Behind the Mask: Feminist and Historical Analysis on the Slasher
In the past twenty years, feminist, historical, and even social science scholarship has attempted to analyze objections to slashers discussed in part two. Though Ebert and Siskel's accessible arguments and anti-pornography feminist's convergence with the conservative Christian right are seemingly easy targets for liberal academics, not all scholarship dismiss their criticism. In her popular article on female spectator in horror films, Linda Williams advised "we must be deeply indebted to Ebert for identifying and condemning the onslaught of these offense films (and for doing so on public television,)" though she did criticize Ebert's nostalgia for more the more "artistic" horror films of Hollywood's golden age or even more respected contemporary horrors in the late seventies. To Williams, artistic horrors are just as guilty for perpetuating the male gaze and female passivity. For example, just like Laurie in Halloween, the female survivor of the critically acclaimed Psycho is required to have no sexuality, "ignorant of sexual desire altogether."
Siskel and Ebert's critiques had profound effects on how some academics and the general public has come to remember the genre. In his complex, detailed history of seventies film history, historian David A. Cook hyperbolically declared the period's slasher films "the most extreme expression of misogyny in the history of the American cinema."39David Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 237. The critics pushed for greater regulatory control of the genre through the Motion Picture Association of America's rating board, the Classification and Ratings Administration (CARA). According to historian Richard Nowell, himself a major academic defender of slasher films, Siskel and Ebert pushed for CARA to begin labeling the violent and sexually explicit slasher films X-rated, instead of R-rated, thus lessening their appeal to MPAA film distributors and theaters who associated them with pornography. CARA's 1981 chairman Richard D. Heffner stated "many R-rated slasher films of 1979 would have received an X just two years later."41David Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 237. Probably to Siskel and Ebert's delight, Cook noted that the backlash against slasher movies led many newspapers to stop publishing reviews of the films.42David Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 237.
A Limited Backlash
The success of this backlash, however, is limited. For one, reviewers, including Siskel and Ebert until at least 1985, continued to publish and remark on these films in print and television, even if it were just for the reviewers to bring up the now exhaustive debates of the genre and offer their disgust. Though scholars tend to discuss the fall of the slasher by the middle of the decade, the financial successful sequels of more recognizable franchises like Friday the 13th and the introduction of unique environments and characters like in 1984's Nightmare on Elm Street kept the slasher genre alive into the 1990s. Similarly, Ebert and Siskel's efforts to manipulate CARA against the violence in the slasher did not entirely succeed. In 1986, the federal commission on pornography's report to Attorney General Edwin Meese largely ignored violence in favor for pushing for national reforms on the depiction of sex in mainstream films. Though the commission admitted that slasher films "can be harmful," rightwing Christian conservative members, whose main mission was the control of sexual images in mass media, influenced the commission into mainly focusing on sex. Thus, as Chicago Tribune reporter Timothy McNulty described, despite the grisly murders of Leatherface using both a meat hook and a chainsaw to torture and kill his young victims in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, because there is "no sexual explicitness and overt sex is absent, it is assigned an 'R' [restricted] rating instead of 'X' [for adults only]."
Beyond Pornography
McNulty's article informs us of the connection Americans placed between pornography and slasher movies by the mid 1980s. Anti-pornography feminists like Kate MacKinnon might have praised the Meese report as proof of their long held belief that a link existed between sexual violence and pornography. However, their efforts at city anti-porn initiatives were held unconstitutional, a violation of the First Amendment's free speech clause. Other feminist activists and scholars harshly criticized the work of MacKinnon. Lisa Duggan called the anti-pornography campaign a "symbolic substitute for a more diffuse, but more necessary, campaign against the myriad forms of male domination in economic life, in political life, in sexual life." Instead of aligning feminists with racial minority communities to fight for affirmative action or push for greater access to reproductive or lesbian rights, MacKinnon sided with religious conservatives who eventually wanted to co-opt their anti-pornography message with calls for the criminalization of homosexuality and defense of the traditional "family unit."
Ann Snitow (right image) brilliant argued against anti-pornography feminists by laying out the historical oppression of women. She explained that women of the 19th century were actual property of their husbands and experienced silent sexual violence with few avenues of escape. Though it might be easy to think of the depictions of women in 20th century pornography as, in Snitow's words "a defeat," feminists must recognize that "women are flooding into public space. Exploitation, new forms of sexual anomie, backlash, phobic resistance from men, new impediments to women's autonomy are all inevitable." To Snitow, the fact that the public was having discussions on the representation of women is cause for celebration, at least compared to women of previous centuries. It would be difficult to imagine pornography or slasher films not portraying, explicitly or not, some elements of the patriarchal order. Instead of trying to introduce bans on certain depictions, Snitow advised feminist to not "lose heart about our long-term ability to change the state, nurture our own institutions and protect ourselves without restricting ourselves."
Some horror film historians have sought evaluate whether Siskel and Ebert are correct about these films presenting a backlash to the women's movement. During the "Sneak Previews" special, Siskel asserted that the dominant image of the slasher genre is "a woman in abject terror." To horror historians like David Konow, the intentions of the filmmakers are important. Through his extensive interviews with a variety of slasher films' production teams, Konow discovered filmmakers had no plans to make misogynistic movies. According to Friday the 13th director Sean Cunningham, "[the movie] certainly wasn't trying to demean women. We killed democratically." Historians and even some psychologists back Cunningham's claim about the relatively evenness in the death toll of slashers. In a 1990 study, psychologists Gloria Cowan and Margaret O'Brien coded fifty-six slashers and reported that women were not more likely to die nor less likely to survive in slasher movies. However, as Ebert and Siskel discussed, whether or not one engaged in sexual activity is the main determinant to survival. Interestingly, Cowan and O'Brien differentiated slasher films from pornography. While pornography "supports the rape myths that women enjoy and elicit sexual abuse. In slasher films, sexual abuse by the male partner appears to be relatively rare and the implication that women desire and enjoy rape is not the message."
Historians like Richard Nowell and Adam Rockoff believed this revelation of equality in deaths and displays of brutality towards men largely eliminated any need for feminist inquiry into slasher content. "I refuse to believe," Rockoff professed, "that [slasher filmmakers] sat around discussing psychosexual paradigms . . . [death in the slasher] is a unisex curiosity." To be sure, gender scholars like Vera Dika did not ignore the violence directed toward men in the slasher film. To the contrary, in her discussion of Friday the 13th, Dika was mindful that filmmakers attempted to "be fair and nonsexist" in their equal death representation between men and women. Dika even applauded the filmmakers for their exclusion of sexual stereotypes in the film and praised the "relaxed, friendly supportive air [that] pervades" the encounters of the men and women at Camp Crystal Lake. Still, to these same scholars, the deaths of men and women were not portrayed in the same manner. Dika explained that the men in Friday the 13th usually died quickly and without the humiliating struggles often endured by the women.
Horror's Diversity
Lastly, Siskel and Ebert's obsession with lumping all horror films that share elements of part one into a single category,slashers, erases some major differences between the films. During their "Sneak Previews" special, the critics saved special disgust for a 1978 rape revenge film, I Spit On Your Grave. The controversial film depicted a young woman, Jennifer, verbally harassed by a group of men throughout much of the early part of the movie until she is brutally gang raped in the woods. The second half of the film showed the same woman killing off her attackers one by one in clever manners, either by surprise or by seducing them, sometimes through castration. Siskel and Ebert presented their "Sneak Previews" audience a clip from an early scene where Jennifer sunbathed quietly on a boat alone until her soon to be rapists circle her while in their speedboat while hooting and whistling. Granted, the critics could not show any of the most gruesome aspects of the film since their show was on television, but they make no mention of Jennifer's later revenge tactics or how this film differs greatly from other women-in-danger films. This is not to suggest rape revenge pictures are in anyway feminist films. As feminist scholar Barbara Creed noted, revenge scenes are often eroticized. Jennifer "is monstrous because she castrates, or kills, the male during coition." The rapes of women in rape revenge films (as opposed to the revenge killings they administer) are much longer in duration and highly more pornographic.
Others scholars took issue with Ebert's claim that the films allow for no substantial thought provocation on behalf of the presumably adolescent viewers. Some scholars noted that themes of family and suburbia as particularly challenging to the viewers. Pat Gill explored the family dynamics of slasher films, noting that they are reflections of discontent among the children of baby boomers within the United States. Gill commented on how the common setting of the slasher, the suburban town, is reminiscent of television shows in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the films themselves "seem to delight in undoing the happy domestic scenes and comfortable, safe communities of that television era, replacing them with vapid or nasty family encounters." Despite Ebert's belief that slashers were inherently dull and inartistic, they may offer the young viewer an escape from authority figures common in their lives, like over protective parents, police officers, etc. Scholar Tony Williams agreed that Ebert and Siskel did not give the viewers more credit as active participants. Like Konow, Williams believed intentions are important; he cited Wes Craven's belief that horror films were a "boot camp for the psyche." Just like the setting allowed viewers to challenge their role in society, the villains of the slasher represented the malignant actors in their lives. According to Craven, Freddy Krueger was a "paradigm of the threatening adult: the savage side of male adulthood, the ultimate bad father."