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80's Slasher Films
11 Plays2 months ago
Welcome to the world of 80’s slashers! It’s full of red herrings, traumatic childhood incidents, and the scandalous behavior of teens. We’ll explore some of the slashers that didn’t make it to the giant franchise level of Freddy and Jason.
Movies discussed: Prom Night (1980), Terror Train (1980), The Burning (1981), Maniac (1980), Pieces (1982), and The House On Sorority Row (1982)
Episodes available on YouTube or Spotify!
Intro Music: Body in the trunk by Victor_Natas -- https://freesound.org/s/717975/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
Outro Music: drum loop x5 by theoctopus559 -- https://freesound.org/s/622897/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
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Transcript
Introduction to 80s Horror Movies
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to What Haunts You, a podcast about the stories that haunt our dreams. Follow us on Instagram at whathauntsyoupod and find any previous episodes on YouTube or Spotify. I'm your host Carly and today we are headed straight to the eighty
00:00:39
Speaker
Here's the thing. I'm going to do a few parts covering the 80s and horror movies of the 80s, but you just got to know the truth up front. It's impossible for me to do eighty s horror justice here.
00:00:50
Speaker
That could be its entire own podcast, and it would be basically endless. Like, there would be unlimited content to mine. It's pretty much inevitable that there will be movies that someone listening or even, like, I myself think, oh, I cannot believe the 80s horror episode didn't cover this movie.
00:01:09
Speaker
But it's just not going to happen.
Low Budget and Direct-to-Video Boom
00:01:11
Speaker
The ability to shoot on video and send that straight out into the video stores and the ability to shoot horror movies on such low budgets led to such a proliferation of horror movies that was completely unprecedented that we have an insane number of movies to work with out of the 80s.
00:01:28
Speaker
Another thing to remember about this time period was that people were making movies that they expected to be like a blip on the radar, like just there and gone. not things that they would be remembered for decades later.
00:01:40
Speaker
So people were just churning out horror movies because they could make them fast, they could make them cheap, they could just get them done. And they were not supposed to be lasting the way that so many of them have been.
Horror Icons and Societal Fears
00:01:53
Speaker
A lot of the movies later gained cult followings and became horror fan favorites. So we have a lot of horror icons from this time who did not actually set out to be horror icons. They were just looking for work, and this is where the work was.
00:02:06
Speaker
It was also a time where maybe people needed horror movies more than ever to metabolize the fears of the world they were living in. In the documentary In Search of Darkness, Doug Bradley, who plays Pinhead in the Hellraiser franchise, says of the eighty s that it's very much the decade in which America tells stories about itself.
00:02:25
Speaker
And maybe he's right because in the same documentary, John Carpenter says maybe Ronald Reagan inspired all the horror. That seems fairly plausible to me. In Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue, the evolution of the American horror film, Carpenter is further quoted as saying, People are experiencing today paranoia in their everyday lives.
Audience Attraction to Low-Budget Creativity
00:02:47
Speaker
You read a headline about a murder, and the next day, you begin looking at the person walking next to you a bit more carefully. People had more to be scared of, there was more stuff on the news, and when these directors leaned into that fear, audiences were more than happy to follow them.
00:03:04
Speaker
People loved the movies that were so bad they were good. People loved the good movies that were coming out. It was a time where people were interested to see what kind of things they could accomplish with micro-budgets.
00:03:15
Speaker
This was also a time where cover art was king, and people would walk the aisles of the video store renting the movies that had the coolest art on the box.
Exploring 'In Search of Darkness'
00:03:25
Speaker
If you're really a fan of 80s horror, or if you want to beef up your knowledge of 80s horror, you need to check out the documentary series In Search of Darkness.
00:03:35
Speaker
There are three parts covering 80s horror, and they are long. i don't mean, like, slightly over two-hour-long movie long. I mean, between the three movies, it amounts to almost 15 hours dedicated exclusively to exploring 80s horror movies.
00:03:51
Speaker
I know that's a lot, but if you have the patience and the attention span for it, or even if you just need something low stakes for, like, background noise while you're cleaning or doing whatever— I highly recommend this series of documentaries.
00:04:02
Speaker
And they're starting to cover 90s movies now too, like they're continuing on into the future. So I think it's going to be a really fun thing to continue to have your eye on.
Focus on 80s Slasher Films
00:04:11
Speaker
Today, we are going to be talking about eighty s slashers.
00:04:14
Speaker
So let's get into it. And remember, I cannot cover all of the eighty slasher films. Can't be done. Would be its own podcast. But slashers are definitely one of the first subgenres that comes to mind when people think of horror movies. And I think especially so when people think of 80s horror.
00:04:33
Speaker
Slashers usually follow a pretty specific formula. Some people know the formula, and for some people it's kind of like the pornography, i can't define it, but I know it when I see it thing. But usually we start with some tragedy, and a survivor of that tragedy goes on to create a new tragedy, attacking a group of teenagers or young adults who are left to their own devices without any competent adults around.
00:04:58
Speaker
In Going to Pieces, The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, Adam Rockoff writes that slasher films are notoriously devoid of grown-ups, and the few who are present tend to play three general roles.
00:05:09
Speaker
One, the killer him or herself. Two, the wise seer or elder who offers advice on how to defeat the killer. Or three, the ineffectual authority figure who refuses to believe or acknowledge the danger.
00:05:24
Speaker
You might think of Dr. Loomis from Halloween as like the wise elder with a deeper knowledge of the killer than the kids have, or the cops in Slashers as reluctant to acknowledge the presence of danger, especially when the cops happen to also be the parents of the kids being targeted like they are in Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street.
The 'Final Girl' Trope
00:05:44
Speaker
In slashers, the kids are picked off, often just one at a time, usually kind of subtly and quietly with only one person, usually the final girl, even realizing that there is danger or how much of it there really is.
00:05:59
Speaker
The final girl is a concept discussed extensively in Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Gender in the Modern Horror Film by Carol J. Clover, and she is typically the survivor of the story. She's usually a little less feminine than her peers.
00:06:12
Speaker
She's usually more straight-laced than her friends are. She's usually pretty creative and strategic and very cautious and is usually really resourceful, too. Sometimes she's the only survivor, and sometimes she's just the only one that really matters.
00:06:28
Speaker
Clover writes, she is abject terror personified. If her friends knew they were about to die only seconds before the event, the final girl lives with the knowledge for long minutes or hours.
00:06:39
Speaker
She alone looks death in the face, but she alone also finds the strength to either stay the killer long enough to be rescued, ending A, or to kill him herself, ending B.
Slasher Film Perspectives
00:06:51
Speaker
Slasher kills usually have a level of intimacy to them.
00:06:55
Speaker
They're often sneaky and happening in silent ways, but more important than that is the intimacy of the kill, that the killer is usually up close and personal with the victims. Clover talks more about this in Men, Women, and Chainsaw's writing, The preferred weapons of the killer are knives, hammers, axes, ice picks, hypodermic needles, red-hot pokers, pitchforks, and the like.
00:07:17
Speaker
Such implements serve well a plot predicated on stealth and the unawareness of later victims that the bodies of their friends are accumulating just yards away. But the use of noisy chainsaws and power drills, and the non-use of such relatively silent means as bow and arrow, spear, catapult, or sword, would seem to suggest that closeness and tactility are also at issue.
00:07:41
Speaker
Another part of the slasher formula is that slashers usually start from a really different perspective than they end. A lot of them in earlier moments have a point of view shots from the perspective of the killer.
00:07:53
Speaker
Earliest in the movie, we often see the killer's perspective of whatever tragedy happened to them that set off this chain of events to begin with. Then we often either see them or see through their eyes as they are stalking and spying on the kids they're targeting.
00:08:09
Speaker
Clover writes, we are linked in this way 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 our closeness to him wanes as our closeness to the final girl waxes a shift underwritten by storyline as well as camera position By the end, point of view is hers.
00:08:28
Speaker
We are in the closet with her, watching with her eyes the knife blade pierce the door, in the room with her as the killer breaks through the window and grabs her, in the car with her as the killer stabs through the convertible top, and so on.
00:08:40
Speaker
And with her, we become, if not the killer of the killer, then the agent of his expulsion from the narrative vision. So while we start the film with the killer, we usually end the film with the survivor.
00:08:52
Speaker
Our focus shifts, and you can really see it in the audience responses during horror movies too. During the first several kills of a slasher film, the audience is usually on the killer's side.
00:09:03
Speaker
They're having fun watching the kills. We all know that we go to slashers hoping for new and interesting kills. It's one of the main things we're going to talk about when we leave the theater. And the kids are often annoying at best or violent or sexually aggressive at worst.
00:09:17
Speaker
Like, they're usually kind of easy to root against. But the final girl is different. She's usually smarter, kinder, more creative, and more brave than the rest of the kids, and we're much more reluctant to see her get hurt.
00:09:31
Speaker
By the time the showdown between the final girl and the killer happens, we are not cheering for the killer anymore. We are ready to watch the final girl kill the killer, and we will love every second of it People could argue until the end of time about what movie should be given the title of the first slasher movie, and I'm not even going to try to answer that question.
00:09:51
Speaker
But i am going to talk about one of the titles that's often proposed, which is Texas Chainsaw Massacre. If you didn't know, Texas Chainsaw Massacre was very loosely based on Ed Gein, the Wisconsin man who had ah fondness for dead body parts.
00:10:07
Speaker
Between this origin story and the chainsaw motif, Texas Chainsaw presented the genre with some great jumping off points. In the 80s, you can really see how Texas Chainsaw worked its way into slashers of the time.
00:10:20
Speaker
And sometimes this was done deliberately to like ride the coattails of such a shocking film, but sometimes it was probably more unintentional and just a result of the impact that that film had on other filmmakers.
00:10:33
Speaker
Two movies that you can really see the influence of Texas Chainsaw and just like the story of Ed Gein on are nineteen eighty s Maniac and nineteen eighty two s Pieces. When Maniac came out, it really made waves. People were not happy with this movie.
00:10:49
Speaker
Adam Rockoff, in Going to Pieces, wrote about the backlash against it, saying, quote, The Los Angeles Times banned the entire existence of the film in their newspaper. They didn't just ban the ad or decline to review the film.
00:11:01
Speaker
They refused to print its name in the paper. For the theaters in which Maniac was playing, the listing cryptically instructed readers to call the theater for information. Seeking to capitalize on the film's notoriety, Analysis blasters posters all over L.A. saying, maniac the film the los angeles times refuses to advertise In the end, the Times' his tactics failed miserably.
00:11:25
Speaker
If anything, they succeeded in attracting more people who were eager to see what all the fuss was about. And this is something we still see today. This is something you can see over time. When things get banned or things get restricted, it often creates a taboo that makes people interested.
00:11:41
Speaker
So I think they could have known this would backfire, but i guess it worked out for the movie. Maniac starts with a cold open where a couple gets murdered on a beach. And later, the killer wakes up screaming in his own apartment.
00:11:54
Speaker
His apartment is filled with mannequins who seem to have mementos from his different victims, and the mannequin in his bed has the clothing and the bloody scalp of the girl from the beach.
00:12:06
Speaker
This does not appear to be why he is screaming. This appears to be how he likes his apartment to be. But he does wake up screaming. Our killer goes out and picks up a sex worker outside of a shitty hotel.
00:12:17
Speaker
And while they're together in the hotel room, he starts to strangle her. He immediately is sick. He runs to the bathroom to throw up, which is sort of unexpected for a killer in a movie like this. And a killer like he seems to be with clearly like multiple previous victims.
00:12:33
Speaker
He stands over her with a knife saying, why did you make me do that? I didn't want to do that. And proceeds to take her scalp. Our killer's name in this movie is Frank. I don't really remember at what point that gets revealed, but very early on in the movie, we can see the level to which Frank is unwell.
00:12:52
Speaker
Frank goes home with a new mannequin and the new mannequin has clothing and hair thanks to the dead sex worker. We hear a voice that Frank seems to be hearing in his head. It talks to him about what he's doing, sort of chastising him but also egging him on at the same time.
00:13:08
Speaker
After he gets to the new mannequin settled in, he picks up a newspaper and sees a report about the couple murdered on the beach. Later on, we see him pack up a murder kit into a guitar case, and he says goodbye to his mannequins and dolls.
00:13:22
Speaker
He also has a doll in a tiny birdcage, very creepy, and he tells them all that he'll be right back. He stalks a couple, well, actually a man with a girl who's sort of cheating on her boyfriend, with effects legend Tom Savini doing a cameo as the man.
00:13:37
Speaker
Frank kills the couple with a shotgun. He leaps onto the hood of the car and shoots Tom Savini's head, which basically explodes. In Going to Pieces, director William Lustig is quoted describing the aftermath of this scene because they were not actually allowed to fire a shotgun there.
00:13:54
Speaker
He says, what happened was, as soon as he fired the shotgun, we grabbed the gun, stuck it in the trunk of the car, and sent a PA to drive to New Jersey, get that shotgun out of town. And here he's driving a car with a shotgun hole in the front and blood all over the inside of the car.
00:14:10
Speaker
So he goes through the toll booth and he gives them his money. When he pulls out of the toll booth, six cop cars converge on him. There he is in the middle of the night trying to explain how this unregistered car has all this blood and a shotgun hole in the middle of it.
00:14:26
Speaker
So, like, imagine being that PA. Like, imagine that being your normal day at work. But this scene actually sets the movie apart from a lot of slashers where you would never expect to see a gun fired.
00:14:38
Speaker
A big reason for that is because guns can be so much more impersonal, but Frank does make it as personal as possible. He gets incredibly close to his victims, and he holds the gun on the girl for a lot longer than necessary, so he's giving her time to be afraid.
00:14:54
Speaker
Later, Frank is back at his apartment watching news about the most recent killings. He's talking to himself as both this internal voice that chastises him and just as himself.
00:15:05
Speaker
Fancy girls in their fancy dresses and their lipstick. Laughing and dancing. But you stop them, don't you? The next day, Frank is stalking around Central Park, and he sneaks a peek at a woman's address off of her bag.
00:15:19
Speaker
That night, he hears a couple nurses talking outside. Frank follows one of them, and eventually she realizes that someone's following her. After an extended chase scene, he catches her and kills her.
00:15:31
Speaker
Back at the apartment, there is more of Frank talking to himself, talking to his mannequins. That's what most of the scenes in his apartment are like. Eventually, he shows up at this woman's house, and it's the woman who took his photos at the park.
00:15:45
Speaker
They are talking about her work. She takes gorgeous photos of women, and he's talking about how she shouldn't sell them. She should keep them forever to preserve them and keep them beautiful forever.
00:15:57
Speaker
She tells them that that's not how it works and that you can't keep someone forever. He asks her on a date to go to dinner with him, and she accepts. Early on, he's fairly personable while talking to her, and he tells her that he's a painter.
00:16:10
Speaker
He tells her, you're the most beautiful woman I've seen since my mom. Which, like, you can just see in there some nods to Psycho and some nods to Ed Gein, just the fixation on the mother and the beauty and the importance of the mother.
00:16:24
Speaker
and the tendency to compare all women, even women that are seen as potential lovers, to the mother. She tells Frank it needs to be an early night, and you can tell that he's feeling rejected, and he starts acting like a little bit incel-ish.
00:16:39
Speaker
But they each go their separate ways, and a few days later, Frank shows up at her work while she is photographing some models, and he brings her little stuffed animal as a gift. She's acting a little gay in this scene, to be honest. She's flirty-flirty with the models in her shoot. There's one that she seems especially close with, and i it seems like she is in a relationship with one of the models.
00:17:02
Speaker
Frank steals the necklace of the photographer's probably gay girlfriend after she takes it off for the photo shoot, and then later he goes to her house to return in the necklace. After he returns it, he sneakily turns off the mechanism on her door that makes it automatically lock when she walks out, and then he heads out.
00:17:22
Speaker
Later, he breaks back in, and he ties her up, and he talks to her as if she is his mother. And here we learn a lot more about his tragic backstory, because unlike a lot of slashers, we don't have the formal flashback scene at the beginning. We kind of get the pieces of it as we move through the story.
00:17:39
Speaker
He says to her, you were wrong to leave me alone. You left me alone lots of times. I was scared, real scared. I was afraid that you wouldn't come back. Why did you need those other men? They didn't love you. I loved you and I needed you. There were so many men.
00:17:53
Speaker
Why? Because they gave you some dollars, but they didn't love you. Only I loved you. Only me. I'm not going to kill you. I'm going to keep you so you'll never go away. So you won't ever go away ever again.
00:18:05
Speaker
After he kills her, he says, not tonight. You're not going out tonight. So it seems possible that in the past, Frank killed his own mom to stop her from going back out to work as a sex worker and leaving him home alone.
00:18:19
Speaker
Some amount of time after this happens, he invites Anna for another date, the the photographer.
00:18:26
Speaker
Before their date, they go to the cemetery because he wants to leave flowers for his mom, and while they're there, he starts crying. And then he starts attacking Anna, and she runs away, and she ends up hitting him with a shovel when he comes after her.
00:18:39
Speaker
He starts hearing voices, like the voice of his younger self and his mother talking, and the voice of his younger self begging his mother not to lock him in the closet. As he cries by the grave of his mother, he has a hallucination of her rotting corpse coming out of the ground and grabbing him.
00:18:58
Speaker
He eventually goes home and he's laying in his bed crying. He's wounded and bloody and surrounded by all these bloody mannequins with the scalps and the clothing of his victims.
00:19:09
Speaker
The mannequins all rise up, like they animate, and then they go into his guitar box killing kit and get weapons. And then they all like join together and descend upon him and just like tear him apart.
00:19:23
Speaker
The next morning, two cops show up, probably because Anna called them because Frank attacked her, and he is laying on his bed with a sword through his torso. The bloody mannequins, with all their evidence, are all over the room.
00:19:38
Speaker
The cops, seeing Frank is already dead, leave him there and close the door behind him. In the final moments of the film, Frank opens his eyes. There is so much DNA of Psycho and Ed Gein in here.
00:19:51
Speaker
Frank is really fixated on his mother, and he's collecting scalps to make these mannequins feel more real, using them almost interchangeably to represent his mother and the lover that he doesn't really have.
00:20:05
Speaker
This movie doesn't really show us the experiences that led to this behavior, but we do get those hints along the way. It seems like when he was little, his mom really left him to his own devices. When he was very young, he probably saw more than he should have.
00:20:19
Speaker
He felt abandoned and betrayed by her and carried that into his interactions with women as an adult. Now, this is not to say that killers become killers because of their moms.
00:20:30
Speaker
This is just what slasher movies do. This is a concept they're exploring. Part of that is because so many of them take their root in the story of Ed Gein, who was obsessed with his mother.
00:20:42
Speaker
Because we don't get a single defining moment, because we don't get to see any of this played out, it kind of differs from the average slasher film. As Rockoff writes in Going to Pieces, in the majority of slasher films, the killer is an ordinary person who has suffered some terrible, and sometimes not so terrible, trauma.
00:21:01
Speaker
It is because of this past injustice that he seeks vengeance, and the bloodier the better. The next movie diverts from this tradition as well. In a similar way to Halloween, rather than being the victim of a much earlier crime or tragedy, the killer in the film Pieces was the perpetrator of a crime in his childhood.
00:21:21
Speaker
Although I do imagine that killing someone would traumatize you. The movie opens in Boston in 1942. A little boy named Timmy is putting together a puzzle and singing Humpty Dumpty to himself.
00:21:35
Speaker
There might be some foreshadowing there about putting things back together again, but this isn't a regular puzzle. This is a puzzle of a naked lady, and his mom walks in and catches him with it.
00:21:48
Speaker
She seems totally disgusted, and she says that she's going to dispose of it. Timmy's not happy with this, and he retaliates by murdering and dismembering his mother, and then he goes on to finish his puzzle.
00:22:01
Speaker
Eventually, some amount of time later, a neighbor calls the cops to do a wellness check on them, and when the cops come, they find all the blood, and eventually they find the mom's head in the closet.
00:22:12
Speaker
In a different closet, they find Timmy. He's hiding in there. They comfort him, and they tell him that a maniac must have broken in and killed his mom. He knows that's not true, but they don't know that that's not true.
00:22:24
Speaker
Then the movie flashes to 40 years later and someone is going into an apartment closet where they find a box of what seem almost immediately like serial killer trophies. Like there are clothing items and stuff and it's all bloody.
00:22:38
Speaker
And with this collection is the naked lady jigsaw puzzle that Timmy was doing all those years ago. So we have not seen what Timmy looks like as an adult, but we know this is Timmy.
00:22:49
Speaker
The rest of the movie takes place at and around a college campus. It's a mundane setting that evokes a sense of predictability that is about to be totally disrupted. As Rockoff writes in Going to Pieces, the location is often a universally recognized place associated with adolescence, summer camp, high school, college, or even the comforting streets of suburbia.
00:23:11
Speaker
Even if the film isn't specifically set in this milieu, its characters have come from there. These locations are associated with adolescence, like he said, but they're also associated with that predictability.
00:23:23
Speaker
We know what a day at c summer camp looks like. We know what a day of high school looks like. We know what a day of college looks like. We know what to expect in these places. And so when something like the events of a slasher film happens, it totally shakes our ground. It totally throws everything into question.
00:23:39
Speaker
In pieces, the string of murders naturally kicks off with a girl getting decapitated by a chainsaw. Everyone at school basically is like, I don't know who the hell this girl is. Like the cops are asking her teacher about if she ran around with boys. They're asking people, trying to get a feel for what she was like, how responsible she was.
00:23:58
Speaker
And basically everyone is just like, i don't really know anything about her, which is kind of actually sad. The anatomy teacher seems to be like a big hit with all of the students. Like all of the girls are super into him and and are kind of inappropriate with him in ways that I find it hard to imagine talking to a professor that way.
00:24:18
Speaker
And the cops are also interviewing the dean of the school and they tell him that they have basically no leads. Willard, the groundskeeper, is doing landscaping work with a chainsaw.
00:24:28
Speaker
He serves as like our classic slasher film Red Herring. A lot of the time in slasher films, they will set up one or even several red herrings. Sometimes it's just someone who has like a creepy vibe to them.
00:24:42
Speaker
It could be someone who's a little too interested in the people being targeted or someone who might just be like too close to too many of the crime scenes too many times. In a slasher movie, the more someone gets your guard up, it's sort of less likely that they will actually be the killer.
00:25:00
Speaker
In the case of this groundskeeper, Willard, he's creepy, and I mean, come on, he's even got the chainsaw. Willard finds the next victim, and he tries to leave the scene, and so they catch him and think he's acting suspicious, and so he gets arrested.
00:25:15
Speaker
It makes sense that they suspect him, but any seasoned horror viewer knows that that would just be too easy, way too simple. It can't be him. This latest victim had been a girl who went to meet a boy she liked at the pool, and he basically drowns her with, like, the net that you use to clean out a pool, like, to get leaves out of a pool.
00:25:34
Speaker
She gets killed, and her entire torso is taken by the killer. The cops start to wonder what the killer is doing with all of these missing pieces of dead girls, and... We have a couple of moments of, like, early criminal profiling, so that's always kind of a treat in these older movies.
00:25:52
Speaker
The detective, for some reason, sends an ex-tennis pro turned undercover cop named Mary into the college to pose as a tennis instructor to one of the students named Kendall.
00:26:02
Speaker
I guess she's there to, like, keep an eye on things, but it's kind of weird and elaborate and seems sort of not that helpful. A reporter named Sylvia shows up, but they don't really give her any information, and This whole time we see glimpses of a gloved killer putting together this puzzle of a naked lady.
00:26:21
Speaker
The killer eventually follows and kills Sylvia and he takes her arms. Then another student, another tennis player, is attacked and this time he takes her legs. As she's being killed in a totally classic slasher movie moment, she's like, you!
00:26:37
Speaker
So we know that she knows who the killer is, but we don't actually know who the killer is. Kendall goes to the cops and says that he thinks the killer must work at the university.
00:26:48
Speaker
He turns out to be right, and eventually they discover that the dean of students had had his name legally changed because his mother was murdered when he was a child, but really, he is Timmy.
00:27:00
Speaker
So he killed and chopped up his mother as a child. You might even say he chopped her into pieces. And meanwhile, Mary is at the dean's apartment right now while this is happening, and he drugs her.
00:27:12
Speaker
He needs her feet. The cops get there in time to save her and they take him down. At the end of the movie, it's revealed that he has been stitching up a lady friend for himself with the body parts of these dead women. He's like sewing them together to make a whole lady.
00:27:27
Speaker
In Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Clover writes, the notion of a killer propelled by psychosexual fury, more particularly a male in gender distress, has proved a durable one and the progeny of Norman Bates stalk the genre up to the present day.
00:27:42
Speaker
Pieces shows us a killer who has a distorted relationship with his own sexual desire and the objects of that desire. This turns into a morbid fascination and probably shame around being unable to connect with women in a more standard and you know, safe and healthy way, and using these body parts to connect when human connection feels so elusive.
00:28:05
Speaker
This is all very Ed Gein-coded. You can see how inspired this was by his story. And where we see Ed Gein's influence, we usually also see Norman Bates.
00:28:17
Speaker
And that's the thing, right? Even before Texas Chainsaw Massacre did Ed Gein, Psycho did it first. But it's always there. This man is building a woman out of body parts, just like Ed Gein made a skin suit, just like Norman Bates preserved his mother in her entirety, just like the Sawyer family in Texas Chainsaw Massacre have body parts saved all throughout their home.
00:28:40
Speaker
You can see it in both of these films, as well as Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Psycho, that there is something distorted in the way these killers interact with gender and sexuality. In Psycho, the fury of Norman's mother was activated and unleashed by his sexual interest in Marion.
00:28:58
Speaker
In Texas Chainsaw Massacre, we see Leatherface taking on the role of wife and mother and wearing a skin mask that has feminine makeup on it while doing domestic chores in a house that has no female figure.
00:29:11
Speaker
In Maniac, he was trying to keep these women with him in some way. By bringing their scalp and affixing it to the mannequins, he feels like he is surrounded by all of his lovers essentially forever.
00:29:23
Speaker
And finally, in pieces, all the way back in childhood, the association between his mother and sex and jigsaw puzzles create a chaotic vision of a woman as a sexual object constructed piece by piece.
00:29:37
Speaker
In the very last moments of the movie, the Frankenstein's dead body part lady actually comes to life and like grabs Kendall by the crotch and just squeezes the shit out of him.
00:29:49
Speaker
Like that's how the movie ends. This Frankenstein amalgamation of the body parts of these dead women comes to life and attacks this random kid. It's a wild way to end the movie, honestly.
00:30:01
Speaker
But they like that. Like they like to give you a final scare to end on. And sometimes it's as simple as the killer opening his eyes back up, and sometimes it's the Frankenstein dead lady coming to life.
00:30:13
Speaker
So we had a couple, like, fun, more urban setting slashers, and now let's take it to summer camp with 1981's The Burning. A lot of slasher movies have, like, big stars from before they were famous, and this cast has a really hilarious example of that.
00:30:28
Speaker
Like, Holly Hunter is in this movie, and, like, a pre-Seinfeld Jason Alexander is in this movie, which is so random. The opening flashback tragedy is about Cropsey.
00:30:39
Speaker
This one is more standard in that we see the killer being the victim of some sort of violent and humiliating tragedy. Cropsey, who gets his name from like a famous urban legend already, is burnt in an explosion after some teenagers pulled a prank on him at the summer camp that he was the groundskeeper for.
00:30:58
Speaker
At the hospital shortly after, we get like a kind of classic jump scare when an orderly and a doctor who seems to be kind of still training go into Cropsey's hospital room and Cropsey's arm like reaches out and grabs the orderly.
00:31:13
Speaker
Then we flash forward some amount of years to him being released from the hospital, and the doctor is telling him that it might be weird at first, but he'll adjust in no time and absolutely, like, do not be resentful against those kids who burnt you. Like, he's telling him resentment will not help you.
00:31:30
Speaker
You just need to adjust to being back out. Don't hold any grudges. And I guess he's just hoping for the best. I'm sure that'll work out great. Of course, his first move upon being released is to go to a sex worker and also kill her.
00:31:44
Speaker
And then we're finally at the camp. Once everyone, like campers, counselors, and killer arrive at camp, one girl almost gets killed with garden shears while she's looking for a ball that went into the woods, but she gets away at the last second.
00:31:58
Speaker
And by the way, this camp actually just sucks. Like 90% of this movie outside of the kills is kids pranking and bullying each other. Like it's so ridiculous. And it's not like light teasing either. Like it's fully pushing a kid in water who doesn't know how to swim, shooting a guy with a BB gun, like causing physical harm to people, pranks and bullying. This is not like light jokes.
00:32:21
Speaker
And I actually kind of support the anti-prank messaging of this movie as like a certified hater of pranking. The counselors go to take the campers on like an actual canoeing camping trip, like as opposed to being in their cabins. They're taking the canoes out and they're sleeping outside. And at the campfire, the counselor tells the story of Cropsey.
00:32:40
Speaker
And he tells us more information about him. And it turns out that Cropsey used to drink heavily and he was a bit of a sadist. Like he just tormented all the campers. And he tells them about the garden shears that he used to carry.
00:32:52
Speaker
Garden shears we've already seen when that one girl almost got attacked. He tells them that the prank pulled on Cropsey was intended to be kind of revenge for him being so terrible, but that it went wrong, which caused the explosion that burnt him.
00:33:07
Speaker
He tells the campers about how since then Cropsey has lived in the woods surrounding the camps in the area. They pull a classic campfire move and have someone sneak up on the campers with a mask and a knife at the scariest possible moment for the story to have maximum effect.
00:33:23
Speaker
I hate that. Speaking of maximum effect, for such a random movie, this movie has an amazing score. Like the music, the sound design, it's just so well done. But anyway, while they're on this overnight trip, the canoes and one of the counselors disappear.
00:33:39
Speaker
They build a makeshift raft and a few of them try to paddle it back to the camp. They find one of their missing canoes out on the water, and out pops a killer with his gardening shears, and he kills all of them.
00:33:52
Speaker
Back with the group, the two who have sex obviously also get murdered very quickly, and then we have a kind of classic boy-who-cried-wolf moment. There's this one particularly weird pranky kid who is the only one who saw what happened, and he takes the other counselor to go find these kids who got killed,
00:34:11
Speaker
And the counselor doesn't really believe him, but then they get there and the counselor gets killed and the weird pranky kid runs off and he escapes. They send another group back on another makeshift raft to try to get back to the camp to get help.
00:34:25
Speaker
They do get there this time and they call the police who say that they'll head there by helicopter. But Cropsey is there with a fucking flamethrower, and it turns out that one of the counselors was one of the kids who played the prank gone wrong all those years ago, and Cropsey is here for his revenge.
00:34:45
Speaker
Earlier in the film, the counselor had referenced that as a kid, he actually was kind of a troublemaker himself and that he had got kicked out of his camp when he was a kid. Now we know why.
00:34:56
Speaker
he got kicked out of camp for participating in the prank that led to the explosion that burnt Cropsey. In the end, the counselor ends up killing Cropsey, and he lights him on fire for the second time.
00:35:09
Speaker
Then we flash forward to the weird pranky kid now as an adult himself, and now he's a camp counselor. He's sitting around the campfire repeating the Cropsey legend to the campers just like his counselor before him.
00:35:22
Speaker
The Burning is a pretty straightforward slasher film that also serves up an interesting enough twist in that reveal at the end. But the thing about The Burning is that it manages to be pretty effective while also being made up mainly of caricatures.
00:35:36
Speaker
None of the people in this movie seem particularly real. There's no real character work being done in any of this. There's a smooth-talking womanizer, there's a wholesome couple who have been together for so long, and and there's a troublemaker who almost seems like a greaser plucked out of the 50s and like plopped into this 80s movie.
00:35:57
Speaker
And it's an example of what Going to Pieces talks about, about the tone of slasher movies and how they manage to kind of make fun of themselves while continuing to explore and push the genre forward.
00:36:09
Speaker
Rockoff writes, "...the rapid alteration between registers, between something like real horror on the one hand and a camp, self-parodying horror on the other, is by now one of the most conspicuous characteristics of the tradition." The characters don't have to be real.
00:36:26
Speaker
The stories are good enough, and part of the fun is that the characters follow these tropes. They are so cliché that it makes them more disposable and more easy to say goodbye to as we watch the movie.
00:36:39
Speaker
That's part of it, and that's part of why it works. After the success of Halloween and, to a much lesser extent, Black Christmas, a wave of slashers emerged that revolved around different holidays or other major events.
00:36:53
Speaker
We had Graduation Day, April Fool's Day, My Bloody Valentine, and Silent Night, Deadly Night, and more. And 1980 gives us Prom Night, which obviously takes place on Prom Night,
00:37:06
Speaker
and Terror Train, which takes place during a New Year's Eve celebration. And with Halloween, this is like the trilogy of Jamie Lee Curtis as Final Girl.
00:37:17
Speaker
While Prom Night stars Jamie Lee Curtis as the Final Girl and does follow much of the formula laid out by Halloween, Paul Lynch is quoted about making Prom Night and going to pieces, saying, I always did Prom Night based on Hitchcock more than anything else, based on a little bit of Hitchcock and a little bit of De Palma.
00:37:36
Speaker
Not based on Halloween, as much as I loved Halloween. For me, it was the kids and their situation that were interesting. The horror was second to that. It was the premise for me of Psycho, where you get involved with the people and out of the people you get some interesting horrific experiences.
00:37:52
Speaker
For me, it was always the kids. I was interested in the characters and what happened to them. The violence was secondary and there was no real reason to go beyond what we did." I think it's worth pointing out that Halloween was also based on Hitchcock and Psycho.
00:38:07
Speaker
It sort of all comes back to Psycho and all of the movies that followed in its footsteps, which, again, also means it sort of all comes back to Ed Gein. I know that's like a big thing right now because the new Netflix show came out, but trust me, he's been around being misrepresented left and right, I promise.
00:38:24
Speaker
But the opening scene of Prom Night is basically the most ominous game of like tag and hide and seek where the person who is it is called the killer. So like these kids are all yelling, the killer is coming, the killer is coming.
00:38:38
Speaker
The kids playing are Wendy, Nick, Jude, and Kelly. Kim and her younger twin siblings, Alex and Robin Ann Hammond, find the kids playing and Kim and Alex go home, but Robin Ann tries to join the game.
00:38:52
Speaker
And they all sort of gang up on her. They shove her around yelling, kill, kill. They're like chanting and saying the killers are coming. It is seriously like weirdly horrific, even though it's supposed to be believable as a game.
00:39:05
Speaker
She is scared and cowering, obviously, and eventually she falls out the window. They don't push her exactly, but they really corner her there until she is like about to fall out the window.
00:39:17
Speaker
One of the kids says that they should go get help, but another girl swears them all to secrecy, saying that they'll go to jail if anyone finds out. We flash forward six years to the family visiting the dead girl's grave.
00:39:29
Speaker
and her siblings are now teenagers. In case the title didn't clue you in, they are all getting ready for prom. The now teenage members of this group that was playing start getting phone calls informing them that they will see you at prom.
00:39:44
Speaker
The now teenage members of this original group start getting phone calls, and all the phone calls say is, see you at prom. It turns out that the man that the police had initially suspected of killing Rob and Ann had escaped from a local hospital.
00:39:59
Speaker
He had been deemed unfit to stand trial and has been in the hospital ever since, and the cops are worried that he's returned to take revenge for getting locked up and also getting burnt in an accident in the process because slasher movies love their killers to be burnt for some reason.
00:40:14
Speaker
He is our first red herring. Our second red herring is Mr. Sykes, who works at the school and just has like a general reputation for being creepy. So Kim and Robin an and Alex's dad is the principal of the high school, and Kim's boyfriend, Nick's dad, is the detective, and Nick was one of the kids who had been playing with her sister when she died.
00:40:39
Speaker
Wendy is Nick's ex-girlfriend. She's also one of those kids, and she is very pissed that Kim and Nick are dating, even though she is now dating Kim's younger brother, Alex.
00:40:50
Speaker
This movie gives us a kind of fun twist on the point of view stalking scenes of the killer. Instead of him stalking them in person, we see the killer's hands and like his point of view looking through the yearbook at the photos of all the people involved and running through his list of the guilty.
00:41:07
Speaker
Kim gets like sexually harassed by a school bully named Lou and it turns into a whole thing where Alex like fights against him and his friend, but he's outnumbered. So obviously he kind of loses the fight.
00:41:19
Speaker
They get sent to the principal's office, but Alex's dad is the principal, so that's kind of a weird dynamic. Lou gets suspended, and Alex gets basically no consequences, which I'm kind of not mad about because he was trying to stop someone from sexually harassing his sister, but it is like a little weird that his dad is the principal.
00:41:38
Speaker
Later on, Alex is trying to break up with Wendy, and she is basically like rejecting his rejection, but he's insisting that it's over. Kim and Nick go for a walk, and she talks about her younger sister who died.
00:41:52
Speaker
and of course, prom night is falling on literally the anniversary of Robin's death, and she would have been a junior this year, so it would have been her first prom. He sort of tries to apologize to her that her sister dies, and it seems like he's having some sort of flashbacks to what happened because he was there, but he's not really able to get the words out.
00:42:14
Speaker
And he was the one who had wanted to get help but was talked out of it. Wendy is pissed, so she sort of gets involved with Lou. And if you've seen Carrie, they're kind of like the Chris and Billy of this movie.
00:42:26
Speaker
They both hate the Hammond family and like want their own revenge separately. So they're going to prom together and kind of like joining forces. So have like a double revenge situation here. Triple revenge if you count, you know, the actual slasher.
00:42:41
Speaker
Alex is DJing part of the prom for some reason. Nick and Kim are prom queen and king, so they have like some rehearsal time. They tease each other. They both seem to not be taking it that seriously, but like in a good way, in a way that's endearing. Like they know that prom is exciting and fun, but they're also not taking themselves too seriously.
00:43:04
Speaker
the students are all finding their yearbook pictures in their lockers, like the photos we've seen the killer looking at. Everyone is getting all ready for prom. The boys are picking up their dates.
00:43:16
Speaker
The prom in the movie looks so fun. Like the music is great. The vibes are high. Everyone's having a good time. Jamie Lee Curtis as Kim gets to have like a weirdly elaborate disco dance sequence that really is like the highlight of the movie for me.
00:43:32
Speaker
Kim and Nick have an entire choreographed dance to do And for some reason they do this dance like not after they get crowned prom king and queen, but like randomly when they feel annoyed with Nick's ex-girlfriend.
00:43:44
Speaker
Except obviously they had to do it before everything went horribly wrong or we would not be so blessed to see it. So I guess it had to happen this way, but kind of kind of a plot hole. Doesn't doesn't totally make sense.
00:43:55
Speaker
After the dance scene, we get kind of a change up on like the post coital death scene of a slasher movie where where Kelly had stood her ground and said no, but she gets killed anyway, not by her boyfriend, but by the killer.
00:44:08
Speaker
Kim's friend Jude took this guy Slick to the prom. He's sort of like a weird stoner classmate of theirs who she took sort of a random chance on, but they seem to be having a really good time.
00:44:19
Speaker
We don't spend a ton of time with them, but it's clear that they're really enjoying each other's company and that they feel comfortable together and their interactions are actually quite sweet. They're hanging out in his van and smoking a joint and the killer pulls the door open and attacks them.
00:44:34
Speaker
There's a whole scene of the killer trying to reach into the van to get him, and then the van gets stuck, so the killer gets inside, and in the process of all of this, the van goes over the edge of the bluffs, and the car catches on fire, and that's it for Jude and Slick, but the killer gets out.
00:44:50
Speaker
The killer finally gets to Wendy, and he's chasing her with an axe, and he eventually kills her. Mr. Sykes, if you remember, he's our resident creep. He saw Wendy's murder and tries to tell everyone what happened, but people assume that he's just drunk and either he's seeing things or just like telling tall tales.
00:45:08
Speaker
It's time to crown the king and queen, so Nick and Kim get ready for that. And just before Nick is set to walk out, Lou ambushes him and takes the crown. They tape his mouth shut and like fully knock him out, which is kind of crazy.
00:45:23
Speaker
But then Lou is fully decapitated by the killer and his head rolls out onto the stage. While all this is happening, the song Love Me Till I Die is playing in the prom, so that's kind of a funny juxtaposition.
00:45:36
Speaker
Everyone runs out of the prom after this, but Kim runs behind the stage to find Nick and try to help him get out of there. The killer is back there down on the ground with an axe. Kim unties Nick and tries to help him run away.
00:45:50
Speaker
He is in a bad way. Like, he probably has a fucking concussion and his leg is all messed up. Like, he's not doing well. The killer approaches them with the axe, saying, it's my turn.
00:46:00
Speaker
And he pushes Kim out of the way and goes for Nick. Kim tries to hit him with a chair, but she misses. And then she tries to wrestle the axe away from him, and it flies across the room. So she's also very brave. Like, she is confronting the killer head on.
00:46:16
Speaker
Nick is like wrestling with the killer and Kim comes back over with the axe and she hits the killer with the axe and right as she does, they lock eyes and she realizes who it is.
00:46:27
Speaker
He is hobbling like he's also all fucked up now, obviously, because she hit him with an axe and Kim watches him leave the building. Suddenly, he is having flashbacks to the death of Robin and Kim is begging the cops outside not to shoot him and he goes down from his wound.
00:46:47
Speaker
Kim hugs the killer, who still hasn't even actually been unmasked in the movie, and finally pulls his mask off, revealing what we were starting to suspect, that the killer is Alex, her brother, taking revenge for the death of his twin sister all those years ago.
00:47:03
Speaker
Alex dies in Kim's arms, and now both her younger siblings are dead, and the movie is over. Prom Night is a decent movie, it's worth it for the dance sequence alone, but Honestly, the sequel is better.
00:47:16
Speaker
Hello, Mary Lou Prom Night 2 is like Prom Night and Carrie and Nightmare on Elm Street 2 had a baby. It's amazing and is definitely going to get its own episode at some point. It slots a little less easily into the slasher genre, so we aren't getting all the way into it here, but I couldn't not at least mention it.
00:47:34
Speaker
The final Jamie Lee Curtis as Final Girl film is Terror Trains. Terror Train opens at a New Year's Eve frat party. The stage is set for more pranking. You'll find lots of pranking and lots of pranksters getting punished in these movies.
00:47:49
Speaker
The main character, Elena, is clearly participating in a prank that she feels hesitant about. They lure the nerdy guy, Kenny, into a room thinking he's going to hook up with her, and they plant a dead body in the bed, but she's talking from the shadows, so he thinks it's her in the bed.
00:48:07
Speaker
He tries to kiss the dead body thinking it's her and then the body like falls apart in the bed. This freaks him out understandably. He kind of like has a panic attack and he starts screaming and flailing around and he gets like spun up in the draped fabric from the ceiling fan and it like wraps around him and everyone is laughing at him.
00:48:30
Speaker
But Elena sort of looks like freaked out by the situation. But you also don't feel that bad for her because why did you participate in this? And then three years later, all the pre-med students have a costume party on the train for New Year's Eve.
00:48:44
Speaker
I don't know why they're having a party on a train, but that's what they're doing. One of them walks up to the train with a knife through his belly, but since they're all in costume, they think it's part of his costume, they think it's a prank, a joke, and they just sort of like move along and get on the train while he is dying outside in the snow.
00:49:02
Speaker
His body gets left on the train tracks to get crushed by the train as it pulls away. Elena's talking to her friend. She's graduating early, so they're sad because they're going to be split up, but Elena has to use the semester to work and save up money before starting med school in the fall.
00:49:18
Speaker
The group of them start talking about the prank back then, and it turns out that Kenny had to go to the hospital after this happened. Elena's boyfriend, Doc, says that he spiked a drink that he gave to one of the nerdier guys at the party.
00:49:31
Speaker
And Elena is basically like, why can't you have fun without being an asshole to people? Like, she really calls him on it. There's a scene where the magician does a performance with his lovely assistant and the audience loves it.
00:49:43
Speaker
But later on, they're talking and it turns out that nobody actually hired a magician for this party. So nobody knows who's who this guy is. So because they're all pre-med students, this movie has like an insane amount of double entendres that are like medical terms as sexual innuendos from all these pre-med students.
00:50:03
Speaker
It's very weird. It's not sexy. It's maybe supposed to be read as sexy, but it's not sexy. Anyway, eventually, one of the people who works on the train finds a guy dead on the floor in an alligator costume.
00:50:16
Speaker
But by the time they bring someone else to see what happened, the killer has taken the place of the man in the costume. He's put on the alligator costume and he starts to act like he had actually just been down because he was too drunk.
00:50:30
Speaker
So because he is posing as this other guy, he ends up being able to kill Michi, Elena's friend from earlier. The magician approaches Elena and flirts with her, and she's like pretty receptive because she's annoyed with her boyfriend, who is also just clearly an asshole.
00:50:45
Speaker
The conductor finds Mitchie's body and tells Elena that she's dead. The magician later does another trick where he makes the assistant reappear again, and some guy is like slashed in the crowd, and Elena's boyfriend Doc is begging for help.
00:51:02
Speaker
But once again, we have like the boy who cried wolf moment. Nobody fucking believes him because he's a prankster, which is essentially just the same thing as being a liar. They pull the emergency brake and finally acknowledge that there must be a killer on the train.
00:51:17
Speaker
They make everyone get off the train and take their masks off. Elena is basically like all the people being attacked were involved in the prank against Kenny. This has to be related somehow.
00:51:29
Speaker
She reveals that she had actually tried to visit Kenny in the hospital after what happened, but they didn't let her see him, but they did tell her that he had previously killed someone.
00:51:39
Speaker
That's a HIPAA violation. i don't know that they can tell her that, but they told her that. They realize that Kenny is probably the one after them, and Doc, like, aggressively locks himself and Elena in a room.
00:51:51
Speaker
They discover that Kenny had been a magician in high school, so now they're suspicious of this magician that nobody hired. Elena thinks she should go out and warn everyone, and he's like, no way, we're staying locked in this train car so we don't get killed, and he basically just, like, doesn't care what happens to anybody else.
00:52:11
Speaker
Elena leaves because she finds him annoying, clearly, and Doc gets killed and sort of, like, doesn't even fight back at first because he just thinks he's being pranked. And like I said, I'm famously a hater of pranks, so again, i sort of love...
00:52:26
Speaker
the anti-pranking propaganda happening here. The train gets going again, and Elena tells the conductor that she thinks the killer is the magician. Eventually, Elena has to fight the masked killer, and during the fight, he falls between the train cars, and Elena runs away thinking that he's dead.
00:52:45
Speaker
What they don't know is that he was, like, hanging off the side of the train. He was, like, holding on to part of the train car, which is not super believable, but, like, let's just go with it. Elena is resting on the train after her ordeal. They think that everything is over and the music picks up and gets very suspenseful and we see a masked guy like lowering down behind her.
00:53:08
Speaker
One of her friends comes in and is like, why don't you come back with all of us? Things have kind of calmed down a bit out there and it's a lot less creepy with everybody around. But then they find the magician dead.
00:53:19
Speaker
which is extra scary because now they really don't know who the killer is. They thought that it was the magician. Clearly that's not who it is. So now all bets are off again. She finds someone wearing the uniform of the people who work on the train, but when she gets closer, she realizes he has a mask on.
00:53:36
Speaker
He pulls off his cap and his mask to reveal himself as the magician's assistant, but then pulls that disguise off as well and reveals himself to actually be Kenny.
00:53:48
Speaker
he tells Elena that she hasn't changed. Then he makes her kiss him, which is super weird. And then he starts having like a flashback to the prank, like the dead body and getting stuck in the fabric. And like he's flailing and flinging himself around this train car.
00:54:04
Speaker
The conductor comes in and attacks him. He hits him a couple of times. And in doing so, like throws him out of the train and off of a bridge into a river. And that's how the movie ends.
00:54:16
Speaker
Again, you can kind of see some like weird gender and sexuality things happening here with Kenny dressed as the feminine magician's assistant.
00:54:28
Speaker
A lot of people find these things to be transphobic. I think that's something that modern slashers can definitely learn from and move away from. So I just want to acknowledge that because clearly there's a pattern here.
00:54:41
Speaker
and with that one, we have talked about two of the three Jamie Lee Curtis as final girl slashers. We're not getting into Halloween today. Not the right decade. Too big of a franchise, but we'll get there eventually.
00:54:55
Speaker
But now you know that Jamie Lee Curtis has been Final Girl a couple of times. If you're a fan of her in Halloween, it might be worth going and checking those other ones out too. Our last movie we're going to talk about today is House on Sorority Row.
00:55:09
Speaker
This movie's flashback has a specific date, June 19th, 1961. A pregnant woman goes into labor. Complications lead to an emergency C-section by a Dr. Beck.
00:55:22
Speaker
When the woman, who is named Mrs. Slater, wakes up, she is given some bad news about the baby. We don't really know what the news is, but she cries out, obviously distressed.
00:55:33
Speaker
We sort of assume the baby didn't make it, but it's not really confirmed exactly what happened. We jump into present day, which is prepping for graduation. I love the getting ready and getting the house ready sequence of this movie, like the opening sequence here. It's so ethereal. It sort of has the energy of the opening scene of Carrie, but in a way that feels...
00:55:57
Speaker
a lot less bogged down by the male gaze. Katie is our main character, and she's kind of arguing with her mom. Her mom wants her to move back home after school, but she doesn't want to.
00:56:09
Speaker
Katie agrees to her sorority sisters to stay a few extra days so that she can attend a big end-of-year party. The sorority house is owned by Mrs. Slater, and she wants to spend the summer living there while the girls are away for summer.
00:56:23
Speaker
She's the house mom, but she also seems to kind of hate the girls who live there. She tells her doctor, who's trying to dissuade her from this, that she wants to spend her summer there, and she says, if you try to stop me from living as I please, I'll see that what you did is remembered.
00:56:40
Speaker
We don't know what he did, but clearly it was something bad. Another sorority sister named Vicky is with her boyfriend Rick, who recently got a gun and is teaching her how to use it. She is way too excited about this, does not bode well, does not feel promising,
00:56:56
Speaker
how much she's enjoying learning how to shoot. Later at the house, six girls are sitting around. They're drinking and celebrating, and they're talking about their plans. One is going to be a flight attendant. One is going to law school.
00:57:10
Speaker
Some of them don't know what they're doing next. Miss Slater comes home and is furious that the girls are still there, even more furious that they're drinking because the house was supposed to be closed up already.
00:57:23
Speaker
For some reason, their sorority house always closes earlier than the other houses and always before june nineteen They want to stay a couple extra days this year to set up for a party that they were supposed to be able to host somewhere else, but for some reason they couldn't.
00:57:39
Speaker
Mrs. Slater says they all absolutely need to leave by tomorrow and that there will absolutely be no party there. Mrs. Slater goes and looks at photos of all the years that she has been the house mother at this sorority house, and then she burns all the photos.
00:57:55
Speaker
Later on, she catches Vicky and her boyfriend having sex in her room inside the sorority house, which is a big no-no, and she breaks open the waterbed that they are having sex on.
00:58:06
Speaker
Vicky yells at her, I'm gonna kill you. I'll get back at you if it's the last thing I do. Later, the girls are all talking about how annoying Mrs. Slater is, and obviously Vicky is still pissed, so she's kind of leading the charge, and they're making a plan to do a good old-fashioned sorority prank.
00:58:25
Speaker
Have I mentioned yet that I hate pranks? Katie says, this is silly. We're supposed to be mature adults now, aren't we? Katie is our final girl, and we see here she is presented as the voice of reason, but still gets overridden and sucked into the situation.
00:58:43
Speaker
Back at the hospital, Dr. Beck is talking about Mrs. Slater's latent violence, saying that she should really spend the next three months under observation at the hospital. The girls are making a plan to use Vicky's boyfriend's gun in the prank, and Katie is trying to talk them out of it, saying that's way too extreme.
00:59:03
Speaker
They've been talking up to this point about how disgusting the pool is and how Mrs. Slater won't click won't get it cleaned for them. And the prank is that they're going to put her cane on a floaty in the middle of the pool and are literally going to force her by gunpoint to get into this nasty pool.
00:59:22
Speaker
Again, have I mentioned I hate pranks? Does this even count as a prank? Like, if you pull a gun on someone, can you even still call that a prank? I don't think so, but that's what they're calling it. While this is happening, Vicky fires a real shot, which none of the girls were expecting, and they had thought that the gun was empty.
00:59:40
Speaker
They quickly turn on her and tell her to stop, In the chaos, she actually accidentally shoots Liz, one of the other girls. Then she shoots into the pool where Mrs. Slater was, and then they're kind of like laughing about it.
00:59:54
Speaker
Mrs. Slater goes to hit her with her cane, which she deserves at this point. The gun goes off, and Vicky shoots Mrs. Slater, who falls back into the pool. They get her out of the pool. They think she's dead. They want to hide her body, so they basically wrap her up and like throw her back into the pool.
01:00:14
Speaker
As they're trying to figure out what to do about this, the band for the party is like getting to the house. They've already pulled her body out of the pool and Katie is insisting on calling an ambulance in case she could still be saved, but everyone else basically begs her not to, saying she's definitely already dead and they don't want to get into trouble.
01:00:34
Speaker
So they decide to weigh her body down and sink it into the disgusting pool until after the party. They have the party. It's like a pretty standard college party scene.
01:00:45
Speaker
The first partygoer to wander off goes down into the trees behind the yard. He gets killed. The girls had set up Katie with some guy as a blind date, and he seems sweet, but she's like pretty freaked out and upset, obviously, because she has now been made an accomplice to murder.
01:01:05
Speaker
Some guys were pretending to throw one of the girls into the pool, and obviously, She and the rest of the girls totally freaked out, and then one of them does get thrown in and is super upset.
01:01:18
Speaker
The girls also just right now seem to realize that the pool has lights in it that someone could just totally turn on, and if they did, they'd probably be able to tell that there was a body in the pool.
01:01:30
Speaker
As the party goes on, Vicky's boyfriend asks where his gun is and how the prank went. A group of guys go out back in their tighty-whities to swim in the gross pool. It is so visibly gross, I don't know why they would swim in it.
01:01:43
Speaker
College boys do crazy things. But they turn on the pool lights and all the girls run out to the backyard totally panicked. But there is no sign of the body in the pool.
01:01:54
Speaker
They don't know if they are relieved or horrified, but the body is gone. The girls once again stop Katie from calling the cops. Some of them start to look for Mrs. Slater, and they send one girl to pack up Mrs. Slater's clothes to make it look like she left town.
01:02:12
Speaker
Later on Mrs. Slater's body falls down on one girl from the attic door, and the girls do not understand how her body could have gotten up there.
01:02:23
Speaker
The party is somehow going great while all of this is happening behind the scenes. Like, everyone is having a great time. Vicky is unhinged as fuck. More girls kind of continue to back out of the situation as they keep trying to figure out how to get rid of this body and how to get away with the situation.
01:02:42
Speaker
While they're pushing the dumpster they threw the body into to the garage, they manage to hit it into a campus police car. They should get caught.
01:02:53
Speaker
They don't get caught. This is the incompetent police. This is what happens in slashers. ah Not that police are competent in real life. I'm not trying to give them credit. But like, this is just what happens in slashers. They are totally, totally useless.
01:03:07
Speaker
The cop gets called away to something more urgent. And he basically tells them like, bring this dumpster back to your house. Like you do not need to be doing this at 143 in the morning. And so they do. And he leaves.
01:03:19
Speaker
More people die, like some of the sorority girls die. Katie finds the medical tag that they had that the hospital sent home with Mrs. Slater, and she calls it. She tells them that Mrs. Slater is missing and a girl was attacked.
01:03:34
Speaker
The doctor says he is coming to the house. When he gets there, he stresses the importance of finding her, and Katie asked him why she had the medical tag. He tells Katie about how 24 years ago, she was his patient and he treated women struggling with fertility.
01:03:51
Speaker
He did experimental procedures to help women have kids. It turns out, every June 19th, the date that she gave birth, she celebrated her son Eric's birthday as if he were alive.
01:04:05
Speaker
The doctor presses her, saying he knows there is something she isn't telling him and they find the bodies of three of the sorority sisters in the pool. More girls get killed.
01:04:16
Speaker
Dr. Beck and Katie drive to the cemetery to look for the other girls, and she tells him what really happened at the house. They find more dead girls, and we watch them just continue to realize the level of danger that Katie is in.
01:04:30
Speaker
In Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Clover writes, It is the conventional task of the genre to register in close detail the victims' dawning understanding as they survey the evidence of the human crimes and perversions that have transpired there.
01:04:45
Speaker
That perception leads directly to the perception of their own immediate peril. This is the moment where the danger is fully realized. We know how much danger Katie is in They know how much danger Katie is in.
01:04:58
Speaker
Most of the other girls involved have already met their fate. They unwrap the dead body to check who it really is, and under all the towels, it really is Mrs. Slater. The doctor says he's alive, seemingly referring to the son Eric that supposedly hadn't made it. He's realizing that maybe Eric was alive and they really were celebrating his birthday every year.
01:05:21
Speaker
They get back to the sorority house and the doctor injects Katie with a mild sedative and forces her out of the car and back into the house. He realizes that Eric wasn't stillborn.
01:05:32
Speaker
He was born with certain abnormalities. So this kind of is like a throwback to It's Alive from the last decade we covered, if you remember that one. This is almost like what would have happened later. He finally reveals that Mrs. Slater was taking Eric out of the clinic over the summers each year, and he would live in the attic of the sorority house with Mrs. Slater while the girls were on summer break.
01:05:55
Speaker
Dr. Beck thinks that Eric must have seen what happened to Mrs. Slater from the attic window. He says he must find Eric and that she is going to have to be the bait to catch him. Katie is like hallucinating her dead friends and the house mother. She's obviously very upset by everything that's happened, so she's seeing them call out to her.
01:06:17
Speaker
Katie's date, Peter, walks back into the house at the exact wrong time, and he gets shot with, like, a tranquilizer dart, so he's not dead, but it's not good. The doctor is saying that he doesn't want to hurt anyone, and he just can't be found out, like, he can't have people find out about his experiments.
01:06:36
Speaker
Katie finds Vicky's boyfriend's gun, but outside the room, the doctor is attacked with the cane, presumably by Eric. Katie is stumbling around with the gun. She finds one of her friend's heads in the bathroom.
01:06:48
Speaker
Very unclear what she's actually trying to do here. But she's on sedatives, so, you know, fair. She goes up into the attic, and she's still having these, like, hallucinations of all of her dead friends.
01:07:01
Speaker
The attic is full of clown stuff, which I obviously love to hate, and one of the larger clowns basically comes to life. It turns out to be Eric, dressed as a clown, and she fires the gun at him while he comes at her with the cane.
01:07:17
Speaker
She realizes that the gun is loaded with all blanks and then pulls off the head of a clown doll, revealing a knife underneath and stabs him with it. He falls down the latch attic door, all like bloodied up and looking pretty dead.
01:07:32
Speaker
She's upstairs, still in the attic, catching her breath, and just at the last moment—can you guess it? Do you know what's going to happen? Just at the last moment, his eyes pop back open.
01:07:44
Speaker
Slashers love to end with the killer disappearing, popping back up, opening their eyes when you think they're dead— They always like to have the implication of immortality or at least some serious durability and maybe the option to franchise.
01:07:58
Speaker
That didn't happen with this one, but we know it happened with a lot of them. Obviously, this is just a small collection of slasher films from the 80s. There are so many more to dive into, from the dregs of the so-bad-they-are-good to the actually-good.
01:08:15
Speaker
And I know that I didn't get to the slasher legends. That's just because they deserve their own episodes. But just to give you an idea of what was happening with these big slasher franchises during the 80s, here's a quick breakdown.
01:08:27
Speaker
Three more Halloween movies came out during the 80s featuring Michael Myers. There was also Halloween 3, which doesn't feature Michael at all and isn't a slasher film at all, but please watch it if you haven't.
01:08:39
Speaker
There were eight Friday the 13th movies that came out just during the eighty s and five Nightmare on Elm Street movies. Slasher movies were hot, and they were taking advantage of the interest.
01:08:50
Speaker
The slasher killers were more often than not the star more than the final girl or any other characters. We love to see glimpses of our wise elders returning, like Dr. Loomis. We love that Nancy came back to the franchise in Nightmare on Elm Street.
01:09:05
Speaker
But we know who the star is, and we know who we are really there to see. The slasher killers, for better or worse, have worked their way into weirdly special places in our hearts and have us looking forward to seeing what weird kills they will come up with next.
01:09:41
Speaker
Thanks for listening to this episode of What Haunts You, a podcast about the stories that haunt our dreams. I have watched a lot of slashers lately to go over my thoughts for this episode, and while I'll miss them, it's time for me to move on to other parts of 80s horror.
01:09:56
Speaker
And I'm looking forward to those parts too. Before I do that, we have our next episode about a very special movie. This is one I'm really excited about. Caitlin is coming back on to talk about Rocky Horror Picture Show.
01:10:09
Speaker
We will take you on a strange, strange journey. We will do the time warp and we will beam ourselves to Transylvania to sing and dance once more. So meet us there and I'll talk to you next time.