2025/01/01 by Michael Burke · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Gothic Literature and Media Analysis #Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction #Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art
paper · doi:10.5406/19346018.77.4.02
slasher films have long been considered transgressive, trampling over political and cultural values and violating social mores on violence, sexuality, and often common sense. Moreover, they are typically dismissed as lowbrow, misogynistic, and as Carol Clover notes, “consigned to the bottom of the horror heap” (21), fixated more on gratuitous nudity and superfluous gore than on interrogating the nature of horror or criticizing the status quo. However, such sweeping criticism does an injustice to both well-crafted slasher films and the genre in toto. Scholarly research, ranging from Vera Dika's structuralist approach and Clover's analysis of the representation of sexuality and gendered spectatorship to Adam Rockoff's comprehensive tabulation of slasher cinema, has emphasized how the slasher film challenges the culture's predominant pieties and dogmas. More recent studies continue this focus, exploring the postmodern parodying of slasher film tropes (Petridis, “A Historical Approach”; Wee), the neoslasher's nostalgic pining for a mythic America in the post 9/11 era (Wetmore 196), and recent innovative slashers sporting cross-genre permutations. This article inquires into the last category, which I call the science fiction (hereafter SF) slasher, which are films incorporating metaphysically fantastic and SF premises into the conventional slasher film, as exhibited in a recent crop of slasher hybrids including The Final Girls (Todd Strauss-Schulson, 2015), Freaky (Christopher Landon, 2020), Happy Death Day (Christopher Landon, 2017) and its sequel Happy Death Day 2U (Christopher Landon, 2019), and Totally Killer (Nahnatchka Khan, 2023).It is no coincidence that critics such as Chris Evangelista, Benjamin Lee, and Richard Newby have grouped together these SF slashers. Yet if genres are christened by the discourse of film critics, scholars, and cinephiles, such baptisms do not imply that genres are simply figments of critics’ imaginations. For all their artificiality, genres operate as cultural conventions; as Andrew Tudor contends, “[g]enre is what we collectively believe it to be” (7). Nor do generic classifications dwell in isolation from one another; some of the more compelling instances of art, especially horror, derive from the overlapping of various genres, including fantasy, SF, and suspense. Such hybridizations of genres and subgenres might complicate easy, pat summarizations of their fields, but they also produce some of the more excellent exemplars consumed by the public, as with horror and its subgenre, the slasher. Although not a monolithic subgenre, the slasher film typically relays the trials and tribulations of what Clover dubs the “Final Girl,” a cinematic foil to the Killer, who “(1) undergoes agonizing trials, and (2) virtually or actually destroys the antagonist and saves herself” (Clover 59). The SF slasher retains these elements but transforms and opens new permutations of slasher tropes due to its inclusion of the SF genre and other subgenres.Not only has the SF slasher broached new possibilities for horror and revitalized the conventions of the classic slasher, but a parodic self-referentiality also subtends it, as each of these films draws from an original film of a different genre (the anchor film), amalgamating that genre's tropes into its story and composition. Happy Death Day and Happy Death Day 2U replicate the typical slasher tropes but with a fundamental metaphysical twist—a spiral narrative involving a time loop, teasing references to Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993), a comedic time-loop narrative about the moral redemption of a narcissistic weatherman. Totally Killer, a SF slasher where the Final Girl travels back in time to stop a masked murderer, borrows heavily from the classic SF saga Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985, 1989, 1990), its influence shining through the complicated (and humorous) interactions of the Final Girl with her teenaged parents. Freaky appropriates the identity-swapping trope of Disney classic Freaky Friday (Gary Nelson, 1976; and in a later iteration, Mark Waters, 2003) in which a shy teenager trades bodies with a disturbed serial killer. Last, The Final Girls waxes nostalgic over classic slasher tropes, as well as deriving its screen-crossing premise from movies such as Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998) and The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1985). These films do not simply employ a fantasy or science fiction gimmick to spice up the Killer's hunt, but instead unfold as intriguing cross-fertilizations of disparate subgenres, distorting the fundamental parameters of the conventional slasher film. Space, time, and causality undergo fundamental transformations in these hybrids with the introduction of the metaphysical change, which likewise skews the Final Girl's struggle with the Killer.This article opens with a brief sketch of the slasher subgenre and the SF genre, identifying their basic conventions. Incorporating SF's notion of the novel change and its effect of cognitive estrangement, I interrogate how these features are sutured to the traditional slasher film with its representation of dilated space, and Final in the SF slasher. elements the SF the an narrative that a metaphysical change to the (2) the by the and the parodic of these in the Happy Death Day The Final and Totally Killer, the SF of the Final its the and of slasher slasher a a of in an by a (Petridis, “A Historical Moreover, the tropes and to have as in The in the and and the Yet a brief of the slasher pat and one the that in the to as in such as The Girl and The with the to the of these horror often to a who and the masked Yet this narrative does not the generic which with the the and slasher including and slashers also complicate For in a where the Final Girl is by the antagonist other not in the the Killer a teenaged and and the Final Girl a no as the the classic slasher such genre permutations from its slashers the subgenre, such as in Friday the and in Final from the Killer's in such as in on 1985). 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slasher, the criticism of and its of the of film, by of classic slashers and on and original such as the and the postmodern of the slasher in a The of 9/11 and the the neoslasher's the the Killer's more to social and to (Petridis, “A Historical are as to as they are to for their and social (Petridis, of the the Final Girl not the last an are not for or a are as to as is about of classic slasher films in their through of the or of how to a of the especially in and cultural values the of from its postmodern to horror with which slasher as or they as in an the a novel of the slasher tropes or in the postmodern in the slasher the SF slasher of the slasher The SF slasher borrows from the neoslasher's of the classic often for comedic and parodic the classic to for a the SF slasher the of the the notion of a Killer, by the trope of a time loop, time or into the film Moreover, the nature of the SF slasher other slasher as the SF slasher an anchor from genre as or the for original films such as 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The of and of the by slashers the and the of the of time, this SF slashers to and the through which horror distorting the and (and and the of and in SF slashers the typical slasher especially the Final Yet these films the of the slasher genre, as of the slashers also of these including the and SF of SF and horror tropes transforms the of time and and to the For SF is typically in the narrative into and new or with especially the slasher film, and time, not only with the or but also in in the slasher as in a to the the Killer's and of in the original The metaphysical of in the SF slasher the and as the Killer is into an of and slasher in the of The Final The SF slasher also and time to the through to the Killer's a or a film of or by the to a time of in her time loop, to to the her to her the are and the of the film, in which the SF of the of the Final Girl and her with the Killer, the of the from simply the Killer to the about by the metaphysical of her is that the SF slasher has from the and its of the classic slasher. the of that has especially up horror cinema, the together of slasher tropes with film has the slasher subgenre to and The narrative it to a approach into studies that the and the of the Final its of the and of the the Final Girl and the Killer, the SF slasher has it is to the slasher to the of the a of an or about it as a masked or a time