Patterns of Violence in Original Slasher Films and Remakes
From the Final Girl to the Final Boy: Patterns of Violence in Original Slasher Films and Remakes
Courtney L. Jones
Longwood University
Table of Contents
From the Final Girl to the Final Boy: Patterns of Violence in Original Slasher Films and Remakes
Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………………… 3
Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………………….... 4
Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………… 5
Defining the Slasher Film………….………………………………………………..…………… 6
Literature Review
Themes of Sex, Death, and Survival in Slasher Films ……………………………..…..... 7
Methodology …………………………………………………………………………………… 14
Thematically Organized Findings……………………………………………...……………….. 17 Future Research ………………………………………………………………...... ……. 21
Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………... 22
References ……………………………………………………………………………………… 24
Appendix A:
Code Sheet for Analysis of the A Nightmare on Elm Street films ……………………....25
Appendix B:
Code Sheet for Analysis of the Friday the 13thfilms……………………………….…...26
Abstract
This study analyzes patterns of violence in original slasher films and remakes, specifically in the films A Nightmare on Elm Street (19840 & (2010) and Friday the 13th(1980 & 2009).Every instance of violence against the male and female characters was recorded to help uncover patterns that emerged from the original film to the remake using a psychoanalytical analysis. The key findings were the existence of a final boy in the slasher film remake, who also helps the final girl destroy the killer and how the character of the final girl has evolved from the original film to the remake. The findings also revealed that patterns of violence were similar within each franchise, further proving that the plot of the slasher remake did not deviate much from the plot of the original film. Male characters are killed quickly and more gruesomely than the female characters, whose death is slow and intimately carried out by the killer. The study also provided evidence that the weapon used by the killer did not change, allowing for the characters to be killed in a similar manner in all four films. The study also revealed that although the final girl is not the only survivor of the films, she is still the ultimate destroyer of the killer, despite the presence of a male survivor in the remakes.
Acknowledgements
This study is dedicated to my family, friends, and fellow slasher film fans. I would also like to acknowledge the Department of Communication Studies at Longwood University for giving me the guidance and opportunity to complete this study. I could not have completed this study without the gifted talent of the writers, directors and producers of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th. Thank you to Wes Craven and Robert Englund for bringing Freddy Krueger to life and intriguing my interest in slasher films forever. I would like to dedicate this to all my Dreamers, I could have never done it without all of you!
Introduction
Have you ever had a nightmare that you couldn’t wake up from? This was the plot of one of the most popular slasher films of the 1980s. A Nightmare on Elm Street tells the tale of Freddy Krueger, a child killer who kills a group of teenagers in their dreams, and if they die in their dreams, they die in real life. Another popular slasher film in the 1980s was Friday the 13th. This film introduces a boy named Jason Voorhees, who drowns at summer camp and his mother gets revenge on the counselors by killing them one by one. I have always been a fan of slasher films, and when popular slasher films from the 1980s were being remade in the 2000s, I was curious as to why. The purpose of this research is to examine the patterns of violence towards men and women in original slasher films and slasher film remakes. The films I have chosen to analyze are the original film A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and the remake ANightmare on Elm Street (2010) as well as Friday the 13th (1980) and Friday the 13th (2009).
My communication phenomenon will focus on the amounts of violence towards each sex. I will look at whether one sex is targeted more than the other or if one sex is targeted more specifically in one film. I will also analyze how the portrayal of the final girl character has changed from the originals to the remakes. This research will focus on an overview of slasher films, while the review of literature will explain common rules in slasher films and how accurate they are. Currently there is no existing research that analyzes original slasher films and remakes. Most research on slasher films analyzes them as a group based on their popularity or box office success. My research will fill this gap because I am interesting in looking into a specific film franchise like the Nightmare on Elm Street films. I will then present the theoretical grounding which will inform this research and the research questions necessary to examine the amounts of violence towards males and females in an original slasher film and its remake.
Defining the Slasher Film
Slasher films were very popular in the late 1970s and 1980s, but they continue to be produced to this day with their largest viewership being teenagers. However, these films are not usually received well by critics. Slasher films are a specific genre of horror films, which viewers either seem to love or think is too gross to watch. Some of the most popular slasher films are Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Slasher films consist of a psychotic killer with a knife like weapon that is stalking a group of teenagers and trying to kill them. In each film, “the killer is the product of a sick family or event, but is still recognizably human” (Clover 1987). The films get their names because the killer in each film “slashes” the characters open with his weapon. This method of attack causes an “unprecedented level of explicit violence” (Dika 1987). I have chosen to analyze two slasher films for this study, which are the original A Nightmare on Elm Street from 1984 and the remake ANightmare on Elm Street from 2010 as well as Friday the 13th (1980) and Friday the 13th (2009). It is important to look into these films since they continue to be popular yet the plot does not seem to vary much from film to film.
Themes of Sex, Death and Survival in Slasher Films
Factors That Determine the Final Girl
Many scholars such as Clover (1987), Connelly (2007) and Cowan (1990) have conducted studies about what characteristics the final girl possesses in most slasher films. The final girl is usually the main character of the film other than the killer. The final girl is most commonly always a girl, since there has never been a final boy in a slasher film.
Clover (1987) found that the final girl is always dressed modestly and is a virgin. The final girl will become masculine at the end of the film when she uses the killer’s weapon against him. The weapon is usually some type of knife what can be used to slash open the victim. The final girl is able to survive the film by fighting back against her killer and getting away to safety over and over again. She also uses the killer’s weapon against him, switching the gender roles. The final girl will become masculine by attacking the killer, so he becomes the victim.
Connelly (2007) examined the films Halloween and Halloween H20 to find that “in ‘Halloween’ Laurie became empowered as the Final Girl by fighting off Michael’s monstrous attacks long enough to be rescued” (p. 13) and in Halloween H20, Laurie “becomes empowered as the Final Girl by taking on Michael’s very own masculine weapons” (p. 13).
Cowan (1990) found that males died more often than females and the females who were killed off were usually sexual through their clothes or activities. This supports the idea that the final girl is portrayed as nonsexual and always survives. The final girl tends to be shy and a bookworm type of girl and the girl who is sexualized or has sex is always killed off.
The final girl is one of the repeated messages in slasher films which portray her as the one character who survives being killed. This is important because the appearance of the final girl suggests that violence is not targeted towards women as at least one always survives. She is relevant to my study because she is usually wounded by the killer but not fatally, which is still violence towards a female in a slasher film.
Sex in Slasher Films Does Not Always Equal Death
There is a “rule” in slasher films that any character that has sex will die. This idea appears in most slasher films, but the rule does not specify whether the characters die during, after, or just because they had sex. Many scholars like Molitor and Sapolsky (1993), Molitor, Sapolsky & Luque (2003), Weaver (1991) and Welsh (2010) have found that violence and death does not normally occur during sex in slasher films and gender does play a part.
Molitor and Sapolsky (1993) was a study that found females were not the main victims of slasher films in the 1980s and that only one-third of sexual images were connected to a single act of violence which proves that violence is uncommon during the act of sex. Molitor, Sapolsky and Luque (2003) found that after analyzing successful slasher films of the 1980s and 1990s that all of the films had an equal amount of male victims and there was almost no violence during sex. Males and females are rarely killed while they are having sex, but this study did not look at those who are killed following sex. Both studies suggest that violence most commonly occurs after sexual activities and not during them.
When female characters are attacked by the killer in slasher films, there should be a distinction between whether they were killed because the killer encountered them or because they just experienced sexual intercourse. Weaver (1991) found in this study that female death rates were higher after acts of violence in general than after sexual activity. Sex is not necessarily a prerequisite to death although the death will still occur. Weavers’ results showed that out of 406 scenes analyzed, 24.1% of the scenes had violence, but less than 6% was after sexual activity occurred.
Welsh (2010) conducted a quantitative study of 50 slasher films from 1960 to 2009 and discovered that sexualized females were more likely to be killed than survive. Their death scenes were also significantly longer than males. The slasher film is known for its eroticized violence by the killer towards mostly female characters as punishment for sexual activities. A sexualized character is a slasher film is a target of the killer regardless of whether they are killed during or after sex.
These articles are relevant to my research because the idea that if a character has sex they will die is a repeated message that becomes a belief. Also, there is a repeated message in slasher films that violence and sexual intercourse are related, so it is important to specify the correlation between violence and sexual intercourse, which also informs connections between both sexes and violence.
How Viewers Perceive Violence and Sex in Slasher Films
Scholars like Dika (1987), Oliver (1993) and Green & Kenmar (2005) focused on how viewers feel about watching violence towards males and females in slasher films. Also, how the viewers felt watching sexual intercourse which involved violence in slasher films.
The eyes are an important part of slasher films because the eyes are how the killer sees the victims. The killer does not interact with the characters except to kill them, so his emotion comes from watching them with his eyes, giving that most killers in slasher films are men. Dika (1987) found that the slasher films have an already seen feeling to them due to the production value, and this focuses on idea of the male gaze. The male gaze is the view that the characters in a slasher are being stalked through the film, and the male gaze watches female victims throughout the film. The audience gets the view of film often from the killer’s point of view.
Every viewer watches each film from the point of view of the killer, so the viewer gets a front role seat for the stalking of the victims. Since the viewer is not actually the killer, the viewer can begin to feel for the killer, such as sympathy for the victims or sympathy for the killer if he is monstrous (disfigured) and would be alienated in society. Oliver (1993) found that females recorded higher amounts of fear and lower amounts of enjoyment than males who watched the same videos. The difference in response based on sex is significant because all scenes that were analyzed contained both sexual intercourse and violence. There was an emotional response associated with the sexual intercourse and violence, and the idea that males recorded lower fear rates is related to the idea that the film is shown from the point of view of male gaze. Because the male viewers are male, they are familiar with male gaze and watching the females, while the female viewers are unfamiliar with watching others. The killer is usually male as well, except in very rare occasions (Friday the 13th) and the final girl is always female.
There is also evidence that supports an emotional response that is not differentiated by male or female sex. Greene and Kemar (2005) found that a positive sensation was associated with watching both violent and horror films by co-ed college students. Both male and female college students made this association to watching violence in slasher films towards both men and women, although it did not differentiate male and female levels individually like Oliver’s study. So this supports the notion that watching violence in slasher films creates positive sensations for both sexes, but Oliver’s (1993) study is more specific in revealing that males feel the sensation in larger amounts than women.
To review, there is research to support the existence of the final girl who is usually the only surviving character. The rule of slasher films that having sex means the characters will die is still accurate, but in the research studies I found the violence was not known to happen during or immediately after sex. The research on the viewer emotions is interesting because it links the basic plot of the slasher film to male gaze. The idea that the killer stalks the victims is supported by male gaze, since the killer has to watch them to stalk them. It is not surprising then that the male viewers experienced more sensations while watching violence in slasher films because it is from their own gaze. Male gaze is also a way of establishing which character will become the final girl.
Factors That Determine Character Survival
Scholars like Lizardi (2010), Markovitz (2000) and Martin (2007) evaluated slasher films by how misogyny and feminism have impacted contemporary horror cinema. Their research points out that slasher films have been focused on relating monsters to current social issues and emphasizing socially destructive themes which gives the final girl an unhopeful future in the film while emasculating her.
But Lizardi (2010) argues that slasher horror film remakes give a more hopeful outlook for the final girl to continue to be tortured into hegemonic gender roles. Lizardi explains that one reason for this change in hope is that the final girl may not be the only survivor at the end of the film in a slasher film remake. Viewers of more recent slasher film remakes could be noticing a change in the convention that the final girl is not the final survivor, but is the usually the only surviving female.
Markovitz (2000) argues that the survival of a character is based on their ability to listen to their paranoia and prepare to be attacked by the killer. The way that the final girl’s fear becomes her is way slasher films expose misogyny. She is overcome by her fear of the killer that she isolates herself from family and friends while thinking of ways to destroy the killer. The final girl is portrayed as weak, as she is culturally seen in a society that is hostile towards women, until she ultimately survives and defeats the killer.
Martin (2007) found that the empowerment of the final girl happens when she defeats the monster, but she usually loses her sanity in the process. This imbalance relates to anxieties brought around by contemporary femininity and current representations of female strength. The film The Descent was the only film in Martin’s study but the plot consists of a group of female spelunkers who are attacked while exploring a cave. The film symbolizes the pleasures and disappoints that the female characters represent. The final girl is analyzed in the past decades and in the current decade by Martin as to how the final girl clashes with contemporary feminism and post feminism discussions.