Slasher Films & Why We Love Them

Cailyn Lockwood

Edited by: Amber Atkinson

Slasher Films & Why We Love Them

           Halloween is right around the corner so, of course, candy corn, jack-o-lanterns, and sexy women being violently murdered are all trending again. This year, as I was considering which version of the “blonde woman with minimal clothing accompanied by masked man with a weapon” duo my boyfriend and I should be for Halloween, I realized that this was a weird question to be asking myself. I also realized this is a strange thing that has been normalized in popular culture. This line of thinking led me to do some research.

         The idea of the slasher film, which we all have grown to know and love, really didn’t exist as we know it before the 80s. There are different theories about the origins of the slasher and why the industry began using the common tropes that are associated with this genre. People believe that the films reflected the feelings and opinions of the first few directors to use them, and then when they caught on and began to do well, others adopted them for their own films. People believe the messages in the films mirrored the feelings of the public at the time of their origin. But the theory that is most widely accepted is a sort of combination of a few different factors. They were probably a response to the second wave of feminism, which was gaining traction in the United States during one of the more conservative eras in U.S. history. This wave of feminism was primarily focused on sexual freedom and expanding access to contraception.

         These factors seemed to have contributed to and influenced the trope of the “final girl.” She appears in cult classics like Halloween, Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Scream, to name a few. She is the last girl left alive — sometimes the most attractive, and most innocent. She may be injured or afraid, but she is the sole survivor of her peers. She is spared because she is deemed more morally acceptable than the other girls in the film. She’s usually against drinking, doesn’t partake in drugs or smoking, and she doesn’t have sex. In fact, she is commonly a virgin. As a result, the final girl is also an integral piece of the “sex equals death” trope which is a signpost in slashers. Everyone who has sex, or even dresses provocatively, is brutally killed. This was such a common trope that characters within the films began to warn each other of this phenomenon. An example can be shown in Scream when Randy explains how to survive a horror movie. His rules are as follows:

1. No sex.
2. No drinking or drugs
3. Never say, “I’ll be right back.”

           More recently, directors have opted to reject this notion. They have instead begun to allow the final girl to have sex, too! This was first done in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which Buffy is not a nerdy, wholly moral girl, but she still defeats evil and has sex. This phenomenon can be observed in the movie X, the latest spin on the classic sexual horror trope. The main character, Maxine, is making porn like the rest of her friends, yet still makes it out alive.

           The history of these films can further help us investigate why we still enjoy them to this day. People becoming horny while watching slashers or horror is most frequently assigned to a psychological phenomenon called “misattribution of arousal”. It essentially means that our bodies cannot always delineate between fear and sexual arousal. This is especially true when we are watching these films with a date, or if the movie itself has subliminal — or extremely explicit — sexual content. In an interview with Refinery29, Margee Kerr, a sociologist and fear researcher, refers to this very common phenomenon as “sexy scared.” This is one of the reasons that the genre has survived so long, thus being able to maintain the same storylines, plots, characters, and tropes.

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/why-do-horror-movies-turn-you-on

https://practicalpie.com/misattribution-of-arousal-definition-examples/