Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) and the Sexual Mythology of the Slasher

The original Slumber Party Massacre (1982) was written by feminist and novelist Rita Mae Brown as a reflection on the genre's subtexts, a metafilm as it were: a juvenile fascination with nude women and sex, a nearly omnipotent and nearly motiveless killer, a phallic murder weapon, are all appropriated from the genre to point out the gender politics in the slasher film. Contrary to popular belief, Brown had not written a parody; the comedy was added in an extensive re-write by director Amy Holden Jones. Apparently not a feminist, Jones took the material and, to the best of her ability, played the subtextual structure as a tongue-in-cheek slasher. The result is an over-the-top instance of the slasher, the archetypal instance of the cheesy '80s slasher, not to be confused with moody '70s-style slashers like Black Christmas (1974), Halloween (1978), When a Stranger Calls (1979), and He Knows You're Alone (1980). The goggle-eyed killer earnestly drilling nubile young girls is too ridiculous to take entirely seriously and yet Brown's subtext shows through, or perhaps is helped by the comedy: this killer is a frighteningly aggressive male sexuality dead-set on drilling the nubile girls. The same goes for the gratuitous showering, girls who hide about as well as a four-year-old playing hide-and-go-seek with her grandparents in the nursing home, and dialogue gems like, "Hey, it's not the size of your mouth; it's what's in it that counts." All of it is a joke and simultaneously a statement on the psychosexual dynamics of the slasher film.

As the film is definitively neither thoughtful metafilm nor over-the-top cheese-fest, whether The Slumber Party Massacre is taken as one or the other is ultimately up to the viewer. Both possibilities resulted in sequels, curiously enough. Jim Wynorski's Sorority House Massacre II (1990) and Sorority House Massacre III (1990), confusingly sequels to The Slumber Party Massacre rather than Sorority House Massacre (1986), take the over-the-top qualities and push them into comically extreme territory. In the Sorority House Massacre sequels, the driller killer of The Slumber Party Massacre becomes a malevolent spirit capable of possession. He then terrorizes increasingly big-titted babes with decreasing skin-coverage. The comedy elements reach their peak when both the potential victims and the villain refuse to die, no matter how many bullets are sent into them. The Slumber Party Massacre sequels, on the other hand, written and directed by women, sided with Rita Mae Brown over Amy Holden Jones. Slumber Party Massacre III (1990) does so by making its killer a sexually impotent victim of childhood molestation. Slumber Party Massacre II is by far more interesting; the rest of this essay will be devoted to why.

The plot of Slumber Party Massacre II ostensibly picks up where The Slumber Party Massacre left off. In the aftermath of the tragic incident, one of the survivors is in a mental hospital and her sister, Courtney Bates (Crystal Bernard), is trying to hold her own life together. On top of her over-protective mother, she has to contend with a series of disturbing dreams partially remembrance of the harrowing ordeal and partially filled with gruesome imagery presided over by a leather-clad, rockabilly driller-killer. Once her mom allows her to attend a weekend in a friend's country home she begins to suspect the dreams are premonitions. Unfortunately--the plight of the seer--no-one heeds her concerns until it's too late. After a series of hallucinations that leave her friends thinking she's crazy, the rockabilly driller-killer emerges from her dreams and, all while rocking some killer tunes, slays her friends one-by-one with his guitar-drill.

What makes the film so interesting is Courtney's dreams. A throw-away line in the film explains that dreams are the subconscious mind's way of dealing with trauma. Dreams give the trauma some sort of order that makes sense in the pre-rational depths. For perhaps the first time in horror film history, we're treated to a sequel that seriously deals with the psychological aftermath of a trauma like seeing one's friends drilled to death by a maniac. The result is, then, a very peculiar slasher film that is itself entirely a damaged mind's way of dealing with the content of a previous slasher film: it's a meta-film, in short. This allows writer-director Deborah Brock to take her investigation of the gender politics and sexual dynamics in a slasher film much farther than Rita Mae Brown could.

Courtney's dreams take a dualistic form: although they're all sexual in nature, there are the positive sexual dreams and the negative sexual dreams. The positive, or good dreams are those centered on the sweet, handsome Matt, her desired boyfriend. He's always shirtless and engaging in some sport that emphasizes his muscularity, or smiling at her from a slight low angle--she's literally looking up to him, in both adoration and sexual submission. Whenever she dreams of getting closer to Matt, however, her dreams are invaded by the negative. The negative dreams are centered on the darkly handsome driller-killer, with his leather jacket, brylcreemed hair, and guitar with a drill in place of a fretbar. While he's killing her friends, most importantly Matt, he's pursuing her with misguidedly amorous intent, not unlike Pepe Le Pew. Where Matt represents a clean, pure female sexuality, fantasizing about the physical beauty of the sporty boy-next-door, the driller killer represents that darker female sexuality that is drawn to dangerous, sadomasochistic relationships. Matt's sexual aura is comprised of his physique, winning smile, and sports. The killer's sexual aura is comprised of rock n' roll, leather, sexual dancing, and violence.

There is clearly a relationship between Courtney's pure, one could say socially-sanctioned sexuality, and the violent sexuality that terrifies her. Whenever she begins to fantasize about Matt, the rocker intrudes. What this seems to suggest is that the ordeal she survived in the first Massacre has affected her ability to engage in a mutually satisfying sexual relationship; she instinctly transforms it into a sadomasochistic relationship. A slight twist on this point, she may just on some level perceive all male sexuality as destructive, all female sexuality as trapped in sadomasochism. In the first film, Courtney, still a young girl, witnessed a man sticking a phallic drill in nubile girls wearing skimpy clothes. This image seems to have impressed itself upon her as the only course sexuality can take. By the same token, she automatically punishes herself for her sexual desire. She seems unable to cope with a sexual desire that is as pleasurable for her as it is for the male.

At the level of fantasy, Courtney's negative dreams are much like bondage: an attempt to transfer what one fears into an environment one can control. While often viewed as a perversion, bondage is little different than a man with a fear of heights going skydiving. Courtney dreams of the rocker so she can, on a subconscious level, deal with her fear of her own sexuality impressed upon her from the first Massacre. As the fantasist of a rape fantasy doesn't really desire to be raped, Courtney doesn't really desire to be subject to the driller-killer's terrorism.

At the beginning of the film, Courtney is seemingly in control of these dreams. Like any dream, they run without explicit control. Yet she's cheerful and undisturbed as she eats her breakfast. Once she leaves home and sees a dead bird--just as in her dream--she begins to worry that she's lost control of her comforting fantasy. As the film goes on and sexuality begins to impinge upon her more and more, her hallucinations increase in frequency. After she overhears her friend having sex, she hallucinates her bathtub filled with blood and then her friend's head overtaken with a gushing zit. These are all revealed to be hallucinations, much to her relief and dismay.

(Note: Major Spoilers from here on.)
The turning point is when, finally, her dreamboy Matt takes her to bed. When her positive dream becomes a reality, so too does her negative dream. By allowing herself to engage in sexual pleasure, she releases the sadomasochistic fantasy into reality. The killer immediately drills through Matt, destroying Courtney's hope for a normal sexual relationship. He pursues Courtney through the house, singing his lines and performing sexualized rockabilly dances while terrorizing the girls. The editing becomes expressionistic, giving him little music videos. This shows he's in control; he's no longer a subconsciously contained fantasy, a safe exploration of danger and fear. Gradually he manages to drill through everyone until it's just he and Courtney.

For better or worse, Courtney is unable to embrace this aspect of her sexuality. The film doesn't make entirely clear where it stands on this subject and it is by no means self-evident. As noted, the sexuality Courtney has with Matt is a mutually satisfying one. One might therefore assume the film is against an abnormal and sadomasochistic sexuality. However, feminist filmmaking is characteristically against perceptions of what's normal or abnormal in sexuality. Matt is, after all, a very much socially sanctioned object of female desire. Perhaps the driller-killer represents a fear of her more adventurous sexual interests that ought to be embraced. At one point he states, "You and I are one until we go all the way." Courtney's sister (in her dreams), however, says, "Don't go all the way!" In the context of the genre, though, I would suggest that the film can be taken at face value. The driller-killer, in the lineage of slasher villains, is an essentially patriarchal force that exploits females and denies them the right to their own sexual pleasure. Feminist writers, like Carol Clover and Linda Williams, have made much of this, from the phallic choices of weapon (although, what weapon isn't phallic?) to the relentless pursuit of girls engaged in sexual behaviour and the ultimate survival of the virginal heroine. This was made more explicit in The Slumber Party Massacre than any prior slasher; and Slumber Party Massacre II makes it even more explicit, indeed, as I've been showing, the very central dynamic of the film.

The film's final shot, to some very disappointing but to us the most interesting of all, reveals the whole film to have been a dream. Valerie Bates is not the sister in the mental hospital, but rather Courtney herself. Suddenly that throw-away line about the mind dealing with trauma seems all the more relevant. Cowering in her hospital room, she imagines the driller killer piercing her room--a visual euphemism for penetrating her, of course--just as she's imagined all we've seen in the film. Had this not been the case, the fantasies of the ideal Matt could be chalked up to a reflection of reality. However, once we realize there is no Matt, we see he's a purely idealized vision of a young woman's sexual desires. He's infinitely attentive to her needs, impossibly handsome, and while talking on the phone wears nothing but cut-off jeans and poses like a poster boy. Brock, moreover, directs the film such that Matt is consistently represented in a dream-like manner, with strange, subjective shots of him looking into the camera.

The intrusions of the driller-killer are thus not just about sexuality. A normal sexuality is co-extensive with a normal life altogether, which the traumatic events of the first Massacre have prevented Courtney from enjoying. The sadomasochistic fantasy perverts not just her sexuality but her whole world. He destroys her friends, destroys her romantic dreams, destroys her boyfriend, till it's only him left in her world. Her final attempt to exorcise him from her dreams with fire is a failure. If the film represents her struggles at self-therapy, the therapy fails; she remains a frightened, broken girl in her hospital room.

Sexuality is central, however, because just as the events of the first film are contained within a highly sexualized slasher format, so Courtney's means of dealing with the events are themselves contained within a sexualized slasher--albeit from a notably more feminine point of view. Brock is able to engage, in this way, not only slasher genre tropes, but also criticisms of the genre. In her 1984 essay "When the Woman Looks," Linda Williams argued that any woman who dares to grant herself the privilege of desire in a horror film is punished with her own reflection in the monster, a creature of abnormal power, and simultaneously victimized by it. If this dynamic is what Courtney witnessed in The Slumber Party Massacre, she's now internalized the experience and is cursed to perpetually punish herself in her own dreams for exhibiting sexual desire. The first-person relishing of the beautiful Matt is an instance of female gaze, female desire enjoying the spectacle of a beautiful male. It's genuine and not salacious; it is, for once, female pleasure acknowledged in a slasher. For this Courtney punishes herself, having internalized the slasher dynamic.

Moreover, Carol J. Clover's 1987 essay, "Her Body, Himself," which Deborah Brock could conceivably have read prior to writing Slumber Party Massacre II, argues that the 'Final Girl' in the slasher film, the girl who survives the ordeal, is purged by her experience. The most self-denying of the female characters, virginal and serious, usually a tomboy, the Final Girl is stripped through the horrifying experience of any desire to seek out pleasure for herself. Courtney was already a Final Girl. In this film, she's dealing with the results of this purgation. As I've noted, Courtney punishes herself for fantasies of mutually satisfying relationships. These fantasies pervert themselves into sadomasochistic relationships with a primal male sexuality she can't control. In an instance of Freudian repetition, she's forever reenacting in her fantasies her own ordeal as a Final Girl, repeatedly purging herself of her healthy sexuality. But the purgation, in Brock's film, is itself extremely unhealthy and leaves the female with an unbalanced, pathological sexuality.

The film's message, if we may call it that, is not that women watching slashers will, like Courtney, internalize the sexual dynamic and become sexually unbalanced. Courtney witnessed the Massacre from inside, not safely projected on a screen or popped in a DVD player as we do. (Although the names of the characters--Bates, Voorhees, Krueger--suggests Courtney's watched her fair share of horror films.) But if slasher films are to some extent reflections of a social disorder, a disorder based upon repressing female sexual liberty, then Slumber Party Massacre II suggests the dangers of propagating such a disorder. Film is a very powerful medium and what viewers of that medium can and will assimilate would astound. Freedom of sexual desire is sexual health.