a LOT of slasher flicks from the 70s and 80s strike me as sexually violent revenge fantasies against women’s growing independence at the time tbh
Siskel and Ebert beat you to it in 1980…. Part One
Part Two
There’s a lot of interesting discourse on this post, and I’d like to add Donato Totaro’s article “The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror” to it, covering a major debate in feminist theory over the horror genre. On one side is the straightforward argument that viewers are meant to view slashers through the lens of the killer, taking sadistic enjoyment in the brutalization of women. Carol Clover famously disagreed with that argument, adding that slasher movies are constructed in such a way that viewers are meant to identify with the “final girl” protagonists in their struggle against and ultimate victory over the killer. A variety of other positions exist as well; for example, I find Linda Williams’ argument of a relationship between a female protagonist and a monstrous antagonist interesting:
In other words, in the rare instance when the cinema permits the woman’s look, she not only sees a monster, she sees a monster that offers a distorted reflection of her own image. The monster is thus a particularly insidious form of the many mirrors patriarchal structures of seeing hold up to the woman…
Thus I suggest that, in the classic horror film, the woman’s look at the monster offers at least a potentially subversive recognition of the power and potency of a non-phallic sexuality. Precisely because this look is so threatening to male power, it is violently punished.
ForLoveFromFear 