The Monstrous Years: Teens, Slasher Films, and the Family

Pat Gill, University of Illinois

In 1978, Halloween heralded a new sub-genre of horror, the teen slasher film. Combining inventive violence and a clever, eerily evocative suburban mis-en-scène with engaging, believable contemporary teen protagonists and a superhuman killer, director and co-writer John Carpenter created a new, effective type of film thriller. There were earlier films that featured teen-aged protagonists, such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) and Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976), some of them gorier and almost all more expensively made,[1] but Carpenter’s camera work and narrative style distinguished Halloween from these predecessors. Accompanied by creepy piano music composed by Carpenter, the Steadicam roams through the small town streets, stalking the victims. Its point-of-view merges into and out of the killer’s; every innocuous movement is made suspicious and every suburban commonplace menacing. The suburban haven, away from the dangers of the city, not only fails to protect its children, but has become the breeding ground of living nightmares unknown to urban landscapes.

In films following Halloween, suburban and small town teenagers have been put in danger time and again, at home, at school, at camp, and on holiday. These films seem to mock white flight to gated communities and parental attempts to shield their children from the dangerous outside influences represented by the city: widespread crime, easy access to drugs, unsupervised friendships. The danger is within, the films seem to say; the horror derives from the family and from the troubling ordeal of being a late twentieth-century teenager. Several critics have noted horror films’ overt relation to and covert dependence on the American family, and I rely on their excellent discussions in the argument that follows.[2] My focus is much narrower than the general category of horror, however, and much more punctual. I focus on teen slasher films, posit the reason for their arrival in [PG1] the late ‘70s, their modifications through the years, and their recent parodic incarnations.

Linked to a tradition of horror whose inception is most often located in English Gothic, contemporary horror films extend and revise themes that dominated earlier horror films. Critics generally fix the beginning of English Gothic in the second half of the Eighteenth century, with Horace Walpole’s, The Castle of Otranto (1764).[3] Contemporary horror plays out many of the defining characteristics of the Gothic: defenseless heroines; suppressed passions; unspeakable desires; fearful landscapes and haunted, uncanny interiors; untrustworthy and suspicious relations and relationships; terrifying uncertainty and stifling knowledge; familial secrets and their dreadful exposure; and jarring juxtapositions of the moral and the monstrous, the sexual and the grotesque, the virtuous and the violent.

Mark Edmundson believes that contemporary horror films represent a degradation of the Gothic tradition. He explains that the initial wave of Gothic fiction afforded a “means of insight,” a “vitalizing effect” (Edmundson xiii) in its revelation in darkened shades of a world of layered complexity. He finds that most of today’s Gothic does no such thing, calling contemporary Gothic (as manifested in selected films, sordid confessional television talk shows, the reporting and analysis of the O.J. Simpson trial, and some recent fiction), “no-fault, dead-end and politically impotent” (Edmundson 68). The attraction of this latter type of Gothic, Edmundson explains, is that it “offers epistemological certainty; it allows us to believe that we’ve found the truth” (Edmundson 68). The truth is that the world is a hopeless, terrifying nightmare.

For Edmundson, Gothic despair is a salve, a manufactured albeit gloomy meaning that relieves us of making meanings of our own, of living through an engagement with “the complexity of our problems and the breadth of our responsibilities” (Edmundson 68). It is also a catalyst for what Edmundson calls “a culture of facile transcendence,” a contemporary willingness to look for salvation in the forms of simplistic pop psychologies and group therapies, psychic hotlines, uplifting popular novels and self-help books, narratives of angelic intercession and spiritual redemption, and “fantasies of renewal” such as Forrest Gump and Iron John (Edmundson 179). In this argument, Freddy, the gleeful, brutal murderer of adolescents of the A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984), serves a bizarrely apotropaic function: his savage presence wards off the far more unsettling circumstance of unknown evil, of personal guilt and social indifference. Our contemporary Gothic fears astonish us, freeze us intellectually, successfully short-circuiting the possibility of any imaginative personal or social transformation. Gothic despair becomes an end in itself, a point of stasis resistant to visionary change.

Although not many critics share Edmunson’s view of the psychological relief to be found in seeing the world as an evil, randomly violent, godless universe, they find Gothic horror to function in psychologically and culturally significant ways.[4] Critics have analyzed the otherness and enforced alienation of the murderous, monstrous protagonist as well as the gender dynamics at work in the representation of horror.[5] They have pointed out the family relations or repressed fears and desires elaborated by horror scenarios,[6] and have described the cultural assumptions and political circumstances at play and under attack.[7] In general, critics who examine familial horror speak of family structures gone horribly awry, not merely of deep-rooted dissatisfactions and unbearable repression, but also of simulated or makeshift family units engaged in repugnant, gruesome behavior, of obsessed father-creators and refractory son-monsters, of appalling mothers and endangered or psychotic sons and daughters, of creatures in savage search of or in rebellion from deficient parents, and parents in hideous hunt for or in ghastly revenge of lost children. Teen slasher films are indeed densely populated by instances of all these characters and arrangements. The family structure that interests me in horror films, however, is an absent one. Teen slasher films both resolutely mock and yearn for the middleclass American dream, the promised comfort and contentment of a loving, supportive bourgeois family.

Slasher films show teenagers in peril with no hope of help from their parents. Mostly these parents are generally too busy or too involved in their own problems or pleasures to help. Even caring, concerned parents are impotent; often they are hapless and distracted, unaware of their children’s problems and likely to dismiss or discount their warnings and fears. Indeed, parents like these need guarding, and children frequently find themselves in the stressful adult role of protector.[8] At times the parents, albeit unwittingly, have created the monsters. Some action in their past has brought about this relentless evil force to wreak havoc among their children. What is striking about most of these films is the notable uselessness of parents, their absence, physically and emotionally, from their children’s lives. Teens must deal with the extraordinarily resilient monsters on their own.

For the past thirty years, sociologists, psychologists, and family therapists have pointed out the accelerated changes in the structure of contemporary families, theorizing recently on the ramifications of these changes on the development of children. In general, divorce has been seen as the primary catalyst in these changes. In the opening paragraphs of The Divorce Culture, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead writes

The entire history of American divorce can be divided into two periods, one evolutionary and

the other revolutionary. For most of the nation’s history, divorce was a rare occurrence and an

insignificant feature of family and social relationships. In the first sixty years of the twentieth

century, divorce becomes more common, but it was hardly commonplace. In 1960, the divorce

rate stood at a still relatively modest level of nine per one thousand married couples. After

1960, however, the rate accelerated at a dazzling pace. It doubled in roughly a decade and

continued its upward spiral until the early 1980s, when it stabilized at the highest level among

advanced Western societies” (3).

“Currently,” report E. Mavis Hetherington, Tracy C. Law, and Thomas G. O’Connor in “Divorce: Challenges, Changes, and New Changes,” “it is estimated that half of all marriages will end in divorce and that approximately 60% of these dissolutions will involve children” (209). For Whitehead, divorce is less a cause than a product of what she sees as an “ethical shift” in the meaning and value of family responsibility. “Beginning in the late 1950s,” she contends, “Americans began to change their ideas about the individual’s obligations to family and society. Broadly described, this change was away from an ethic of obligation to others and toward an obligation to the self” (4). Whitehead explains that she does not mean that people suddenly engaged in a wholesale abandonment of familial duties, but that “they became more acutely conscious of their responsibility to attend to their own individual needs and interests” (4). It was this new emphasis on self-fulfillment and individual growth that allowed for a reconception, and increase, of divorce.

“Postmodern parents are not necessarily more self-indulgent or less self-sacrificing than modern parents,” David Elkind remarks. “It is simply that the demands of postmodern life are different from those that obtained in the modern world … This said … the imbalance of the family’s ability to meet the needs of its members has shifted in favor of adult needs over those of children and youth” (Elkind 3-4). Adolescents seem to suffer most, or at least the most visibly, from the changes in the families caused either by divorce or other structural modifications of the family. “Given the intense biological, physical, and cognitive changes that are occurring during this time,” write Monica McGoldrick, Marsh Heiman, and Betty Carter, “in combination with the search for one’s identity and the inherent confusion around negotiating and regulating boundaries and emotional distance between one’s family and the outside world, adolescents are extremely vulnerable for developing symptoms” (428). Elkind agrees, arguing that adolescents need “protected time,” a time in which adults need to provide their children with values and limits. Unlike adulthood, Elkind explains, adolescence “is a period of extremely rapid physical, emotional, psychological and social growth. This period of rapid growth leads to a metamorphosis unlike any transition that occurs in adulthood. Adult transition takes place within a relatively fixed firmament of physique, mental ability, and established social roles. Adolescent transitions do not. Even though young people are now exposed to demands for identity formation from an early age, they still need time in adolescence to adjust to their new body configuration, their new emotions, their new thinking abilities, and their new patterns of social interaction “(153).

The family dynamics and adolescent troubles in slasher films graphically bear out the concerns of the writers above. Parents in these films are generally absent, either physically or emotionally. They have demanding jobs, working late in the evening. They go on business trips, or on vacations without the kids, or on get-away weekends with friends. Sometimes the parents have drinking or drug problems, or are involved in new relationships. Some parents are well-meaning but inept and insufficiently attentive, failing to grant the seriousness of their children’s worries and fears while making a show of interest. Other parents are exacting, abrupt, and impatient, too concerned with their own pleasures and desires to pay attention to the needs of their children. At no time do parents attempt to set values or explain limits.[9] They may constrain their children, but they never teach them. The adolescent heroes in slasher films are cool, resourceful, and independent, but the grim events that unfold suggest the psychological and physical price they pay for their freedom from parental intrusions and the precocious self-reliance they are forced to develop. In Halloween, Friday the 13^th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980), Prom Night (Paul Lynch, 1980), A Nightmare of Elm Street, Hell Night (Tom DiSimone, 1981), Slumber Party Massacre (Amy Jones, 1982), Sleepaway Camp (Robert Hiltzik, 1983), Fright Night (Tom Holland, 1985), Night of the Creeps (Fred Dekker, 1986), The Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, 1987), Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987), Pumpkinhead (Stan Winston, 1988), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Fran Rubel Kuzui, 1992), Cherry Falls (Geoffrey Wright, 2000), and their many sequels, teenaged protagonists must face their horrors alone or with their peers. As their fellow adolescents fall to one monstrous force or another, they must save themselves and their world on their own.

In The Kids’ Book of Divorce, a 1981 guide written by twenty children between the ages of 11 and 14, a chapter entitled “Do We Turn Out Differently?” lists what the young authors feel to be the commonly held myths about children from broken homes. The myths state that children whose lives differ from perceived standards “would become mentally disturbed; would commit suicide by the age of 21; would get rare diseases; would be on drugs; would become alcoholics; would become thieves and rob banks, steal cars, etc; would get divorced themselves; would murder their siblings, talk back to teachers; become violent; smoke pot in class; would be angry all the time; would be lonely all the time; have no friends; would think something’s wrong with them” (111). The authors bravely assert that “we think these things are not true” (111) but they fight an uphill battle. The writers are painfully aware that the myths promote their own predictions, that they are prescriptive rather than descriptive. Friends, parents, teachers, and social institutions that adopt these assumptions inadvertently help to confirm them by their expectation and heightened recognition of social maladjustment in certain designated groups. After twenty years, many sociological studies, political arguments, and fact-finding reports still subscribe to what these strikingly self-aware children contended were harmful, influential myths.

Adolescents in teen slasher films inhabit worlds constructed from these and kindred myths. If the roots of these myths are in stresses introduced into the late twentieth-century American family by the intensified prevalence of divorce, the end result in these films is a social world emptied entirely of the family as a resource for coping with growing up. The self-absorbed parents of these films, whether divorced or together, provide no useful knowledge, no understanding of their children’s needs or fears, no viable models for negotiating the world, and certainly no protection from that world. Even the most well-adjusted protagonists, the good girls and boys whose moral integrity marks them as special and valuable, feel alienated and different, dissatisfied and lonely. Homes in these films do not provide a haven from a world gone bad, or even a place of safe retreat. The boundaries of these homes are entirely permeable to the evil that attacks their teenaged inhabitants.

The violence attributed to children of broken homes is either projected onto the ubiquitous, supernatural Other stalking the school hallways, the hometown streets, the lover’s lanes, and the bedrooms of its victims, or it is retaliatory, the necessary response to repeated malevolent attacks from a stalking monster. Teenagers, especially vulnerable because of their precarious position at the cusp of adulthood, mask their inchoate desires and childish fears in self-conscious poses of cool carelessness. It is no accident that Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s high school is located near a cemetery that is a gateway to hell. The offhand cruelty of high school social exchanges; the feelings of anxiety and dread that accompany adolescents uncertain of their bodies and feelings, uncertainty most poignantly brought out in awkward public and personal encounters; the day to day stress, shame, humiliation and bewilderment of negotiating hierarchies and cliques that seem vitally important—all become more oppressive and overwhelming when combined with an absent home life. The teenagers in slasher films are plagued by the putative symptoms that result from broken homes; the screams provoked by the anomalous monsters stalking these adolescents are a cry for help unheeded by adults.

Slasher films covertly engage an odd nostalgic yearning for a traditional family. A number of books have argued that baby-boomers suffer from the cognitive disconnect between their lived experiences and the sentimental family fare they saw on TV. Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, The Donna Reed Show, Make Room for Daddy, and My Three Sons depict worlds in which families were at ease socially and financially, where parents disagreed only on minor matters, where momentary misunderstandings and temporary hurt feelings were the only emotional distress, and where solutions to problems emerged within twenty-two minutes. Some critics suggest that since these impossibly idyllic portraits could never be matched in real domestic situations, the young baby-boomers, the first generation to be brought up on TV, felt dissatisfied with their own relations and deprived of proper family experiences.[10] If young baby boomers did not recognize their parents in these television comedies, however, then they also did not recognize themselves in the relentlessly cute, groomed children whose innocence and simplicity were never tarnished and always carried the day. Contemporary young viewers had the benefit of the instant reality check of their daily lies to inform them that they were watching fantasy. The familial relations and childhood experiences elaborated in these early television productions seem to reflect adult fantasies of domestic harmony rather than resonate with contemporary children’s predilections. Had Beaver or Kitten ever appeared at a real local playground, they would have been dreadful bores.

If the immensely popular slasher films serve as an indication of a popular mood, it is not baby boomers who pine for the idealized lives of television families, lives they realized were certainly not like those of their own or of their friends. It is teenagers of the seventies and later who seem willing to watch endless reruns of these family shows on the Nickelodeon channels and TV Land. In rerunning such shows, these channels successfully mine viewers’ appetite for nostalgic recreations of a mythic past.[11] The clever, tongue-in-cheek promotions of these old shows highlight episodes’ trite moral summaries, insipid plots, unfortunate fashions, and astoundingly stupid dialogue. Despite the mockery, it seems as if later generations view these series as forms of history, as somewhat sappy but fairly accurate versions of the lives their parents enjoyed as children but that are denied their progeny. The teenaged protagonists of slasher films reflect this adolescent cultural apprehension of past harmony and present dysfunction. Surprisingly conversant with television and film “classics,” they frequently allude to well-known characters and bits of dialogue, as they jokingly refer to a motherly cohort as “Mrs. Cleaver” or comment in a tone both droll and ominous that “we’re not in Kansas anymore.” The locale of teen slasher films—the small town or attractive suburb—revisits the setting of family television programs of the ’50s and early ’60s. Slasher films seem to delight in undoing the happy domestic scenes and comfortable, safe communities of that television era, replacing them with vapid or nasty family encounters and a lurking, murderous neighborhood presence. These cinematic attacks on the façade of contentment and security have a wistful edge; the satiric jibes at the suburban dream are fueled by a sense of injustice at the false promise they hold.

This attack on the bourgeois American family is not new to films. In direct and deliberate contrast to 50s’ and early 60s’ television programs of the model parents who easily solve superficial familial problems each week, many films during the same era offered hard-hitting investigations into troubled family life.[12] Although most of these films looked at the hypocrisy, moral turpitude, and indignity of relationships among adults, some films, such as The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950), Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), and Home from the Hill (Vincente Minnelli, 1960), explored the anguished, often violent responses of teenagers to problems at home. The selfishness and inadequacies of the parents in these films are comparable to those of the parents found in teen slashers. There seems always a hope of parental redemption in these earlier films, however, a hope missing in nearly all of the slashers. And even when parents fall short in the films of the fifties, there are other adults—social workers, teachers, police—who manage to help, who understand the issues and make a difference, who, in short, behave as adults. It is the wholesale nature of the indictment in slasher films that marks the difference between them and their predecessors.

In slasher films, the decay of the family makes children not merely defenseless but also prone to danger. A comparison of the two Cape Fears, one a suspense film of the early sixties and the other a thriller of the early nineties, helps to highlight this condition. The original Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1962) tells the story of a wily, sinister criminal (Robert Mitchum) who stalks and eventually attacks an upright lawyer (Gregory Peck) and his innocent, well-adjusted family. The evil clearly comes from without: the sadistic crook threatens the safety of the wife and daughter, but he never unsettles the family as a unit. The family members remain loving and supportive; there is no doubt that the lawyer’s behavior is righteous and his ethics admirable. In the later Cape Fear (Martin Scorcese, 1991), the lawyer (Nick Nolte) is compromised professionally and personally. He has negotiated shady legal transactions and has had an adulterous affair, putting severe strain on his relationship to his wife. In both films, the father manages successfully to protect his family and kill the assailant, although in the 1991 version, the criminal is astonishingly resilient, repeatedly recovering from catastrophic injuries to batter family members once again. In this later Cape Fear, the family unit is restored under duress, but its original fault lines exposed the unit to danger, separating members from one another and making them liable to repeated harassment. The villainous ex-con (Robert De Niro) attacks the family at its most vulnerable point: the teenaged daughter. Aware of the tension between her parents, the young woman (Juliette Lewis) is rebellious and disaffected. She has no respect for either parent; she makes perilous decisions on her own. As a consequence, the killer is able to lure the daughter, to charm and eventually terrify her.[13] The overwrought family situation has put the daughter at-risk.

In the slasher films, by contrast to both versions of Cape Fear, there is no redemption of the original family. There is no enduring core of parental strength, compromised by parental ambition, adultery, or distraction, to be recovered through the struggles of horrified parents. Many of the friends of the survivors in slasher films possess attributes associated with children of broken homes, the attributes decried as destructive myths in the Kids’ Book of Divorce. These adolescents are careless about their well-being and willing to take risks for new pleasures. Uninterested in schoolwork or academic achievement, sexually active, well-acquainted with drugs and/or alcohol, self-consumed and cynically dismissive about love, marriage, and their future, sociable but often unkind, these teens suffer bizarre, gruesome deaths. Given money, clothes, and cars to make up for the lack of attention and affection of their parents, supported in their unethical or unlawful doings by strident mothers or fathers unwilling to learn about their children, these teens are not an endearing lot. Doomed by their own shallow natures, victims to and products of their unrestricted lives, they die without ever having lived, unmourned and unloved.

In Halloween, protagonist Laurie’s irresponsible but nonetheless good-hearted friends think of their babysitting jobs as opportunities to share drinks and beds with their boyfriends. One by one they are killed in drolly macabre fashion by Michael Myers, an asylum escapee who years ago at the age of six murdered his sister for preferring sex to taking care of him. The resilient Laurie fends off the repeated attacks of Michael, while protecting her charge, aided at last by an outsider, the doctor who tended to Michael in the asylum. No police come to her rescue. No neighbor folk in the small, picture-pretty Illinois town show up to aid Laurie—indeed, they turn off their lights as she pounds on their doors for help. No parents, either of the teenagers or of the children left in their charge, call to check on or arrive to keen over their children. Laurie learns the hard facts of teen slasher films: family is more often a hindrance than a help, law enforcement is suspicious and ineffective, and surviving into adulthood demands a full comprehension of and a comparable response to savage evil.

Carol Clover sees in these films the story of the “Final Girl,” the one who “encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril” (Clover 35). Clover argues that the gender of the Final Girl is “compromised from the outset by her masculine interests, her inevitable sexual reluctance, her apartness from other girls” (Clover 48), making her a masculinized individual who uses ingenuity, skill, and deadly weapons to kill her attacker. “The Final Girl has not just manned herself,” Clover contends, but “she specifically unmans an oppressor whose masculinity was in question to begin with” (Clover 49). For Clover, the plot that pits the ferocious, repressed slasher against the armed, blood-drenched, surviving girl would “seem to be one of sex and parents. The patently erotic threat is easily seen as the materialized projection of the viewer’s own incestuous fears and desires. It is this disabling cathexis to one’s parents that must be killed and rekilled in the service of sexual autonomy. When the Final Girl stands at last in the light of day with the knife in her hand, she has delivered herself into the adult world” (Clover 49). That the survivors find themselves in sequels battling once again these demons, however, suggests that it is not a break from but a primary eroticized attachment to parents that is overcome and internalized. It is not what the protagonist finds or becomes at the end of these films that engenders the sequel, but the return of the absence from their beginnings.

By the late eighties there were as many final boys or boy and girl teams as final girls, and the sexual inhibition of the young heroine was no longer an issue. Indeed, in A Nightmare on Elm Street5: The Dream Child (Stephen Hopkins, 1989), Freddy invades the dreams of the unborn child of the heroine, an unwed teenaged mother. Clover’s contentions that the films construct “gender-bending scenarios” and their “own brand of gender transgression” (231) rely on the congenially androgynous Final Girls with whom young men as well as young women could identify.[14] The masochistic identification with the survivor that Clover posits still occurs in later slasher films, but it is not gender but character type that enables this viewer relation. What Clover sees as androgyny in the Final Girl seems more like mature self-possession. The character of Laurie played by Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween is not depicted as sexually ambiguous; her moral attributes, however, are shown to be as important as her physical ones. The sexual activity of her friends serves as one more indication of their giddy, thoughtless natures, suggesting not that Laurie is sexually repressed, but that her friends have no proper sense of hierarchy, no responsibility to themselves or others. The final person in slasher films does not so much bend gender as age, somehow gathering into her or his character the maturity and responsibility missing in the adults..

The young people who survive possess traits in common: they are smart, determined, quick-thinking, and inventive, but most importantly, they are caring. They protect the weak, tend to the wounded, go back into known peril to help their friends, and risk their lives to save the group. In short, they are parental. It is not that Oedipal conflicts and incestuous desires do not inform the narratives of these slasher films, but that the overarching psychic drama seems to be one of loss.[15] The discontented teens all seem to be in a state of mourning for something they cannot quite describe, and they use sex, drugs, and drink in an unsuccessful substitute for it. The monsters haunting the streets, dormitories, and dreams of the protagonists are less figures of patriarchal control and punishment than the ogres of childhood nightmares and the social hell of adolescence, which remain undiminished because no parent comes round to dispel them. If the monsters are products of the parents, it is as the residue of their absence, indifference, and failure to understand.

The slasher villains themselves testify to the lost potential of childhood, to the absence of family. Survivors are those who worry about themselves and others, who voice moral concerns about the activities of the group, who feel guilt and remorse for their actions, and who accept the burden of setting things right, even if that means killing someone or some thing. These protagonists recreate the proper, ideal family, one they have never experienced at home, performing the acts necessary to carry on in a world in which parents can never be counted on. The survivors are not many. Most of the youths in slasher films are disengaged from the demands of life, although active in the pursuit of momentary pleasure. Nothing within or without has prepared them to recognize or face the demons that threaten them. They lack traditional consciences or what used to be called moral fiber.[16] They are replicas of their parents, junior versions of what they despise and resent. In its embittered killing spree, the slasher leaves behind a gory trail of what it found when it arrived: wasted youth.

The generational transmission of violence also has it roots in this punning sense of waste. Michael Myers of Halloween was ignored by his sexually active sister and abandoned, at least at the moment, by his parents, who arrive home from their nighttime excursion to find him standing outside with a knife dripping with the blood of his murdered sibling. Fifteen years later, Michael wreaks havoc on babysitters (and their friends) who are about his sister’s age. Jealousy and incestuous desire may well contribute to Michael’s actions, but rage at failed family care seems to provide the more compelling motive. Clinically, Michael along with Jason of Friday the 13^th and Freddy of A Nightmare on Elm Street, would be diagnosed as a character-disturbed individuals, individuals who are “unattached” emotionally. Because they have not bonded properly with their parents, they have not developed a sense of humanity and so become increasingly aggressive and hostile. “It is vital to understand attachment if we are to stem the tide of high-risk children growing up without a conscience” (47), warn Dr. Ken Magid and Carole A. McKelevy. “To be closely involved with their children, parents need more time on a daily and weekly basis … Never before in the history of this country have so many parents been away from home and their children at the most critical times” (Magid and McKelvey, 118-119). In slasher films, the consequences of insufficient bonding take on spectacular proportions as the enraged, conscienceless products of unhappy homes rise from the dead to haunt vulnerable adolescents. In their sly manner, Halloween, Friday the 13^th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street teach hard-hitting conservative lessons about parents’ responsibilities to children.

Michael and his compatriot slashers are also the hobgoblins of childhood fantasy, indestructible beings who seem able to be everywhere and do anything. They can be seen both as the representatives of the childhood fears never put to rest by adult explanation and refuge and as the manifestations of teenage angst unhampered by adult intervention. The principals, guidance counselors, teachers, and law enforcement members in slasher films fail time and again to understand and protect the youth in their care. Often venal and cruel, compelled by political pressure or ambitions, they willingly sacrifice the children in their care, covering up incidents and blaming the innocent in order to keep their jobs or to gain power. Even those adults who seem sincerely concerned cannot communicate with the young people, and the misunderstandings always allow for more dead teens. In the humorous and somewhat satirical slasher film Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the guidance counselor is a hapless loser who tries to seem hip and in touch. He nods knowingly at the students’ fears and warnings, making inept analogies to his “time in ‘Nam” while wholly oblivious to the death and destruction taking place in the here and now. The parodic slashers such as Buffy, Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) and its sequels, Scary Movie (Keenan Ivory Wayans, 2000), Psycho Beach Party (Robert Lee King, 2000) and Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13^th (John Blanchard, 2000), dramatize greed, unconcern, ineptitude, failure, and absence as the typical attributes adults bring to present-day teen life. The narrative of these parodies may be clever and funny, but they still function exceptionally well both as frightening horror films and covert satires.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, popular, vapid, astonishingly ignorant, high school cheerleader Buffy (Kristy Swanson) learns that she possesses the mark of the slayer. As a consequence, she must save the world from an onslaught of vampires and zombies who emanate from the cemetery near her high school. At first she resists her calling, far more concerned with shopping and the prom than with safeguarding life as we know it. She is the ideal offspring of her feckless, self-obsessed parents, who seem vaguely fond of her but who pay no attention to her whatsoever and have no inkling of her activities, happily leaving her alone on weekends with her boyfriend. As Buffy begins to recognize the imminent outbreak of evil and her duty to prevent it, she becomes less and less like her friends and parents. Personal and social responsibilities alienate her from all she knows. Returning home late on a school night after her first night slaying demons, Buffy meets her mother in the front hall, who demands, “Do you know what time it is?” Buffy stutters out the correct time and her mother turns, hitting the face of her watch. “I knew this thing was slow! You pay a fortune for something … Honey!” she calls to her husband, “Come on, we’re gonna be late.” The scene unfolds as a joke: the suggestion that Buffy’s mother might be worried about her daughter or angry that she is out late on a school night is quickly and cleverly undercut by her self-absorbed comments. As Buffy comes to accept her role, she no longer feels comfortable in the solipsistic world of her parents. Her life is transformed. No longer a thoughtless teen destined to become a replica of her thoughtless mother, she becomes a concerned, savvy young adult. Like all survivors in slasher films, parodic and “serious,” Buffy becomes a caregiver and a caretaker.

In some slasher films, the protagonists hope to reestablish a diminished family unit after retrieving a mother or father from supernatural danger. In these films, the children become wise, determined parents, protecting their wayward, naive mom or dad from the counterfeit pleasure of sex and romance. In Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Tony Randel, 1988), young Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), incarcerated in an asylum and accused of killing her father and stepmother, travels to hell to retrieve her father. Heedless of his daughter’s warnings, sexually enamored of his predacious new wife Julia, Kirsty’s father became caught in the netherworld that his wife she and her paramour, his (dead) brother Frank, had opened up in Hellraiser. Kirsty fought to free her father in the first film, and is quick to answer his cry for help from beyond the grave in the second. After harrowing, extraordinarily gruesome encounters with various manifestations of hell, Kirsty discovers that it is her uncle Frank, not her father, who has sent for her in “his own private hell,” a chamber in which everyone but he is enjoying sex. He plans to spend an eternity exploring the physical endowments of his nubile niece. Escaping her uncle, Kirsty reunites with Tiffany, another young asylum inmate, and together they fight to close the gates of hell, Kirsty acting as a protective older sister to the fragile, mute Tiffany. As Kirsty points out in Hellbound, her life seems a nasty fairytale. She loses her father to the sensual delights offered by her wicked stepmother and is forced to deal with the sordid sexual behavior of the adults on her own. She realizes that her continued existence demands that she abandon the hopeless task of restoring her family. She cannot have her parents but she can be one to another damaged girl; the film ends with Kirsty and Tiffany walking out of the asylum to freedom.

In The Lost Boys, Michael and Sam (Jason Patric and Corey Haim) discover that their mother’s sweet, nerdy suitor is actually a devious blood-sucking Peter Pan who needs a Wendy to tend to his crew of juvenile vampires. This smart, deft film metaphorically suggests the fate of missing children whose faces were once found on milk cartons and postcards. Hungry, frightened, they are easy prey of the bloodsuckers who haunt the streets in search of vulnerable homeless kids. The Lost Boys affords a frightening yet poignant glimpse at a horribly perverse makeshift family of street hustlers composed of bitter, crafty young runaways. As in Hellbound, this film highlights the predatory nature of adults. The lesson of both films is that adults will exploit children for their own ends whenever possible, and parents not only are often unwittingly part of the problem but also are unwitting encumbrances to the solution. In these films, parents actively endanger their children by bringing deadly strangers into the home.

In the most well-known exempla of teen slashers, Friday the 13^th and A Nightmare on Elm Street and their multiple sequels,[17] the killers derive directly from parental malfeasance. In the first of the Friday the 13^th series, the slasher turns out to be the mother of Jason Voorhees, a child who drowned at camp because of inattentive camp counselors. When the campgrounds reopen after years of dormancy, this mother takes her revenge on the group of young people hired to ready the camp. The mother’s implacable fury at these new counselors, teens who had nothing to do with the death of her son, suggests a displaced anger, a terrifically nagging rage and guilt for depositing her son at camp instead of tending to him herself. In the second entry, Friday the 13^th Part 2 (Steve Miner, 1981), Jason has been miraculously resurrected, full-grown and wearing mom’s hockey mask, out to murder

any teens who cross his path as a form of homage to and retribution for his dead mother. Jason avenges a family he never had and a mother he hardly knew. The survivors of Jason’s attacks are those who understand Jason’s psychotic investment in his dead mother, or who have had family problems of their own that make them especially attuned to and concerned for others.

The Nightmare on Elm Street series is perhaps the most overt indictment of parental dereliction and disregard, and worth discussing is some detail. Freddy Krueger infiltrates the dreams of the adolescents of Elm Street, turning them into nightmares in which the dreamers flee from the ever-changing, ever-present slasher to their inevitable horrid deaths. Before Freddy became a supernatural dream stalker, he was a child murderer, killing “over twenty children in the neighborhood.” Finally apprehended by the police, Freddy was freed on a legal technicality. The parents of Elm Street took the law into their own hands, literally incinerating him.[18] Years later, he has returned to reclaim the children of the mob that killed him, his face horribly scarred by burns and one of his hands covered by a glove with long, thin, razor-like fingers. In the first Nightmare, Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) finally wrests the truth about Freddy from her alcoholic, divorced mom, who though shown material proof, refuses to believe that Freddy is responsible for the rash of teen murders. Nancy’s father, a police officer who has much to lose if the murder of Freddy is uncovered, is concerned for the safety of his daughter but loathe to believe her reports of her nightmare. Nancy must face Freddy on her own, and although she demands that he restore her friends and family to life and seems for a moment to gain her wish, the films ends with the garish murders beginning again.

In Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985), Freddy takes control of the body of Jesse (Mark Patton), a teen-aged boy whose family has moved into Nancy’s house on Elm Street. In this film, the parents are well-meaning but incapable of understanding the threat to their son. They bicker about how to treat Jesse, suspecting a wayward nature or drugs, but fail to investigate these or any other cause of their son’s malady. These parents seem fairly innocuous: they find their teenager exasperating and while they expect him to behave maturely, they respond to him as if he were a child. They care about but do not know their son, and have no idea that any more effort on their part is necessary. The film reveals with woeful clarity the inadequacies of this disengaged family. Behind the façade of a happy home in the heartland lies parental ignorance and teen torment. Children’s questions and accusations are met with denial or excuses by parents who do not wish to engage them fully. The prosperous middleclass family in their comfortable, well-appointed house hides terrors that will fatally affect their children.

In general, the parents in the Nightmare saga refuse to discuss Freddy, and are impatient with and dismissive of their children’s desperate fears. “It’s not you,” Nancy, the lone survivor of Part 1, tells the adolescents during tense therapy group encounter in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors (Chuck Russell, 1987) “Your parents, my parents, they burned him alive, and now we’re paying for their sins.” Nancy has grown up to become a psychiatric counselor specializing in dream therapy, hoping to help others who suffered as she did from deadly nightmares. Nancy’s insider knowledge and sincere concern for the teens enables them to drop their defenses and bond with another, becoming the “dream warriors” of the full title of this entry in the series. Nancy helps to form a family of sorts, but dies in her attempts to protect “the last children of Elm Street.”

One of the young clinic inmates, Kristen, seems especially good at entering others’ dreams and helping them to elude Freddy. Her mother tells the staff at the clinic that Kristen’s behavior is simply a bid for attention, and is obviously annoyed when Nancy comes to interview her about the inciting factors of her daughter’s illness, which the mother attributes off-handedly to the removal of her credit privileges. Kristen’s bedroom is filled with drawings and other paraphernalia graphically indicating Freddy’s presence, but her mother has obviously never bothered to investigate. The teens in the therapy group reveal similar strained relations with their parents. Kristen and two friends manage to survive to A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Renny Harlin, 1988), but neither her friends nor she will make it through this fourth installment. Freddy slaughters Kristen’s two asylum friends within the first ten minutes of the film’s opening. Kristen, the last remaining Elm Street child, and her other friends are left to cope with Freddy’s new atrocities.

Again, parents figure as callous, destructive forces in their children’s lives. Kristen’s boyfriend Rick and his sister Alice live with their spiteful, alcoholic father, who detests Kristen and treats his children as servants. Kristen’s mother is even more egregious in Nightmare 4. Bored by the discussion of Freddy, she decides to calm her daughter’s anxieties by slipping a tranquilizer in her soda.

“Something the matter with the cuisine?” the chain-smoking, elegantly dressed mother asks.

“Well mom, I’ll tell you. When two of your friends die in the same day, let me know what it does to your appetite.”

“You’re just tired. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that you haven’t been sleeping, young lady. That has got to stop, honey.”

Suddenly feeling groggy, Kristen realizes that her mother has fed her sleeping pills. In quiet terror, she asks, “Oh God, What did you do?”

“Look Kristen, I’m sorry. I’m just—

“Sorry? Sorry that you and your tennis pals torched this guy and now he’s after me? In case you haven’t been keeping score, it’s his fucking banquet and I’m the last course!”

“Kristen, we went over this in therapy!”

“No mother, you just murdered me. Take that to your goddamn therapy.”

The caffeine pills and coffee Kristen had been taking to stay awake cannot counter her mother’s pills. Kristen unwillingly succumbs to sleep. Her final, fatal encounter with Freddy is the direct result of her mother’s unthinking actions.

After Kristen and her other friends die one by one, Alice gains strength and courage, putting Freddy to rest (temporarily). Newly indulgent and heartsick over the loss of his son, her father tries to pull himself together to be a parent to his daughter, but it is she who consoles him, a beaten, diminished man. In Nightmare on Elm Street 5, Alice’s unborn child affords Freddy an opportunity to wreak more havoc, and to save her son, she must resurrect Freddy’s dead mother, a nun raped by a multitude of criminally insane asylum inmates (presumably all of them the father of Freddy), to drag Freddy back into the womb. The parents of the now murdered boy who fathered Alice’s child want to adopt the baby, and threaten to take the child away from Alice as soon as she delivers. Alice’s father is supportive of Alice’s desire to keep the baby, but woefully unable to help her. Alice must fight for her incipient family both in the dream and real world, aided only by a (dead) mother who knows her son Freddy should never have been born.

In Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (Rachel Talalay, 1991), part six of the series, Freddy’s child, a full grown psychologist working with troubled youths, must kill her father to save a new batch of adolescents from being destroyed. The film opens with an irate father lecturing his son in the visiting room of the Recovery House. As the father angrily departs, he snaps at psychologist Maggie (Lisa Zane): “Nice job on my kid. I expected to see some improvement.” “He’s not a Toyota,” she snaps back. Turning to the boy Spencer, she asks

“You okay?”

“Yeah, Dad just came to lay down some ground rules for when I come home. No more running away. No more setting cars on fire.”

“Well, there are other ways of getting his attention besides blowing up the garage.”

“Yeah, he barely even blinked. All he wants me to do now is to grow up to be him—an exact copy. Frankly, I don’t feel like playing football and raping co-eds.”

“One of these days,” Maggie replies, “you’re going to have to face your father.”

Freddy is happy to help. He arranges a nightmare in which Spencer becomes a computer-generated action figure who engages with his father, a giant bully who beats his son to death. Two other teenaged patients encounter their abusive parents in nightmares concocted by Freddy, and these teens die horribly as well. In the Final Nightmare, parents are materially responsible for the miserable lives of their children and symbolically responsible for their deaths.[19] In this film, abused children cannot face their fears and survive. Only the adult child has the power to counter the evil effects of parent, and the only good parent is a dead one.

In the Nightmare films, as in the Halloween series, the only adults who offer a modicum of help to the youths are health care professionals who directly work with the suffering teens. Slasher films have depicted psychiatrists and, especially, clinic directors as ignorant, self-serving and exploitive, but there always seems to be one or two therapists among the corrupt lot who tries to understand and protect the teens. That they generally fall short suggests the broad breakdown of social institutions which support children and the family. Slasher films expose a dreadful, deadly abyss at the core of middleclass family life. They provide negative examples of what family clinicians, psychologists, social workers, and sociologists see as efficacious domestic environments. It is the failure of the family to function effectively that makes the children vulnerable to the nightmares of adolescence, either by lack of moral character or through lack of adult understanding and protection.

In her introduction to Normal Family Processes, Froma Walsh, while acknowledging the difficulties in creating any single model for health, identifies a number of “important processes for healthy family functioning” (Walsh 58). These processes include:

-Connectedness and commitment of members as a caring, mutually supportive relationship unit (“We are family”).

-Respect for individual differences, autonomy, and separate needs.

-For nurturance, protection ,and socialization of children and care taking of other vulnerable family members, effective parental /executive leadership and authority.

-Adaptability: Flexibility to meet internal or external demands for change. To cope effectively with stress or changes that arise.

-Open communication characterized by clarity of rules and expectation, pleasurable interaction, and a range of emotional expression and empathic responsiveness.

-Effective problem-solving and conflict-resolution processes. (58)

Walsh notes that her list records optimal conditions, and that “typical” functioning families use strategies that incorporate and adapt these processes to their specific needs. Slasher films portray families in which none of these processes obtain. These films offer a sustained conservative critique of family life, mourning the middleclass dream while mocking it. Parents refuse to commit to their children: their disinclination, work, pleasures, or addictions prevent them from taking their parental responsibilities seriously. None of the parents, even the most well-meaning and kind, ever succeeds in making the connections necessary to create a functioning family unit. As a result, children either become shallow, selfish duplications of their parents, susceptible to deadly mishaps and grisly predators, or stalwart survivors of an adolescent hell who must relinquish the attenuated bonds to their deficient families in order to create a functioning one of their own.