From Bates To Bush: The New Slasher Film

Abstract

This essay suggests that recent film criticism and genre scholarship neglects the historical and theoretical connection between so-called "Torture Porn" and the 1980s slasher film. The creation of this altogether new generic category limits the discussion of the contemporary horror film and encourages current scholarship to ignore the generic persistence of scenes of brutal and graphic torture within the genre. As a result, scholars fail to ask how individual films use such depictions of violence to generate new textual meanings within a new context. Most problematically, such scholarship ignores the shift in gender dynamics present in recent American horror film as compared to earlier iterations. This study suggests that it is precisely the shift in gender dynamics that generates textual, linguistic, and cultural meaning for the contemporary horror film. Thus, the essay resituates contemporary horror films such as Wolf Creek, Eli Roth's Hostel, Marcus Nipsel's Friday the 13th remake, and Rob Zombie's Halloween remakes in their larger historical and cultural context, focusing not only on the evolution of the slasher monster, but also on the evolution of the earlier slasher protagonist--the Final Girl--into a Final Boy. By attending more closely to generic and cultural contexts, we can see that this shift registers specifically post-9/11 anxieties about the status of the hero and the inviolability of the masculine/national body.