The Monstrous Years: Teens, Slasher Films, and the Family
2002; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 54; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Crime and Detective Fiction Studies
ResumoIN 1978, HALLOWEEN HERALDED new subgenre of horror, teen slasher film. Combining inventive violence and clever, eerily evocative suburban mise-en-scene with engaging, believable, contemporary teen protagonists and superhuman killer, director and co-writer John Carpenter created new, effective type of film thriller. There were earlier films that featured teen-aged protagonists, such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Carrie (1976), some of them gorier and almost all of them more expensively made,1 but Carpenter's camera work and narrative style distinguished HaIloween from these predecessors. Accompanied by creepy piano music composed by Carpenter, Steadicam roams through small town streets, stalking victims. Its point-of-view merges into and out of killer's; every innocuous movement is made suspicious, every suburban commonplace menacing. The suburban haven, away from dangers of city, not only fails to protect its children, it has become breeding ground of living nightmares unknown to urban landscapes. In films following Halloween, suburban and small town teenagers are put in danger time and again, at home, at school, at camp, and on holiday. These films seem to mock white flight to gated communities, in particular attempts of parents to shield their children from dangerous influences represented by city: widespread crime, easy access to drugs, unsupervised friendships. The danger is within, films seem to say; horror derives from family and from troubling ordeal of being late-twentieth-century teenager. Several critics have noted horror films' overt relation to and covert dependence on American family, and I rely on their excellent discussions in argument that follows.2 My focus is much narrower than general category of horror, however, and much more punctual. I focus on teen slasher films, posit reason for their arrival in late 19705, their modifications through years, and their recent parodie incarnations. Slasher Roots Linked to tradition of horror whose inception is most often located in English gothic, contemporary horror films extend and revise themes that dominated earlier horror films. Critics generally fix beginning of English gothic in second half of eighteenth century, with Horace WaIpole's The Castle ofOtranto (1764).3 Contemporary horror plays out many of defining characteristics of gothic: defenseless heroines; suppressed passions; unspeakable desires; fearful landscapes and haunted, uncanny interiors; untrustworthy and suspicious relations and relationships; terrifying uncertainty and stifling knowledge; familial secrets and their dreadful exposure; and jarring juxtapositions of moral and monstrous, sexual and grotesque, virtuous and violent. Mark Edmundson believes that contemporary horror films representa degradation of gothic tradition. He explains that initial wave of gothic fiction afforded means of insight, vitalizing effect (xiii) in its revelation, in darkened shades, of world of layered complexity. He finds that most of today's gothic does no such thing, calling contemporary gothic (as manifested in selected films, sordid confessional television talk shows, reporting and analysis of O. ). Simpson trial, and some recent fiction), no-fault, dead-end and politically impotent (68). The attraction of this latter type of gothic, Edmundson explains, is that it offers epistemological certainty; it allows us to believe that we've found (68). The truth is that world is hopeless, terrifying nightmare. For Edmundson, gothic despair is salve, manufactured, albeit gloomy, meaning that relieves us of making meanings of our own, of living through an engagement with the complexity of our problems and breadth of our responsibilities (68). It is also catalyst for what Edmundson calls a culture of facile transcendence, contemporary willingness to look for salvation in forms of simplistic pop psychologies and group therapies, psychic hotlines, uplifting popular novels and self-help books, narratives of angelic intercession and spiritual redemption, and fantasies of renewal such as Forrest Gump and Iron John (179). …
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