Brothers, Sisters, and Chainsaws: The Slasher Film as Locus for Sibling Rivalry

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Barbara Jane Brickman is an Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of West Georgia, where she is developing a Film Studies program. She has previously published articles on the pathologization of female teens in medical discourse and on representations of teen spectators and fans in film and television. Her current project examines the intersection of adolescent spectatorship, fandom, and fantasy in postwar literature and teen films.

Notes

1. See also Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia UP, 2000) for another challenge to the Oedipal model through a re-examination and re-focus on Antigone's legacy.

2. As Mitchell contends in Siblings: Sex and Violence, with the onset of puberty “boys and girls will re-experience the murderousness towards siblings” (30).

3. For example, Wood emphasizes the little girl who “kills and devours her parents” in Night of the Living Dead instead of the final murderous confrontation between Johnny and Barbara (124). Or, with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Wood opposes two entire family units—the young people and the slaughterhouse family—to examine their hierarchal positions as young and old, affluent and poor, normal and monstrous (131).

4. See Vivian Sobchack, “Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange,” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: U of Texas, 1996) for another focus on the child at the expense of teen murderer in slasher films, in order to understand the relationship between a rejected or threatened patriarchy and the children it takes as its victims or imagines as its monster. See also William Paul's reading of the child monster in Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror & Comedy (New York: Columbia UP, 1994).

5. Tony Williams’ Hearths of Darkness: The Family in American Horror Film (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 1996) does take up Wood's focus on the entire family unit, particularly in regards to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Last House on the Left (Craven, 1972), and The Hills Have Eyes (Craven, 1977) as oppositions between a monstrous and a “normal” family, but his view of the later slasher films reasserts the generational divide. In the case of The Hills Have Eyes, David Rodowick also pursues Wood's focus on the family unit, arguing that the mirroring of the two families blurs the “comfortable distance” between the two and indicates the violence inherent within the bourgeois family (348).

6. Proposing it as a “major theme” of the “stalker cycle” of films, Dika joins the “Oedipus conflict” with the act of looking in order to establish the “primal scene” as its foundational drama (17). Unlike Steve Neale, who connects the “primal scene” of Halloween's opening sequence to the phallic mother (“Halloween” 368), Dika focuses on the child-viewer of the primal scene. Dika pursues a model for the voyeurism and self-reflexivity noted by early commentators on the film, such as J.P. Telotte in “Faith and Idolatry in the Horror Film,” Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, Ed. Barry Keith Grant (Lanham: Scarecrow P, 2004) and “Through a Pumpkin's Eye: The Reflexive Nature of Horror,” American Horrors: Essays on the Modern Horror Film, Ed. Gregory Waller (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987).

7. I will be citing the original article “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film” as it was reprinted in Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, Ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: U of Texas P, 1996) 66–113.

8. While she uses examples of beating fantasies in Victorian flagellation literature rather than Freud's male examples in a “A Child Is Being Beaten” who imagine a mother figure beating, her example from Steven Marcus’ work raises a similar unruly female presence when he describes one gentleman being whipped by prostitutes (97). Clover summarizes this other possibility with an intriguing question: “If her masculine features qualify her as a transformed boy, do not the feminine features of the killer qualify him as a transformed woman (in which case the homoerotic reading can be maintained only by defining that ‘woman’ as phallic and transforming her into a male)?” (99). Or, one might add, it simply transforms her into the phallic mother.

9. The close connection between the feminine or marginalized monster and the female protagonist and spectator has been theorized by Linda Williams in “When the Woman Looks,” Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: U of Texas P, 1996) 15–34, and Barbara Creed in The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993). As Williams proposes in her article, the relationship between the killer and the female victim/viewer is marked by resemblance and possibility (31) and she suggests there is power in their shared difference and in their ability to “mutilate and transform the vulnerable male” (23).

10. Wood characterizes the opening monument work of art as a “parody of domesticity,” and certainly the same could be said of the dinner scene (132). This parody creates for Wood a “sense of grotesque comedy” and a fundamental absurdity to the film that does not make it any less horrific or insightful.

11. Interestingly, though, while feelings for “siblings and peers cast their shadow over relations with parents,” they are neglected by psychoanalytic theory, according to Mitchell. In her inversion of the typical psychoanalytic ordering for the development of the subject, she places the Oedipus complex in the shadow of sibling ambivalence (77).

12. See William Paul, Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy for resistance to the “sexual” reading of Michael's actions. Paul questions of Michael's “latent sexual desire” as based on “a strange assumption of what the needs of a six-year-old might be” (322) and asserts, instead, that the shock of the sequence's final revelation forces us to examine the killer as a child who takes revenge on his neglectful caretaker.

13. Juliet Mitchell proposes a different understanding of sex in the sibling situation that interweaves sex and death; “sibling sex,” in her terms, works as love of the same intertwined with murderousness and death, not sexual difference and reproductive life (Siblings 30).

14. In fact, this sense of Laurie's imagination or psyche playing tricks on her becomes a trope in the later films in the series in which Laurie Strode returns, Halloween H2O: 20 years Later (Miner, 1998) and Halloween Resurrection (Rosenthal, 2002). For example, in H2O Laurie has visions of Michael that disappear after she closes her eyes and wishes him away, except, of course, until their battle begins.

15. This model of subjectivity, Mitchell recognizes, has obvious parallels to Lacan's account of the “mirror stage,” in which the subject's ‘real’ self is forever lost through the mediation of the “I” in the mirror, but her model suggests the sibling as that mirror (Mad Men 106). Mitchell describes this experience of the child looking in the mirror and seeing itself “as unified” as a joyful experience, but Lacan is quite careful to also assign murderous aggression to the child as well, hating and wanting to annihilate the me-more-than-me, which fits Mitchell's analysis of the sibling conflict even better.

16. S.S. Prawer's significant contribution to analysis of “terror film,” Caligari's Children: The Film as Tale of Terror (New York: De Capo, 1980), devotes an entire chapter to the uncanny, locating the feeling in “our penetration of the author's psyche which we recognize as akin to hidden ideas in our own,” which are “at once familiar and strange” (117). Provocatively, Prawer characterizes the author as “brother to both patient and analyst” in the exploration of those hidden areas.

17. Mitchell does not closely examine Freud's concept of the uncanny is this regard and Clover does not consider the double as a major component of the uncanny, instead favoring the concept of “intellectual uncertainty” (100).

18. Perhaps Sarah Trencansky puts it best when she recognizes, through Isabel Cristina Pinedo's work, that “the statistical proportion of female to male viewers is largely contested,” yet these arguments do not deny “that female viewership of slashers exists” (64). Indeed, a recent study of horror film audiences takes for granted the predominance of younger viewers (25 and under), but contests the common critical presumption that these are male viewers with evidence that “just under half” of the study's female respondents “watched a horror film at least once a week” (Cherry 170). See also Valerie Wee, “Resurrecting and Updating the Teen Slasher: The Case of Scream,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 34.2 (Summer 2006): 50–61, for an examination of the diverse audience for the Scream franchise.

19. For investigations of this trend in American culture toward the dominance of youth cultures, see Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1989); James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford, 1986); Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (New York: Perennial, 2000); Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham: Duke UP, 2005); Grace Palladino, Teenager: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1996).

20. While I agree with Andrew Tudor's claims that the subjective camera does not “necessarily place the viewer in a position of vicarious participation in Michael's stalking activities” because to insist on that identification “underestimates the complexity of the movie spectator's relation to the optical point of view” (201), such an identification remains a possibility, just not an inevitability, and might still represent a significant pleasure offered by the films.

21. Although I am suggesting a fluidity in gender positions for the adolescent spectator here, the films are not so flexible on the question of racial difference within the adolescent peer group. In fact, the whiteness of Michael's mask indicates an anxious hyper-whiteness that attempts to deny racial difference but becomes a parody of that exclusionary practice. These horror films offer a notoriously whitewashed world where the lack of racial diversity indicates a deeper anxiety about the empowerment or visibility of racial minorities in this time period than about the growing empowerment of young women.

22. Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead (1981) offers an interesting inversion of this male-killer-brother and female-survivor-sister trope, wherein Ash is tormented by his possessed sister, Cheryl, throughout the film; she is the first to be possessed and the last to die. Although not technically a slasher film, Evil Dead presents a group of youths secluded at a cabin where they are assaulted by demons who possess first Cheryl and then each of Ash's friends until he is the last left. In the end, Ash appears to be triumphant, representing a rare Final Boy, but the final tracking shot of the film indicates he might “join” his sister and friends after all.