Final Monsters: Intergenerational Repression And Horror Cinema

Criticism of the slasher genre often emerges from feminist framework, which often sees them as little more than gratuitous displays of power over the bodies of women, culminating in the approval of a 'good' femininity in the unsullied Final Girl trope. I would argue that there is more to the portrayal of youth in these films than merely the opportunity for some fetishistic titillation. If horror films are truly concerned, at least primarily, with a psychological return of the repressed, then it is no wonder that their focus has come onto increasingly younger casts of characters.

This youth is a transgressive one; one which emerged in a bastard world of their parent's making and responded to it with disdain. The subsequent generation would eschew the normality of their parents Americana, with the war in Vietnam putting a clear conclusion to any post-war optimism left for that generation's youth.

"The seams of American identity began to give way. Growing numbers in the civil rights and antiwar movements began by rejecting American practices, went on to reject American ideals, and soon, since America was its ideals, rejected the conventional versions of American identity altogether." (Gitlin, 1995: 68)

Wes Craven's Last House On The Left (1972) provided a critical lens of the end of the preceding generation, but the genre's development past that (moving closer to, and into, the 1980s) set out a series of horrors that didn't just mediate the violence committed by one generation unto another, but gave that generation an opportunity to fight back. It is in light of this that I want to propose the Final Girl not as a misogynistic trapping, but a performance of the genre's moral ambiguities. Particularly, moral ambiguities in line with, not only the sociopolitical context around the production of these films, but those which also mediate particularly intergenerational anxieties.

"What the previous generation repressed in us, we, in turn, repress in our children, seeking to mold them into replicas of ourselves, perpetrators of a discredited tradition." (Wood, 2003: 66).

The horror films of the 80s are similarly concerned with the repression of previous generations, but they develop this towards its next logical step, by freeing the upcoming generation from the shackles of that repression and casting them as the leads, rather than as tragic victims. When John Carpenter defies readings of Halloween's (Carpenter, 1980) female victims as reaping what their sexuality has sewn, he is positioning them alongside his main character, not against her. Within this pantheon of youth. he even claims to not recognise the non-sexual, purely virginal Laurie Stode that critics have read her as:

"They [the critics] completely missed the boat there, I think. Because if you turn it around, the one girl who is the most sexually uptight just keeps stabbing this guy with a long knife. She's the most sexually frustrated. She's the one that killed him. Not because she's a virgin, but because all that repressed energy starts coming out. She uses all those phallic symbols on the guy... She and the killer have a certain link: sexual repression." (Carpenter qtd. in Clover, 1992: 48-49)

Laurie Strode from Halloween (1978).

Concurrent to this, Carol Clover also suggests that a shared masculinity also links the Monster with the Final Girl (1992: 49) and both these facets are instances of a repressed, returned. Outside of the parameters of a reactionary, judicial killing of sexual women, the Victims of the Monster express their own repression in taboo female sexuality and in refusing to perform their sexual femininity in the expectedly docile way. They do not fear men in a way they may have been expected to. This isn't a sign of youthful idiocies, of shallow, air-headed women whose lack of awareness of the danger around them signify them as ripe for retribution, but is rather a signifier for how these character's defy generational expectations. They no longer engage in acts of repression.

While the Monster seems to police the bodies of these transgressive women, the Monster himself fits into this formulation of the repressed, returned. This has tended to be the focus of writing on Horror cinema, discussions around how each Monster exists outside of normative hetero-patriarchy, how he is often a materialisation of that which we, the audience, have repressed, and so on. Repression of child sexuality, for example comes to the forefront in Halloween (1978). Repressed female sexual energy, or creativity, is positioned directly against the legitimated female labour in the film, as sex always seems to get in the way of babysitting. In the childlike perspective of Meyers, it is the abdication of babysitting duty that seems to be what antagonises the most.

What I'm interested in, however, is the convergence of these aspects. It is important to note that the Final Girl is similarly transgressive, insofar that her performances of masculinity (the tomboyish nature that the Final Girl's have in common, to varying degrees) and bisexuality, have been hitherto repressed. Once denied "drives culturally associated with masculinity" (Wood, 2003: 64), these are now brought to the forefront by the Monster. So the Victims, Monster and Final Girl all exist outside of conventional normality. The actions of the Monster, for example, are not merely those of an agent of the repressed arriving as arbiter of punishment, nor is it simply the revenge of a societal outcast. Instead, in these films, we see an entire sphere of societal transgressions played out against the previous generation's normative safe space: white suburbia. Heroes and villains alike are cast as separate from the normative order, which is presented as ignorant and ineffective.

The reveal at the end of Prom Night (1980) takes a meta approach to this, but delivers a flaccid, irresponsible parental order nonetheless. Engaged with our knowledge of Michael Meyers, escaped mental patient and horror villain, the film shows the police in search for the danger they (and the audience) expect. When he is found, not anywhere near the location of the titular high-school prom night, the police believe the danger to be averted and drop their guard. Of course, the threat is located elsewhere and the police have proved themselves to be no more adept at protecting the younger generation than that generation is at protecting itself. The identity of the killer, Kim's brother, further blurs the line between the Victims, Final Girl and Monster: in the slasher follow up to Halloween (1978) the Monster is no longer clearly Othered (the general plot of a covered up murder coming back to haunt people also fits nicely with the idea of the return of the repressed).

The killer attacks the prom in Prom Night (1980).

So it is particularly the police force and the nuclear family model which are shown incapable of providing moral authority or physical safety, with these two artefacts coalescing neatly in Nightmare on Elm Street's (1984) police family unit. Whilst Nancy's father cannot mobilise the police force to protect the street's youth, Nancy's mother's moral authority is stripped away by alcohol abuse and the part she played in her neighbourhood's original sin, in the creation of Freddy Krueger. In one reading, we can see the parental generation's failings as the reason that the film has no happy ending, when Freddy's final scare is to take his revenge on Nancy's mother, but I think the loss of the 'happy' ending actually occurs earlier- precisely, it happens when Nancy rejects any of the power and dominance that the nightmarish Freddy may have over her. Robin Wood describes the 'happy ending' as a "restoration of repression" (2003: 66). By sheer power of will, it is this which Nancy can not allow to happen. She takes her transgressive bisexuality out of the hands of an abusive force and restores, not repression, but transgression, by returning her youthful, sexual friends alongside her banishment of her harasser. The reneging of Horror films, since Night Of The Living Dead (1968), to provide such a 'Hollywood'-style, conventionally happy ending, is where I read a progressive tendency in the genre: the refusal to restore the repression transforms the film-viewing experience away from something fleeting and escapist, becoming a more tactile text.

Nancy turns her back on her abuser, denying him his power, in A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984).

That the Final Girl heroines rarely seem able to totally restore the normative, repressive status quo positions their role as transgressive characters as a progressive moment; in spite of their intent and desire towards a world where the repressed is restored, they can never go home again. It is here that I refer back to this post's title: The Final Monster. In my view, the Final Girl may be a heroic trope, but she should be read to be just as transgressive as any Monster she comes up against. The film language itself tells us this, when “we are linked, [with a first person camera perspective], with the killer in the early part of the film, usually before we have seen him directly and before we have come to know the Final Girl in any detail” (Clover, 1992: 45) and when our perspective switches over to the Final Girl entirely by the film's conclusion. She is inextricably linked to monster-hood. Not a bastion of purity and conservatism, she is seen rejecting the values and beliefs of previous generations and their halcyon views of youth. She also exists on the other side of trauma, often with no satisfying conclusion to her story, offering a nebulous fictional zone wherein which she can be doomed and liberated simultaneously.
And, of course, that's why I have no interest in watching any of the sequels to these films.

Works Cited:

Clover, C. (1992). Men women and chainsaws: Gender in the modern horror film. London: British Film Institute.

Gitlin, T. (1995). The Twilight of Common Dreams. New York: Henry Holt.

Wood, R. (2003). Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan ...and beyond(Expanded and rev. ed.). New York: Columbia University Press.

Films Cited:

Halloween (1978) [film] Directed by J. Carpenter. United States: Compass International Pictures.

Last House On The Left (1972) [film] Directed by W. Craven. United States: Sean S. Cunningham Films.

Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) [film] Directed by W. Craven. United States: New Line Cinema.

Night Of The Living Dead (1968) [film] Directed by G. A. Romero. United States: Image Ten.

Prom Night (1980) [film] Directed by P. Lynch. Canada: AVCO Embassy Pictures.