You can't escape: inside and outside the ‘slasher’ movie

Abstract

Since the 1970s, the ‘slasher’ movie, with its violence towards women and the surviving ‘final girl’, has been a constant presence in the horror genre to the delight of some and the perplexed dismay of others. Traditional academic approaches to the genre have tended to make assumptions about who is watching these films and why. This article uses a Jungian-inflected approach to reconsider the potential meaning of the genre, suggesting that the violence in the films is less an exhortation to violence against women, but rather a representation of women's experience of patriarchy, with the ‘final girl’ as a figure of resistance. The article also considers the meaning of the more contemporary ‘final girl as perpetrator’ slasher films.

Keywords:

• slasher movie
• final girl
• Jung
• horror
• feminism
• film theory

Notes on contributor

Dr Catriona Miller is a senior lecturer in media at Glasgow Caledonian University where her research interests include the discourses, ideology and archetypal dimensions of science fiction, horror and fantasy. She has published on television, film and other transmediatised phenomenon.

Notes

1. The term ‘mash-up’ was included in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. A mash-up is a fusion or combination of two disparate elements – sometimes musical, sometimes digital files, sometimes diegetic. In this case, it is a fusion of the hitherto separate story-worlds of Friday the 13th and Halloween. A high-profile superhero mash-up, the as yet untitled Batman vs. Superman project, directed by Zack Snyder, is due for release in 2016.