Alfred Hitchcock)
Diary of the Dead (2007, USA, dir George A. Romero)
Don’t Go in the House (1979, USA, dir Joseph Ellison)
Dracula (1931, USA, dir Tod Browning)
Dracula (1958, UK, dir Terence Fisher)
Dressed to Kill (1980, USA, dir Brian De Palma)
Driller Killer, The (1979, USA, dir Abel Ferrara)
Event, The (NBC, 2010–11, USA)
Evil Dead, The (1981, USA, dir Sam Raimi)
Exorcist, The (1973, USA, dir William Friedkin)
Eyes of a Stranger (1980, USA, dir Ken Wiederhorn)
Eyes of Laura Mars (1978, USA, dir Irvin Kershner)
Eyes Without a Face [also Les Yeux Sans Visage] (1960, France/Italy, dir Georges Franju)
Faculty, The (1998, USA, dir Robert Rodriguez)
Fallen (1998, USA, dir Gregory Hoblit)
Fatal Games [also The Killing Touch] (1982, USA, dir Michael Elliot)
Femme Fatale (2002, France/Switzerland, dir Brian De Palma)
Festen [also The Celebration] (1998, Denmark/ Sweden, dir none credited [Thomas
Vinterberg])
Final Destination (2000, USA/Canada, dir James Wong)
Final Destination, The [also Final Destination 4] (2009, USA, dir David R. Ellis)
Final Destination 2 (2003, USA/Canada, dir David R. Ellis)
Final Destination 3 (2006, Germany/USA/Canada, dir James Wong)
Final Destination 5 (2011, USA/Canada, dir David Quale)
FlashForward (ABC, 2009–10, USA)
Flesh and Blood Show (1972, UK/USA, dir Pete Walker)
Fog, The (1980, USA, dir John Carpenter)
Frailty (2001, USA/Germany, dir Bill Paxton)
Frankenstein (1931, USA, dir James Whale)
Freddy vs. Jason (2003, Canada/USA/Italy, dir Ronny Yu)
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991, USA, dir Rachel Talalay)
French Connection, The (1971, USA, dir William Friedkin)
Friday the 13th (1980, USA, dir Sean S. Cunningham)
Friday the 13th (2009, USA, dir Marcus Nispel)
Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981, USA, dir Steve Miner)
Friday the 13th Part III 3D (1982, USA, dir Steve Miner)
Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter (1984, USA, dir Joseph Zito)
Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985, USA, dir Danny Steinmann)
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988, USA, dir John Carl Buechler)
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989, USA/Canada, dir Rob Hedden)
242 Filmography
Funhouse, The (1981, USA, dir Tobe Hooper)

Fury, The (1978, USA, dir Brian De Palma)
Ghost Adventures (Travel Channel, 2008–Present, USA)
Ghost Ship (2002, USA/Australia, dir Steve Beck)
Godfather, The (1972, USA, dir Francis Ford Coppola)
Gone Girl (2014, USA, dir David Fincher)
Gothika (2003, USA, dir Matthieu Kassovitz)
Graduation Day (1981, USA, dir Herb Freed)
Halloween (1978, USA, dir John Carpenter)
Halloween (2007, USA, dir Rob Zombie)
Halloween II (1981, USA, dir Rick Rosenthal)
Halloween II (2009, USA, dir Rob Zombie)
Halloween III: The Season of the Witch (1982, USA, dir Tommy Lee Wallace)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988, USA, dir Dwight H. Little)
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989, USA, dir Dominique Othenin- Girard)
Halloween 666: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995, USA, dir Joe Chappelle)
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998, USA, dir Steve Miner)
Halloween: Resurrection (2002, USA, dir Rick Rosenthal)
Happy Birthday to Me (1981, Canada, dir J. Lee Thompson)
Happy Endings (2005, USA, dir Don Roos)
Hell Night (1981, USA, dir Tom De Simone)
Hellraiser (1987, UK, dir Clive Barker)
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986, USA, dir John McNaughton)
Hills Have Eyes, The (2005, USA/France, dir Alexandre Aja)
Hitcher, The (1986, USA, dir Robert Harmon)
Hitcher, The (2007, USA, dir Dave Meyers)
Homicide: Life on the Streets (NBC, 1993–99, USA)
Honeymoon Killers, The (1969, USA, dir Leonard Kastle)
Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus, The (1962, France/USA, dir Georges Franju)
Hostel (2005, USA, dir Eli Roth)
Hostel: Part II (2007, USA, dir Eli Roth)
Hostel: Part III (2011, USA, dir Scott Spiegel)
House of Wax (1953, USA, dir Andre De Toth)
House of Wax (2005, Australia/USA, dir Jaume Collet-Serra)
Howling, The (1981, USA, dir Joe Dante)
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997, USA, dir Jim Gillespie)
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998, USA, dir Danny Cannon)
I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006, USA, dir Sylvian White)
I Spit on Your Grave (1978, USA, dir Meir Zarchi)
I Spit on Your Grave (2010, USA, dir Steven R. Monroe)
Identity (2003, USA, dir James Mangold)
In Dreams (1999, USA, dir Neil Jordan)
Innocents, The (1961, USA/UK, dir Jack Clayton)
Iron Man (2008, USA, dir Jon Favreau)
Jason and the Argonauts (1963, UK/USA, dir Don Chaffey)
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993, USA, dir Adam Marcus)
Jason Lives!: Friday the 13th Part VI (1986, USA, dir Tom McLoughlin)
Jason X (2001, USA, dir Jim Isaac)
Jaws (1975, USA, dir Steven Spielberg)
Filmography 243
Jeepers Creepers (2001, Germany/USA, dir Victor Salva)

Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003, USA, dir Victor Salva)
Kids (1995, USA, dir Larry Clark)
Last Week Tonight (HBO, 2014–Present, USA)
Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990, USA, dir Jeff Burr)
Leprechaun (1993, USA, dir Mark Jones)
Leprechaun 4: In Space (1996, USA, dir Brian Trenchard-Smith)
Lion King, The (1994 [3D 2011], USA, dirs Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff)
Lost (ABC, 2004–10, USA)
Lost Highway (1997, France/USA, dir David Lynch)
Lovers Lane (2000, USA, dir Jon Ward)
Man Bites Dog (1994, Belgium, dirs Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoît
Poelvoorde)
Maniac (1980, USA, dir William Lustig)
Maniac (2012, USA, dir Franck Khalfoun)
Memento (2000, USA, dir Christopher Nolan)
Metropolis (1927, Germany, dir Fritz Lang)
My Bloody Valentine (1981, Canada, dir George Mihalka)
My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009, USA, dir Patrick Lussier)
Nashville (1975, USA, dir Robert Altman)
Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy (2010, USA, dirs Daniel Farrands and
Andrew Kasch)
Night of the Creeps (1986, USA, dir Fred Dekker)
Night of the Living Dead (1968, USA, dir George A. Romero)
Nightbreed (1990, USA, dir Clive Barker)
Nightmare on Elm Street, A (1984, USA, dir Wes Craven)
Nightmare on Elm Street, A (2010, USA, dir Samuel Bayer)
Nightmare on Elm Street 2, A: Freddy’s Revenge (1985, USA, dir Jack Sholder)
Nightmare on Elm Street 3, A: Dream Warriors (1987, USA, dir Chuck Russell)
Nightmare on Elm Street 4, A: The Dream Master (1988, USA, dir Renny Harlin)
Nightmare on Elm Street 5, A: The Dream Child (1989, USA, dir Stephen Hopkins)
Nosferatu (1922, Germany, dir F. W. Murnau)
Obsession (1976, USA, dir Brian De Palma)
Old Dark House, The (1932, USA, dir James Whale)
Opera (1987, Italy, dir Dario Argento)
Others, The (2001, USA/Spain/France/Italy, dir Alejandro Amenábar)
Paranormal Activity (2007, USA, dir Oren Peli)
Passion (2012, Germany/France, dir Brian De Palma)
Patrick (1978, Australia, dir Richard Franklin)
Patrick (2013, Australia, dir Mark Hartley)
Peeping Tom (1960, UK, dir Michael Powell)
Person of Interest (CBS, 2011–Present, USA)
Phantom of the Paradise (1974, USA, dir Brian De Palma)
Prom Night (1980, Canada, dir Paul Lynch)
Prom Night (2008, USA/Canada, dir Nelson McCormick)
Psycho (1960, USA, dir Alfred Hitchcock)
Psycho (1998, USA, dir Gus Van Sant)
Rage, The: Carrie 2 (1999, USA, dir Katt Shea)
Raising Cain (1992, USA, dir Brian De Palma)
244 Filmography
Rear Window (1954, USA, dir Alfred Hitchcock)

Red Lights (2012, Spain/USA, dir Rodrigo Cortés)
Rio Bravo (1959, USA, dir Howard Hawks)
Roswell (The WB, 1999–2001; UPN 2001–02, USA)
Saw (2004, USA/Australia, dir James Wan)
Saw II (2005, USA/Canada, dir Darren Lynn Bousman)
Saw III (2006, USA/Canada, dir Darren Lynn Bousman)
Saw IV (2007, USA/Canada, dir Darren Lynn Bousman)
Saw V (2008, USA/Canada, dir David Hackl)
Saw VI (2009, Canada/USA/UK/Australia, dir Kevin Greutert)
Saw 3D/VII: The Final Chapter (2010, Canada/USA, dir Kevin Greutert)
Scary Movie (2000, USA, dir Keenen Ivory Wayans)
Schizoid (1980, USA, dir David Paulsen)
Scream (1996, USA, dir Wes Craven)
Scream 2 (1997, USA, dir Wes Craven)
Seed of Chucky (2004, Romania/USA/UK, dir Don Mancini)
Session 9 (2001, USA, dir Brad Anderson)
Seven [also Se7en] (1995, USA, dir David Fincher)
Sex and the City (HBO, 1998–2004, USA)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943, USA, dir Alfred Hitchcock)
Shining, The (1980, USA/UK, dir Stanley Kubrick)
Shivers [also They Came from Within] (1975, Canada, dir David Cronenberg)
Shocker (see Wes Craven’s Shocker)
Silence of the Lambs, The (1991, USA, dir Jonathan Demme)
Sisters (1973, USA, dir Brian De Palma)
Sixth Sense, The (1999, USA, dir M. Night Shyamalan)
Sleepaway Camp (1983, USA, dir Robert Hiltzik)
Sleepaway Camp 2 (1988, USA, dir Michael A. Simpson)
Slumber Party Massacre, The (1982, USA, dir Amy Jones)
Slumber Party Massacre 2 (1987, USA, dir Deborah Brock)
Smallville (The WB 2001–06; The CW 2006–11, USA)
Sorority House Massacre (1986, USA, dir Carol Frank)
Sorority Row (2009, USA, dir Stewart Hendler)
Spider-Man (2002, USA, dir Sam Raimi)
Stalker (CBS, 2014–Present, USA)
Stepfather, The (1987, UK, dir Joseph Ruben)
Stepfather, The (2009, USA, dir Nelson McCormick)
Stranger, The (1946, USA, dir Orson Welles)
Superman (1978, USA/UK, dir Richard Donner)
Suspiria (1977, Italy, dir Dario Argento)
T2 3D: Battle Across Time (1996, USA, dirs John Bruno, James Cameron and Stan
Winston)
Taking Lives (2004, USA/Australia, dir D. J. Caruso)
Taxi Driver (1976, USA, dir Martin Scorsese)
Terror Train (1980, Canada/USA, dir Roger Spottiswoode)
Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The (1974, USA, dir Tobe Hooper)
Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013, USA, dir John Luessenhop)
Filmography 245
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The (2003, USA, dir Marcus Nispel)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, The (1986, USA, dir Tobe Hooper)
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The: The Beginning (2006, USA, dir Jonathan Liebesman)
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The: The Next Generation (1994, USA, dir Kim Henkel)
Thing, The (1982, USA, dir John Carpenter)
Thing from Another World, The (1951, USA, dir Christian Nyby)
Tower of Evil (1972, UK/USA, dir Jim O’Connolly)
Town that Dreaded Sundown, The (1976, USA, dir Charles B. Pierce)
Train (2008, USA, dir Gideon Raff)
Trash Humpers (2009, USA/UK/France, dir Harmony Korine)
Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990–91, USA)
Twister (1996, USA, dir Jan de Bont)
Urban Legend (1998, USA/France, dir Jamie Blanks)
Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000, USA/France, dir John Ottman)
Valentine (2001, USA, dir Jamie Blanks)
Vertigo (1958, USA, dir Alfred Hitchcock)
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, UK/USA, dir Lynne Ramsay)
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994, USA, dir Wes Craven)
Wes Craven’s Shocker (1989, USA, dir Wes Craven)
When a Stranger Calls (1979, USA, dir Fred Walton)
When a Stranger Calls (2006, USA, dir Simon West)
While the City Sleeps (1956, USA, dir Fritz Lang)
X-Men (2000, USA, dir Bryan Singer)
You’re Next (2011, USA, dir Adam Wingard)
Index
3D, 9, 41, 60, 66 n.6, 113, 117, 122, Black Christmas

140, 228 n.10 (1974), 7, 18, 22, 110
9/11, 149, 196, 200–4, 208–9 (2006) (also Black Xmas), 140
Abbott and Costello Blair Witch Project, The, 195, 202, 204,
Meet Frankenstein, 109 208, 209, 211 n.8
Meet the Mummy, 109 Blanks, Jamie, 10, 11, 82, 92, 99, 100,
advertising, 180, 211 n. 4 101, 103, 113, 140, 170
see also marketing Blood and Black Lace (also Sei donne
adaptation, 132, 134, 139, 140, 141, per l’assassino), 110
143–144, 153, Blow Out, 144 n. 5
Aisenberg, Joseph, 133, 135 Body Double, 144 n. 5, 145 n. 8
Allen, Graham, 150, 153 Booth, Stephen, 3, 4, 5, 14 n. 2
Altman, Rick, 22, 36 n. 9 Bordwell, David, 2, 4, 9–10, 51–52, 53,
Amazing Adventures of 56, 77, 119–120, 132, 137
Spider-Man, The, 66 n. 6 Boreanaz, David, 92–93, 104
Amityville Horror, The, 182 Botting, Fred, 67
And Then There Were None, 68 BoxOfficeMojo, 104
animation, 55, 60 Bracke, Peter, 14 n. 7, 39, 43–44, 49 n.
stop-motion, 58 3, 50 n. 6
April Fool’s Day, 109, 217, 219, 220 Briefel, Aviva and Sianne Ngai, 74
Argento, Dario, 7, 35 n. 2, 68, 109, Bruhm, Steven, 27, 36 n. 10
Assault on Precinct 13, 91 n.4 Buckland, Warren, 119, 120–121, 122,
Austen, Ben, 74 125, 127, 129, 130 n. 2 n. 3
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 95
Bad Boys, 114 Burning, The, 8, 107, 141, 216, 219,
Bad Seed, The, 153, 156 220
Bakhtin, M. M. and P. N. Medvedev,
138, 144 n. 2 Cabin in the Woods, The, 106, 114,
Baldick, Chris, 69 195, 198, 204–207, 209
Baudriallard, Jean, 110, 150, 155 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The, 210 n. 2
Bava, Mario, 7, 8, 110 Campsite Massacre, 108
Bay, The, 204 Candyman, 10, 67–78, 111, 112, 156,
Bay of Blood, A (also Ecologia del 179 n. 8
Delitto or Twitch of the Death Cannibal Holocaust, 208
Nerve), 110, 111 Captivity, 126
Beauty and the Beast 3-D, 66 n. 6 Carlito’s Way, 145 n.8
Benshoff, Harry M., 182–183, 194 n. 5. Carroll, Noël, 2, 141, 213, 228 n. 11
Berenstein, Rhona J., 227 n. 1 n. 3, n. 12
228 n. 16 Carpenter, John,7, 18, 35 n. 2, 64, 69,
Berliner, Todd, 2, 3–4, 38, 48 82, 91 n. 4, 93, 107, 121, 125,
Bersani, Leo, 184, 194 n.3 127–8, 133–4, 150, 156, 161, 165,
Birds, The, 132 174, 197, 199–200, 214
247
248 Index
Carrie Crane, Jonathan, 144 n. 6

(1974 novel), 132–45 Craven, Wes, 9, 10, 36 n. 6, 39, 51, 58,
(1976), 7, 12, 102, 131–145, 159, 59, 69, 82, 83, 92, 107–108, 111,
194 n. 4, 222–223 114, 121, 133, 136, 149, 156, 161,
The Rage: Carrie 2, 137, 139, 140 166, 167, 170, 195, 213, 228
(2002), 137, 139 n. 13
(2013), 12, 131–45 Creed, Barbara, 51, 132, 224–225
Cat and the Canary, The, 68 C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation, 117
Cawelti, John G., 107 Cube, 106, 114, 116
Cell, The, 179 n. 1 Cunningham, Sean S., 8, 14 n. 7, 41,
CGI, see Computer Generated Imagery 44, 64, 69, 107, 156, 169
Chang, Justin, 145 n. 13 Curse of Chucky, see Child’s
Cherry, Brigid, 94 Play – Curse of Chucky
Cherry Falls, 113, 170 Curtis, Jamie Lee, 81–86, 91 n. 2, 156
Child’s Play, 111–12, 141–2, 167,
Curse of Chucky, 140 Dance of the Dead, 137
Seed of Chucky, 140 Dargis, Manohla, 145 n. 13
Chinatown, 144 n. 7 Dark Knight, The, 138
Christensen, Kyle, 51, 166, Dawson’s Creek, 94, 95
Church, David, 89 De Palma, Brian, 7, 12, 102, 131–145,
Clayton III, G. Wickham, 2–3, 14 n. 1, 194 n. 4, 222–3
37–8, 39–40, 49 n. 1 Deadly Spawn, The, 93
Clouser, Charlie, 73 Deliverance, 135–136
Clover, Carol J., 6, 7, 13,17, 18, 20, Dial M for Murder, 145 n. 16
22, 24, 35, 36 n. 11, 47, 50 n. 8, Diary of the Dead, 204
51, 69, 71, 76, 87, 107–8, 133, Dickstein, Morris, 224
141, 144 n. 1, 151–2, 155, 156, Dika, Vera, 6–8, 14 n. 6, 17,
172–3, 179 n. 2, 181–8, 194 n. 2, 18, 34, 51, 57, 107, 144 n. 4, 213,
213–228 222
Cohen, Lawrence D., 135, 145 n.14 Dogma 95 (also Dogme 95), 195, 202,
Collins, Jim, 154, 163, 179 n. 4 204
colour, 3, 5, 35–6 n. 4, 53, 75, 93, Donaldson, L. F., 198
96–105, 151, 198–200, 202 Don’t Go in the House, 228 n. 19
composition, 19–20, 22, 24–28, 30–35, Doty, Alexander, 183
42, 62, 70, 90, 98, 99–100, 139, Dracula
157, 165, 186, 191, 198, 199, 207, (1931 film), 68
208, 207 (1958 film), 158
Computer Generated Imagery (CGI), Dressed to Kill, 144 n. 5, 145 n.9
66 n.7 Driller Killer, The, 9
Con Air, 114 Dyer, Richard, 150, 154
Connelly, Kelly, 87, 91 n. 6, 227 n. 6
Conrich, Ian, 11–12, 68, 106–117 Eagleton, Terry, 3, 5
Cook, David A., 35 n. 1 Ecologia del Delitto, see Bay of Blood, A
Cover Girl Killer, 110 Edmundson, Mark, 125
Cowen, Gloria and Margaret O’Brien, Eikhenbaum, Boris, 131, 144 n. 2
227 n. 7 Elliott-Smith, Darren, 13, 50 n. 8, 194
Craft, The, 93 n. 4
Craig, Pamela and Martin Fradley, Everitt, David, 41–42
153 Event, The, 123
Index 249
Evil Dead, 156 Friday the 13th

Exorcist, The, 4, 18, 143, 144 n. 7, series/franchise, 9, 10, 14 n. 1 n. 7,
156, 157 39–41, 43, 49 n. 1, 59, 65 n. 2, 68,
Eyes of a Stranger, 8, 17, 20–21, 84, 89, 106, 111–114, 122, 125,
27–36 130 n. 4, 170, 179 n. 6, 218–219
Eyes of Laura Mars, 174 (1980), 6, 8, 41, 43, 49–50 n. 4, 64,
Eyes Without a Face (also Les Yeux Sans 69, 107–8, 111, 144 n. 4, 145 n.
Visage and The Horror Chamber of 9, 156–7, 169, 170, 179 n. 6, 217,
Doctor Faustus), 7 221
Part 2, 8, 41, 49–50 n. 4, 107, 111,
fabula, 119–123, 127, 129, 162, 178 217, 221
Faculty, The, 140, 178–179 n. 1 Part III 3–D, 9, 41, 114, 217, 221
Fall of the House of Usher, The, 69 (Part IV:) The Final Chapter, 9, 39,
Fallen, 12–13, 161, 167–172, 174, 175, 40–42, 108, 217, 221, 228 n. 19
176, 179 n. 5 Part V: A New Beginning, 1, 9,
Fangoria, 39, 41, 37–50, 89, 91 n. 8, 194 n. 2, 217,
Fatal Games, 108 221
feminine(ity), 17, 51, 164, 174, Jason Lives!: Part VI, 95, 113,
184–185, 186, 214, 216–217, 222, 165–166, 217, 221
226 Part VII: The New Blood, 113, 145 n.
feminism, 6, 20, 138, 181, 185, 207 10, 217, 221
Femme Fatale, 144 n. 5 Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan,
Festen, 204 113, 210, 217, 221
Final Destination, 11–12, 106, 110, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday,
114–117, 178–179 n. 1 10, 113
Part 2, 114, 115 Jason X, 11, 111
Part 3, 114 (2009), 112–113, 140
Final Girl, Frost, Craig, 187, 188, 191, 192, 194
first-person shot, see point–of–view n. 1
shot Fuchs, Michael, 196, 197
Fischer, Lucy and Marcia Landy, Funhouse, The, 9
Fiske, John, Fury, The, 144 n. 5
flashback, see narrative, non–linear
FlashForward, gaze, 17–18, 20, 24, 26, 32, 42, 73, 164,
Flesh and Blood Show, 166–9, 172, 174–175, 201, 208
Flisfeder, Matthew, 2 male, 17, 174–175, 184, 198, 209
Fog, The, 156 Geaghan, Stephen, 92
formalism (also neoformalism), 1–5, genre, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 17, 18–19,
95, 119 20, 22, 34, 35, 37–8, 41, 43, 45,
found footage, 195, 198, 200–201, 52, 57, 64–5, 67–69, 71, 77–78,
204, 208, 209, 211 n. 3 84, 86, 88–9, 92–95, 97, 99,
Frailty, 13, 161–162, 176–179 107–110, 119, 120–121, 129–130
framing, see composition n. 2 n. 3, 131–138, 141, 143–144,
Frankenstein, 218 144 n. 4 n. 6 n. 7, 149–152, 156,
(1931 film), 156 160, 163, 167, 170, 174, 179
Freddy Vs. Jason, 139 n. 3, 181, 182, 185, 190, 191,
French Connection, The, 4 195–196, 197, 199–200, 202–4,
Freud, Sigmund, 184, 194 n. 3, 209–210, 210 n. 1, 211 n. 6,
224–225 215, 224
250 Index
genre, (continued) 666: The Curse of Michael Myers, 10,

sub, 1, 6–11, 13–14, 14 n. 9, 88, 91 n. 2
38–39, 43, 47, 49, 57, 107–110, H20: 20 Years Later, 11, 81–91, 92,
115, 144 n. 4, 161–4, 167, 170, 140, 227 n. 6
172, 178, 183, 184, 197, 222, 227 Resurrection, 87–9, 91 n. 6
n. 4 (2007), 113, 140
formula, 6, 7, 20, 39, 41, 82, 89, 94, II (2009), 140
132–6, 141, 143, 151, 155, 158, Hantke, Steffen, 57, 85, 194 n. 1,
161, 163, 170, 176, 178, 179 n. Happy Birthday to Me, 8, 107–8, 170
4, 193, 213–8, 222–4, 226–7 n. 5, Happy Endings, 122
228 n. 16 Harryhausen, Ray, 58
Ghost Adventures, 212 n. 13 Hayward, Susan, 153
Ghost Ship, 178–179 n. 1 Heigl, Katherine, 97
Giles, Dennis, 224–5, 228 n. 14 Hell Night, 107, 216, 219, 220
Glass, Philip, 70–1, 73 Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra, 200–1,
Godfather, The, 4 208
Gombrich, E. H., 132, 134 Hellraiser, 111–112, 156
Gone Girl, 136 Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, 179 n.
Gothic, 10, 18, 56, 67–78, 109, 134, 3, 208
190, 197, Hills, Matt, 117, 118
Gothika, 178–9 n. 1 and Steven Jay Schneider, 162–3,
Graduation Day, 107 166, 174, 177
Grand Guignol, 68, 114–5 Hills Have Eyes, The (2006), 180
Grant, Barry Keith, 121, 127, 129 Hitchcock, Alfred, 7, 17, 36 n. 4, 82,
Green, Bruce, 39 107, 132–3, 135, 140, 144 n. 4 n. 5,
Grove, David, 8, 39, 49 n. 3 145 n. 7 n. 16, 151, 172, 197, 214
Hitcher, The (2007), 140
Halloween Homicide: Life on the Streets, 204
series/franchise, 10, 14 n. 9, 59, 64, Honeymoon Killers, The, 7
65 n. 2, 82–3, 89–91, 106, 122–3, Hopgood, Fincina, 211 n. 8
125, Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus, The,
130 n. 4, 170, 218 see Eyes Without a Face
(1978), 6–8, 12, 14 n. 7, 18–20, Hostel
22–4, 26, 28, 30, 33, 35, 35 n. 1, series/franchise, 114
35–6 n. 4, 64, 69, 82, 88, 89, 90, (2005), 96, 106, 126
91 n. 4 n. 5, 93, 107, 108, 110, II, 106
111, 112, 121, 124, 125, 128–129, III, 106
133, 134, 136, 144 n. 4 n. 6, 150, House of Wax
156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 165, (2005)
167, 169, 172, 174, 197, 199–200, Howling, The, 156
214–215, 217, 219, 220, 222, 223, Hutchings, Peter, 108–110, 153,
227 n. 3 184–6
II (1981), 8, 9, 82–9, 90, 217, 219,
220 I Know What You Did Last Summer, 10,
III: The Season of the Witch, 9, 89 14 n. 8, 82–3, 86, 92, 104, 113,
4: The Return of Michael Myers, 89, 140, 170, 195
217, 219–20 I Still Know What You Did Last
5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, 89, Summer, 82, 113, 170
91 n. 2, 217, 218–20 I Spit on Your Grave
Index 251
(1978), 107 4: In Space, 111

(2010), 211 n. 4 Les Yeux Sans Visage, see Eyes Without
Identity, 179 n. 1 a Face
In Dreams, 12–13, 161, 172–6 Levin, Thomas Y., 202–3
incoherence, see narrative, Lion King 3–D, The, 66 n. 6
incoherence Lizardi, Ryan, 181, 186–7, 189, 193,
Innocents, The, 165 194 n. 1
Lord of the Rings, The films,
Jameson, Fredric, 153–5 58–9
Jancovich, Mark, 85, 150, 160 Lost, 123
Jason and the Argonauts, 58 Lost Highway, 120
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, see Lovers Lane, 113
Friday the 13th, Jason Goes to Hell:
The Final Friday Macdonald, Moira, 138
Jason X, see Friday the 13th, Magistrale, Tony, 153, 210 n. 2
Jason X Man Bites Dog, 208, 211 n. 6
Jaws, 7, 223 Manfredini, Harry, 39, 42
Jeepers Creepers Maniac
series/franchise, 106, 114 (1980), 8–9
(2001), 179 n. 1 (2012), 179
Jess-Cooke, Carolyn and Constantine Martin, John Edward, 197
Verevis, 64–5 masculinity, 172, 183–8, 190,
Johnston, Dierdre D., 228 n. 16 194 n. 4, 214, 227 n. 8
Jones, Steve, 14 n. 10, 118–9, 126–8 Maslin, Janet, 43
Jost, François, 18, 34 McCabe, Colin, 2–4
McCarty, John, 6, 14 n. 6
Kael, Pauline, 133 Memento, 120
Kakmi, Dmetri, 133 Metropolis, 210
Keen, Suzanne, 120 Metz, Christian, 23
Keisner, Jody, 196–7, 207, 227 n. 1 Mighall, Robert, 70, 74
Kendrick, James, 59 Miller, Victor, 14 n. 7
Kermode, Mark, 118, 188 Miner, Steve, 8, 9, 11, 41, 81, 84, 92,
Kerswell, J. A., 39, 59, 66 n. 4 107, 140, 227 n. 6
Kids, 204 mise en cadre, 22–35
King, Stephen, 132–5, 139–44 mise-en-scène, 69–70, 73–5, 90, 95,
Knapp, Laurence F., 134 101, 134, 152, 188, 191, 199,
Kolker, Robert, 97 225–6
Kristeva, Julia, 153 Mitchell, Elvis, 92–3
Kuersten, Erich, 188–90, 193 modernism, 9–10, 51–65
Modleski, Tania, 196, 228 n. 9
Lacan, Jacques, 194 n. 3 Molitor, Fred and Barry S. Sapolsky,
Lagier, Luc & Jean-Baptiste Thoret, 227 n. 7
35 n. 2 Monaco, James, 133, 223
Lane, Richard, 155 Morris, Jeremy, 14 n. 10
Last Week Tonight, 212 n. 14 Murphy, Bernice, 165
Lee, Nathan, 181, 194 n. 1 My Bloody Valentine
Leigh, Janet, 81–4, 90 n. 1, 157 (1981), 8–9
Leprechaun 3-D (2009) 113, 140, 180
series/franchise, 111 Mysteries of London, The, 74
252 Index
narrative omnipresence, 23–7, 29, 31, 35, 116,

incoherence, 38, 46–9 125, 141, 167, 172, 203, 206, 225–6
meta–, 10–11, 52, 58, 165 Opera, 109
non–linear, 64, 77, 101, 91 n. 5, Others, The, 68, 93
119–23,127–9, 141–2, 176
perversity, 48–9 Paradise Lost (1667 John Milton
Nashville, 4 Poem), 153
Ndalianis, Angela, 115–116 Paranormal Activity, 197, 205, 209
Neale Stephen (also Steve Neale), Passion, 144 n. 5
19–20, 30, 35, 43, 50 n. 7, 224–5 pathos, 21, 44–5, 48
Nelson, Andrew Patrick, 91 n. 7 Paul, William, 223
Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Peeping Tom, 7, 17, 110, 197, 204
Legacy, 52–60 Perkins, Claire, 83
Newman, Kim, 118, 130 n. 1 Perkins, V. F., 38
Night of the Creeps, 136 Person of Interest, 203
Night of the Living Dead, 121, 206 perversity, see narrative, perversity
Nightbreed, 93 Petridis, Sotiris, 91 n. 3
Nightmare on Elm Street, A Phantom of the Paradise, 132
Series/Franchise, 9–10, 14 n. 9, Phillips, Kendall R., 91 n. 3
51–66, 88, 89, 108, 109, 110, 111, Pinedo, Isabel Cristina, 121–2,
122–123, 124, 125, 130 n. 4, 170, 124–6, 196, 207, 210 n. 1,
218, 219 227 n. 1
(1984), 9, 39, 51, 53, 58, 59, 61–62, Pinkerton, Nick, 68
107–108, 109, 121, 136, 166–167, Pirie, David, 136
170, 175, 217, 221 Poe, Edgar Allan, 57–8, 69, 117, 121,
2: Freddy’s Revenge, 53, 55, 60–61, 136
62, 217, 221 point-of-view shot 8, 19, 68, 72, 157,
3: Dream Warriors, 54, 55, 57–58, 59, 162, 174, 179 n. 7, 191, 200, 201,
61, 62, 63, 66 n. 3 n. 5, 109, 217, 216–217
218, 221 Poole, Benjamin, 117
4: The Dream Master, 55–56, 57, 58, Postmodernism, 12, 83, 109–10,
61, 62, 63, 66 n. 3, 217, 221 149–160, 196
5: The Dream Child, 55, 56, 58, 59, hyper–, 10, 84, 154
61, 62, 66 n. 3, 217, 221 neo–, 11, 195–212
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, Powell, Michael, 7, 17, 110, 197
51, 58, 59–60, 61, 62, 63–64 179 Premature Burial, The, 121
n. 3, 217, 221 Prom Night
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, 10, 58, (1980), 8, 107, 136, 144 n. 4, 156,
83, 213 169–70, 216, 219, 220
(2010), 140 (2008), 113, 137, 140
Nosferatu, 210 n. 2 Propp, Vladimir, 107
Nowell, Richard, 7–8, 35 n. 3, 38, 49 Psycho
n. 3 (1960), xvi, 7, 17, 18, 32,
nudity, see sex 35–36 n. 4, 82–4, 87, 107,
110, 132–7, 140–2, 143, 144 n. 4,
O’Sullivan, Michael, 137–8, 145 n. 13 151, 157–9, 172, 194 n. 1,
Obsession, 132 197, 214–15, 216, 219, 220,
Old Dark House, The, 68 223–4
Oliver Twist, 74 (1998), 140
Index 253
Puppetmaster, 111–2 Part 2, 82, 83, 85, 86, 94–95

puzzle film, 12, 106, 118–30 Part 3, 82, 83, 85, 114
Seed of Chucky, see Child’s Play, Seed of
queer(ing), 13, 53, 180–94, 223 Chucky
aesthetics, 182–3, 186, 188–94 Sei donne per l’assassino, see Blood and
gender, 190 Black Lace
September 11, see 9/11
Raising Cain, 144 n. 5 Session 9, 178–9 n. 1
Rear Window, 35–6 n. 4 Seven (also Se7en), 14 n. 9, 34
Red Lights, 136 sex, 6, 44, 59, 88, 97, 104, 107, 110,
Red Right Hand, 153 133, 151, 155, 158–9, 182–94,
Reifschneider, Matt, 41 196, 198–9, 211 n. 4, 212 n. 15,
Reiser, Klaus, 164, 167, 172 214–5, 216, 218, 219, 220, 222,
Remake, 9, 11–13, 50 n. 3, 91 n. 224–8
4, 112–113, 131–45, 153, 160, –ism, 104–5, 185–6
180–94, 211 n. 4 nudity, 59, 103–4, 110
Rio Bravo, 91 n. 4 –ual repression, 141, 151
Roche, David, 8, 19–20 –ual transgression, 44, 88, 110,
Rockoff, Adam, 6–7, 9, 38–9, 40, 49 n. 151, 184, 204, 214–5
3, 109 Sex and the City, 93–7, 104
Roscoe, Jane, 211 n. 6 Shadow of a Doubt, 144–5 n. 7
and Craig Hight, 198 Shining, The, 134
Roswell, 97 Shklovsky, Victor, 131, 135–6, 144
n. 2
Saw Shivers (also They Came From
series/franchise, 11–12, 96, 106, Within), 121
113–117, 118–130 Shocker, see Wes Craven’s Shocker
(2004), 10, 11, 67–78, 116, 124, 126, Silence of the Lambs, The, 34, 156, 217,
127–128 219, 220
II, 116, 124 Silver, Tim, 39
III, 123, 124 Sipos, Thomas M., 93–5, 99, 101
IV, 123, 125–126 Sisters, 132
V, 123–124, 129 Sixth Sense, The, 120
3-D/ VII: The Final Chapter, Sleepaway Camp, 10, 108
117, 122 Part 2, 217, 219, 220
Scary Movie, 150, 160 Slumber Party Massacre, The, 10, 216,
Schizoid, 141–2 219, 220
Schneider, Steven Jay, 84, 86, 91 n. 3 Part 2, 217, 219, 220
n. 5 Smallville, 139
Sconce, Jeffrey, 97, 162, 179 n. 3 Smith, Claire, 67–8
Scream Sorority Row, 140
Series/Franchise, 10, 12, 82–85, ‘splatter movies’, 6, 14 n. 6,
87, 89, 91 n. 3, 92, 96, 109, 113, 107, 157
149–160, 170, 204 Staiger, Janet, 4–5, 13–14
(1996), 10–11, 12, 36 n. 6, 69, Stalker, 211 n. 7
82–85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91 n. 3, stalker movies, 6–8, 14 n. 6, 17, 51,
92, 94, 95, 96, 104, 133, 136–137, 107, 136, 144 n. 4, 174–5
140, 149–160, 161, 163, 170, 195, Steinmann, Danny, 9, 37, 41–3, 48,
199–200, 228 n. 13 89, 194 n. 2
254 Index
Stepfather, The Twister, 114

(1987), 136 Twitch of the Death Nerve, see Bay of
(2009), 140 Blood, A
Stranger, The, 144–5 n. 7 Twitchell, James, 224–5, 227 n. 3
Strayer, Kirsten, 197 Tynjanov, Jurij, 131
supernatural, 9, 12–3, 29, 33, 39,
67, 82, 89, 111–3, 121, 124–6, Underwood, Tim and Chuck
161–79, 195, 197, 201, 204–5, Miller, 133
208–10, 218, 226, 227 n. 5 Urban Legend, 10, 82–3, 85, 92, 110,
Suspiria, 35 n. 2, 35–6 n. 4, 68, 140, 170
syuzhet, 119–20, 122–3, 127 series/franchise, 109, 113
Urban Legends: Final Cut, 82, 170
T2 3–D: Battle Across Time, 66 n. 6
Taking Lives, 141–2 Valentine, 11, 82, 92–105, 113
Taxi Driver, 3–4 Vertigo, 135
‘Terrible Place’, 69–73, 75, 133, 152, voiceover, 70, 73, 188, 211 n. 7
156–7, 225
Terror Train, 8–9, 107, 156, 169–70, Warwick, Alexandra, 74,
216, 219, 220 We Need to Talk About Kevin, 136
Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The, 7, Weaver III, James B., 187, 227 n. 7
18–19, 50 n. 8, 69, 77, 107–8, 110, Wee, Valerie, 10, 84–5, 88–9, 91 n. 3,
143–5, 156, 180, 214, 216, 219, 94–6, 149–51, 154–5, 160, 170
220, 223 Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, 165
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The, 11, 13, Wells, Paul, 152
139, 180–94 Wes Craven’s Shocker, 111, 167
Part 2, 107–8, 216, 219, 220 Westbrook, Bruce, 91 n. 2
The Next Generation, 136 Wetmore, Kevin J., 149, 196,
The Beginning, 140, 187 211 n. 3
Texas Chainsaw (3D), 140 When a Stranger Calls
They Came From Within (see Shivers) (1979), 8, 20–8, 30, 34–5, 35 n. 3,
Thing, The, 91 n. 4 35–6 n . 4
Thing From Another World, The, (2006), 36 n. 6 n. 10, 140
91 n. 4 While the City Sleeps, 35–36 n. 4
Thompson, Kristin, 2–5, 67, 71, 131 whodunit (also whodunnit), 41–3,
Tietchen, Todd F., 91 n. 3 113, 117, 162, 165, 169–172,
Todorov, Tzvetan, 143 175, 178
Totaro, Donato, 56 Wieand, Dick (Richard), 39
Tower of Evil, 110 Williams, Linda, 17, 51, 228 n. 14
Town that Dreaded Sundown, The, 156 Wishmaster, 111
Train, 96 Wood, Robin, 6, 20, 27, 138,
Trash Humpers, 195–208, 211–12 n. 11 227 n. 3
Trencansky, Sarah, 138, 227 n. 8 Woodward, Adam, 137
Trotsky, Leon, 1–3 Worland, Rick, 10, 121, 126, 150–1,
Tudor, Andrew, 88, 95, 100, 109–10, 153
141, 213–14, 223, 227 n. 5, Wright, Will, 107
228 n. 9
Twin Peaks, 123 You’re Next, 195, 203–8

Wickham Clayton (Eds.) - Style and Form in The Hollywood Slasher Film-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2015)

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List of Figures and Tables ix

Part I The Birth, Death and Revenge of the

Part II Older, Darker and Self-Aware 79

8 The Killer Who Never Was: Complex Storytelling,

Part III Form versus Theory 147

0.1 The Paramount Studios logo from Psycho (1960;

14.1 The formula 216

Stacey Abbott is a reader in Film and Television Studies at the University

Mark Richard Adams received his first-class BA with honours from

Jessica Balanzategui is a doctoral candidate at The University of Mel-

Gary Bettinson lectures in Film Studies at Lancaster University. He has

and several edited collections, including Puzzle Films: Complex Storytell-

Wickham Clayton is a writer and lecturer at the University for the

Ian Conrich is Associate Head of School: Research at the University of

Darren Elliott-Smith is a senior lecturer in Film and Television at

Matthew Freeman is a visiting lecturer in Media and Communication

Andrew Patrick Nelson is Assistant Professor of Film History and Criti-

Dana Och is Lecturer in English and Film Studies at the University of

Fran Pheasant-Kelly is MA Course Leader and Reader in Film and Tel-

Pleasure: New Signifying Practices in Contemporary Cinema’ in Gilad

David Roche is an associate professor at the Université Toulouse Jean

Karra Shimabukuro is a PhD student in British and Irish Literary Studies

Janet Staiger is the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor Emeritus in

Leon Trotsky (1923/1996) once warned of the dangers of formalism. I’d

The style and form . . .

Formalism, sometimes called neo-formalism, is taken from the principles

‘meaning’, even to the point where formalists ignore basic repre-

. . . academic criticism, which would do well to join the ‘pure’

Whether you agree with or even approve of Booth’s damning accu-

is fully dedicated to looking at a decade where Hollywood was produc-

A colleague once accused me of excluding non-dominant, non-

Here, Berliner is appropriating a mode of analysis to understand, as sci-

is condemned as conservative, however, it should be noted that its

Though it is frequently assumed that the Russian Formalists advo-

Furthermore, it is important to point out that, within cognitivism and

. . . of the Hollywood slasher film

significant forbears to the slasher: Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face

The slasher, according to Richard Nowell in his book Blood Money: A

Ultimately, there is still a clear idea of the general narrative template

Shimabukuro demonstrates how these films adhere to these qualities,

This collection aims to help redress the balance of scholarly work on

compiling this collection is to help fill an existing gap in film analysis,

to associate marked but unmotivated point-of-view shots with

Again, then, suspense and aggression are functions of a lack of knowl-

The third section combines these two strategies: potential POV-shots

movies of the 1970s, including Halloween, I have foregrounded the

When a Stranger Calls:

3 Clifford chases Duncan, who escapes.

certain whether she is aware of her older sister’s investigation.7 When a

When a Stranger Calls

rephrased question – ‘Have you checked the children?’ has become

this strategy is borrowed from Halloween, where a mock-POV-shot often

By comparison, Eyes of a Stranger does appear to be, as Robin Wood has

the stable POV-shot through the photographer’s viewfinder [1:55] is, in

the aquarium is a clear instance of zero ocularization that anticipates

interlude is shown, more than ever, to depend on a specific arsenal of