#18: Slashers
In the absence of certainty, guest writer Laura Gilbert has turned to slasher films and debunking podcasts to make sense of the world.
I keep comparing the Omicron variant’s wildfire spread to living in a really boring slasher movie. I’ve started talking to my colleagues about Mr Covid (not to be confused with Miss Rona), who I picture as a slenderman-esque figure stalking through the streets of London and seizing those who dared do anything social (or, indeed, anything at all) in the lead-up to Christmas. Arguably he could also act as a Krampus type character.
“Try to keep safe from Mr Covid,” I type over Teams chat. I receive “ha ha” or “you too” or something like that in response. “Ha, ha,” since it’s all a bit of a joke, isn’t it? A terribly bitter one, because this is all beginning to feel like some god-awful sequel. Many of us wanted to believe it was over. But Covid is like Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger. It just keeps coming back.
I’ve got slashers on the brain. I’ve been watching a lot of them recently, trying to work my way through the canon. The (virtual) quiz I gave at work yesterday involved a horror round (tenuously dubbed ‘nightmare before Christmas’), and up until this week I’ve found myself cornering fellow guests at events (a birthday party, a friend’s poetry book launch, etc) to give them my grand theory about the genre’s classics.
I’m probably not going to a party for a little while so please, patient reader, assume the role of a man I don’t know very well/at all, politely listening to my thoughts on the horror of the adolescent state.
Let’s define slashers as movies depicting a group of people being hunted down and picked off, one by one, by a killer or killers (frequently masked), often using sharp bladed objects. We’re talking Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), etc. They tend to focus on young people: teenagers either studying high school or just out of it. There can be a whole range of reasons for this focus on youth (such as, I don’t know, targeting younger markets), but there's a specific peril facing adolescents I want to focus on. They exist in a transitional phase - no longer children, not yet fully-fledged adults. We could talk about pubescent bodies and body horror (‘hair where there was no hair before?’ sounds pretty werewolf to me), but instead I want to consider an anxiety around authority.
As a child, provided you had a fairly stable upbringing, you may well believe in grown-ups: in their knowledge, their good will, their ability to protect you. Sure, there are nasty adults, but there are nice ones, too. You are dependent on your parents, but you could sleep at night without worrying too much about this dependence. Then you have adults, who appear to have means and the power to do what they want. But teenagers are stuck somewhere between the two.
What we frequently find in slashers are adolescents who no longer can believe in their parents or other officials. They have no faith in authority that cannot keep them safe. But they frequently don’t have the ability to secure their own safety, either.
Take Halloween. The movie opens with Michael Myers origin story: a mostly naked teenage girl is slashed to death in her bedroom with a kitchen knife. Her killer leaves the house, to be met by her parents (returning home after a night out). The camera reveals the identity of the murderer: her little brother.
This opening also establishes a motif that will be repeated throughout the movie: absent parents. It’s a film about babysitters and their pals. The characters cosplay as adults for the night (whether by doing their job or doing grown-up things like sex and drinking beer), but they aren’t grown-ups. They are meant to go back to their mom and dad’s house late at night, after their hijinks, but most of them will never go home again. One of the victims of Halloween has a cop dad. A cop dad. He has no idea his daughter’s life is in danger: he doesn’t even find out, over the course of the film, that she is dead. In a way, he doubly fails his daughter: as both an officer of the law, and a protective father.
The only grown-up who seems to really help any of the younger characters at all still can’t definitively defeat Michael Myers (and so the franchise lives on). But, hey, at least he tried to help. In these films we are left with world where grown-ups are either ignorant, or ineffective, or callously indifferent, or too frightened to help, or literally trying to slash kids.
In I Know What You Did Last Summer (which largely takes place a year after graduation), there’s one scene where a character walks past the open doorway of the living room and says “hey dad” and her father carries on watching TV, not even noticing her. I found this moment heartbreaking. There’s a real coldness to it, that makes me feel like this girl has been ignored for a long time, despite the fact that the previous summer she was a beauty queen with dreams of making it as an actor in New York City. The movie’s killer sneaks into the house shortly after this non-exchange, and papa fails to recognise the fact an intruder bent to killing his daughter has entered the house.
Proto-slasher Black Christmas (great holiday viewing) focusses on a sorority house and adult characters who do things like calmly decide to have an abortion after getting accidentally pregnant, yet we still seem to have a second category of adults (that is, adults older than our main characters) who fail to help our girls: whether it’s an off-screen mother cancelling Christmas plans to hang out with her boyfriend (meaning her daughter is in the danger house during the period of the movie), or a nice-enough seeming father showing up the day after his girl’s brutal murder, or indeed the ending of the film I shan’t elaborate on too much as I think you should all go off and watch it.
I might be some years out from my teens but something about the terror of the adolescent/youth state struck a chord with me. There’s been a lot said about the infantilisation of our generation (depending on who counts as part of this generation). Much of this is undoubtedly connected to the 2008 credit crash and the fact that many of us will not be buying homes or having babies or in long-term stable employment at the time our parents were hitting those milestones. Whether it’s millennials using the words “adulting” or grown-ups fixating on trends that remind them of their childhood (shout out to Holly McNish’s poem ‘Cupcakes or Scones’), it can seem like a lot of people never reached that self-assured state the slasher parents seem to occupy. I certainly don’t feel like an authority figure, not even a false one.
The anxiety around authority has been exacerbated by the pandemic. In the UK, we’ve had plenty of reasons to criticise our Government’s response to COVID-19.
What is arguably more difficult than doubting our politicians, is finding ourselves having to doubt the human race’s omniscience. We don’t all have to be experts, but we like to think that, whatever the question, someone can speak to it. The pandemic has, however, underscored the limits of human knowledge: we’ve done a lot as a species, but a novel coronavirus is, by definition, novel. Medical researchers and all sorts were having to learn about the disease as it ran rampant. COVID-19 was new to patients and doctors alike. No disrespect to those who worked so hard to understand the virus, to develop the vaccines, to figure out protocols – these folks are utter heroes and I can only sit back in awe that they were able to do it all so quickly – but we can easily recall spring of 2020 where we felt we faced the unknown and the semi-known. Then each new variant brings with it new questions. Will this one be more infectious? Less dangerous? What will happen to our hospitals, our economy, our holidays?
I sincerely believe the pandemic has challenged our faith in even the notion of, say, tomorrow – a world where plans happened because they were planned. It feels a bit “all bets are off” right now, and no matter how concertedly people try to make stuff normal again (as many did earlier this year, with festivals and parties and collective sighs over how nice it was to just sit in a Cafe Nero), we can’t manifest our way out of Wave X.
We are all teenagers again. We know the danger, but we aren’t really able to control our situation (short of becoming a hermit, which isn’t an option for all of us, and is even trickier for those with housemates).
But I don’t want to leave you all on such a bleak note.
I started my slasher spree off the back of a reference in an old episode of You’re Wrong About (YWA). YWA is a debunking podcast that looks at historical events and on occasion, broader social issues (such as homelessness), challenging the dominant myths surrounding them.
Listening to YWA has been educational, but it’s also about learning’ how to be wrong and, in turn, how to try to right yourself. There’s a real focus on moral panics, and challenging the lazy journalism and the sort of blinkered thinking that allows people to settle for easy narratives. Both hosts, Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes, are clearly very intelligent, but what strikes me most is their compassion: they are driven by a desire to understand the truth, because this is the only way we can help people. Whether questioning why certain women are dismissed as bimbos, or looking at the treatment of sex offenders, You’re Wrong About invites listeners to test their preconceptions and asks if specific views and beliefs can be substantiated. It encourages us, in short, to be fact-checkers. You may not always share the views of the hosts (one of my friends thinks Sarah can be a bit too forgiving at points), but it’s still a good idea to welcome the idea of debate in your own noggin.
Michael Hobbes has now left YWA (an announcement that left me feeling like my favourite band ever were breaking up), but he continues his debunking work on Maintenance Phase with pal/writer Aubrey Gordon. Michael and Aubrey take apart diet and wellness culture, and while some of the episodes focus on the kind of fads us ‘sensible folk’ might already scoff at (celery juice will not save you), others question things like the BMI, which are still in use in professional medical contexts. The intellectual laziness or prejudice exposed in YWA is also criticised in Maintenance Phase, whether they are considering the legacy of Dr Phil or the damage caused to patients through anti-fat bias.
If we recognise that people are fallible, that we’ll always have patches of ignorance and weakness and uncertainty, we may need to recognise we can’t graduate from the adolescent horror phase. Oh, well. What remains is a choice. We can:
Seek out some new authority/belief system to sign up to (whether a conventional one, or some new alt-right conspiracy theory that lets us feel smug and self-assured)
Throw our hands in the air and giggle about our inability to do taxes
Continue to struggle on in this muddled-up world, seeking out the truth and knowing this is really a life-long kind of a quest.
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