Slasher therapy: the slasher movie as an allegory for uncovering trauma

This study aims at analyzing slasher films as potential allegories for the therapeutic process of uncovering trauma, proposing a reading of the slasher killer as a metaphor for the trauma. To perform this analysis, the plots of the movies A Nightmare on Elm Street (Bayer, 2010) and Final Girls (Schulsson, 2015), were read as possible allegories for a psychoanalytical process in which their final girls come to terms with trauma as they face the killers. This analysis is performed based on the slasher film structure as composed by Final Girl versus Slasher killer, as defined by Carol Clover (1992), and, as their confrontation takes place in what Clover calls the Terrible place, that is compared to the unconscious and its dynamics, as proposed by Sigmund Freud’s The Ego and the Id (2019). The correlation of trauma and fictional narratives is performed based on Cathy Caruth’s (1996) studies of trauma and the construction of narratives.

Psycho-killer: Shifting spectator address from Psycho to Bates Motel

Leveraging Carol Clover’s influential Men, Women, and Chain Saws, this article attempts to situate the A&E television series Bates Motel as a progressive prequel to Psycho. Through a close reading of the series’ formal and narrative components, vital distinctions are clarified between Psycho and Bates Motel, arguing that the latter achieves a unique mode of spectatorial address. This unique address is accomplished via three devices: a shift in genre away from the horror/slasher film to re-situate the backstory of Norman Bates within the melodrama – a genre traditionally geared to a female spectator; by playing Norman as an active investigative protagonist rather than the prototypical psycho-killer devoid of psychological complexity; and by opening up the narrative to dual protagonists via the inclusion of Norma Bates. Taken together, Bates Motel emerges as an adaptation of the iconic Hitchcock film whose very success is dependent on intentionally altering its mode of spectatorial address.

Groped and Gutted

The realm of horror provides a creative space in which the breakdown of social order can either expose power relations or further cement them by having them persist after the collapse. Carol Clover proposed that the 1970s slasher film genre—known for its sex and gore fanfare—provided feminist identification through its “final girl” indie invention. Over three decades later, with the genre now commercialized, this research exposes the reality of sexual and horrific imagery within the Hollywood mainstay. Using a mixed-methods approach, I develop four categories of depiction across cisgender representation in these films: violent, sexual, sexually violent, and postmortem. I explore the ways in which a white, heterosexist imagination has appropriated this once productive genre through the violent treatment of bodies. This exposes the means by which hegemonic, oppressive structures assimilate and sanitize counter-media. This article provides an important discussion on how counterculture is transformed in capital systems and then used to uphold the very structures it seeks to confront. The result of such assimilation is the violent treatment and stereotyping of marginalized identities in which creative efforts now pursue new means of brutalization and dehumanization.

The Slasher Film

This chapter argues that of all the horror genre's many strands and variations, the original 'slasher' cycle of the 1970s and early 1980s remains the most disreputable and critically vilified, yet its commercial popularity and lasting influence are unquestionable. Whilst rarely making out-and-out slashers themselves, major Hollywood studios cashed in by buying finished films from their independent producers, giving the makers an instant profit and the studios a cheap marketable film virtually guaranteed an audience of teenagers. The chapter examines a film frequently cited as a forerunner of the slasher, one heavily influenced by the Italian giallo genre of crime fiction. In diverging from the established conventions of the giallo, Mario Bava's Bay of Blood (1971) introduced a number of narrative and aesthetic features found in many of the slasher films that followed. The chapter then considers the influence of the video industry on the evolution of the horror genre (and vice versa), and looks at the issue of censorship as it assesses the British 'video nasties' scare of the early 1980s.

Visions of Queer Anarchism: Gender, Desire, and Futurity in Omar Ali Khan’s Zibahkhana

Modelled upon American slasher film tropes, Omar Ali Khan’s Zibahkhana (2007) is more than a transnational remake. It is a vision of a queer revolution, and imagines queer futures brought about through rural anarchy and violent eroticism. This article reads the masked killer of Zibahkhana as a monstrous queer agency armed with a queer (zombie) militia prepared to consume and transform the heteronormative matrix. Offering an unprecedented and unapologetic representation of queer aggression onscreen, Khan’s indie slasher explores queer articulations of desire and anarchy in the figure of the killer, Baby, a queer woman and a murderous cannibal. With Baby, Zibahkhana offers a queer anti-hero, the first of its kind for Pakistani cinema, that challenges normative modes of being, belonging, and desiring. Thus Zibahkhana not only offers a welcome revision of Western slasher film tropes, it blazes a trail for transgressive and incendiary portrayals of queer embodiments and intimacies in Pakistani visual media.