The Voorhees Shock Doctrine, Part I: Sluts and SERFs
Slashers are perhaps the most misunderstood subgenre of horror. That’s an odd statement, since horror movies generally and slasher movies especially should be easy to understand. There are however pervasive myths about slasher movies that continue to be regurgitated by either biased film critics or simple horror fans too dense to interpret the movies they claim so much to love. Part of the reason for these myths is the defamation campaign carried out by feminist film critics like Siskel and Ebert; another is the popularity of gender politics and their misplaced application to slasher movies; still another is the plain nastiness of people who, unsatisfied by hating actual people who have more fun than they do, go after fictional people as well.
It’s amazing how seriously people can take slasher movies, which are about as intellectually rewarding as a ponderous Limp Biscuit about Christina Aguilera. No one really wants to admit they watch garbage media; people therefore naturally make up for the shame by injecting their midcult favorites with a social-political subtext they could easily find in better movies they never watch. On any given day you can find some nonsense essay such as one espousing the post-colonial subversion of cultural appropriation just under the surface of Black Panther. Oh, let me tell you about how the Hunger Games is really about Stalin’s liquidation of the former serf farmers in order to further the dictatorship of the proletariat. You thought Endgame was just a popcorn movie? Well allow me – philistine – to lecture you about how reversed gender objectification worked to salve male castration fantasies.
Film is art, and art is open to interpretation, but for God’s sake people there’s a limit to common sense. You might want to go out for a drink or two if you find yourself applying Freudian poststructuralist critical techniques to Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama.
Given an intellectual climate in which the Handmaid’s Tale is an allegory of the Trump administration and JoJo Rabbit is an edgy satire of historical events from like literally almost a goddamned century ago, it’s no surprise that people confuse trash with art and go about looking for something social-political to bitch about in slasher movies. No matter how much I love them, trash is what they are. I admit that, and love them as trash. I don’t whip out a copy of the Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory to sit down and watch Jason X. Save that for Blue is the Warmest Color and the few who actually watched its entirety instead of vigorously masturbating while fast-forwarding to the good parts like us normal people.
In an attempt to debunk these myths for good and all, I’m writing the following series of essays, each one dealing with a particular myth. A few caveats. The slasher movie, of course, is a vast sub-genre composed of probably hundreds of thousands of movies that no mere mortal has seen the sum of. While universal claims might be impossible, generalities however certainly are. So please spare me the hate mail that I’m wrong because Dude Bro Party Massacre III doesn’t’ conform to my argument. If you asked your average person on the street to name a slasher movie, the odds are he’ll name one of the mainstream franchises produced in the last forty years. I’m going to use the Friday the 13th franchise as a model because that franchise spanned the entire 1980s, and because I don’t really want to review each movie individually.
The dominant myth about slasher movies is that the teenagers are murdered because they are having sex. This myth is pretty stupid: often the movies themselves explicitly say why the masked murderer is off and about killing kids. The motive in fact is central to the structure of the story: nearly every slasher movie begins with a crime or tragic accident set in the past, which usually adversely affects the killer and therefore motivates him to slaughter kids later after he’s triggered by remembering it.
But aren’t the promiscuous kids killed all the same, you may ask? Promiscuity there is aplenty in pretty much every slasher movie, and that should come as no surprise to anyone. How enjoyable would a movie be that spends a whopping amount of its run-time showing young adults, unsupervised and intoxicated in an isolated location, that just sit around reading Jack Chick tracts and the Decline of the West, lamenting the sad state of sexual affairs in Reagan’s raucous America? Young adults get fucked up and fuck a lot. To suppose that the killer in any given slasher movie is killing them because they are having sex is a classic post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: this therefore because of this. It’s is a confusion of cause and effect: the kids were having sex; they were murdered; therefore they were murdered because they were having sex. It’s the very fallacy that Heathers made fun of when the inept police officers find the bodies of the two slain jocks and attribute the cause of death to a murder-suicide pact merely by the presence of a bottle of spring water. "I got all the answers right here. Sex. #killallmen." The terrible accident, whether the death of a sister (Prom Night) a prank gone bad (Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2; the Burning) or just David Copperfield alone (Terror Train) are all insufficient motives for our family-friendly feminist film critic: no, it’s fucking, and fucking alone, that motivates our killer, who is tyrannical Patriarchy incarnate.
Not so. Sex is incidental to the killer’s motives. Given the gender make-up of most slasher movies, a killer who only kills sexually active kids would limit his victim pool by a three-quarters at least simply because there aren’t enough people to go around for everyone to get laid. And he would have to wait for a piss-ass long time before he could kill the ones that are fucking. In Friday the 13th, only Kevin Bacon and Marcie have sex, and it takes them half the movie to get around to it. In fact, from Part 1 to Part 8, only one couple has sex per movie, and I’m not even sure Part 8 has a sex scene. So if Jason’s motives were to kill sexually active kids, his body count would be exactly two per movie; since his body count is much higher, he must either have separate motives for killing the remaining tens of people he kills, or have two or maybe several motives operating all at once: either option negates the theory that he’s killing from only sexual motives.
But even if there was rampant sex involving every character, such an orgy would deprive a slasher movie of its distinguishing feature: comedic sexual tension. With the exception of Part 7 and 4, all the sex scenes in the Friday franchise are with pre-established couples. You could hardly label missionary sex with someone you’re in an exclusive relationship with as promiscuous behavior. The rest of the sex scenes unfold through sexual intrigues; there’s usually more single women than men, and the men usually compete to sleep with at least one of them. This is a trope slasher movies borrowed form teen-comedies in order to attract a female audience. Sexual selection in slasher movies is a complicated business; I’ll write another essay about that. Point is, there’s always more courtship and foreplay than actual sex, which is never enough sex anyway to give the faint impression that Jason kills kids for being promiscuous when only one goddamned couple have sex and usually they were already dating and can’t be expected to abstain because sex-negative feminists are old, ugly hags who despise attractive women actually enjoying life.
But the motive of the killer doesn’t require a forensic psychologist of Hannibal Lecter’s caliber to figure out. In the first slasher wave -- Happy Birthday to Me, My Bloody Valentine, Prom Night – the killer’s motive isn’t apparent until the killer is revealed at the end; I assure you it’s never “I can’t stand them damn kids fucking!”. Sometimes there isn’t a motive to speak of. Michael Myers originally killed for no discernable reason; for the rest of the sorry series he wants to kill his closest family member and anyone who gets in his way. The truth is that slasher movies don’t require much of a motive because the killers are often faceless, unstoppable monsters like Jaws; they’re meant to be shadowy and impersonal to heighten the fear. When they have a motive, it’s almost always tied to the tragedy in the past; independent filmmakers didn’t take criminal profiling classes and interview Ed Kemper to understand misogynistic lust murder in order to craft their characters.
Mrs. Voorhees’s motive, despite whatever else has been written about it, is really quite simple. The first murders in the franchise – Barry and Claudette– occur around the time Jason supposedly drowned, so those murders were just straight-up revenge. You could argue that Barry and Claudette, along with the cook, the thief, his wife and her lover were all fucking while Jason drowned, but the fucking is incidental. Jason’s death is the motive, the fucking merely the distraction that kept people from watching him (and honestly who wouldn’t rather fuck than watch the little shit anyway. He probably smelled too). The camp counselors could have been playing D&D or watching Bible Man and Mrs. Voorhees would still murder them because her son drowned from negligence.
But what about the later murders? Those murderers have an equally specific and equally explicit motive: Mrs. Voorhees doesn’t want to the camp to open again and she can’t therefore allow the chance of some other poor mongoloid boy drowning at the hands of lazy kids. She says this quite clearly. There could easily have been a lot of rage motivating her simultaneously, but again that rage is centered on Jason’s death, not merely sex. Had sex been her only motive, she had ample opportunity to kill pretty much an entire generation in the 1960s, and indeed she would be unduly optimistic to wait to start killing again in the Religious Right fueled and fundamentalist-frenzied 1980s in which there was also a full-blown AIDS epidemic.
So much for Mrs. Voorhees and her I Can Feel it Coming Through the Air Tonight murder spree. What about Jason? It’s really astonishing that people can claim that Jason is murdering camp counselors because they were having sex when he drowned. A person making that claim either hasn’t seen the second movie, or has a poor grasp of logic and should go back to watching movies that don’t depend on it like Ghostbusters (2016). Jason did not in fact drown; he survived and became a wild-man behemoth. People who say these stupid things are the same people who wonder why Jason is a child in the first movie but a full-grown zombie in the rest. The reason people think Jason kills because he hates sex is, I believe, a combination of two things: misremembering the movies, and replacing the narrative of the films with the sex-negative feminist narrative that has sought to defame slasher movies since the early 1980s and beyond.
Jason kills the camp counselors because one of them decapitated his mother. He never outright says this – he never says anything – but it is postulated by one of the counselors and is a far more logical motive than killing counselors to avenge a death he didn’t die from. You could say he’s avenging the almost-drowning he suffered, but if that’s true, why did he wait so long to start killing and then only start killing after his mother was killed first? It’s pretty indisputable that the return and subsequent death of his mother was the trigger device that started his killing spree, which is backed up sufficiently when you consider that the very first death in Part 2 is the woman who killed Mrs. Voorhees; Jason goes way out of his way to do this, and even takes his mother's head with him all the way to whatever suburb she lived in. Jason is later killed and becomes an undead fiend, after which his motive probably differs from movie to movie, if he even has one. His motive in Part 4, when he rises from the dead, is anyone’s guess. He kills Crispin Glover after he had sex, but he also kills everyone else who doesn’t and spends a great deal of time trying to kill Corey Feldman whose chances of getting laid are a flat zero indeed. In Part 5 the killer is a paramedic avenging his son’s death over a candy bar. Jason apparently just wants revenge in Part 6, in which he looks for Tommy but kills a lot of other people just because. From that point forward Jason kills people independent of rhyme and reason, both the sluts and the saints. He murders the princesses, the brains, the criminals, and even the occasional basket case.
There is quite a lot of fucking going on in these movies, but the fucking is there for reasons other than bizarre political propaganda that teenagers should wait to get married before having sex. The sex is there quite frankly because sex sells. The filmmakers who made slasher movies in the early 1980s wanted a large audience so they could make a profit on their investment. No one would honestly say that a teen in the early 1980s would see a slasher movie and abruptly change his mind about having sex before marriage because he doesn’t want to be murdered by a mask-wearing undead fiend.
The Voorhees Shock Doctrine, Part I: Sluts and SERFs
Slashers are perhaps the most misunderstood subgenre of horror. That’s an odd statement, since horror movies generally and slasher movies especially should be easy to understand. There are however pervasive myths about slasher movies that continue to be regurgitated by either biased film critics or simple horror fans too dense to interpret the movies they claim so much to love. Part of the reason for these myths is the defamation campaign carried out by feminist film critics like Siskel and Ebert; another is the popularity of gender politics and their misplaced application to slasher movies; still another is the plain nastiness of people who, unsatisfied by hating actual people who have more fun than they do, go after fictional people as well.
It’s amazing how seriously people can take slasher movies, which are about as intellectually rewarding as a ponderous Limp Biscuit about Christina Aguilera. No one really wants to admit they watch garbage media; people therefore naturally make up for the shame by injecting their midcult favorites with a social-political subtext they could easily find in better movies they never watch. On any given day you can find some nonsense essay such as one espousing the post-colonial subversion of cultural appropriation just under the surface of Black Panther. Oh, let me tell you about how the Hunger Games is really about Stalin’s liquidation of the former serf farmers in order to further the dictatorship of the proletariat. You thought Endgame was just a popcorn movie? Well allow me – philistine – to lecture you about how reversed gender objectification worked to salve male castration fantasies.
Film is art, and art is open to interpretation, but for God’s sake people there’s a limit to common sense. You might want to go out for a drink or two if you find yourself applying Freudian poststructuralist critical techniques to Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama.
Given an intellectual climate in which the Handmaid’s Tale is an allegory of the Trump administration and JoJo Rabbit is an edgy satire of historical events from like literally almost a goddamned century ago, it’s no surprise that people confuse trash with art and go about looking for something social-political to bitch about in slasher movies. No matter how much I love them, trash is what they are. I admit that, and love them as trash. I don’t whip out a copy of the Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory to sit down and watch Jason X. Save that for Blue is the Warmest Color and the few who actually watched its entirety instead of vigorously masturbating while fast-forwarding to the good parts like us normal people.
In an attempt to debunk these myths for good and all, I’m writing the following series of essays, each one dealing with a particular myth. A few caveats. The slasher movie, of course, is a vast sub-genre composed of probably hundreds of thousands of movies that no mere mortal has seen the sum of. While universal claims might be impossible, generalities however certainly are. So please spare me the hate mail that I’m wrong because Dude Bro Party Massacre III doesn’t’ conform to my argument. If you asked your average person on the street to name a slasher movie, the odds are he’ll name one of the mainstream franchises produced in the last forty years. I’m going to use the Friday the 13th franchise as a model because that franchise spanned the entire 1980s, and because I don’t really want to review each movie individually.
The dominant myth about slasher movies is that the teenagers are murdered because they are having sex. This myth is pretty stupid: often the movies themselves explicitly say why the masked murderer is off and about killing kids. The motive in fact is central to the structure of the story: nearly every slasher movie begins with a crime or tragic accident set in the past, which usually adversely affects the killer and therefore motivates him to slaughter kids later after he’s triggered by remembering it.
But aren’t the promiscuous kids killed all the same, you may ask? Promiscuity there is aplenty in pretty much every slasher movie, and that should come as no surprise to anyone. How enjoyable would a movie be that spends a whopping amount of its run-time showing young adults, unsupervised and intoxicated in an isolated location, that just sit around reading Jack Chick tracts and the Decline of the West, lamenting the sad state of sexual affairs in Reagan’s raucous America? Young adults get fucked up and fuck a lot. To suppose that the killer in any given slasher movie is killing them because they are having sex is a classic post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: this therefore because of this. It’s is a confusion of cause and effect: the kids were having sex; they were murdered; therefore they were murdered because they were having sex. It’s the very fallacy that Heathers made fun of when the inept police officers find the bodies of the two slain jocks and attribute the cause of death to a murder-suicide pact merely by the presence of a bottle of spring water. "I got all the answers right here. Sex. #killallmen." The terrible accident, whether the death of a sister (Prom Night) a prank gone bad (Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2; the Burning) or just David Copperfield alone (Terror Train) are all insufficient motives for our family-friendly feminist film critic: no, it’s fucking, and fucking alone, that motivates our killer, who is tyrannical Patriarchy incarnate.
Not so. Sex is incidental to the killer’s motives. Given the gender make-up of most slasher movies, a killer who only kills sexually active kids would limit his victim pool by a three-quarters at least simply because there aren’t enough people to go around for everyone to get laid. And he would have to wait for a piss-ass long time before he could kill the ones that are fucking. In Friday the 13th, only Kevin Bacon and Marcie have sex, and it takes them half the movie to get around to it. In fact, from Part 1 to Part 8, only one couple has sex per movie, and I’m not even sure Part 8 has a sex scene. So if Jason’s motives were to kill sexually active kids, his body count would be exactly two per movie; since his body count is much higher, he must either have separate motives for killing the remaining tens of people he kills, or have two or maybe several motives operating all at once: either option negates the theory that he’s killing from only sexual motives.
But even if there was rampant sex involving every character, such an orgy would deprive a slasher movie of its distinguishing feature: comedic sexual tension. With the exception of Part 7 and 4, all the sex scenes in the Friday franchise are with pre-established couples. You could hardly label missionary sex with someone you’re in an exclusive relationship with as promiscuous behavior. The rest of the sex scenes unfold through sexual intrigues; there’s usually more single women than men, and the men usually compete to sleep with at least one of them. This is a trope slasher movies borrowed form teen-comedies in order to attract a female audience. Sexual selection in slasher movies is a complicated business; I’ll write another essay about that. Point is, there’s always more courtship and foreplay than actual sex, which is never enough sex anyway to give the faint impression that Jason kills kids for being promiscuous when only one goddamned couple have sex and usually they were already dating and can’t be expected to abstain because sex-negative feminists are old, ugly hags who despise attractive women actually enjoying life.
But the motive of the killer doesn’t require a forensic psychologist of Hannibal Lecter’s caliber to figure out. In the first slasher wave -- Happy Birthday to Me, My Bloody Valentine, Prom Night – the killer’s motive isn’t apparent until the killer is revealed at the end; I assure you it’s never “I can’t stand them damn kids fucking!”. Sometimes there isn’t a motive to speak of. Michael Myers originally killed for no discernable reason; for the rest of the sorry series he wants to kill his closest family member and anyone who gets in his way. The truth is that slasher movies don’t require much of a motive because the killers are often faceless, unstoppable monsters like Jaws; they’re meant to be shadowy and impersonal to heighten the fear. When they have a motive, it’s almost always tied to the tragedy in the past; independent filmmakers didn’t take criminal profiling classes and interview Ed Kemper to understand misogynistic lust murder in order to craft their characters.
Mrs. Voorhees’s motive, despite whatever else has been written about it, is really quite simple. The first murders in the franchise – Barry and Claudette– occur around the time Jason supposedly drowned, so those murders were just straight-up revenge. You could argue that Barry and Claudette, along with the cook, the thief, his wife and her lover were all fucking while Jason drowned, but the fucking is incidental. Jason’s death is the motive, the fucking merely the distraction that kept people from watching him (and honestly who wouldn’t rather fuck than watch the little shit anyway. He probably smelled too). The camp counselors could have been playing D&D or watching Bible Man and Mrs. Voorhees would still murder them because her son drowned from negligence.
But what about the later murders? Those murderers have an equally specific and equally explicit motive: Mrs. Voorhees doesn’t want to the camp to open again and she can’t therefore allow the chance of some other poor mongoloid boy drowning at the hands of lazy kids. She says this quite clearly. There could easily have been a lot of rage motivating her simultaneously, but again that rage is centered on Jason’s death, not merely sex. Had sex been her only motive, she had ample opportunity to kill pretty much an entire generation in the 1960s, and indeed she would be unduly optimistic to wait to start killing again in the Religious Right fueled and fundamentalist-frenzied 1980s in which there was also a full-blown AIDS epidemic.
So much for Mrs. Voorhees and her I Can Feel it Coming Through the Air Tonight murder spree. What about Jason? It’s really astonishing that people can claim that Jason is murdering camp counselors because they were having sex when he drowned. A person making that claim either hasn’t seen the second movie, or has a poor grasp of logic and should go back to watching movies that don’t depend on it like Ghostbusters (2016). Jason did not in fact drown; he survived and became a wild-man behemoth. People who say these stupid things are the same people who wonder why Jason is a child in the first movie but a full-grown zombie in the rest. The reason people think Jason kills because he hates sex is, I believe, a combination of two things: misremembering the movies, and replacing the narrative of the films with the sex-negative feminist narrative that has sought to defame slasher movies since the early 1980s and beyond.
Jason kills the camp counselors because one of them decapitated his mother. He never outright says this – he never says anything – but it is postulated by one of the counselors and is a far more logical motive than killing counselors to avenge a death he didn’t die from. You could say he’s avenging the almost-drowning he suffered, but if that’s true, why did he wait so long to start killing and then only start killing after his mother was killed first? It’s pretty indisputable that the return and subsequent death of his mother was the trigger device that started his killing spree, which is backed up sufficiently when you consider that the very first death in Part 2 is the woman who killed Mrs. Voorhees; Jason goes way out of his way to do this, and even takes his mother's head with him all the way to whatever suburb she lived in. Jason is later killed and becomes an undead fiend, after which his motive probably differs from movie to movie, if he even has one. His motive in Part 4, when he rises from the dead, is anyone’s guess. He kills Crispin Glover after he had sex, but he also kills everyone else who doesn’t and spends a great deal of time trying to kill Corey Feldman whose chances of getting laid are a flat zero indeed. In Part 5 the killer is a paramedic avenging his son’s death over a candy bar. Jason apparently just wants revenge in Part 6, in which he looks for Tommy but kills a lot of other people just because. From that point forward Jason kills people independent of rhyme and reason, both the sluts and the saints. He murders the princesses, the brains, the criminals, and even the occasional basket case.
There is quite a lot of fucking going on in these movies, but the fucking is there for reasons other than bizarre political propaganda that teenagers should wait to get married before having sex. The sex is there quite frankly because sex sells. The filmmakers who made slasher movies in the early 1980s wanted a large audience so they could make a profit on their investment. No one would honestly say that a teen in the early 1980s would see a slasher movie and abruptly change his mind about having sex before marriage because he doesn’t want to be murdered by a mask-wearing undead fiend.