1. Films referred to in this essay are: Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), Aliens (James Cameron, continue

1986), All of Me (Carl Reiner, 1984), An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981), The Amityville Horror (Stuart Rosenberg, 1979), Behind the Green Door (Mitchell Brothers, 1972), The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), Blood Feast (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1963), Blow-Out (Brian De Palma, 1981), Body Double (Brian De Palma, 1984), Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972), Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980), Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980), Every Woman Has a Fantasy (Edwin Brown, 1984), The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), The Eyes of Laura Mars (Irvin Kershner, 1978), The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980), Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972), Friday the Thirteenth (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980), Friday the Thirteenth, Part II (Steve Miner, 1981), Friday the Thirteenth, Part III (Steve Miner, 1982), Friday the Thirteenth: The Final Chapter (Joseph Zito, 1984), Friday the Thirteenth, Part V: A New Beginning (Danny Steinmann, 1985), Friday the Thirteenth, Part VI: Jason Lives (Tom McLoughlin, 1986), Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), Halloween 2 (Rick Rosenthal, 1981), Halloween III: The Witch (Tommy Lee Wallace, 1983), He Knows You're Alone (Armand Mastroianni, 1981), Hell Night (Tom DeSimone, 1981), I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1981), It's Alive (Larry Cohen, 1974), Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), King Kong (Merian B. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933), Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972), Macabre (William Castle, 1958), Motel Hell (Kevin Connor, 1980), Mother's Day (Charles Kauffman, 1980), Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981), A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1985), A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 2: Freddy's Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985), Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922), The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976), Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1973), Play Misty for Me (Clint Eastwood, 1971), Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Psycho II (Richard Franklin, 1983), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975), Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), Slumber Party Massacre (Amy Jones; screenplay by Rita Mae Brown, 1983), Splatter University (Richard W. Haris, 1985), Strait-Jacket (William Castle, 1964), Taboo (Kirdy Stevens, 1980), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre II (Tobe Hooper, 1986), Totsiee (Sydney Pollack, 1982), Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983), The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman, 1959), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962), Wolfen (Michael Wadleigh, 1981).

2. Morris Dickstein, "The Aesthetics of Fright," American Film 5 (1980): 34.

3. "Will Rogers said he never met a man he didn't like, and I can truly say the same about the cinema," Harvey R. Greenberg says in his paean to horror, The Movies on Your Mind (New York, 1975); yet his claim does not extend to the "plethora of execrable imitations [of Psycho ] that debased cinema" (137).

4. William Schoell, Stay Out of the Shower (New York, 1985).

5. "Job Bob Briggs" was evidently invented as a solution to the Dallas Times Herald 's problem of "how to cover trashy movies." See Calvin Trillin's "American Chronicles: The Life and Times of Joe Bob Briggs, So Far," The New Yorker , 22 December 1986, 73-88.

6. Lew Brighton, "Saturn in Retrograde; or, The Texas Jump Cut," The Film Journal 7 (1975): 25.

7. Stephen Koch, "Fashions in Pornography: Murder as Cinematic Chic," Harper's , November 1976, 108-9.

8. Robin Wood, "Return of the Repressed," Film Comment 14 (1978): 30.

9. Robin Wood, "Beauty Bests the Beast," American Film 8 (1983): 63.

10. Dickstein, "The Aesthetics of Fright," 34.

11. "The 'Uncanny,'" in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund continue

Freud , ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), 17:244. Originally published in Imago 5/6 (1919): 317.

12. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (New York, 1964), 278.

13. William Castle, Step Right Up! I'm Gonna Scare the Pants Off America (New York, 1978).

14. Given the number of permutations, it is no surprise that new strategies keep emerging. Only a few years ago, a director hit upon the idea of rendering the point of view of an infant through use of an I-camera at floor level with a double-vision image (Larry Cohen, It's Alive ). Nearly a century after technology provided a radically different means of telling a story, filmmakers are still uncovering the possibilities.

15. Mick Martin and Marsha Porter, in reference to Friday the Thirteenth I , in Video Movie Guide: 1987 (New York, 1987), 690. Robin Wood, "Beauty Bests the Beast," 65, notes that the first-person camera also serves to preserve the secret of the killer's identity for a final surprise--crucial to many films--but adds: "The sense of indeterminate, unidentified, possibly supernatural or superhuman Menace feeds the spectator's fantasy of power, facilitating a direct spectator-camera identification by keeping the intermediary character, while signified to be present, as vaguely defined as possible." Brian De Palma's Blow-Out opens with a parody of just this cinematic habit.

16. On this widely discussed topic, see especially Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York, 1983), 194-236; and Lesley Stern, "Point of View: The Blind Spot," Film Reader 4 (1979): 214-36.

17. In this essay I have used the term identification vaguely and generally to refer both to primary and secondary processes. See especially Mary Ann Doane, "Misrecognition and Identity," Cine-Tracts 11 (1980): 25-32; also Christian Metz, "The Imaginary Signifier," in his The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington, Ind., n.d.).

18. Mark Nash, " Vampyr and the Fantastic," Screen 17 (1976): 37. Nash coins the term cinefantastic to refer to this play.

19. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London, 1981), 31.

20. As Dickstein puts it, "The 'art' of horror film is a ludicrous notion since horror, even at its most commercially exploitative, is genuinely subcultural like the wild child that can never be tamed, or the half-human mutant who appeals to our secret fascination with deformity and the grotesque"; "The Aesthetics of Fright," 34.

21. James B. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (New York, 1985), 84.

22. Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (New York, 1983).

23. Wood, "Return of the Repressed," 26. In Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street , it is the nightmare itself, shared by the teenagers who live on Elm Street, that is fatal. One by one they are killed by the murderer of their collective dream. The one girl who survives does so by first refusing to sleep and then, at the same time that she acknowledges her parents' inadequacies, by conquering the feelings that prompt the deadly nightmare. See, as an example of the topic dream/horror, Dennis L. White, "The Poetics of Horror," Cinema Journal 10 (1971): 1-18.

24. It is not just the profit margin that fuels the production of low horror. It is also the fact that, thanks to the irrelevance of production values, the initial stake is within the means of a small group of investors. Low horror is thus for all practical purposes the only way an independent filmmaker can break into the market. Add to this the filmmaker's unusual degree of control over the product and one begins to understand why it is that low horror engages the talents of such people as Stephanie Rothman, continue

George Romero, Wes Craven, and Larry Cohen. As V. Vale and Andrea Juno put it, "The value of low-budget films is: they can be transcendent expressions of a single person's individual vision and quirky originality. When a corporation decides to invest $20 million in a film, a chain of command regulates each step, and no person is allowed free rein. Meetings with lawyers, accountants, and corporate boards are what films in Hollywood are all about"; Incredibly Strange Films , ed. V. Vale and Andrea Juno, Re/Search 10 (San Francisco, 1986), 5.

25. Despite the film industry's interest in demographics, there is no in-depth study of the composition of the slasher-film audience. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures , 69-72 and 306-7, relies on personal observation and the reports of critics, which are remarkably consistent over time and from place to place; my own observations concur. The audience is mostly between the ages of twelve and twenty, disproportionately male. Some critics remark on a contingent of older men who sit separately and who, in Twitchell's view, are there "not to be frightened, but to participate" specifically in the "stab-at-female" episodes. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel corroborate the observation.

26. The development of the human-sausage theme is typical of the back-and-forth borrowing in low horror. Texas Chain Saw Massacre I hints at it; Motel Hell turns it into an industry ("Farmer Vincent's Smoked Meats: This is It!" proclaims a local billboard); and Texas Chain Saw Massacre II expands it to a statewide chili-tasting contest.

27. "The release of sexuality in the horror film is always presented as perverted, monstrous, and excessive, both the perversion and the excess being the logical outcome of repressing. Nowhere is this carried further than in Texas [ Chain Saw ] Massacre [ I ]. Here sexuality is totally perverted from its functions, into sadism, violence, and cannibalism. It is striking that there is no suggestion anywhere that Sally is the object of an overtly sexual threat; she is to be tormented, killed, dismembered, and eaten, but not raped"; Wood, "Return of the Repressed," 31.

28. With some exceptions: for example, the spear gun used in the sixth killing in Friday the Thirteenth III .

29. Stuart Kaminsky, American Film Genres: Approaches to a Critical Theory of Popular Film (New York, 1977), 107.

30. The shower sequence in Psycho is probably the most echoed scene in all of film history. The bathtub scene in I Spit on Your Grave (not properly speaking a slasher, though with a number of generic affinities) is to my knowledge the only effort to reverse the terms.

31. Schoell, Stay Out of the Shower , 35. It may be argued that Blood Feast (1963), in which a lame Egyptian caterer slaughters one woman after another for their bodily parts (all in the service of Ishtar), provides the serial-murder model.

32. This theme too is spoofed in Motel Hell . Farmer Vincent's victims are two hookers, a kinky couple looking for same (he puts them in room #1 of the motel), and Terry and her boyfriend Bo, out for kicks on a motorcycle. When Terry (allowed to survive) wonders aloud why someone would try to kill them, Farmer Vincent answers her by asking pointedly whether they were married. "No," she says, in a tone of resignation, as if accepting the logic.

33. Further: "Scenes in which women whimper helplessly and do nothing to defend themselves are ridiculed by the audience, who find it hard to believe that anyone--male or female--would simply allow someone to kill them with nary a protest," Schoell, Stay Out of the Shower , 55-56.

34. Splatter University (1984) is a disturbing exception. Professor Julie Parker is clearly established as a Final Girl from the outset and then killed just after the beginning of continue

what we are led to believe will be the Final Girl sequence (she kicks the killer, a psychotic priest-scholar who keeps his knife sheathed in a crucifix, in the groin, runs for the elevator--and then is trapped and stabbed to death). So meticulously are the conventions observed, and then so grossly violated, that we can only assume sadistic intentionality. This is a film in which (with the exception of an asylum orderly in the preface) only females are killed, and in highly sexual circumstances.

35. This film is complicated by the fact that the action is envisaged as a living dream. Nancy finally kills the killer by killing her part of the collective nightmare. See note 23 above.

36. Spoto, Dark Side of Genius , 454. See also William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 246-341.

37. "The Philosophy of Composition," in Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe , ed. G. R. Thompson (New York, 1970), 55.

38. As quoted in Schoell, Stay Out of the Shower , 56.

39. As quoted in ibid., 41.

38. As quoted in Schoell, Stay Out of the Shower , 56.

39. As quoted in ibid., 41.

40. Spoto, Dark Side of Genius , 483.

41. Silvia Bovenschen, "Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?" New German Critique 10 (1977): 114. See also Doane, "Misrecognition and Identity."

42. E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (London, 1983), 15. The discussion of the gendered "gaze" is lively and extensive. See above all Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16 (1975): 6-18; reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings , ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, 3rd ed. (New York, 1985), 803-16; also Christine Gledhill, "Recent Developments in Feminist Criticism," Quarterly Review of Film Studies (1978); reprinted in Mast and Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism , 817-45.

43. Wood, "Beauty Bests the Beast," 64.

44. The locus classicus in this connection is the view-from-the-coffin shot in Carl Dreyer's Vampyr , in which the I-camera sees through the eyes of a dead man. See Nash, " Vampyr and the Fantastic," esp. 32-33. The 1987 remake of The Little Shop of Horrors (itself originally a low-budget horror film, made the same year as Psycho in two days) lets us see the dentist from the proximate point of view of the patient's tonsils.

45. Two points in this paragraph deserve emending. One is the suggestion that rape is common in these films; it is in fact virtually absent, by definition (see note 27 above). The other is the characterization of the Final Girl as "sexy." She may be attractive (though typically less so than her friends), but she is with few exceptions sexually inactive. For a detailed analysis of point-of-view manipulation, together with a psychoanalytic interpretation of the dynamic, see Steve Neale, " Halloween : Suspense, Aggression, and the Look," Framework 14 (1981).

46. Wood is struck by the willingness of the teenaged audience to identify "against" itself, with the forces of the enemy of youth. "Watching it [ Texas Chain Saw Massacre I ] recently with a large, half-stoned youth audience, who cheered and applauded every one of Leatherface's outrages against their representatives on the screen, was a terrifying experience"; "Return of the Repressed," 32.

47. "I really appreciate the way audiences respond," Gail Anne Hurd, producer of Aliens , is reported to have said. "They buy it. We don't get people, even rednecks, leaving the theater saying, 'That was stupid. No woman would do that.' You don't have to be a liberal ERA supporter to root for Ripley"; as reported in the San Francisco Examiner Datebook , 10 August 1986, 19. Time , 28 July 1986, 56, suggests that Ripley's maternal continue

impulses (she squares off against the worst aliens of all in her quest to save a little girl) give the audience "a much stronger rooting interest in Ripley, and that gives the picture resonances unusual in a popcorn epic."

48. Further: "When she [the mother] referred to the infant as a male, I just went along with it. Wonder how that child turned out--male, female, or something else entirely?" The birth is understood to be parthenogenetic, and the bisexual child, literally equipped with both sets of genitals, is figured as the reborn Christ.

49. Linda Williams, "When the Woman Looks," in Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism , ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams, American Film Institute monograph series (Los Angeles, 1984), 90. Williams's emphasis on the phallic leads her to dismiss slasher killers as a "non-specific male killing force" and hence a degeneration in the tradition. "In these films the recognition and affinity between woman and monster of classic horror film gives way to pure identity: she is the monster, her mutilated body is the only visible horror" (96). This analysis does not do justice to the obvious bisexuality of slasher killers, nor does it take into account the new strength of the female victim. The slasher film may not, in balance, be more subversive than traditional horror, but it is certainly not less so.

50. Freud, "The 'Uncanny,'" 245. See also Neale, " Halloween ," esp. 28-29.

51. "The woman's exercise of an active investigating gaze can only be simultaneous with her own victimization. The place of her specularization is transformed into the locus of a process of seeing designed to unveil an aggression against itself"; Mary Ann Doane, "The 'Woman's Film,'" in Re-Vision , 72.

52. John Carpenter interviewed by Todd McCarthy, "Trick and Treat," Film Comment 16 (1980): 23-24.

53. This is not so in traditional film, nor in heterosexual pornography, in any case. Gay male pornography, however, films some male bodies in much the same way that heterosexual pornography films female bodies.

54. Compare the visual treatment of the (male) rape in Deliverance with the (female) rapes in Hitchcock's Frenzy or Wes Craven's Last House on the Left or Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring . The latter films study the victims' faces at length and in closeup during the act; the first looks at the act intermittently and in long shot, focusing less on the actual victim than on the victim's friend who must look on.

55. Marcus, The Other Victorians , 260-61. Marcus distinguishes two phases in the development of flagellation literature: one in which the figure being beaten is a boy, and the second, in which the figure is a girl. The very shift indicates, at some level, the irrelevance of apparent sex. "The sexual identity of the figure being beaten is remarkably labile. Sometimes he is represented as a boy, sometimes as a girl, sometimes as a combination of the two--a boy dressed as a girl, or the reverse." The girls often have sexually ambiguous names, as well. The beater is a female, but in Marcus's reading a phallic one--muscular, possessed of body hair--representing the father.

56. Ibid., 125-27.

55. Marcus, The Other Victorians , 260-61. Marcus distinguishes two phases in the development of flagellation literature: one in which the figure being beaten is a boy, and the second, in which the figure is a girl. The very shift indicates, at some level, the irrelevance of apparent sex. "The sexual identity of the figure being beaten is remarkably labile. Sometimes he is represented as a boy, sometimes as a girl, sometimes as a combination of the two--a boy dressed as a girl, or the reverse." The girls often have sexually ambiguous names, as well. The beater is a female, but in Marcus's reading a phallic one--muscular, possessed of body hair--representing the father.

56. Ibid., 125-27.

57. Further: "Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement. . . . The perfect 'woman of mystery' is one who is blonde, subtle, and Nordic. . . . Movie titles, like women, should be easy to remember without being familiar, intriguing but never obvious, warm yet refreshing, suggest action, not impassiveness, and finally give a clue without revealing the plot. Although I do not profess to be an authority on women, I fear that the perfect title, like the perfect woman, is difficult to find"; as quoted by Spoto, Dark Side of Genius , 431.

58. This would seem to be the point of the final sequence of Brian De Palma's Blow-Out , continue

in which we see the boyfriend of the victim-hero stab the killer to death but later hear the television announce that the woman herself vanquished the killer. The frame plot of the film has to do with the making of a slasher film ("Co-Ed Frenzy"), and it seems clear that De Palma means his ending to stand as a comment on the Final Girl formula of the genre. De Palma's (and indirectly Hitchcock's) insistence that only men can kill men, or protect women from men, deserves a separate essay.

59. The term is Judith Fetterly's. See her The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington, Ind., 1978).

60. On the possible variety of responses to a single film, see Norman N. Holland, "I-ing Film," Critical Inquiry 12 (1986): 654-71.

61. Marcus, The Other Victorians , 127. Marcus contents himself with noting that the scene demonstrates a "confusion of sexual identity." In the literature of flagellation, he adds, "this confused identity is also present, but it is concealed and unacknowledged." But it is precisely the femaleness of the beaten figures that does acknowledge it.

62. Freud, "The 'Uncanny,'" esp. 219-21 and 226-27.

63. Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 216.

64. Not a few critics have argued that the ambiguity is the unintentional result of bad filmmaking.

65. So argues Susan Barrowclough: The "male spectator takes the part not of the male, but of the female. Contrary to the assumption that the male uses pornography to confirm and celebrate his gender's sexual activity and dominance, is the possibility of his pleasure in identifying with a 'feminine' passivity or subordination." See her review of Not a Love Story in Screen 23 (1982): 35-36. Alan Soble seconds the proposal in his Pornography: Marxism, Feminism, and the Future of Sexuality (New Haven, 1986), 93. Porn/sexploitation filmmaker Joe Sarno: "My point of view is more or less always from the woman's point of view; the fairy tales that my films are based on are from the woman's point of view; I stress the efficacy of women for themselves. In general, I focus on the female orgasm as much as I can"; as quoted in Vale and Juno, Incredibly Strange Films , 94. "Male identification with women," Kaja Silverman writes, "has not received the same amount of critical attention [as sublimation into professional 'showing off' and reversal into scopophilia], although it would seem the most potentially destabilizing, at least as far as gender is concerned." See her discussion of the "Great Male Renunciation" in "Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse," in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture , ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 141.

66. Elaine Showalter, "Critical Cross Dressing: Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year," Raritan 3 (1983): 138.

67. Whatever its other functions, the scene that reveals the Final Girl in a degree of undress serves to underscore her femaleness. One reviewer of Aliens remarks that she couldn't help wondering why in the last scene, just as in Alien , "we have Ripley wandering around clad only in her underwear. A little reminder of her gender, lest we lose sight of it behind all that firepower?"; Christine Schoefer, East Bay Express , 5 September 1986, 37.

68. Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," 12.

69. Kaja Silverman, "Masochism and Subjectivity," Framework 12 (1979): 5. Needless to say, this is not the explanation for the girl-hero offered by the industry. Time magazine on Aliens : "As Director Cameron says, the endless 'remulching' of the masculine hero by the 'male-dominated industry' is, if nothing else, commercially shortsighted. 'They choose to ignore that 50% of the audience is female. And I've been told that it has been proved demographically that 80% of the time it's women who decide which film continue

to see'"; 28 July 1986. It is of course not Cameron who established the female hero of the series but Ridley Scott (in Alien ), and it is fair to assume, from his careful manipulation of the formula, that Scott got her from the slasher film, where she has flourished for some time with audiences that are heavily male. Cameron's analysis is thus both self-serving and beside the point.

70. If this analysis is correct, we may expect horror films of the future to feature Final Boys as well as Final Girls. Two recent figures may be incipient examples: Jesse, the pretty boy in A Nightmare on Elm Street II , and Ashley, the character who dies last in The Evil Dead (1983). Neither quite plays the role, but their names, and in the case of Jesse the characterization, seem to play on the tradition.

71. For the opposite view (based on classic horror in both literary and cinematic manifestations), see Franco Moretti, "The Dialectic of Fear," New Left Review 136 (1982): 67-85.

72. Vale and Juno, Incredibly Strange Films , 5.

73. Tania Modleski, "The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Post-modern Theory," in Studies in Entertainment , 155-66. (Like Modleski, I stress that my comments are based on many slashers, not all of them.) This important essay (and volume) appeared too late for me to take it into full account in the text. break