Trying to Kill the Boogeyman: Objections to the Slasher
Siskel and Ebert
In September 1980, Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times hosted a special edition of their regularly syndicated movie critic show "Sneak Previews" about "a disturbing new trend at the movie box-office" which they labeled "women in danger films."20Quotes from Ebert and Siskel’s September 1980 special edition “Sneak Peak” The critics objected to depictions of women being, to Gene Siskel at least, constantly raped, tortured, and killed in these films which were released, as they said, on a weekly basis. Ebert decried the portrayal of women as "helpless victims" and lamented that all of these films "fall into the same pattern," giving a rather concise description of the common elements of the slasher previously outlined.
Though horror scholars have tended to analyze Roger Ebert's complaints about the slasher genre (and this analysis is no exception), it is in many ways important not to overlook Gene Siskel's important critique. Siskel suggested that women-in-danger films constituted Hollywood filmmaker's response to the growing feminist movement in the United States in the late 1970s. "A lot of people think that the battle has been won in Hollywood on films about women," Siskel explained, "they think that now women have parity with men; that there are strong women images in film . . . they got it all wrong." As Siskel elaborated, popular films in the late seventies that depicted strong female leads (he cited films starring Jill Clayburgh or Jane Fonda) were not the norm. Clayburgh and Fonda's depictions were lost among the weekly releases of the slasher films, which showed, as Siskel saw it, "the dominant image of women today . . . cowering in the corner, knives being brandished in their faces, being raped,to being sliced apart." Siskel theorized that the negative representation of women in the slasher films was in large part due to "the growth of the women's movement in America in the last decade." He continued:
I think that these films are some sort of primordial response by some very sick people, of men saying 'get back in your place women. These women in these films are typically portrayed as independent, as enjoying life and the killer typically, not all the time but most often, is a man who is sexually frustrated with these new aggressive women and so he strikes back at them. He throws knives at them. He can't deal with them. He cuts them up. He kills them. Get back in your place. It's against the women's movement.
Porn, Feminism, and Censorship
By the late 1970s, feminist objections to female representation in film were largely centered on pornography. However, scholars often point to a 1976 pornographic slasher as the catalyst to the feminist anti-pornography movement eventually spearheaded by Kate MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Husband and wife filmmaking team Michael and Roberta Findlay produced Snuff, sometimes classified as a sexploitation film but with several elements tied to the American slasher formula. This slasher film gained notoriety for its alleged inclusion of a real videotaped murder of a young woman. Though this claim was eventually revealed to be a hoax, the film encountered major box office success in cities like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. The mixture of violence and overt sex acts, far more than the typical slasher film and most definitely at a greater scale than respected slashers like Halloween, made Snuff particularly controversial. Feminist film scholar Linda Williams called this difference a "generic confusion between horror and hardcore."21David Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 31. Women's historian Ruth Rosen acknowledged the centrality of feminists fighting against pornography. Responding to activists like Robin Moran who famously proposed, "pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice," slasher films were obvious and logical extensions of blatant pornography for feminist activists to target. After all, "the cultural dehumanization of the female body was a precondition for and invitation to commit violence against women," a position that Rosen explained gained popularity among many second-wave feminists throughout the 1980s.22Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 191.
Gene Siskel did not explicitly endorse the idea that viewers could be inspired to commit sexual violence against women by watching slasher films. "I know a lot of people are wondering, 'Well you know, people are going to see this film and imitate the behavior.' Some people may, I don't know." Offhandedly, however, Siskel suggested that a possible way for the public to combat the release of women-in-danger films was through censorship. " I worry then," he continues, "about this idea which is that when you view women constantly as sport, being stabbed, I think that is a sort of sick notion . . . You know, they outlawed bullfighting because it was cruel. I almost have some of the same kind of feelings towards these movies."
Film censorship became a major goal for anti-porn feminists in the early 1980s. During this time, the organization Women Against Pornography (WAP) pushed passage of ordinances linking pornography with sex discrimination in Indianapolis and other major American cities.23Lisa Duggan, "Censorship in the Name of Feminism" in Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995) 62. To some of these feminists, the issue of pornography and sexualized portrayals of women in the movie industry were of paramount importance. In Only Words, Kate MacKinnon proposed, "the representation of violence against women was as dangerous as actual violence itself."24Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 192. Duggan comprehended that, with MacKinnon's controversial viewpoint in mind, it made sense for the WAP to target not just slasher films but all pornographic images, the same endeavor "cultural reactionaries have tried to outlaw for more than a century."25Lisa Duggan, "Censorship in the Name of Feminism" in Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995) 64. This expansive agenda allowed for MacKinnon to ally with groups not typically associated with feminist causes, like the Moral Majority, the Republican Party and right-wing fundamentalists, ancestors to the same ideology held by Duggan's "cultural reactionaries."26Lisa Duggan, "Censorship in the Name of Feminism" in Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995) 62. Other feminists did not universally accept this alliance; as discussed in part three, some feminist theorists correctly predicted the alliance might show feminist support for anti-gay or anti-ERA positions advocated by the religious right during the resurgence of mainstream conservatism under President Ronald Reagan.
Point of View: Through the Eyes of a Killer
Similar to MacKinnon's critique, Ebert's objections essentially centered on the ability for the audience to identify with the killer in slasher films, particularly through point-of-view (POV) shots made by the camera. Though POV shots were nothing new to cinema and horror in particular (think of the opening scene of Spielberg's Jaws), Ebert rightfully claimed that their use was transformed and extensively used in slasher films. To Ebert, the fact that the audience member often brutalizes women through the eyes of a killer, slasher films "had the effect of transferring 'the lust to kill and rape psychologically at least to the audience."21David Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 237. During the "Sneak Previews" special, Ebert showed a scene from Denny Harris's 1980 Silent Scream and the opening scene of Friday the 13th to help explain the concept of the POV to viewers. In defense of Harris, the Silent Scream example was not perfect. Unless the killer had some ability to see his upper body from behind him, the POV is slightly misrepresented; Ebert had plenty of other examples he could have chosen and it seems odd that he was sloppy with his instructional selection.
Siskel and Ebert made a point to discuss how they differentiated "pretty good" horror movies, like Halloween from "sleaze bucket movies" of the slasher cycle. Both critics applauded the use of Laurie's POV in the famous closet scene, where Jamie Lee Curtis's final girl character appeared smart and, as Clover put it" "watchful to the point of paranoia . . . Laurie even at her most desperate, cornered in a closet, has the wit to grab a hanger from the rack and bend it into a weapon." Oddly, Ebert made no mention of the famous opening scene of Halloween. The films opened with a view of the front of large suburban house. Only until the camera moved forward, lurked around the home, and peaked through the windows did the audience become aware of their position in POV shot. More explicitly, the killer eventually entered the home, picked up a clowns mask from the floor, and put the mask on his face, with the camera lens now defining the position of the future killer's eyes through the mask. The killer, revealed later to be a six-year-old Michael Meyers, eventually kills his naked sister upstairs. Rockoff dismissed Clover and other's attention toopening shot in Halloween. "The audience never really feels as if they are the killer," Rockoff justified. "Rather, Carpenter is just showing the murder from a different, albeit more personal perspective." In the TV special, Siskel identified with solely Laurie after his viewing of the Halloween clips. "When I saw that scene," Siskel recalled, " I wasn't really worrying about the woman as much as I was placing myself in that closet and thinking about that killer, how I would handle it." In other words, as Ebert emphasized, "Halloween does not hate women."
Explore Siskel and Ebert's views on their show Sneak Previews, recorded on September 18, 1980
Both Siskel and Ebert indirectly embraced a classic psychoanalytic model of film viewing in their discussion of their displeasure of the slasher film in the early 1980s. In her famous article Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey discussed how Hollywood films have more often than not reflected "a male gaze," the ability for the male spectator to erotically gaze upon women in the cinema. If men are the lookers, women are given a passive role. "In their traditional exhibitionist role," Mulvey explained, "women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness." Summing up Mulvey, feminist scholar Linda Williams contended that because the male gaze is so prominent in Hollywood movies, the female viewer could receive no pleasure at the cinema; "she exists only to be looked at." On the surface, this would not seem like a pressing issue for slasher films, as their target audience has been interpreted to consist of mostly boys. While scholars like Clover admitted the difficulty in analyzing the exact demographic makeup of slasher film viewership and acknowledged sometimes diverse groups in attendance at late seventies movie houses (groups of teenage girls, couples, etc.), they usually did not question the prevailing wisdom of the slasher's appeal to males. "Certainly boys are the unmistakable target audience of horror fanzines," Clover declared, after interviewing over sixty video rental store employees.
Corruption of the Innocent
Though Siskel discussed his disgust at seeing young, presumably heterosexual couples paying to watch slasher films at the movies week after week, both critics attacked what slasher films represented to men and boys. Ebert lamented having to attend regular movie theaters with everyday people to review slasher films since, unlike mainstream films, studios producing slashers did not offer private, select screenings for newspaper reviewers. Ebert's objections also seemed to have a generational bent. Unlike the classic horror films of his childhood, with vampires, monsters, and the like, slasher films provided a limited plot and taught young people "that the primary function of teenagers is to be hacked to death."
Ebert opened his review of the second installment of Friday the 13th telling his Chicago and national readers how he went to the late show at his hometown theater in Champaign-Urbana for a late night screening. "The late show was half-filled with high school and college students, and as the lights went down I experienced a brief wave of nostalgia . . . My nostalgia lasted for the first two minutes." Ebert expectedly listed his usual objections to the plot and violence of the slasher. He applauded typical horror film scares (cats jumping out) but decried over the top violence (ice picks through a woman's skull). The audience in the theater with him, however, had a different reaction. They loved the film, hooting and whistling at the sight of attractive women on the screen and even chanting "We want boobs!" at the sight of a girl undressing. Ebert ended his review with a postscript, which declared this review of Friday the 13th ' 's sequel adequate for any other film in the franchise. Ironically, Ebert reviewed Friday the 13thPart V: A New Beginning in 1985 on "Sneak Peak." Again, his complaints were generationally driven. Teenagers who go to slashers are in "absolutely no danger that they will be required to think, imagine, or experience delight, or joy, or self discovery. All that will be required from them is to look at a lot of dead teenagers . . . Teenagers going to a dead-teenager-movie are equivalent to horses going to the glue factory."