And yet recent box office receipts show that women have an even bigger appetite for these films than men. Theories straining to address this particular head scratcher have their work cut out for them: Are female fans of “Saw” ironists? Masochists? Or just dying to get closer to their dates?
“Jennifer’s Body” (out on Sept. 18), a high school retro-horror romp — written by Diablo Cody, directed by Karyn Kusama (“Girlfight”) and starring Megan Fox as a satanically possessed sex bomb who literally feeds on boys — offers another, more reassuring explanation for the draw: Audiences love a woman who can take back the knife.
Ms. Cody, 31, whose Academy Award-winning screenplay for “Juno” featured a distinctive female voice, said she gravitated toward horror as a girl because she could see herself represented on screen. “When I watched movies like ‘The Goonies’ and ‘E.T.,’ it was boys having adventures,” she said. “When I watched ‘Nightmare on Elm Street,’ it was Nancy beating” up Freddy. “It was that simple.”
This basic appeal for female viewers was given a sophisticated reading by the film theorist Carol J. Clover in “Men, Women and Chain Saws” (1992), in which she refers to a lone young woman who either escapes or overthrows a killer as the “final girl.” More comfortable watching a woman in peril than a man, young, male audiences — initially slasher movies’ core viewers — get the best of both worlds, identifying first with the predator and then with the would-be prey. That women also identify with the scrappy heroine is something of a happy accident.
“Jennifer’s Body” was designed with both feminists and 15-year-old boys in mind, a seemingly eccentric blueprint that, as Ms. Kusama points out, is in line with the best movies of the slasher tradition. “It may be one of the best ways for a young male audience to experience a female story without feeling like they have been limited by a female perspective,” she said.
Here that perspective is doubled, with Jennifer and her innocuous shadow, Needy (Amanda Seyfried). The story of the girls’ tormented, toxic relationship is set off by various depictions of Ms. Fox — a combination of brain-locking beauty and recombinant evil — rummaging through some poor guy’s torso. Between Needy’s cautious yearning and Jennifer’s pure, trampling id, the film presents a portrait of female identity in flux.
It was an effort that often bedeviled Ms. Cody and Ms. Kusama, who tried to balance brute violence and lesbian kisses with the film’s more substantial metaphors. “The tricky thing is if you’re going to subvert those tropes, they have to be there,” said Ms. Cody, whose script is a self-described “crazy, chaotic homage” to the horror films of her youth. “We were constantly bobbing and weaving. Karyn and I talk about the film as a kind of Trojan horse. We wanted to package our beliefs in a way that’s appealing to a mainstream audience.”
That audience is not known for its flexibility: the bulletproof formula of screams, skin and death, pioneered when Janet Leigh and half her blood supply went sliding down the Bates Motel’s shower wall in “Psycho,” took hold because it’s easy and it works. Horror films have adapted with Darwinian fortitude over the years, allegorizing everything from cold war paranoia and eco-anxiety to the breakdown of families. And yet the success of slasher movies, which exploded with films like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” in 1974 and came to dominate what we now think of as scary movies, might have stalled cinema’s most resilient genre.
For the most part, except for a few breakouts like “Shaun of the Dead” (and remakes of still-vital foreign horror films), mainstream American horror has become, like pornography, mainly a cinema of graphic escalation. Though often associated with exploitative fare, the director Rob Zombie, whose recent release, “Halloween II,” revamps another 1970s proto-slasher (and one of the original “final girls,” the character Laurie Strode), says the genre’s indulgence has been its undoing.
“The ’80s are the decade that ruined everything for everybody,” he said. “The soul went away, and it became gore for the sake of gore, and kids were cheering at killings and yelling and screaming. It became a roller coaster ride. And of course once something becomes a roller coaster, all you can do is build a bigger, more extreme roller coaster. That’s where I think horror movies really got perverted.”
One feminist who would agree with that is the novelist Rita Mae Brown, who wrote a slasher sendup called “The Slumber Party Massacre” (1982). Under the auspices of the producer Roger Corman, however, the movie was denuded of its satiric trimmings. Ms. Brown, reached at her home in Virginia, is philosophical about the experience. “Horror films are one of the last places where women will make progress,” she said, “because they go to the root of adolescence. They attract adolescence, on some level, even if you’re 50.”
Twenty-seven years later Ms. Cody’s similar attempt at subversion led to pressure simply to tow the slasher line. “That temptation was there,” Ms. Cody said. “I think there were some people involved who would have liked to have made a straight horror film.” Ultimately, however, Ms. Cody’s script prevailed intact. The risk of mixing things up a little was mitigated, it turns out, by the fact that women are currently helping to prop up hard-core horror releases.
It is a development that has confounded even those buying fake blood by the barrel. Mr. Zombie is baffled by the trend. And so is Debbie Liebling, the former president for production at the recently dissolved Fox Atomic, a studio that was dedicated to low-budget, teen-oriented genre films like “Turistas.”
“I’m not sure what the attraction is, psychologically, for females,” she said in a recent interview. “I would love to know why girls are going to see ‘Saw,’ because I have no idea.” (Fox Atomic acquired “Jennifer’s Body,” which is now to be released by Fox.)
Both “Halloween II” and “Jennifer’s Body” suggest that the best way to move past horror’s current fascination with excess is to take the slasher film back to its relatively character-based roots and regrow it in modern soil. “I watch the original ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ and it feels like a political art film in comparison to some of the stuff we’re seeing right now,” Ms. Kusama said.
Perhaps more familiar now with extreme horror films than with the genre’s classics, most test audience members couldn’t name a single movie analogous to “Jennifer’s Body,” a scary, witty film more closely aligned with the pig-blood pranks of Brian De Palma’s “Carrie” than with the wall-to-wall gore of its descendants. For Ms. Cody this was great news, an opportunity to re-educate a jaded audience about what a horror film is.
The NY Times
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