Victimhood and Villainy

The mouthwatering aroma of popcorn lingering in the air and bright red Coca-Cola signs beckon moviegoers and lure them to the counter to spend their hard-earned dollars on a bucket and soda. The patrons shuffle into their theater and find a seat, plush red and comfy. Perhaps they are seeing a scary movie and their heart beats faster in anticipation, muscles tensing, ready for the knife to drop, and when it does, popcorn is jostled and spills onto the floor accompanied by the simultaneous screaming of the audience and the unlucky victim onscreen. This is the cinema, a favorite pastime of many Americans.

One of the ways we connect with one another is by going to the movies, experiencing the film together, discussing the highs and lows after, seeking film reviews from Rotten Tomatoes or Jeremy Jahns on YouTube. Amongst all the laughs, cries, screams, and edge-of-your-seat moments, have you ever considered what kind of history lives beneath our favorite movies? The cinema has left its mark on our world and it continues to make an impact today. It influences how we see the world and how other nations view us. Television and films diffuse to audiences a sense of the culture that produced them, as well as general impressions and stereotypes. Movies also send messages and make arguments to their native audience. One such message prevalent in the 1980s used the slasher subgenre of horror to push the importance of traditional values and morality. Horror films are often used as a backdrop for battling viewpoints and reflect the political attitudes of the time.

For years, critics dismissed the horror genre, equating it to pornography and considering it a lowbrow, cheap form of entertainment befitting of teens, young adults, and children sneaking glances of the television after their bedtime. However, a group of scholars that emerged in the 80s and 90s began to take the horror genre more seriously. These scholars, primarily women, analyzed the horror film with a feminist lens, examining the constructions of gender and representations of women in the genre. Some prominent voices of this movement were film theorists Linda Williams, Barbara Creed, and Carol J. Clover. These pioneering scholars were influenced by the Freudian theory of the castrated woman, psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject and the maternal, and by film theorist and philosopher Noel Carroll’s theory of horrific appeal. Scholars Barbara Creed, Tony Williams, Dominic Lennard, and others also began to scrutinize gender through the scope of representations of family and children in horror films. In some instances, these various scholars disagree with each other, but there are also plenty of agreements.

In Linda Williams’ article, “When the Woman Looks,” she discusses the various “gazes” in horror films and what they might mean. L. Williams argues that the monster in horror films is a nightmarish reflection of the woman. The man’s look of fear is from fear of that which is different. While woman’s look of fear is the same as the man’s, it also is from fear of the distorted view of herself that she is seeing. Regarding the ‘80s slasher film, some had claimed it was more progressive than past horror subgenres because it portrayed women as having sexual freedom, however, L. Williams explains that the woman is then punished for it. The audience is given the point of view (POV) of the faceless force, the killer, so that the only thing actually horrific is the mutilation of the woman’s body, effectually making the woman the monster.

Carol J. Clover disagrees with L. Williams’ argument. In Clover’s monograph, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, she claims that audiences are given both the POV of the villain and the victim. More than that, she postulates that male audiences are meant to, and do, relate to on-screen females. The emergence of the “Final Girl” or “victim-heroes” might even signal a change in our culture towards being more progressive. The “Final Girl” referred to here is the last surviving victim, almost always female, who ends up killing the psycho killer in slasher films. Linda Williams would dispute this by qualifying that the Final Girl is always the virginal “good girl” and she survives because of this quality, while all her “sinful” friends were punished with death and maiming.

Barbara Creed also does an in-depth study on the representations of gender in film but through a slightly different scope. Creed explains in her monograph, Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, that scholarship has focused only on woman as victim and never on woman as monster. Creed has two approaches to her monstrous-feminine: one through Julia Kristeva’s theory of the Abject and the Maternal, and the second is through Freud’s theory of the castrated woman. Using Kristeva’s theory, Creed identifies five faces of the monstrous-feminine used in horror film: the archaic mother, as in the Xenomorph face-huggers and the male human host-bodies in Alien (1979); the monstrous womb, like Nola in The Brood (1979); the possessed monster, such as Reagan in The Exorcist (1973); the vampire, like Miriam in The Hunger (1983); and the witch, as in Carrie from Carrie (1976). Creed explains here that when the woman is represented as monstrous, it is in relation to her mothering or reproductive functions. Utilizing Freud’s theory, Creed outlines three ways audiences see woman as castrator: Femme Castratrice such as Thana from Ms 45 (1981); the castrating mother, like Ms. Voorhees in Friday the 13th (1980); and the vagina dentata, which has many links, but a common one being the mouths of vampires, like Amy Peterson in Fight Night (1985). In argument with Freud’s theory that women are monstrous because they appear to be castrated, Creed is saying that men’s fear of castration had constructed the monstrous woman as a castrator. When women are represented as monstrous in this context, it is concerning questions of female sexual desire.

This vein of scholarship culminated in 1994 at the Scary Women Symposium hosted at UCLA. Scholars Rhona Berenstein, Vivian Sobchack, Linda Williams, and Barbara Creed spoke at this conference. Berenstein discussed the “ghosting” of lesbianism in films and used The Uninvited (1944) as an example of this. Ghosting in this instance is both literal and metaphorical. The lesbian feelings are manifested as a ghost and the lesbianism is sometimes obvious and other times not apparent. Vivian Sobchack examined the terror of the “aging woman” in horror films of the 1950s. The aging woman, who is typically middle-aged and alcoholic, is linked to fears of alienation, lovelessness, and not being able to hold yourself together in the literal sense as well as the metaphorical sense. She is also abject internally and externally. Internally, the body is physically changing and transforming into a “monster”, and there is a sense that the “true self” is hidden somewhere within. The outside presents the ego, society, and men dismissing her.

Linda Williams used Psycho (1960) to discuss the discipline that audiences had to learn, and the femininity of fear and screaming. When Psycho came out, Hitchcock stressed to audiences and movie theater staff that no one was to be admitted to the film after it had begun. Before Psycho, no one worried about movie times or getting to the theater at the start of the performance, and everyone was simply admitted when they got there. Audiences had to learn to look up movie times and get there in a timely manner, and they had to learn not to spoil the movie’s secrets to others. More than that, however, Psycho taught audiences how to scream. The film “punished” audiences for getting so sucked into the plot by using intrusive camera angles. Women hid their faces and men became stiff, in an attempt to remain stoic and masculine while screaming and cowering were marked as feminine. Over time, women became emboldened to look and men became emboldened to react at looking. Spectators began to embrace new ways of reacting in the name of entertainment; performances of fear became a part of the film and a way of enjoying the film together as an audience.

Barbara Creed discussed images of female monstrosity and focused specifically on the “castrating woman.” She used Basic Instinct (1992) and the male-bondage pornographic film Lashes as an example of this trope. Creed explained that the castrating woman, the all-consuming woman, was both dangerous and alluring to audiences. While fearing her, audiences also covet her. She uses this as a platform to make a larger claim: horror challenges gender representations. The castrating woman and the phallic woman both subvert traditional male-female relationships.

After this trend in feminist theory and looking specifically at representations of women in horror films, other scholars took to examining family dynamics and representations of children in the genre. Tony Williams, for example, discusses the family in his article “Trying to Survive on the Darker Side: 1980s Family Horror.” He engages in Clover’s idea of the Final Girl but disagrees with her on the extent to which the victim-hero is a progressive figure. After the events of the slasher film, audience members see the breakdown of their would-be hero, as she succumbs to madness and trauma, and is hauled off to the hospital or insane asylum. She too is in a sense killed by the ax-wielding maniac. He then claims that horror films, particularly the slasher, are essentially a dysfunctional family, headed by the faceless force, or father-figure, enforcing a return to the patriarchal order and punishing women (“his children”) for their immoral actions. T. Williams asserts that until the genre is free from the entanglement of “family values,” horror films will not ever be completely progressive. Creed also takes a look in the territory, focusing more closely on the role of little girls.

In Creed’s article “Baby Bitches from Hell: Monstrous Little Women in Film,” she examines why little girls are so often depicted in horror films. She argues that it is because they are considered innocent by American audiences, that they are at extreme risk for corruption. Little girls’ innocence makes them more susceptible to it, and this corruption of such a perfectly innocent child makes her transformation all the more disturbing and impactful. Because of American’s cultural understanding of little girls, their marring makes for a more horrific plot. Dominic Lennard also considers children in the horror film, specifically their villainy.

In his book, Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors: The Child Villains of Horror Film, Lennard delves into depictions of child villains in the genre. Lennard argues that child villainy in horror exposes adult fears and resentments of children and children’s culture. Adults control the world of the child; however, horror makes this world dark, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. He also talks about the child’s gaze as threatening to adult power, such as in Village of the Damned (1960) or the beginning of Halloween (1978) where Michael Myers kills his sister. Lennard also uses Child’s Play (1988) to discuss adult resentment of children's consumer culture. Child villainy in horror films depicts childhood and adulthood as opposing forces and Lennard argues that this reveals the fundamental anxiety around children usurping adults.

From October 2019 to April 2020, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles had an exhibit called the “Science of Scary” that looked at some of Universal’s most famous movie monsters and their real-world inspiration. The Universal monsters of the 1930s and ‘40s are some of the most famous horror monsters of all time. During the Great Depression, the movies were an escape from the turmoil of the real world. The ‘30s and ‘40s were the era of the sympathetic monster; these movies highlighted a fear of alienation from civil society. In the ‘50s, sympathy for monsters all but disappeared and the “Red” monster rampaged on screen. Because of the Red Scare, monsters had no human qualities, they were giant insects or space invaders. These monsters were grotesque and the only way they could enter society was to invade it, they were based on the fear of communist invasion and a threat to the “American Dream.”

Then, the 1960s and ‘70s brought with them rapid change: the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and the women’s movement. With this atmosphere of change, different types of people were being formed – beatniks and hippies, feminists and black panthers. The Rolling Stones played, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” and it became an anthem for these agents of change. This was the era of the politically charged horror film, where social commentary was in every scare. Critics had considered it a renaissance, or golden era of the horror genre. Then, in 1980, Reagan was elected president and American politics swung back to conservativism.

In 1984, Madonna sang “Material Girl,” encapsulating the transformation of American society and culture, from being warriors of justice and equality to feeling at home in a mall, shopping for creature comforts. While critics reveled in the politically charged horror films of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the films that were being produced in the ‘80s were considered the death of the horror genre. Critics thought that these “chop shop” films had no deeper meaning behind them other than sensationalism churned out for more money. However, that view was short-sighted. Besides the fact that every horror film was made with the main goal of earning money, each film has something deeper to say, whether intentional or not.

But what were these new horror films of the ‘80s? They went by many names, but the one that stuck was “slasher.” In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock shocked the world with his film, Psycho. Psycho is about mama’s boy, Norman Bates, who dresses up as his mother and kills women that come to stay at their family motel, “Bates Motel.” These victims are attractive women who he finds alluring. Because of his attraction, his “mother” gets angry and kills these women for seducing her son. Psycho laid the foundations for the future slasher subgenre. It was so shocking to audiences because it killed off what audiences thought to be the main character, played by well-known actress Janet Leigh. Psycho had a human monster – Norman Bates – and it had a body count of 2 with past murders mentioned. Although the body count was low and the bloodshed kept to a minimum, Psycho punished women for their sins. Janet Leigh’s character was having premarital sex and was stealing a large sum of money from her trusting boss. While she had decided to return the money, it was too late. She had sinned and was destined to die from the moment the movie began. An all-too-human monster, a body count, punishment for immorality, a weapon that stabs rather than shoots, these are all markers of the future slasher subgenre. And it just so happens that Janet Leigh is future scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis’ mother, who will go on to star in one of the first slasher films, 1978’s Halloween.

What sets the slasher subgenre apart from other subgenres of horror? Horror before the slasher fixated on creatures, monsters, cryptids. The Universal monsters were Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), The Wolf Man (1941), The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and so on. Then, films shifted to types of monsters – vampires, werewolves, aquatic monsters, and zombies, among others. Fear was centered on these cryptids. Enter, then, the 1980s slasher, where humans were the monster. Fear shifted away from the monster, in this case, the crazed psycho-killer, and onto the actions of the crazed psycho-killer, creating fear that focused on what the monster was going to do.

In horror before the ‘80s, blood and gore were minimal. The most horrific deaths were implied off-screen. In Psycho’s famous shower scene, the blood was chocolate syrup washing down the drain. The ‘80s ramped up the gore, thanks to more intelligent special effects. Like most things in the ‘80s, blood and gore were excess, it was spectacle. Previously, the payoff was the revealing shot of the monster; in slashers, the payoff was the grotesque, butchered bodies of the amoral teens. The dead and dying bodies of victims were where the real horror was (see fig. 1). Just as fear shifted from the monster to the act of killing and maiming, the villains shifted too.

At first glance, it is easy to say that the villain and the monster were one and the same – the crazed psycho-killer. However, upon further examination that is not the case; the killer’s victims were the villains. The audience was meant to cheer as the hedonistic young adults and teens who were having premarital sex, doing drugs, and drinking alcohol were being slaughtered. When the killer is given a motivation, it is never his or her fault, it is always the group of teens themselves who gave the killer some deformity or scorned them in some way, or it is the killer’s overbearing, abusive mother, such as Creed’s phallic mother, exemplified by Norman Bates’ mother in Psycho. It is important to note here, that it is nearly always the mother and not the father at fault in this scenario.

Film critic Robin Wood, in his book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, discusses the return of the repressed: “Insofar as horror films are typical manifestations of our culture, the dominant designation of the monster must necessarily be evil: what is repressed (in the individual, in the culture) must always return as a threat, perceived by the consciousness as ugly, terrible, obscene.” The monster in any given horror movie is metaphorically what that society is repressing. In the slasher, we have something unique. According to T. Williams’ theory that the characters in a slasher are a dysfunctional family, the killer is a father-figure punishing his children for their indiscretions. As Freddy Krueger says in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985), “You’re all my children now.” This monster is the repression of patriarchal values in the ‘60s and ‘70s. But in the slasher, the killer is not the monster, the victims of his blade are. If these teens and their chopped-up bodies are the monster, then what is being repressed in ‘80s society is sexual freedom, particularly of women, liberation, and the hedonism of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

The slasher gives us insight into the ideal gender roles, family values, and ideas of morality that conservative Americans held in the 1980s. The slasher film was reactionary to the liberal culture that dominated the prior two decades. The killer was symbolic of a father figure, regardless of mask or gender, and the young adult victims were deviant children that the father-figure was reining in via punishment. The killer was reinforcing family values that were rooted in patriarchal ideals. While filmmakers may not have subscribed to conservative principles, the slasher framework was a product of conservative beliefs. The general formula of the slasher was a killer hunting young adults, killing them in creative ways one by one. Popular instruments of death were strangulation, knives, other yard-work tools, spears—anything that bludgeoned, strangled, or stabbed. Guns were never a weapon of choice by the killer and when he was shot, as he so often was by victims or police, bullets generally had no lasting effects. The films Halloween (1978), Sleepaway Camp (1983), and The Stepfather (1987) support these claims.

Halloween (1978) begins in 1963 on Halloween day, in Haddonfield, Illinois. The audience is made a voyeur as they watch teenage Judith Myers (Sandy Johnson) making out with her boyfriend (David Kyle) on the family couch. Later, from behind a mask, the audience approaches Judith, as she brushes her hair in the nude. She turns and sees her peeper who then attacks, stabbing her repeatedly with a kitchen knife, killing her. After leaving the scene of the crime and standing outside the front of the house, the mask is taken off the peeping tom, revealing that Judith Myers’ killer is her 6-year-old brother, Michael (Will Sandin). His parents, who had just gotten back for the night, stand and stare at him, stunned.

The audience is transported 15 years later, to Smith’s Grove, Illinois, on October 30th, 1978. Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) is driven by a nurse (Nancy Stephens) to the psychiatric facility that holds Michael. Dr. Loomis refers to Michael as an ‘it’ and the nurse asks if they can refer to Michael as a ‘him’. They arrive at the facility to see psychiatric patients walking around outside in the rain. Dr. Loomis hops out of the car to try and open the gate, and the nurse left inside gets attacked by Michael (Tony Moran). She runs out of the car and Michael drives off in it. Dr. Loomis despairs, “The evil is gone.”

Back in Haddonfield, on Halloween, the audience sees Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) as she is leaving for school when her father calls back to her to leave the key under the mat at the Myers’ abandoned house, which he is trying to sell. As she drops the key off at the dilapidated Myers’ house, it is revealed to the audience that Michael is there, watching her from the front window.

As Laurie sits in class, she looks out the window and sees Michael, a masked figure in a mechanic’s jumpsuit, staring at her from across the street. Although she has not been paying attention, when the teacher calls on Laurie, she answers the question with no issue. They are discussing fate in a book they had read and Laurie answers, “Samuels felt that fate was more like a natural element like earth, air, fire, and water.” The teacher responds, “That’s right, Samuels definitely personified fate... Fate is immovable, like a mountain, it stands where man passes away. Fate never changes.”

After classes, Laurie and her friend Lynda (P.J. Soles) begin walking home and Lynda teases her about all the textbooks she is bringing home. Lynda, a cheerleader, talks about all the things she needs to do before the dance the following night as she lights up a cigarette. Lynda has a full plate of social activities, whereas Laurie in stark contrast has nothing to do. Friend Annie (Nancy Kyes) catches up to the two girls and complains about her boyfriend, Paul, being grounded by his parents and not being able to hang out with her that evening. She shares the cigarette with Lynda. Laurie thought that Annie was babysitting that night and Lynda implies that the only reason Annie babysits is so that she has a place to have sex. Laurie realizes that she forgot her chemistry book and Lynda laughs that she “forgets” her textbooks all the time. Annie teases Laurie about never going out on dates and Laurie tells her that guys think she is too smart.

Dr. Loomis, at a graveyard, discovers that Judith Myers’ headstone has been stolen, confirming that Michael is in Haddonfield. Dr. Loomis and the Sheriff of Haddonfield (Charles Cyphers) go to the Myers’ house in search of Michael and find a dead dog, probably eaten by Michael. “No man would do this,” the sheriff says. “This is no man,” Dr. Loomis replies. He explains to the sheriff that for 7 years he tried to connect with Michael, who maintained a blank, expressionless face and he spent the next 8 years trying to keep Michael locked away because he is pure evil.

In the evening, Laurie is babysitting Tommy (Brian Andrews), who sees “the boogeyman” across the street where Annie is babysitting Lindsey (Kyle Richards). When Laurie looks out of the window, Michael has already disappeared again. Michael is stalking Annie, watching her through the windows from the outside. Annie’s boyfriend, Paul, calls and tells her that his parents are out and asks if she can pick him up. Annie takes Lindsey over to Tommy’s house so that Laurie can watch her while Annie goes and picks up Paul. However, once in the car, Michael, who was lying in wait in the back seat, strangles her to death. Tommy sees Michael, “the boogeyman,” carrying Annie’s body into Lindsey’s house, but Laurie does not believe Tommy when he tells her that the boogeyman is outside again.

Lynda and her boyfriend, Bob (John Michael Graham), drive up to Lindsey’s house and it is obvious that they have been drinking all night. The plan was to have Annie distract Lindsey while they snuck upstairs to have sex, but when they see no one is home, they make out on the couch. Michael watches, unseen, from a doorway. After having sex upstairs, Lynda lights a cigarette and tells Bob to go get her a beer from downstairs. In the kitchen, Michael strangles Bob while picking him up and pins Bob to the wall with a knife, killing him. Michael goes upstairs, covered with a white sheet like a ghost with Bob’s glasses over the sheet. After standing there, unresponsive, Lynda gets up angrily to call Laurie and ask again about Paul and Annie. Right when Laurie answers the phone, however, Michael takes the phone cord and garrotes Lynda with it, so that all Laurie hears is what sounds like Lynda moaning. Laurie laughs it off but then grows concerned when the moans start to sound more desperate.

Laurie checks on the children and seeing that they are fast asleep, she goes across the street, to Lindsey’s house, to check on Annie and Lynda. In the house, Laurie sees that it is empty and thinks that everyone is playing a mean joke on her. But no one responds. Once she gets upstairs, she discovers Annie’s body on a bed with Judith Myers’ gravestone above her. She finds Bob’s body swinging from a closet and Lynda stuffed into a cabinet. Michael emerges from the shadows behind Laurie and moves to stab her but misses and cuts her shoulder. Shocked, she falls down the stairs and Michael chases after her. She struggles to open the front door and when she fails, she runs through the kitchen and out the back door. Once outside, she runs and screams down the street, but no one comes out of their houses. She runs up to a neighbor’s door desperately knocking and screaming for help. The porch light turns on, they look out the window at her, then close the blinds and turn the porch light back off, ignoring Laurie’s pleas for help. She runs back to Tommy’s house and bangs on the door crying for him to let her in. He does and she orders him back upstairs to lock Lindsey and himself away.

Laurie hides crouched on the ground in front of the couch and grabs one of her knitting needles. Michael pops up from behind the couch and lunges for her, but she stabs him in the neck with the needle. Laurie goes upstairs to check on the children and she tells them that she killed him, but Tommy replies, “You can’t kill the boogeyman.” Michael appears at the top of the stairs and the children lock themselves away again. Laurie runs and hides in a closet. When Michael finds her, she grabs a wire hanger, straightens it out, and stabs him with it. In pain, he drops his knife and she stabs him with that too. Laurie once again checks on Tommy and Lindsey and sends them down the street to a neighbor’s house to call the police. They run to do their task, and in the background the audience sees Michael sit straight up behind Laurie. Tommy and Lindsey come running and screaming out of the house, and when Dr. Loomis sees, he runs in.

Michael grabs Laurie and starts to strangle her. She unmasks him and, shocked, he lets her go to put the mask back on. Dr. Loomis then shoots Michael and continues to shoot him until he falls out of the window onto the ground below. Tearful, Laurie tells Loomis, “It was the boogeyman,” and Loomis agrees, “As a matter of fact, it was.” Dr. Loomis looks out the window to find that Michael is no longer there. The film ends with the sounds of Michael’s breathing and a shot of the Myers’ derelict house.

In John Carpenters’ Halloween, the argument is made that Michael Myers is not a human at all, but something else, something pure evil, according to Dr. Loomis, but there is much more being said there. In Laurie’s classroom, the teacher was talking about fate, and Laurie explained that fate was a natural element. The teacher agreed and went on to explain that fate, according to the author, was like an immovable mountain that would still be standing while man dies. They are talking about Michael here. Michael is an embodiment of a “natural order,” he is unshakable in his duty to kill and he will still be standing while people around him perish. At the Myers’ house, Dr. Loomis and Sheriff Brackett discover a dead dog and Dr. Loomis implies that Michael ate it. The Sheriff says that no man could do that, but Loomis reinforces that Michael is not a man. By having him eat a dog, Carpenter is showing that Michael is savage and primal. At the end of the movie, Dr. Loomis and Laurie agree that Michael is the boogeyman, not a person, but a cryptid.

These psycho killers are “father figures” returning these unruly teens to the patriarchy, or to what they perceive as the natural order. In a lot of ways, these films are arguing that a patriarchal society is the natural way of things. In the Friday the 13th films, Jason Voorhees is preceded by a storm, but the storm that is coming is really Jason and a blood bath. In Halloween, Michael is called fate, a natural element, and he came to punish the teens in the film like he punished his sister for being promiscuous.

By having Michael survive several stabbings, bullets, and a far fall where he disappears and is never found, the film implies that Michael is unkillable. Being unkillable or very hard to kill is a trait shared by many killers in slasher films. Contemporaries Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger of the A Nightmare on Elm St. franchise, and Chucky from the Child’s Play films are also unkillable. They represent patriarchal values and they are unkillable, in constructing these monsters of the slasher subgenre this way, it says that you cannot end the patriarchy; it may stay down for a while, but it will just keep coming back. Keeping in this vein, Halloween’s Final Girl is constructed as an ideal conservative feminine hero.

The film goes to great lengths to show that Laurie Strode is a modest and feminine girl, while her friends are masculine hedonists. The first of this the audience sees is the way she and her friends are dressed. Laurie wears a skirt, thick white stockings, and a sweater, while her friends wear shirts and pants (see fig. 2). This distinctly marks Laurie as not only feminine but modest and although she later wears a shirt and pants while babysitting, other things are used to mark her femininity. Her friends also tease her about never going out, and about how smart she is. Laurie takes all her textbooks home with her and explains that boys never ask her out because they think she is too smart. Her friends tell her that she could ask a guy out instead of waiting to be asked, and she says, “You could do that, I can’t,” further marking her friends as bold and masculine in contrast to Laurie. In the second half of the film, Laurie is also seen reading King Arthur to Tommy, knitting, and wearing an apron to carve the pumpkin for Tommy. All of these are examples of a woman’s domestic role.

Annie, Bob, and Lynda all die because they step out of their traditional roles. Annie is strangled when she gets into a car to go pick up her boyfriend, Paul. Driving is a traditionally masculine task, but earlier in the film, she picked up Laurie, and Paul asked her to pick him up instead of him finding a way to her. Bob and Lynda sneak into Lindsey’s house to have sex and after, Lynda commands Bob to get her a beer as she lights up a cigarette. Like driving, smoking, and drinking beer are considered masculine acts, and sending her boyfriend down to the kitchen to fetch her a beer reinforces her masculinity and feminizes her boyfriend. He jokes, “I thought you were going to get me a beer,” and he goes to get her and himself one. While in the kitchen, Michael strangles Bob, but in so doing, he lifts Bob. While Bob is hanging and choking, he is further emasculated when Michael penetrates him with a kitchen knife, pinning him to the wall (see fig. 3). This scene is not only one of the more memorable deaths of Halloween, but potently emasculating. When Michael, disguised as Bob, joins Lynda upstairs, she propositions him for more sex by uncovering her breasts, another masculine role, and when he remains unresponsive, she demands her beer again. Lynda is garroted to death, not penetrated. Bob was marked as feminine, so he was penetrated with a knife, and Annie and Lynda were more akin to men, so they were strangled.

The only other death by the penetration of a knife would have been Laurie, had she not survived. Michael tried to stab her but missed. Her first weapon against him was stabbing him with a knitting needle, a symbol of femininity, and her next weapon was a wire hanger, another symbol of a woman’s role in the household. It is after she takes Michael’s knife and stabs him with it that Michael tries to strangle her. The knife is a symbol of Michael’s manhood and masculinity, and when Laurie took it, it was transformative. She became masculine in her fight for survival.

Michael is a boogeyman, he is fate, he is a force of nature, and a father figure. Annie, Bob, Lynda, and Laurie are unruly, misguided teenagers that must be punished for misstepping their roles. Annie and Lynda should be modest, quiet, feminine, and occupy domestic spaces because they are women and that is their role. Bob allowed himself to be emasculated by Lynda and stepped out of his role to get her a beer. It should have been Lynda retrieving a beer for Bob, not one for herself, and Bob should have been the one ordering her to do so. Laurie, while she exemplified the conservative ideal woman, reminded Michael of his profligate sister. Michael’s duty was to punish them and return society to a more “natural,” patriarchal order.

From the perspective of the older generation in the ‘80s, the young people seemed like immoral and apathetic hedonists. In 1964, in Queens, New York, a young woman by the name of Kitty Genovese was murdered in front of her apartment building. It was night and she had been screaming for help, but no one had come to her aid or called the police until it was too late. For years, her murder case was studied in psychology classes and became synonymous with the Bystander Effect. In the ‘60s, newspaper articles were published with buzz words like “moral monsters” and “latent sadism” (see fig. 4). Society, it was believed, had lost its moral backbone. Halloween capitalized on this fear and depicted the terror that Kitty Genovese must have felt that night in the climax of the film. Laurie Strode escaped through the kitchen of Lindsey’s house and ran down the street, screaming for her neighbors to help her. She even went up to a neighbor’s house and banged on the door. The neighbor saw Laurie crying to be rescued but mercilessly did nothing (see fig. 5). Laurie was left alone to deal with her pursuer. This scene is arguably one of the most terrifying because Laurie realizes that she is, in fact, alone, even in suburbia surrounded by neighbors. From the conservative viewpoint, Kitty Genovese's murder was further evidence of the breakdown of society, that no one is safe in their own home, and our neighbors are all apathetic, sadistic strangers instead of friends and family, a sentiment that was reproduced by Halloween.

Sleepaway Camp (1983) opens on the lake of a summer camp called Camp Arawak, a father and his two small children play on a sailboat and three teens drive a motorboat and water ski. The girl in the motorboat coaxes the teenage boy driver into letting her try her hand at driving. He hesitates because it is his job that is on the line, but he hands the wheel over to her. The family on the sailboat falls into the water as the boat capsizes and only the water skier sees. She tries shouting to warn her two friends driving the motorboat, but they cannot hear her over the motor, as they are too preoccupied with themselves to look where they are going. The motorboat strikes the father and one child, killing them. In the next scene, which takes place 8 years later, the audience finds out that Angela (Felissa Rose), the daughter had survived, and it was her brother, Peter, who was killed along with her father.

The audience also learns that Angela was taken in by her aunt, who is a doctor. Angela and her cousin, Richard “Ricky” (Jonathan Tierstan), are going off to Camp Arawak. At summer camp, Angela is not received well by the girls in her cabin because she is silent and will not talk to anyone. During lunchtime, Angela still has not eaten anything at camp, so Ronnie (Paul DeAngelo), a head counselor, takes her to the kitchen to find her something she will eat. Ronny introduces her to creepy head cook Artie (Owen Hughs), who takes Angela into the pantry and attempts to rape her. Rickey walks in and sees Artie undoing his belt and shouts at him. Artie threatens Ricky who runs out of the kitchen with Angela. Artie is then badly burned when the killer pushes him off a chair while he is standing over a boiling pot of soup. Mel (Mike Kellin), the owner of the camp, assumes that it was a horrible accident, and tells the staff to keep quiet about it.

The next day there is a dance and Angela is ridiculed by two boys when she will not talk to them. Ricky sees and yells at them, starting a fight that gets broken up. Paul (Christopher Collet), Ricky’s friend sits next to Angela and talks to her. He tells her that Ricky told him about her past and that he is sorry. When Paul leaves, Angela says, “good night,” to him, which upsets Judy (Karen Fields), Angela’s cabin mate and Ricky’s ex-girlfriend.

In the night, the older boys go skinny dipping, and one of the boys who ridiculed Angela at the dance, Kenny (John Dunn), goes out in a canoe with a girl. He teases her about “water snakes” in the water and purposefully capsizes the canoe. The girl swims away angrily and the boy laughs underneath the canoe but is drowned by the killer.

While the girls play volleyball, Paul and Angela have another conversation, which further agitates Judy and their counselor Meg (Katherine Kamhi) who tells Angela that she must play volleyball or do nothing, which includes not talking to boys. In the evening, Paul and Angela watch the movie together and leave holding hands. Paul walks Angela back to her cabin and gives her a good night kiss, though Angela goes straight-faced and shuts down again.

The next day, all the campers are swimming in the lake, except Angela. Paul comes and talks to her but leaves when Meg arrives. Angela stops talking and refuses to answer Meg when she asks if Angela is going to go swimming. Enraged, Meg begins shaking Angela, shouting, “Answer me!” but stops when Ronnie intervenes. Later that evening, Judy is mad at Angela and begins asking her why she never showers with the other girls and teases her about not hitting puberty yet. Angela never responds and goes for a walk.

The older boys are playing with water balloons on the roof of their cabin and throw one at Angela, who then just sits on the grass, her knees to her chest. Ricky sees and starts cursing at them. Mel hears the ruckus and the boys all get in trouble. Ricky runs to Angela’s side and tells her, “I’ll kill him!” referring to Billy (Loris Sallahian), the ringleader of the older boys. After the older boys leave Billy behind, he uses the restroom and the killer locks him into the stall, cuts the screen in the window behind Billy, and drops a beehive into the stall. By the time Billy manages to break out of the stall, it is too late, he has been stung to death. Mel, after hearing about Billy’s death, is then convinced that Ricky is the killer of all the campers.

That night, Paul and Angela are playful on the beach, but Angela shuts down again when Paul starts kissing her. This triggers a flashback of when she and her brother Peter were little, and they saw their dad in bed with another man, gently caressing each other. Back to reality, Angela runs away from Paul. The next day, Paul is irritated by Angela’s rejection of his advances, and Judy, who has been jealous of the attention Paul has been affording Angela, seduces him. They kiss in the woods, and Ricky and Angela see. Angela runs away.

At another dance, Angela tells Paul to meet her on the beach later in the night. Instead of at the dance, Judy is in her cabin alone with one of the older boys. But the boy decides to leave rather than risk getting caught alone with Judy. The killer shows up at the cabin after the boy had left and puts a pillow over Judy’s head. The killer then takes the curling iron that Judy had been using and penetrates her with it repeatedly. This happens off-screen with shadows depicting this gruesome murder. Judy’s body is hidden under her bed.

Mel, certain that Ricky is responsible for killing all the campers, attacks Ricky. He beats Ricky into unconsciousness, walks onto the archery range, and is shot in the neck with an arrow. The police and the counselors decide to gather all of the other campers into one cabin to keep them safe. A police officer and some counselors conduct a search. Paul meets Angela on the beach, and she tells him to undress.

Ronnie and another counselor see a nude Angela sitting on the beach cradling Paul’s head in her lap. They call her name, but she does not answer. There is another flashback, where Ricky’s mother is talking to presumably Angela after the accident that killed her father and sibling. She talks about how she already has a little boy- Ricky, and that she always wanted a little girl. It is then revealed that Peter is the sibling who survived and Ricky’s aunt forced him to adopt the identity of his dead sister, Angela. Back on the beach, Angela stands, Paul’s severed head rolls, off her lap, exposing her male body to the camp counselors. This also unveils Angela as the killer.

Sleepaway Camp opens with a father and his two children, and when the father dies, his surviving child goes to their aunt, not their mother. Angela and Peter’s mother is never in the picture, she is never mentioned. And when Peter is left to his aunt’s devices, she forces him to masquerade as a little girl, as his dead sister Angela. This implies that broken, or non-traditional families leave children unprotected. If Angela and Peter had a mother, they could have gone to her. If their aunt was still married, her husband would never have allowed her to force Peter to change genders. There would have been checks and balances, so to speak, if either of those homes were complete nuclear families.

Throughout the film, there are instances of questioning sexuality. In the first scene where Angela is in the girls’ cabin, she is staring at Judy, who notices Angela’s unwavering stare. “What are you staring at? Why don’t you take a picture?” Judy asked. Angela just kept staring. At first, this appears to just be how Angela is, disturbed by the death of her family, she just stares into space and never speaks. However, having the benefit of knowing Angela’s true sex, this scene plays out very differently. When Ricky and Angela first got to camp, Rickey’s friend Paul told them that Judy’s body had developed since last summer. Angela’s stare is her fascination with Judy and her developed body. Angela, as Peter, is entranced by Judy.

Later in the film, Paul and Angela become a couple. Paul goes to kiss Angela good night and his kiss is stiffly unreciprocated (see fig. 6). Angela is uncomfortable with kissing Paul because, as Peter, Angela is uncomfortable with the homosexuality of it. Angela needs time to process this and leaves Paul immediately after. The next time she is intimate with Paul, Angela has accepted kissing, but when Paul begins fingering her blouse buttons, she tells him to stop. “Come on, Angela, I’m not doing anything,” and she lets him continue, but he doesn’t push farther. However, as Paul kisses her neck, Angela has a flashback of when he, as Peter, and his sister were little and giggling as they watched their father be intimate in bed with another man (see fig. 7). The music in this scene transitions from a sweet and innocent tune associated with childhood to an off-kilter, discordant tune denoting the corruption of innocence. Right after this flashback, Angela shouts, “No!” and shoves Paul off her, running away. Being intimate with Paul, another boy, caused a traumatic flashback that disturbed her. Angela does not know how s/he feels, sexually. Is she a girl, or is she Peter? This emerging homosexuality is being blamed on her father’s homosexual relationship. This sentiment has roots in conversion therapy and the belief that homosexual parents will "contaminate" and pervert their children. Once again, if Peter and Angela’s mother had been in the picture, they may have been spared this trauma.

In Sleepaway Camp, there is also a lot of commentary on puberty and virtue. The character Judy is in the center of this. She had developed since last summer; she had become a woman. When the audience first sees Judy, she is surrounded by older boys talking to her and when Ricky tried to get her attention, she looked at him and said, “hello,” coldly. “I guess I’m not good enough for her anymore,” Ricky had uttered. Puberty is a topic repeatedly highlighted by Judy’s character, "Hey Angela, how come you never take showers when the rest of us do, huh? You queer or somethin'? Oh, I know what it is, you haven't reached puberty yet, is that it? I bet you don't even have your period. Yeah, she takes showers when no one can see she has no hair down below. She's a real carpenter's dream, flat as a board and needs a screw!" She uses puberty to put down others for still being children while she feels like a full-grown woman.

Judy is jealous of Angela getting Paul’s time and attention and tries to seduce him. She continuously fails until Paul feels rejected by Angela because she had run away from him the night before. Once Judy had succeeded in seducing Paul, she taunts Angela about it for the rest of the film and is no longer interested in Paul. Judy’s death is one of the most gruesome deaths in the film and it is off-screen. She was killed by being raped with a hot curling iron; it is shown through shadows on a wall (see fig. 8). Her body is hidden under her bed, symbolic of her promiscuousness. Judy had repeatedly proven herself lascivious and her death was a direct punishment for not upholding her womanly virtue.

The Stepfather (1986) begins with a wide shot of an idyllic suburbia, a newspaper boy on a bicycle throws the newspaper on the lawn of a house. When the camera goes in toward the house, it begins to shake slightly in an unnerving manner. Inside the house, the audience now sees a man (Terry O’Quinn) staring into a mirror, he is covered in blood. After a shower, he transforms himself, discarding his glasses and wedding ring into an empty suitcase, shaving his beard, cutting his hair, and putting in contact lenses. He emerges clean-shaven and clad in a suit and tie. In the hallway, he sees a toy boat, picks it up, and puts it back in a toy box. He then rearranges the toys to fit right and closes the toybox. As he descends the staircase, the pictures on the wall are tilted and a bloody handprint is revealed. Down the stairs, the audience sees the living room as a chaotic mess of red – blood and bodies are scattered about. The camera follows the man out of the door, then pans meaningfully back to hold a pregnant pause on a blond little girl, face down, blood splattered over her and her teddy bear still held in her hand. The man leaves the house whistling a tune and another wide shot shows people on the suburban street going about life as usual - picking up the newspaper, taking out the trash, leaving for work.

One year later, another picturesque suburban neighborhood and two-story house is shown. The audience sees a mother and daughter throwing buckets of autumn leaves at each other, depicting a close and playful relationship. When a car is heard pulling up, the mother, Susan (Shelly Hack) excitedly exclaims, "Jerry's home!" The daughter, Stephanie (Jill Schoelen), is not happy that Jerry (Terry O'Quinn) is home. He surprises Stephanie with a puppy, and while she's excited about the puppy, she still pulls away from Jerry. When he touches her arm, and utters, "That's my girl," she stands, upset, and walks into the house.

In the next scene, Stephanie is talking to her therapist, Dr. Bondurant (Charles Lanyer). The audience finds out that Stephanie's father died a year ago and she is happy to have a stepfather. Stephanie reveals that she sees something in Jerry that she does not like or trust.

Jerry Blake works for American Eagle Realty, and while showing a family a house, he pushes their young daughter on the swing set in the backyard. Jerry tells her he has a daughter too, who goes to the high school that the little girl will be going to one day if her parents buy the house. However, he mixes up the names of Stephanie and the daughter he had before.

At home, Stephanie tells Jerry and her mom that she got in another fight at school, resulting in her expulsion. Jerry responds incredulously, "Girls don't get expelled." She tells them she wants to go to a boarding school. Jerry says, "It's not a family without children…. I don't think we need to break up the family, do we, Pumpkin? Father knows best." Dinner carries on in silence. Jerry goes into the basement after dinner, to continue constructing a birdhouse. Stephanie talks to her friend on the phone about Jerry, "He has his own fantasy we should be like families on TV, and grin and laugh, and have fewer cavities all the time…It's like having Ward Cleaver for a dad." Later in the evening Susan and Jerry talk briefly about his past, which he has not discussed with Susan. He tells her, "I didn't even exist until I met you."

Next scene, there is a shot of the first house from a year ago, it is now in disrepair with the windows all boarded up. Two men drive up in front of the house. "What are we doing here?" One of them asks. "The house where Henry Morrison murdered his family,” replied the other man, Jim Ogilvie (Stephen Shellan). The first man is a reporter and he had been there when the bodies were discovered. Jim is the brother of the victim family's mother and he explains that the case should be reopened. He tells the reporter that 3 weeks before Morrison killed the family, he quit his job and did not tell anyone. Morrison still pretended to go to work every day, maintaining a normal schedule. Jim thinks that Morrison couldn't have gone too far away in that time and believed that Morrison set up a new life somewhere close by. He asks the reporter to run a follow-up story with a picture of Morrison, to see if anyone recognizes him. Audiences now understand that Henry Morrison was Jerry Blake’s previous identity.

At Jerry’s new house, they are having a BBQ. Jerry stands and addresses everyone at the party, "I sell houses, that's my job, but sometimes I think it's more than that. I truly believe that what I sell is the American dream." Later, the men discuss a newspaper article about the murder that Jerry's "past life" committed in Bellevue, a neighboring city. One neighbor says, "Makes you wonder though…What's it take to make a guy do such a thing?" Jerry responds, his mind somewhere else, "Maybe they disappointed him." Stephanie is in the basement fetching ice cream for the party when Jerry comes down and starts banging his fists on his worktable. He starts reenacting something as if he is reliving a past event. He waves his finger pointedly at nothing saying, "We are going to keep this family together! You better believe it!" Then Jerry sees that Stephanie has watched him lose his cool. He smiles at her and explains that he just needed to let off some steam, "You know how it is? Being a salesman, you have to smile at everyone all of the time,” he explains.

After the party, Stephanie sees the article about the slain family in Bellevue a year ago and writes a letter to the newspaper asking them to send her a picture of Henry Morrison. Days later, Jerry goes to get the mail and sees a manila envelope for Stephanie. He opens it and when sees a picture of himself, he takes the envelope. That evening, Jerry is livid and, in the basement, hitting things and trying out different weapons from his worktable. He whispers furiously to himself. He is interrupted when Susan calls down the stairs that dinner will be ready in 15 minutes. Composing himself, he finds the picture of this family that he had thrown and apologizes to it. Jerry takes out the birdhouse he's been working on. Dr. Bondurant, Stephanie’s therapist, calls to speak with Jerry about her wanting to go to a boarding school, but Jerry refuses to talk to him.

The next day, Jerry goes to Stephanie's high school to talk them into letting her back into school. Stephanie talks to Dr. Bondurant again about how Jerry refuses to see him. She tells Dr. Bondurant that Jerry scares her, “I’m afraid of him.” After Stephanie leaves his office, Dr. Bondurant calls Jerry at his work to arrange to look at a house for sale, pretending to be "Ray Martin." Dr. Bondurant meets Jerry for a tour of a house. He pretends to be bachelor Ray Martin, who doesn't buy into the idea of family. Jerry begins to become suspicious, "You know a house like this should really have a family in it." Martin replies, "You really are a cheerleader of the old traditional values, aren't you, Jerry?" Jerry explains, "Tradition is important." Martin asks, "Sounds like you had a strict upbringing?" Jerry utters, "You might say that." Martin slips up and mentions having a wife. Jerry grabs a plank of wood and bludgeons Martin to death with it. He looks in Martin’s wallet and finds that the man he just killed was Dr. Bondurant. Jerry stages a car accident to cover his tracks.

After Jerry had gotten another picture from a photography store to replace the picture of himself, he had put the tampered envelope back in the mailbox. Stephanie finds the manila envelope in the mail and sees a picture of another man, the one planted by Jerry. She begins to doubt her intuition about Jerry. Jerry comes home and tells Stephanie that Dr. Bondurant was in a fatal car accident and he consoles her. Jerry finishes the birdhouse he was building and is putting it up when Stephanie apologizes for being so hard on him. They agree to "bury the hatchet.” Susan introduces more tension by mentioning that Stephanie will start dating soon, "He's so old-fashioned, aren't you?" "Guilty as charged, your honor. There's plenty of time for that, sweetheart,” Jerry says as he finishes putting up the birdhouse.

After playing in an arcade, Stephanie gets a ride home from a friend from school, Paul, and he kisses her good night, but Jerry interrupts and shouts at Paul saying that Stephanie is only 16, to which Paul responds that he is also 16. Susan comes out to ask what's wrong and Jerry exclaims that Paul was trying to rape Stephanie. Stephanie runs away after Susan slaps her for calling Jerry a creep, and Susan yells at Jerry for overreacting and throwing away all the progress they made with Stephanie. It is then that Jerry decides that it's time to move onto another family. The next day Jerry quits American Eagle Realty.

Jim looks in the basement at his sister's house and sees Morrison's workshop area. He finds a magazine with torn-out pages and visits the Bellevue library to find a copy of that issue and see what the missing pages were. He finds an article, "Ten Great All-American Towns, Ideal for Raising a Family," he smiles. Jim gets all the marriage certificates filed a year ago in the town Jerry lives in and begins going door to door off the list to find Henry Morrison. The next name on the list is Susan and Jerry Blake.

On a ferry, Jerry goes into the bathroom and takes off his contacts, replacing them with glasses, he puts on a fake mustache and takes off a toupee that's been covering the shaved top of his head, so that he appears to be balding. Jerry as "Bill Hodgkins" interviews for a job in another town for an insurance agency, saying that he's sold all kinds of policies, but his favorite is life insurance because he truly believes he is "protecting the family."

Jim gets to the Blake residence and asks to see Jerry; Susan tells him that he is gone right now. She calls Jerry at American Eagle Realty and they tell her that he no longer works there. Jerry gets home and Susan confronts him, he explains that the new girl is driving him crazy, and Susan tells him, "Maybe she just got the name wrong," to which he shouts, "Hodgkins! What's to get wrong?... Wait a minute. Who am I here?" "Jerry…?" Susan utters, becoming worried. "Ah, Jerry Blake. Thank you, Honey," he hits her with the telephone. She runs to hide in the basement, but Jerry punches her, and she falls down the stairs. Jerry picks up a kitchen knife, "Let's have a little order around here, huh?" He sees the puppy he had gotten Stephanie and calls him over; he starts petting the puppy. Stephanie gets home and the puppy runs to greet her, she goes upstairs to take a shower. Jerry stands and, unhinged, he whispers, "You've been a bad girl…" Jerry begins slowly ascending the stairs. Jim drove back to the Blake house and begins ringing the doorbell, but sees that the door is unlocked, and he lets himself in. Jerry sees him and is happy, "Jim! Jim Ogilvie!" "Blood…" Jim stammers, grasping for a gun in his pocket. Jerry remembers what he is doing and stabs Jim in the gut. Jim drops the gun as he dies.

Jerry once again ascends the stairs to kill Stephanie, she stabs him in the arm with a shard of broken mirror and runs. She sees her mother down the stairs and Jerry grabs Stephanie, she falls to the ground and Susan shoots him with Jim's gun, he falls a little down the stairs and starts crawling back up to Stephanie, but Susan shoots him again. He keeps crawling upstairs, and Stephanie grabs his knife before he can, and she stabs him in the chest. He whispers a final, "I love you," as he falls to his death. Once again, there is a wide shot of an idyllic suburban neighborhood and a paperboy throws a paper to Susan and Stephanie's front lawn. The Stepfather ends with Stephanie in the backyard as she cuts down the birdhouse Jerry had made.

The Stepfather is a slasher that was created later in the decade, a 1987 film as opposed to Halloween in 1978 and Sleepaway Camp in 1983. There are some important distinctions in this slasher that set it apart from earlier films in the subgenre. It was made post-establishment of the meta, meaning that it has had time to view and study the basic formula of a slasher and has begun to deconstruct and rethink that formula. Previous slashers only offered a limited type of POV of the killer: audiences may have seen through the eyeholes of a mask or heard his smothered breathing, and viewed victims committing sins, running away screaming, or throwing their hands up in defense as they got hacked and slashed. However, in The Stepfather, the film, while Stephanie is the main character, is mainly from Jerry’s POV, and not in the same literal sense of previous slashers. Audiences do not see from the eyes of Jerry, they see his perspective, his reactions, and his feelings. This is a huge distinction from other movies where the killers are immovable forces of nature, who react one-dimensionally. This evolution also means that the messages being sent are different from earlier renditions of slashers. Earlier contemporaries were products of Conservatism and their message was simple – immorality gets punished, stepping out of your gender role gets punished, and nontraditional families create monsters. As a deconstructed slasher, The Stepfather holds a mirror up to prior films and a new message is formulated.

The film presents a lot of commentary on the American dream and patriarchal traditional values. The Stepfather constructs these ideals as noncompatible. One of the ways it does this is by using Jerry, the stepfather himself, as a metaphor for these incongruencies. Throughout the film, there are instances where Jerry seems to have two personalities at odds with each other, a cognitive dissonance between the ideal self and the actual self. One side of Jerry wants to portray himself as a perfect father and husband, and the other side of Jerry has a bloodlust and impatience with waiting for things to come together. This is emphasized at the very beginning of the film. The first man you see, is Henry Morrison, wearing a red plaid shirt, and glasses, his hair is shaggy, and he has a beard. While in that bathroom, the audience watches as he constructs a new ideal self, as he shaves, cuts his hair, puts in contacts, and dons a suit and tie, becoming Jerry Blake. Later, we see him transform himself again into Bill Hodgkins, a balding man in glasses. All these identities portray the same thing – a regular American man who can fit in anywhere, like a chameleon. You can substitute him for any man in America, and that is the point. He wants to fit into any red-blooded American family. This ideal self represents his interpretation of the American dream, the father-figure in 50s sitcoms like “Father Knows Best,” and “Leave it to Beaver,” (both of which are referenced in the film).

After completing his transformation and leaving the bathroom, he sees toys out and puts them back into place. In the living room, surrounded by blood, death, and mayhem, he stops to pick up a chair that had fallen over and replaces the cushion (see fig. 9). His actual self exploded all over that living room, he then collected himself and reconstructed a new ideal, an ideal self that stops to restore order amidst the horror and chaos his actual self had generated. The actual self that is destructive and controlling represents patriarchal family values.

In public, Jerry wore a veneer of smiles and kindness, pretending to be a good husband, father, and neighbor, and a hard worker. At the barbecue party he had for his clients and neighbors, he said, “I truly believe that what I sell is the American dream.” However, down in the basement while the party was going on, Stephanie saw Jerry’s actual self, as he paced in the dark, talking to himself, “We are going to keep this family together!” When he sees that Stephanie is there, he explains that he was just letting off steam, “Being a salesman, you have to smile at everyone all of the time.” Jerry tries to exemplify the father figure in his idea of the American dream, and just like any good salesman, that is what he tries to sell to Susan and Stephanie, and everyone he meets.

Jerry’s patriarchal values undermine his ideal self. When Stephanie sees him in the basement, it confirms her instincts about him. Once he had finally convinced her that he was just a genuinely good guy, he ruins it by interrupting Stephanie’s good-night kiss with Paul and accusing Paul of trying to rape her. Jerry’s attitude towards the kiss illustrates his traditional values: Stephanie at 16 was too young to have sexual desires, and Paul was a predator preying on his innocent, chaste daughter. This action also upset Susan, because they had just made all this progress with their daughter, and he ruined it by over-reacting about a kiss. Susan getting mad at Jerry was the final straw, in that moment, he decided to murder them and move on. This conclusion is also rooted in his patriarchal values. Devoted wives should follow their husband’s lead unquestioningly. Susan should have taken his side, because “father knows best.”

Throughout the film, Jerry is building a birdhouse that looks like a typical suburban two-level house. The birdhouse is Jerry’s symbol of the American dream—like his ideal self, the birdhouse is just an illusion. It is not a real house and it is just meant for birds, but Jerry emphasizes its symbol after he puts up the finished birdhouse. “It will be nice when there’s a family of birds living there,” he muses. The film highlights its meaning by having Jerry finish building and painting, then putting it up just as Stephanie comes out to apologize to him for being such trouble. The image of the ideal family was complete, he erected the birdhouse and as it is foregrounded, the family are close together walking back into the house (see fig. 10). Then, at the end of the film, as if it were a punctuation mark, Stephanie cuts down the birdhouse. It crashes to the ground and is once again in the foreground as Stephanie and Susan walk back into their house together (see fig. 11). Stephanie cut through the illusion of Jerry and the American dream he had tried to build.

Another way The Stepfather shows that the American dream and traditional values are incongruent is through Jerry and Jim. Jerry and Jim are foils of each other—while they are both obsessed with family, how they are obsessed shows the contrast between the two. Although he was repeatedly told to move on from his sister’s and her children’s murders, Jim refused to give up trying to find Henry Morrison. Jerry continually adopts families in a futile attempt to complete the perfect family and when the family he adopted fails to be perfect, he kills them and moves on. In this sense, Jim represents the American dream and Jerry represents patriarchal family values. Jim refused to give up, he worked hard and found a way to track Morrison. Jim put in the effort. The American dream is the idea that if you work hard and do your due diligence, you will succeed, you will get your suburban house with its white picket fence, dog, and happy family.

Jerry, however, does not put in the effort necessary to have a happy family; once he has to actually discuss, compromise, and accept his wife and children as three-dimensional people rather than one-dimensional characters in a family sitcom, he butchers them and moves on to the next. Patriarchal values like the ones in 50s sitcoms claim that the wife and children should blindly follow the word of the father, children should always be respectful and follow orders, the wife should be dutiful, doting, and support whatever her husband orders. It is through blind devotion to the father that the family stays happy. The reason these two ideals are opposed is that in order to have a happy family, discourse must take place, there needs to be open communication and the father should be just as committed to his wife and kids as they are to him. Everyone supports each other and it takes work and effort to maintain a happy family. The American dream champions labor, while traditional values rooted in patriarchal ideals champion devotion to the father.

Both Jim and Jerry die at the end, but Jim was successful. Jim tracked down Morrison and helped save the family after his sister’s. While Jim died as soon as he got to their house, his gun was a symbol of his hard work that was taken up by Susan to shoot Jerry. Her shots were unsuccessful in stopping Jerry, but it slowed him down enough to allow Stephanie to recover and take his knife, landing a killing blow. Jerry, representing patriarchal views, killed Jim, who represented the American dream. Jim and his hard work were sacrificed to give Susan and Stephanie a chance.

All genres of movies tell audiences something about the culture that produced them. The horror film focuses on the fears and anxieties that are present in the era that they were created in. Film can give historians insights into society and culture and horror films construct villains and victims based on the events of any given decade. Some eras even create new subgenres that reflect the current zeitgeist. The slasher was produced in the 1980s by a conservative American public who, wary after the turmoil of the ‘60s and ‘70s, felt a need to go back to traditional family values. Halloween was the first slasher that was a major box office success. It featured an unkillable force of nature that punished immoral teens who violated their gender roles. The film also stressed the role of apathy, emphasizing the breakdown of society leaving citizens unprotected even in their own homes. Sleepaway Camp expressed the dangers of nontraditional households allowing children to be left defenseless, and of homosexuality corrupting youths, making them monsters. The slasher also affirmed the importance of maintaining proper gender roles. The Stepfather was the next evolution in the slasher film, where it deconstructed the original formula of its subgenre and flipped it on its head to tell a story in a new way and articulate a different message. The film asserted that the conservative ideals of the American dream and traditional values, like what many sitcoms of the 1950s depicted, were not compatible and that one would destroy the other.

Slashers have been evolving since they first began in the late ‘70s. Scream (1996) was a self-knowing slasher. Cabin in the Woods (2011) picked apart the slasher to its most basic components and created a new meaning behind them. Halloween (2018) was a direct sequel to its 1978 predecessor and through it, audiences saw the victim become the predator and strong female characters. The evolution of the slasher says things about our society and new horror films are being made every day. What are the new trends in horror today and what do they say about our society? Who are the victims and who are the villains now? Perhaps it is too soon to tell.

____________________________________________________

Bibliography:

Primary Sources:

Gansberg, Martin. 1964. "37 Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police: Apathy at Stabbing of Queens Woman Shocks Inspector; Path of Victim: Stabber's Third Attack was Fatal." New York Times (1923-Current File). Accessed Mar 27, 2020. http://proxy.library.cpp.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxy.library.cpp.edu/docview/115543461?accountid=10357.

Halloween. Directed by John Carpenter. Released 27 October 1978. Amazon Prime Stream.

Hiltzik, Robert. “Robert Hiltzik Talks the Making of Slasher Classic Sleepaway Camp.” Interview by Don Kaye. 3 June 2014. https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/robert-hiltzik-talks-the-making-of-slasher-classic-sleepaway-camp/.

Wehrwein, Austin C. 1965. "Scholars Assay Bad Samaritans: Meeting Examines Motives of Those Who Fail to Help Citizens in Trouble Latent Sadism Cited Rewards and Punishments Urged to Spur Apathetic Onlookers Into Action." New York Times (1923-Current File). Accessed Apr 10, 2020. http://proxy.library.cpp.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxy.library.cpp.edu/docview/116832074?accountid=10357.

Sleepaway Camp. Directed by Robert Hiltzik. Released 18 November 1983. Tubi TV Stream.

The Stepfather. Directed by Joseph Ruben. Released 5 June 1987. Tubi TV Stream.

Secondary Sources:

Britton, Andrew. 1979. American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. Toronto: Festival of Festivals.

Carroll, Noël, Caetlin Benson-Allott, and Eugenie Brinkema. 2015. “Paradoxes of the Heart: The Philosophy of Horror Twenty-Five Years Later: An Interview by Caetlin Benson-Allott.” Journal of Visual Culture 14 (3): 336–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412915607927.

Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge.

Clover, Carol J. 2015. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. First Princeton classics edition.

Cowan, Douglas E. 2008. Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press.

Creed, Barbara. (2005). “Baby bitches from hell: monstrous little women in film.” In J. Crew, & R. Leonard (Eds.), Mixed-up childhood (pp. 33-38). Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London; New York: Routledge.

Franklin, Patrick. 2002. “Horror In the '80s: Let's Scare Audiences to Death.” Flagpole. Athens: Flagpole, Inc. http://search.proquest.com/docview/229909366/.

Grant, Barry Keith. 1996. The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Grant, Barry Keith, and Christopher. Sharrett. 2004. Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film. Rev. ed. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lennard, Dominic. 2014. Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors: The Child Villains of Horror Film. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Maddrey, Joseph. 2004. Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland.

Muir, John Kenneth. 2002. Horror Films of the 1970s. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland.

Muir, John Kenneth. 2007. Horror Films of the 1980s. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co.

Paszkiewicz, Katarzyna, and Stacy Rusnak. 2017. “Revisiting the Final Girl: Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards.” Postmodern Culture 28 (1): 0–0. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/703243.

Phillips, Kendall R. 2005. Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers.

Portner, Jessica. 2019. “Get Spooked: Find Out More About the Science of Scary.” Natural History Museum Los Angeles County. Accessed April 21, 2020. https://nhm.org/stories/get-spooked.

Prince, Stephen. 2004. The Horror Film. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Ryan, Maureen. "Entertaining Fantasies: Lifestyle and Social Life in 1980s America." Journal of Communication Inquiry 39, no. 1 (2015): 82-101.

Valerius, Karyn. 2005. “Rosemary's Baby, Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects.” College Literature 32 (3): 116–35. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/college_literature/v032/32.3valerius.html.

Wood, Robin. 1986. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wilkinson, Simon A. 2008. Hollywood Horror from the Director's Chair: Six Filmmakers in the Franchise of Fear. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co.

Williams, Tony. 2014. Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film. Updated edition. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.