Tingle Mingle

Uncomfortable ASMR, Stephanie Monohan

Uncomfortable ASMR

Stephanie Monohan

Tactile media designed to feel bad

In his collaboration with Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, Marshall McLuhan writes: “All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences, that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage... All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.”

Image: By Jake Reid for Real Life.

McLuhan may not have anticipated how all the aforementioned consequences would be distilled so intensely into something like online video, specifically something like YouTube, but the new genres emerging on online platforms like YouTube don’t only entertain; they also reach out to comfort us.

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or ASMR, videos have been part of the YouTube video landscape since 2009, but they have received a great deal of attention over the past couple of years. What begins as viewers investigating the strange videos out of curiosity and bewilderment sometimes turns into those same viewers recognizing the calm and soothing quality and seeking enjoyment from them. A person (usually a woman) whispering comforting phrases (“we’ve missed you") and stroking the bristles of brushes against a microphone creates a tingly aural sensation that people have had an understandably difficult time describing.

Like its more soothing, vanilla counterpart, it’s possible that “negative ASMR” tells us something about how we navigate and seek emotional refuge from day-to-day life

If ASMR video can be considered part of any particular visual genre, then it lives between tactility (strangely satisfying and visually compelling activities involving touch, like stomato-squishing, paint-mixing) and wellness or self-care videos. Both genres use attractive visuals, whether colors and textures or human faces and voices, to call attention to the viewer’s own physical body and its responses, and prompt them to consider the degree of the ASMR’s effect on their physical self in their evaluation of the work. By prioritizing an embodied experience of the aesthetic, ASMR videos feel like a radical subversion of how viewers have been engaging with visual content online.

Especially in a culture where wellness and self care have been deemed an individual’s responsibility to practice, tools like ASMR videos can be a free resource for de-stressing and finding emotional reassurance. The various sounds that have become recurring in videos - crinkling wrappers, fingernails tapping lightly on a hard surface, among others — are commonly referred to as “triggers.” The use of the term “trigger” is not negative, only factual; it refers to the tactile gestures that create the inexplicable sensations that those sensitive to ASMR can feel. It’s not necessarily used in the context we’ve become accustomed to — as something to avoid for its potential effect, and warn others of — although they are sometimes designed to mimic the stresses that ASMR videos are ostensibly designed to soothe.

The psychosomatic effect the video/aural content has on the viewer is a large determinant in the “quality” of the video, regardless of the creativity and complexity in the content itself. This makes the world of ASMR content perhaps surprisingly suitable for exploring darker and more potentially upsetting material. “Negative” ASMR videos function similarly to more traditional ASMR, but depict stressful (and sometimes frightening) scenarios and create sensations of anxiety and foreboding in the viewer. They can range from straightforward horror (videos that take inspiration from franchise characters like Pennywise the Clown are common) to more realistic stresses, like an appointment with a dentist. And some are intended to just make you feel lousy: videos where the “host” essentially whisper-bullies you for 20 minutes.

Can something be “self-care” if it is designed to make us feel anxious?

At first glance, consuming negative ASMR content may seem counter-intuitive. Why would someone intentionally subject themselves to something that makes them feel physically and mentally uncomfortable, but typically does not lead to catharsis? The “goal” of these videos is either to create a feeling of sustained anxiety or dread (overhearing violence or a fight in the distance) or a quick rush of anxiety that leaves the viewer with a lingering chill of danger (the sound of another car passing at high speed on a freeway). A quick look on the “Negative ASMR” subreddit shows what sounds and situations to expect. A typical entry will be something like: “[slightly creepy] [leather gloves] [spooky whispering in latin].” Nevertheless, like its more soothing, vanilla counterpart, it’s possible that this form of ASMR tells us something about how we navigate and seek emotional refuge from day-to-day life in modernity.

Many unpleasant ASMR videos that are not directly horror-related are ones in which the creator role-plays social interactions involving financial concerns. A popular one by Amal Dabit (amalzd on YouTube), titled “Negative ASMR Insurance Application Roleplay (Typing Sounds, Soft Spoken),” currently has 155K views. Videos like this one are not necessarily trying to create anxiety, but many experience anxiety around obtaining health insurance and find such a video triggering regardless of the intent behind it. Others are more high-stress, and feature debt collectors hounding the user for money, using aggressive language but still communicating in whispers. The role-playing host thus fulfills two contradictory roles at once: that of a helpful pacifier and that of a capitalistic villain. In a society that subjects its citizens to crippling debt and inaccessible healthcare, and places people in a state of constant precariousness mediated by unhelpful bureaucracy, we can engage with the harm being done to us through negative ASMR.

The existence of this form of ASMR and the perceived impact it has on its viewers complicates popularly-held notions about the ASMR “genre” and the purpose it serves. Can something be “self-care” if it is designed to make us feel anxious? Negative ASMR raises important questions about the politics of anxiety and of our sensitivity to our social world. On one hand, it allows people to engage with fear and anxiety in an indulgent way that relieves tension; on the other hand, like any effective horror film, it increases vigilance. It instructs you to keep your guard up. If negative ASMR videos are generating triggers out of daily obstacles to health and happiness (read: life under a capitalistic social structure), perhaps they are calling out those interactions and affects, signaling them as feelings to which one should avoid becoming de-sensitized. They have the potential to soothe while raising consciousness about the politics behind the trigger.

Hyperesthesia, or, The Sensual Logic of Late Capitalism, David Howes

Hyperesthesia, or, The Sensual Logic of Late Capitalism

David Howes

One of the great unfinished tasks of twentieth-century marxian theory has been to write a materialist history of the senses. How have the senses been organized by relations of production and exchange? How in particular have they been organized under capitalism? And how has this organization shaped capitalist society’s cultural pursuits?
Margaret Cohen, ‘The Art of Profane Illumination’

In this chapter, I would like to take up the task of writing a materialist history of the senses. I will argue that one of the reasons this task remains ‘unfi nished’ to date is due to Marxian theory’s failure to ‘acknowledge consumption’ (Miller 1995a, 1995b).1 The essay proceeds by first returning to Marx and examining the philosophical roots of his materialism; second, tracing the role of the senses in the transition from industrial to consumer capitalism; third, excavating what could be called ‘the sensorial subconscious’ of the state we are in now – namely, ‘late capitalism’ (Jameson 1990); and, fi nally, extending the practice of materialist analysis to encompass the social life of the senses on the margins of the global consumer society. There, as we shall see, capitalism’s glitter is not all that it is imagined to be by those theorists whose senses have been ‘massaged’ (McLuhan and Fiore 1967) by living all their lives at the center.

Sensory Deprivation and Industrial Capitalism

There are few more dramatic ruptures in the history of Western thought than Marx’s apparent break with the idealist tradition of German philosophy (Synnott 1991). ‘[M]an is affi rmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, but with all his senses’ proclaimed the young Marx in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx 1987: 108). Whereas Hegel had interpreted world history in terms of the progressive unfolding of Spirit, Marx held that ‘the forming of the fi ve senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present’ (Marx 1987: 109). He was inspired to accord such primacy to the senses by the writings of the materialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. In his doctrine of sense perception, Feuerbach argued that it is not only nature or external objects that are experienced by the senses but ‘Man, too, is given to himself only through the senses; he is an object for himself only as an object of the senses’ (Feuerbach 1966: 58).

Marx’s portrayal of the state of the senses in nineteenth-century bourgeois society was in turn infl uenced by the writings of the utopianist Charles Fourier. Fourier (1851) believed that societies could be judged according to how well they gratifi ed and developed the senses of their members. He argued that the senses were debased by the civilization of his day, in which most people were unable to afford any sensory refi nements and in which all people, no matter their rank, were continually confronted with disagreeable sensory impressions, such as the stench and din of the streets. Furthermore, even if sensory pleasures were to be made more available, most people would be unable to appreciate them as their senses remained brutish and undeveloped. These sensory ills, according to Fourier, were the result of a society obsessed with the accumulation of private possessions to the detriment of the general wellbeing.

There are numerous echoes of Fourier in Marx’s discussion of the condition of the proletariat in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. For example, Marx describes how the senses of the worker, living amidst ‘the sewage of civilization,’ are deformed until he loses all notion of sensory refi nement and ‘no longer knows any need ... but the need to eat’ (Marx 1987: 117). ’ (Marx 1987: 117). Marx returned to this theme of the stripping of the senses in Capital, where he described the conditions of factory work:

Every organ of sense is injured in an equal degree by artificial elevation of temperature, by the dust-laden atmosphere, by the deafening noise, not to mention danger to life and limb among the thickly crowded machinery, which, with the regularity of the seasons, issues its list of the killed and the wounded in the industrial battle... Is Fourier wrong when he calls factories ‘tempered bagnios’? (Marx 1954, I: 401–2)

The sensory deprivation of the proletariat was to be expected, given the grueling conditions of factory work and so-called living conditions in the industrial slums. But Marx insisted that not even among the bourgeoisie are the senses fulfilled. All of the capitalist’s senses are ultimately fixed on one object – capital; and, while the enjoyment of wealth is one of the objects of capitalism; even better is sacrifi cing pleasure in order to accumulate more wealth. ‘The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theater, the dance hall, the public-house; the less you ... sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour – your capital’ (Marx 1987: 118–19).

Developing Fourier’s diagnosis, Marx laid the blame for the alienation of the senses in capitalist society on the dehumanizing regime of private property, and envisioned a world in which ‘the transcendence of private property [would entail] the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities’ (Marx 1987: 139). ‘Only through the negation of the demeaning and oppressive tyranny of capitalist property relations could humankind’s ‘species being’ come into its own. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form – in short senses capable of human gratifi cations, senses confi rming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being’ (Marx 1987: 108).

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels heralded the collapse of the capitalist economic order. The portents of this dissolution included, among other things: the concentration of the proletariat in ever greater masses, the increasingly agitated character of all social relations due to the constant revolutionizing of the instruments of production, and the reduction of personal worth to commodity status. In short, all of the contradictions of bourgeois society had become manifest on its surface, and the illusion of society could no longer hold.

Reading the Communist Manifesto now, when the capitalist system seems more fi rmly entrenched than ever, what most stands out about this text is how brilliantly Marx and Engels foretold the future of capitalism, rather than its demise. For example, Marx and Engels wrote:

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country... In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and ctomatos. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-suffi ciency we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property... The bourgeoise, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. (Marx and Engels 1967: 84)

This passage encapsulates a remarkably prescient description of the phenomenon that has in recent years come to be theorized as ‘globalization’ (Featherstone 1990). The fine food halls and corner stores of Europe and America filled with produce ‘from distant lands and ctomatos’ (see, for example, Cook and Crang 1996; James 1996), the global flow of capital (and people) that has resulted in the ‘universal interdependence of nations’ (see, for example, Robbins 1998), the Hollywood movies and other elements of American popular culture that have become the ‘com mon property’ (or transcultural patrimony) of everybody from Chile to Katmandhu (see, for example, Dorfman 1983; Iyer 1989; Appadurai 1996) all speak to the inescapable truth of this passage. Summing up their vision of globalization as cultural homogenization, Marx and Engels (1967: 84) wrote: ‘In one word, [the bourgeoisie] creates a world after its own image.’

Nevertheless, the apparent flash of insight that this passage contains must not be allowed to distract attention from the limitations of Marx’s analysis of capitalism’s laws of motion. Marx’s gaze always remained centered on the factory and the stock market, and although he may have succeeded at exposing the secrets of the capitalist mode of production through his penetrating analysis of the manufacturing process and wage labor, he neglected an equally salient development – namely, the presentation of commodities in the department stores and world exhibitions that sprang up in the mid-nineteenth-century (Bowlby 1985; Cummings and Lewandowska 2000). The birth of these ‘palaces of consumption’ heralded a transformation in the nature of capitalism with far-reaching implications – the transformation from industrial capitalism (as Marx knew it) to the consumer capitalism of today. For capitalism does not work by surveillance and the extraction of the labor power and value of the worker alone; it also works by generating spectacle and creating consumer desires of all sorts in all people, including the worker (Galbraith 1958, 1967; on surveillance see Foucault 1979, on spectacle Debord 1983).

Sensory Stimulation and Consumer Capitalism

The growing social importance of consumption in the nineteenth-century was evident in the new venue for shopping, the department store. With its theatrical lighting, enticing window displays and its floor after floor of entrancing merchandise – ‘each separate counter ... a show place of dazzling interest and attraction’ (Dreiser cited in Saisselin 1984: 35) – the department store presented a fabulous spectacle of consumer plenty and accessibility. Previously, goods had been kept behind counters and it was presumed that a customer would enter a shop with the purpose to buy. In the department store, by contrast, goods were largely out in the open and anyone could enter simply with the purpose of having a look. The expectation was that the display of goods in such abundance would prove so seductive that even those who were ‘just looking’ would be lured into buying, particularly given the atmosphere of pleasurable self-indulgence that prevailed. In his novel Sister Carrie Theodore Dreiser described the bewitching effect of the department store displays on a potential customer: ‘Fine clothes... spoke tenderly and Jesuitically for themselves. When she came within earshot of their pleading, desire in her bent a willing ear ... “My dear,” said the lace collar... “I fit you beautifully; don’t give me up”‘ (cited in Saisselin 1984: 36).

The department store thus appeared on the scene as an enormous candy store with a cornucopia of goodies to satisfy the taste of the bourgeoisie for fashionable but affordable style. It was able to do so thanks to advances in mass production – specifically, the mechanical reproduction of styled or imitation goods. Mass production brought previously exclusive luxury items within the reach of the bourgeoisie, and even the working class (Miller 1987). As Walter Benjamin (1969) noted with regard to art, what such imitation goods lose in authenticity they gain in mobility: ‘fine’ art, ‘fine’ furniture, ‘fine’ clothes can now go anywhere and everywhere as mass production finds its match in mass consumption.

The counterpart to the (often female) shopper in the new consumer palaces was the (male) fl âneur fl âneur, the voyeuristic idler who treated the whole city as , the voyeuristic idler who treated the whole city as though it were a department store, a variegated spectacle of goods to be viewed and occasionally sampled (Benjamin 1973). ‘The prime requisite of an expert fl âneur fl âneur,’ according to the American novelist Henry James, was ‘the ,’ according to the American novelist Henry James, was ‘the simple, sensuous, confi dent relish of pleasure’ (cited in Saisselin 1984: 19). Yet, as a suitable admirer of the new society of spectacle, the fl âneur found his primary sensory pleasure simply in watching, the watching which in a visualist age would increasingly seem to offer a total sensory experience in itself. In his study of the aesthetics of nineteenth-century consumption, Rémy Saisselin (1984: 25) writes: ‘The flâneur [was] a conscious observer for whom the word boredom had become meaningless: he animated all he saw; admired all he perceived. He strolled, observed, watched, espied...’

As Saisselin goes on to point out in The Bourgeois and the Bibelot The Bourgeois and the Bibelot, the phenonemon of the flâneur flâneur went hand in hand with that of the photo- went hand in hand with that of the photographer, both aesthetic observers, insiders and outsiders at once, both constantly skimming the surfaces of urban life for their rich bounty of visual impressions. The photographer, however, was equipped with the technological means to fi x visual impressions on paper, turning the images themselves into objects of display and desire. The mass produc tion of images, which occurred in the 1800s, thus complemented the mass production of styled goods or imitations. With this proliferation of images and imitations appearance increasingly came to overshadow – and even obliterate – substance (Boorstin 1962; Ewen 1988).

In an essay on photography published in 1859, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: ‘Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt cattle in South America, for their skins and leave the carcasses as of little worth’ (cited in Ewen 1988: 25). The analogy to hunting here is significant for it indicates that the photographic reproduction of the world is not a passive multiplication of images but an active appropriation of all ‘curious, beautiful, grand objects.’ The notion of the ‘carcasses’ of objects being left behind ‘as of little worth’ once their photograph was taken points to a state of affairs in which photographic (and shortly, cinematic) imagery would become more powerful and infl uential than objects themselves. In All Consuming Images Stuart Ewen (1988: 25) states that Holmes correctly ‘laid out the contours by which the phenomenon of style operates in the world today.’ Style deals exclusively in surface impressions, hence possessing the ‘right look’ becomes all important.

If the primary sensory mode of consumer culture was (and remains) that of visual display, the non-visual senses were not left to one side. As Ewen notes, the sense of touch was also appropriated by marketers as a crucial medium of sensory persuasion. Thus, in a 1930s book entitled Consumer Engineering, the business professors Sheldon and Arens write:
Manufacturing an object that delights this [tactile] sense is something that you do but don’t talk about. Almost everything which is bought is handled. After the eye, the hand is the fi rst censor to pass on acceptance, and if the hand’s judgment is unfavorable, the most attractive object will not gain the popularity it deserves. On the other hand, merchandise designed to be pleasing to the hand wins an approval that may never register in the mind, but which will determine additional purchases... Make it snuggle in the palm. (Sheldon and Arens cited in Ewen 1988: 49–50)

Raymond Loewy, commonly regarded as the father of industrial design in the United States, was alert to the signifi cance of tactile stimulation. In a seminal chapter on ‘Design and Psychology’ in his 1951 autobiography Never Leave Well Enough Alone, he wrote: ‘The sensory aspects of the normal human being should be taken into consideration in all forms of design. Let’s take the Coca-Cola bottle, for instance. Even when wet and cold, its twin-sphered body offers a delightful valley for the friendly fold of one’s hand, a feel that is cozy and luscious’ (quoted in Fulton Suri 2002: 163). Loewy’s insight has been borne out by the rapid expansion of ‘human factors’ research within the fi eld of industrial design. Initially concerned with solving problems of usability (such as effi ciency, safety, learnability, adaptability), designers are now increasingly preoccupied with generating affectivity or ‘pleasure with products’ (Green and Jordan 2002). ‘Pleasure is an emotional benefit that supplements product functionality’ (Desmet and Hekkert 2002: 62), and has become a value in its own right. ‘Don’t think affordances, think temptation’; and, ‘Don’t think beauty in appearance, think beauty in interaction’ has become the new design credo (Overbeeke 2002: 11). Indeed, tapping the subjective sensory preferences of the consumer and creating enticing ‘interfaces’ has come to take precedence over conventional design principles. Ornamentation has been decriminalized, and not just in the museum (Drobnick, this volume) but in all things, from personal computers to toilet brushes (Postrel 2003; Kälviäinen 2002). A new, aesthetically charged understanding has taken shape, according to Virginia Postrel in The Substance of Style, an understanding attentive to all the ways in which visual and tactile qualities (color and form) affect people’s feelings and evaluations of products. In place of judgments like ‘This is good design’ (the preserve of the designer, or rational expertise), now the desired response is one of ‘I like that’ (the preserve of the consumer, or personal pleasure) (Postrel 2003: 10; Kälviäinen 2002: 88): ‘People pet Armani clothes because the fabrics feel so good. Those clothes attract us as visual, tactile creatures, not because they are “rich in meaning” but because they are rich in pleasure. The garments’ utility includes the way they look and feel’ (Postrel 2003: 77).

The social logic of flânerie, summed up by Susan Buck-Morss (1989:346) in the phrase ‘look, but don’t touch,’ has been eclipsed, leading to a breakdown in the consumer’s defenses. This breach has been compounded by the recognition that physical contact between server and shopper ‘exerts infl uence on customer’s behaviors by enhancing liking of the salesperson and by creating higher emotional involvement with the shopping situation,’ as well as heightening the shopper’s inclination to comply with a server’s request (Hornik 1992: 451). The invisible hand of the market has been transformed into the knowing touch of the salesclerk.

Branding the Senses: The Progressive Privatization of Sensation

Factoring tactile stimulation into the design of products and strategies of salesmanship makes good business sense for two further reasons, according to the sensual logic of late capitalism. The fi rst has to do with the problem of advertising clutter. The consumer landscape has been transformed into a visual jungle of logos, billboards and neon signs, such that ‘advertising wear-out’ through visual fatigue quickly sets in. Touch revivifies.

The second has to do with the progressive privatization of the visible spectrum of forms and colors as companies scramble to trademark and/or patent the aesthetic packaging or ‘trade dress’ of their products. For example, to protect their brand equity from would-be imitators, the Owens-Corning Fiberglass Corporation has trademarked the color pink for its residential insulation material, and Eastman Kodak has been granted exclusive rights to the use of the distinctive combination of yellow, black and red on its fi lm products (Solomon et al. 1999: 49–51). This development raises the specter of the ‘color depletion’ or ‘color scarcity’ problem in trademark law – that is, the risk that the monopolization of all usable colors (and color combinations) by a few large competitors will place new entrants to the market at a signifi cant competitive disadvantage because there won’t be any colors left to exploit (Jones 2003). Adding feel provides an additional dimension for product differentiation.

Consumer capitalism has, in fact, increasingly made it its business to engage as many senses as possible in its drive for product differentiation and the distraction/seduction of the consumer. ‘Multisensory marketing,’ or the new ‘technocracy of sensuality’ as Wolfgang Haug (1986) dubbed it, reached its height in the late twentieth-century with artifi cal scents added to a range of products from cars to crayons, with muzak modulating people’s moods as they cruise the plushly carpeted or smoothly tiled aisles of department stores and boutiques, and with cafes and fast-food outlets always on hand for gustatory gratifi cation. Everything seems designed to create a state of hyperesthesia in the shopper.

The sensual logic behind this makeover of the body of the commodity and the shopping environment is transparent enough: multiplying the sensory channels through which the ‘buy me!’ message is communicated enhances the likelihood of the message being registered and acted upon by the customer. For example, it has been found that ‘when choosing between two similar food or beverage products, 81 percent of consumers would choose one they could both smell and see over one they could only see’; similarly, piping ‘slow music’ into grocery stores has been discovered to lead to shoppers paying longer visits and spending more money (Solomon et al. 1999: 53, 82). Marketers and designers now hold ‘body-storming’ focus groups (see Bonapace 2002: 191) in an effort to divine the most potent sensory channel, and within each channel the most potent sensory signal, through which to distinguish their products from those of their competitors and capture the attention of potential customers. ‘Perceptual positioning’ now means everything to moving merchandise.

Not surprisingly, there has been a drive to privatize the auditory and olfactory aspects of commodities as well as the visual in recent years. The first trademark of a scent was secured in 1990 by a California company, which used a fl oral fragrance reminiscent of Plumeria blossoms to odorize its sewing thread and embroidery yarn (Classen et al. 1994: 201). Likewise, Harley-Davidson recently sought to trademark the (allegedly) distinctive ‘hog’ sound of one of its motorcycle engines revving. These legal maneuvers to protect (and expand) market share – that is, to colonize by canalizing the ‘mind-space’ of the consumer – have not gone uncontested. All of the original concerns around ‘color depletion’ are now being trotted out again around sound and smell scarcity, as courts give in to demand after demand for the registration of this and that sensory aspect of trade dress (Edelstein and Leuders 2000; Jones 2003). The question arises: how long will it be before every aspect of sensation is brought under the thrall of intellectual property rights?

This hyperestheticization of everyday products may seem excessive from a strictly functional perspective. But it is, in fact, strongly motivated, commercially speaking. The aesthetic functionality of odorizing products, for example, has been confirmed by the results of a survey that involved asking a group of subjects to identify a range of odors. The researchers found that product scents such as crayons, baby powder and bubble gum proved to be more recognizable than such distinctive natural odors as lemon and coffee. Moreover, subjects consistently associated a brand name with a product scent: Crayola crayons, Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder, Bazooka bubble gum (Classen et al. 1994: 203). This evidence of recession in the general population’s consciousness of natural odors, and precession of branded scents, is of acute interest to marketers. To them, it confi rms that ‘the unique sensory quality of a product can play an important role in helping it to stand out from the competition, especially if the brand creates a unique association with the sensation’ (Solomon et al. 1999: 49).

It is in the domain of taste that capitalist sensualism (forget realism) has enjoyed some of its greatest successes with respect to the commodification of ‘subjective human sensibility’ (Marx). No business is more shrouded in secrecy than that of the artificial flavor industry, where the great ‘Flavor Houses’ of the New Jersey industrial corridor, and elsewhere, compete with each other, and with Nature, to divine and develop new tastes to gratify the ever-changing palates of consumers. Many of the flavors consumers crave today have no natural prototype (for example, the cola in Coca-Cola), and even those that do have for the most part been turned into ‘larger-than-life’ savors in the process of being synthesized. It is in this connection that the society of the spectacle looks to have mutated into something much grander: the society of the simulacrum. As noted in Aroma:
The widespread replacement of natural flavours with artificial imitations which we find in the contemporary food industry exemplifies how, in Jean Baudrillard’s words, the world has come to be ‘completely catalogued and analysed and then artificially revived as though real’ [1983: 16]. Artificial flavours are created by the synthetic reproduction of individual flavour notes present in the original natural flavours [though never all of them, only those deemed ‘essential’]. The fl avorist may thus be regarded as the arch-agent in the process of production outlined by Baudrillard where: ‘the real is produced from miniaturized units... and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times’ [1983: 3]. (Classen et al. 1994: 204)

The Social Life of the Senses on the Margins of the Global Consumer Society

We have glimpsed something of the sensual logic of late capitalism. We have examined its ingenious battery of sensory (and inter-sensory) techniques for overcoming the separation of subject and object or environment. But do these techniques work in practice? Do ‘[the] data we receive from our sensory systems determine determine how we respond to products’ (Solomon et al. 1999: how we respond to products’ (Solomon et al. 1999:49, emphasis mine)? Here it is instructive to shift focus from the center to the margins of the global consumer society.

The captains of global capitalism certainly assume that exposure to the representational machinery of capitalist sensualism will induce changes in the consumption behavior of those on the periphery. For example, the fact that Western-style public displays of affection are considered improper in India does not stop Star TV from beaming American movies and television shows with such content into India, nor Indians from watching them. Global marketers expect that this viewing will quickly turn to imitating, and, in turn, create a need for a whole new range of personal care products. As one global marketer explained: ‘When you want to be physically closer to people a lot, then you tend to want to look better, smell better. So the [Indian] market will grow for cosmetics, perfumes, after-shaves, mouthwashes and so on’ (Dyer 1994). This case (for further examples see Classen and Howes 1996) seems to confi rm Marx’s and Engels’ point: ‘In one word, [the bourgeoisie] creates a world after its own image’ (Marx and Engels 1967: 84).

Marx’s and Engels’ vision of globalization as cultural homogenization fi nds further support in the way national élites in many African countries are called ‘white men’ by their less affl uent countrymen, as among the Hausa of Nigeria. The traditional Hausa sensory or ‘aesthetic order’ may be seen as vulnerable to capitalist makeover as the trappings of social standing displayed by these (Westernized) role models ‘trickle down.’ What is more, the premium attached to ‘brilliance’ in the Hausa aesthetic order has made quartz watches attractive substitutes for silver bracelets, and enamelware for gourds. ‘Brilliant!’ says the global marketer, perceiving yet another niche opening up.

However, when we exchange the perspective of the global marketer for that of the ethnographer Eric Arnould (1989), we begin to appreciate the multiple respects in which Western products are, in fact, being re-made in Hausaland. According to Arnould, the emphasis in Hausa consumption practices remains on what is done with objects rather than having them, and the prime context for the encounter with novel Western goods is the bridal display, not the department store. The Hausa marriage ceremony provides an emotionally, aesthetically and socially charged atmosphere for the transfer of cultural meanings to novel objects, and significantly conditions personal choice. What is more, the most desirable products, from an islamized Hausa perspective, are ‘Meccan goods,’ which are infused with grace. Grace is one quality no Western designer or marketer has so far been able to simulate, or likely ever will.

Quite apart from the way in which consumers from the margins consistently override the ‘directions for use’ of globalized commodities in their practices of everyday life,3 there is the growing phenomenon of local rejection of transnational commodities and resistance to Western-style consumer capitalism. Consider the rise of Ostalgie in the former German Democratic Republic – that is, the new demand for old GDR products (including lemonade, washing powder, coffee, transistor radios, TVs and cars, such as the Trabant Trabant) as a matter of conscious preference to (Western) brand name ) as a matter of conscious preference to (Western) brand name goods.

[The] very otherness of GDR products, manifest in their physicality that can be seen, felt, tasted, smelled, and heard, serves as the starting point of these journeys into the past [i.e. East German people indulging in Ostalgie]. These products, however, are not only the basis for individual acts of remembering, but they also signify a group identity for their former consumers: since all former citizens of the GDR were – by necessity – also consumers of its goods, they can fi nd an exclusive identity as former consumers and purchasers of these products since they all have once shared the specifi c [un-branded] knowledge about these products. (Blum 2000: 231)

Suffi ce it to say that the handling, the rumble, the fumes, and especially the sight of a Trabant is unlike the sensory surround of a Lexus.

Acknowledgments

This chapter is a product of the conjuncture of two lines of research, ‘Culture and Consumption’ (1998–2001) and ‘The Sense Lives of Things’ (2002–5), both of which projects were generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I wish to thank the members of the Culture and Consumption Research Group and the Concordia Sensoria Research Team for the many stimulating discussions we have had around the subject of this chapter.

Notes

1. I would submit that ‘acknowledge consumption’ when she asks only ‘How have the senses been organized by relations of production and exchange?’

2. To take an historical example, the Algonquian Indians traded furs for glass beads with the French in seventeenth-century Quebec and there was also quite a traffi c in prayer beads. But the Algonquians did not admire the beads simply for their ‘brilliance’; they also occasionally ground them up and smoked them because ‘the respiratory route’ was the standard route for the ingestion of power-laden substances (von Gernet 1996: 170–6).

3. It should not be overlooked that the creative misuses discussed here can have destructive as well as subversive consequences, as in the tragic case of the ‘misuse’ of infant formula in many Third World countries (see Classen and Howes 1996). 4. It is not clear to me from Featherstone’s account how ‘post-tourists’ acquire ‘the necessary dispositions.’

5. Of course, if Western consumers were all that ingenious or creative at ‘using commodities otherwise,’ recycling would be far more advanced than it is (Coote, Morton and Nicholson 2000). Also, entrepreneurs are always seeking to ‘recuperate for capitalism’ the latest novel usage, whence the endless proliferation of ‘labor-saving devices’ on supermarket shelves.

The Music of Erich Zann, H.P. Lovecraft

The Music of Erich Zann

H.P. Lovecraft

I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again found the Rue d’Auseil. These maps have not been modern maps alone, for I know that names change. I have, on the contrary, delved deeply into all the antiquities of the place; and have personally explored every region, of whatever name, which could possibly answer to the street I knew as the Rue d’Auseil. But despite all I have done it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the music of Erich Zann.

That my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical and mental, was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the Rue d’Auseil, and I recall that I took none of my few acquaintances there. But that I cannot find the place again is both singular and perplexing; for it was within a half-hour’s walk of the university and was distinguished by peculiarities which could hardly be forgotten by anyone who had been there. I have never met a person who has seen the Rue d’Auseil.

The Rue d’Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick blear-windowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It was always shadowy along that river, as if the smoke of neighbouring factories shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches which I have never smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help me to find it, since I should recognise them at once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled streets with rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly steep as the Rue d’Auseil was reached.
I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d’Auseil. It was almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of flights of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving was irregular, sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with struggling greenish-grey vegetation. The houses were tall, peaked-roofed, incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise. Occasionally an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the street like an arch; and certainly they kept most of the light from the ground below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street.
The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly. At first I thought it was because they were all silent and reticent; but later decided it was because they were all very old. I do not know how I came to live on such a street, but I was not myself when I moved there. I had been living in many poor places, always evicted for want of money; until at last I came upon that tottering house in the Rue d’Auseil, kept by the paralytic Blandot. It was the third house from the top of the street, and by far the tallest of them all.
My room was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since the house was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strange music from the peaked garret overhead, and the next day asked old Blandot about it. He told me it was an old German viol-player, a strange dumb man who signed his name as Erich Zann, and who played evenings in a cheap theatre orchestra; adding that Zann’s desire to play in the night after his return from the theatre was the reason he had chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable window was the only point on the street from which one could look over the terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond.
Thereafter I heard Zann every night, and although he kept me awake, I was haunted by the weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the art myself, I was yet certain that none of his harmonies had any relation to music I had heard before; and concluded that he was a composer of highly original genius. The longer I listened, the more I was fascinated, until after a week I resolved to make the old man’s acquaintance.
One night, as he was returning from his work, I intercepted Zann in the hallway and told him that I would like to know him and be with him when he played. He was a small, lean, bent person, with shabby clothes, blue eyes, grotesque, satyr-like face, and nearly bald head; and at my first words seemed both angered and frightened. My obvious friendliness, however, finally melted him; and he grudgingly motioned to me to follow him up the dark, creaking, and rickety attic stairs. His room, one of only two in the steeply pitched garret, was on the west side, toward the high wall that formed the upper end of the street. Its size was very great, and seemed the greater because of its extraordinary bareness and neglect. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron bedstead, a dingy washstand, a small table, a large bookcase, an iron music-rack, and three old-fashioned chairs. Sheets of music were piled in disorder about the floor. The walls were of bare boards, and had probably never known plaster; whilst the abundance of dust and cobwebs made the place seem more deserted than inhabited. Evidently Erich Zann’s world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of the imagination.
Motioning me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, turned the large wooden bolt, and lighted a candle to augment the one he had brought with him. He now removed his viol from its moth-eaten covering, and taking it, seated himself in the least uncomfortable of the chairs. He did not employ the music-rack, but offering no choice and playing from memory, enchanted me for over an hour with strains I had never heard before; strains which must have been of his own devising. To describe their exact nature is impossible for one unversed in music. They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most captivating quality, but to me were notable for the absence of any of the weird notes I had overheard from my room below on other occasions.
Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled inaccurately to myself; so when the player at length laid down his bow I asked him if he would render some of them. As I began my request the wrinkled satyr-like face lost the bored placidity it had possessed during the playing, and seemed to shew the same curious mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed when first I accosted the old man. For a moment I was inclined to use persuasion, regarding rather lightly the whims of senility; and even tried to awaken my host’s weirder mood by whistling a few of the strains to which I had listened the night before. But I did not pursue this course for more than a moment; for when the dumb musician recognised the whistled air his face grew suddenly distorted with an expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long, cold, bony right hand reached out to stop my mouth and silence the crude imitation. As he did this he further demonstrated his eccentricity by casting a startled glance toward the lone curtained window, as if fearful of some intruder—a glance doubly absurd, since the garret stood high and inaccessible above all the adjacent roofs, this window being the only point on the steep street, as the concierge had told me, from which one could see over the wall at the summit.
The old man’s glance brought Blandot’s remark to my mind, and with a certain capriciousness I felt a wish to look out over the wide and dizzying panorama of moonlit roofs and city lights beyond the hill-top, which of all the dwellers in the Rue d’Auseil only this crabbed musician could see. I moved toward the window and would have drawn aside the nondescript curtains, when with a frightened rage even greater than before the dumb lodger was upon me again; this time motioning with his head toward the door as he nervously strove to drag me thither with both hands. Now thoroughly disgusted with my host, I ordered him to release me, and told him I would go at once. His clutch relaxed, and as he saw my disgust and offence his own anger seemed to subside. He tightened his relaxing grip, but this time in a friendly manner; forcing me into a chair, then with an appearance of wistfulness crossing to the littered table, where he wrote many words with a pencil in the laboured French of a foreigner.
The note which he finally handed me was an appeal for tolerance and forgiveness. Zann said that he was old, lonely, and afflicted with strange fears and nervous disorders connected with his music and with other things. He had enjoyed my listening to his music, and wished I would come again and not mind his eccentricities. But he could not play to another his weird harmonies, and could not bear hearing them from another; nor could he bear having anything in his room touched by another. He had not known until our hallway conversation that I could overhear his playing in my room, and now asked me if I would arrange with Blandot to take a lower room where I could not hear him in the night. He would, he wrote, defray the difference in rent.
As I sat deciphering the execrable French I felt more lenient toward the old man. He was a victim of physical and nervous suffering, as was I; and my metaphysical studies had taught me kindness. In the silence there came a slight sound from the window—the shutter must have rattled in the night-wind—and for some reason I started almost as violently as did Erich Zann. So when I had finished reading I shook my host by the hand, and departed as a friend. The next day Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third floor, between the apartments of an aged money-lender and the room of a respectable upholsterer. There was no one on the fourth floor.
It was not long before I found that Zann’s eagerness for my company was not as great as it had seemed while he was persuading me to move down from the fifth story. He did not ask me to call on him, and when I did call he appeared uneasy and played listlessly. This was always at night—in the day he slept and would admit no one. My liking for him did not grow, though the attic room and the weird music seemed to hold an odd fascination for me. I had a curious desire to look out of that window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the glittering roofs and spires which must lie outspread there. Once I went up to the garret during theatre hours, when Zann was away, but the door was locked.
What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb old man. At first I would tiptoe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread—the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player. Certainly, Erich Zann was a genius of wild power. As the weeks passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old musician acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold.He now refused to admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on the stairs.
Then one night as I listened at the door I heard the shrieking viol swell into a chaotic babel of sound; a pandemonium which would have led me to doubt my own shaking sanity had there not come from behind that barred portal a piteous proof that the horror was real—the awful, inarticulate cry which only a mute can utter, and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or anguish. I knocked repeatedly at the door, but received no response. Afterward I waited in the black hallway, shivering with cold and fear, till I heard the poor musician’s feeble effort to rise from the floor by the aid of a chair. Believing him just conscious after a fainting fit, I renewed my rapping, at the same time calling out my name reassuringly. I heard Zann stumble to the window and close both shutter and sash, then stumble to the door, which he falteringly unfastened to admit me. This time his delight at having me present was real; for his distorted face gleamed with relief while he clutched at my coat as a child clutches at its mother’s skirts.
Shaking pathetically, the old man forced me into a chair whilst he sank into another, beside which his viol and bow lay carelessly on the floor. He sat for some time inactive, nodding oddly, but having a paradoxical suggestion of intense and frightened listening. Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied, and crossing to a chair by the table wrote a brief note, handed it to me, and returned to the table, where he began to write rapidly and incessantly. The note implored me in the name of mercy, and for the sake of my own curiosity, to wait where I was while he prepared a full account in German of all the marvels and terrors which beset him. I waited, and the dumb man’s pencil flew.
It was perhaps an hour later, while I still waited and while the old musician’s feverishly written sheets still continued to pile up, that I saw Zann start as from the hint of a horrible shock. Unmistakably he was looking at the curtained window and listening shudderingly. Then I half fancied I heard a sound myself; though it was not a horrible sound, but rather an exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical note, suggesting a player in one of the neighbouring houses, or in some abode beyond the lofty wall over which I had never been able to look. Upon Zann the effect was terrible, for dropping his pencil suddenly he rose, seized his viol, and commenced to rend the night with the wildest playing I had ever heard from his bow save when listening at the barred door.
It would be useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that dreadful night. It was more horrible than anything I had ever overheard, because I could now see the expression of his face, and could realise that this time the motive was stark fear. He was trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown something out—what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be. The playing grew fantastic, delirious, and hysterical, yet kept to the last the qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange old man possessed.I recognised the air—it was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the theatres, and I reflected for a moment that this was the first time I had ever heard Zann play the work of another composer.
Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining of that desperate viol. The player was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a monkey, always looking frantically at the curtained window. In his frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and Bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning. And then I thought I heard a shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; a calm, deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the west.
At this juncture the shutter began to rattle in a howling night-wind which had sprung up outside as if in answer to the mad playing within. Zann’s screaming viol now outdid itself, emitting sounds I had never thought a viol could emit. The shutter rattled more loudly, unfastened, and commenced slamming against the window. Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and the chill wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling the sheets of paper on the table where Zann had begun to write out his horrible secret. I looked at Zann, and saw that he was past conscious observation. His blue eyes were bulging, glassy, and sightless, and the frantic playing had become a blind, mechanical, unrecognisable orgy that no pen could even suggest.
A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it toward the window. I followed the flying sheets in desperation, but they were gone before I reached the demolished panes. Then I remembered my old wish to gaze from this window, the only window in the Rue d’Auseil from which one might see the slope beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It was very dark, but the city’s lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the rain and wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleaming from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to anything on earth. And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the daemon madness of that night-baying viol behind me.
I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light, crashing against the table, overturning a chair, and finally groping my way to the place where the blackness screamed with shocking music. To save myself and Erich Zann I could at least try, whatever the powers opposed to me. Once I thought some chill thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be heard above that hideous viol. Suddenly out of the blackness the madly sawing bow struck me, and I knew I was close to the player. I felt ahead, touched the back of Zann’s chair, and then found and shook his shoulder in an effort to bring him to his senses.
He did not respond, and still the viol shrieked on without slackening. I moved my hand to his head, whose mechanical nodding I was able to stop, and shouted in his ear that we must both flee from the unknown things of the night. But he neither answered me nor abated the frenzy of his unutterable music, while all through the garret strange currents of wind seemed to dance in the darkness and babel. When my hand touched his ear I shuddered, though I knew not why—knew not why till I felt of the still face; the ice-cold, stiffened, unbreathing face whose glassy eyes bulged uselessly into the void. And then, by some miracle finding the door and the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that glassy-eyed thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed viol whose fury increased even as I plunged.
Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark house; racing mindlessly out into the narrow, steep, and ancient street of steps and tottering houses; clattering down steps and over cobbles to the lower streets and the putrid canyon-walled river; panting across the great dark bridge to the broader, healthier streets and boulevards we know; all these are terrible impressions that linger with me. And I recall that there was no wind, and that the moon was out, and that all the lights of the city twinkled.
Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been able to find the Rue d’Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for the loss in undreamable abysses of the closely written sheets which alone could have explained the music of Erich Zann.

Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film, Carol J. Clover

Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film

Carol J. Clover

The Cinefantastic and Varieties of Horror

On the high side of horror lie the classics: F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, King Kong, Dracula, Frankenstein, and various works by Alfred Hitchcock, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and a few others-films that by virtue of age, literary ancestry, or fame of director have achieved reputability within the context of disreputability.' Further down the scale fall the productions of Brian De Palma, some of the glossier satanic films (Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, The Exorcist), certain sci-fi hybrids (Alien/Aliens, Blade Runner), some vampire and werewolf films (Wolfen, An American Werewolf in London), and an assortment of other highly pro duced films, often with stars (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, The Shining). At the very bottom, down in the cinematic underbrush, lies-horror of horrors-the slasher (or spatter or shocker) film: the immensely generative story of a psycho- killer who slashes to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until he is himself subdued or killed, usually by the one girl who has survived.

Drenched in taboo and encroaching vigorously on the pornographic, the slasher film lies by and large beyond the purview of the respectable (middle-aged, middle-class) audience. It has also lain by and large beyond the purview of respectable criticism. Staples of drive-ins and exploitation houses, where they "rub shoulders with sex pictures and macho action flicks," these are films that are "never even written up."2 Books on horror film mostly concentrate on the classics, touch on the middle categories in passing, and either pass over the slasher in silence or bemoan it as a degenerate aberration.3 The one full book on the cate- gory, William Schoell's Stay Out of the Shower, is immaculately unintelligent.4 Film magazine articles on the genre rarely get past technique, special effects, and profits. The Sunday San Francisco Examiner relegates reviews of slashers to the syndicated "Joe Bob Briggs, Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas," whose low-brow, campy tone ("We're talking two breasts, four quarts of blood, five dead bodies.... Joe Bob says check it out") establishes what the paper and others like it deem the necessary distance between their readership and that sort of film.5 There are of course the exceptional cases: critics or social observers who have seen at least some of these films and tried to come to grips with their ethics or aesthetics or both. Just how troubled is their task can be seen from its divergent results. For one critic, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is "the Gone With the Wind of meat movies."6 For another it is a vile little piece of sick crap... nothing but a hysterically paced, slapdash, imbecile concoction of cannibalism, voodoo, astrology, sundry hippie-esque cults, and unrelenting sadistic violence as extreme and hideous as a complete lack of imagination can possibly make it."7 Writes a third: "[Director Tobe] Hooper's cinematic intelligence becomes more apparent in every viewing, as one gets over the initial traumatizing impact and learns to respect the pervasive felicities of camera placement and movement."8 The Museum of Modern Art bought the film in the same year that at least one country, Sweden, banned it.

Robin Wood's tack is less aesthetic than anthropological. "However one may shrink from systematic exposure to them [slasher films], however one may deplore the social phenomena and ideological mutations they reflect, their pop- ularity ... suggests that even if they were uniformly execrable they shouldn't be ignored."9 We may go a step further and suggest that the qualities that locate the slasher film outside the usual aesthetic system-that indeed render it, along with pornography and low horror in general, the film category "most likely to be betrayed by artistic treatment and lavish production values"' 0-are the very qual- ities that make it such a transparent source for (sub)cultural attitudes toward sex and gender in particular. Unmediated by otherworldly fantasy, cover plot, bestial transformations, or civilized routine, slasher films present us in startlingly direct terms with a world in which male and female are at desperate odds but in which, at the same time, masculinity and femininity are more states of mind than body. The premise of this essay, then, is that the slasher film, not despite but exactly because of its crudity and compulsive repetitiveness, gives us a clearer picture of current sexual attitudes, at least among the segment of the population that forms its erstwhile audience, than do the legitimate products of the better studios.

Before we turn to the generic particulars, however, let us review some of the critical and cinematic issues that attend the study of the sensation genres in gen- eral and horror in particular. We take as our point of departure not a slasher film but Brian De Palma's art-horror film Body Double (1984). The plot-a man wit- nesses and after much struggle solves the mysterious murder of a woman with whom he has become voyeuristically involved-concerns us less than the three career levels through which the hero, an actor named Jake, first ascends and then descends. He aspires initially to legitimate roles (Shakespeare), but it becomes clear during the course of a method-acting class that his range of emotional expression is impaired by an unresolved childhood fear. For the moment he has taken ajob as vampire in a "low-budget, independent horror film," but even that job is threatened when, during a scene in which he is to be closed in a coffin and buried, he suffers an attack of claustrophobia and must leave the set. A plot twist leads him to the underworld of pornography, where he takes on yet another role, this time in a skin flick. Here, in the realm of the flesh with a queen of porn, the sexual roots of Jake's paralysis-fear of the (female) cavern-are exposed and finally resolved. A new man, he returns to "A Vampire's Kiss" to master the burial scene, and we are to understand that Shakespeare is the next stop.

The three cinematic categories are thus ranked by degree of sublimation. On the civilized side of the continuum lie the legitimate genres; at the other end, hard on the unconscious, lie the sensation or "body" genres, horror and pornog- raphy, in that order. For De Palma, the violence of horror reduces to and enacts archaic sexual feelings. Beneath Jake's emotional paralysis (which emerges in the "high" genre) lies a death anxiety (which is exposed in the burying-alive of horror), and beneath that anxiety lies a primitive sexual response (which emerges, and is resolved, in pornography). The layers of Jake's experience accord strik- ingly, and perhaps not coincidentally, with Freud's archaeology of "uncanny" feel- ings. "To some people," Freud wrote, "the idea of being buried alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psycho-analysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a transformation of another phantasy which originally had nothing terrifying about it at all, but was qualified by a certain lascivious- ness-the phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence [der Phantasie vom Leben im Mutterleib].""1 Pornography thus engages directly (in pleasurable terms) what horror explores at one remove (in painful terms) and legitimate film at two or more. Beneath the "legitimate" plot of The Graduate (in which Ben must give up his relationship with a friend's mother in order to marry and take his proper social place) lies the plot of Psycho (in which Norman's unnatural attachment to his own mother drives him to murder women to whom he is attracted); and beneath that plot lies the plot of the porn film Taboo, in which the son simply has sex with his mother ("Mom, am I better than Dad?"). Pornography, in short, has to do with sex (the act) and horror with gender.

It is a rare Hollywood film that does not devote a passage or two-a car chase, a sex scene-to the emotional/physical excitement of the audience. But horror and pornography are the only two genres specifically devoted to the arousal of bodily sensation. They exist solely to horrify and stimulate, not always respec- tively, and their ability to do so is the sole measure of their success: they "prove themselves upon our pulses."'12 Thus in horror-film circles, "good" means scary, specifically in a bodily way (ads promise shivers, chills, shudders, tingling of the spine; Lloyds of London insured audiences of Macabre against death by fright); 13 and Hustler's Erotic Film Guide ranks pornographic films according to the degree of erection they produce (one film is ranked a "pecker popper," another "limp"). The target is in both cases the body, our witnessing body. But what we witness is also the body, another's body, in experience: the body in sex and the body in threat. The terms "flesh film" ("skin flicks") and "meat movies" are remark- ably apt.

Cinema, it is claimed, owes its particular success in the sensation genres (wit- ness the early and swift rise of vampire films) to its unprecedented ability to manipulate point of view. What written narrative must announce, film can accomplish silently and instantaneously through cutting. Within the space of seconds, the vampire's first-person perspective is displaced by third-person or documentary observation. To these simple shifts can be added the variables of distance (from the panorama of the battlefield to the closeup of an eyeball), angle, frame tilt, lighting effects, unsteadiness of image, and so on-again, all subject to sudden and unannounced manipulation.'4 A current horror-film favorite locates the I-camera with the killer in pursuit of a victim; the camera is hand-held, pro- ducing a jerky image, and the frame includes in-and-out-of-focus foreground objects (trees, bushes, window frames) behind which the killer (I-camera) is lurking-all accompanied by the sound of heartbeat and heavy breathing. "The camera moves in on the screaming, pleading victim, 'looks down' at the knife, and then plunges it into the chest, ear, or eyeball. Now that's sick." 15

Lagging behind practice is a theoretical understanding of effect. The pro- cesses by which a certain image (but not another) filmed in a certain way (but not another) causes one person's (but not another's) pulse to race finally remains a mystery-not only to critics and theorists but even, to judge from interviews and the trial-and-error (and baldly imitative) quality of the films themselves, by the people who make the product. The process of suture is sensed to be centrally important in effecting audience identification, though just how and why is unclear.'6 Nor is identification the straightforward notion some critics take it to be.'7 Where commentators by and large agree is in the importance of the "play of pronoun function."' 8 If the fantastic depends for its effect on an uncertainty of vision, a profusion of perspectives and a confusion of subjective and objective, then cinema is preeminently suited to the fantastic. Indeed, to the extent that film can present "unreal" combinations of objects and events as "real" through the camera eye, the "cinematic process itself might be called fantastic.'9 The "cine- fantastic" in any case succeeds, far more efficiently and effectively and on a far greater scale than its ancestral media, in the production of sensation.

The fact that the cinematic conventions of horror are so easily and so often parodied would seem to suggest that, individual variation notwithstanding, its basic structures of apperception are fixed and fundamental. The same is true of the stories they tell. Students of folklore or early literature recognize in the slasher film the hallmarks of oral story: the free exchange of themes and motifs, the archetypal characters and situations, the accumulation of sequels, remakes, imi- tations. This is a field in which there is in some sense no original, no real or right text, but only variants; a world in which, therefore, the meaning of the individual example lies outside itself. The "art" of the horror film, like the "art" of pornog- raphy, is to a very large extent the art of rendition, and it is understood as such by the competent audience.20 A particular example may have original features, but its quality as a horror film lies in the ways it delivers the cliche. James B. Twitchell rightly recommends an ethnological approach, in which the various stories are analyzed as if no one individual telling really mattered.... You search for what is stable and repeated; you neglect what is "artistic" and "original." This is why, for me, auteur criticism is quite beside the point in explaining horror.... The critic's first job in explaining the fascination of horror is not to fix the images at their every appearance but, instead, to trace their migrations to the audi- ence and, only then, try to understand why they have been crucial enough to pass along.21

That auteur criticism is at least partly beside the point is clear from interviews with such figures as John Carpenter (Halloween, The Fog)-interviews that would seem to suggest that, like the purveyors of folklore, the makers of film operate more on instinct and formula than conscious understanding. So bewildered was Hitchcock by the unprecedented success of Psycho that he approached the Stan- ford Research Institute about doing a study of the phenomenon.22

What makes horror "crucial enough to pass along" is, for critics since Freud, what has made ghost stories and fairy tales crucial enough to pass along: its engagement of repressed fears and desires and its reenactment of the residual conflict surrounding those feelings. Horror films thus respond to interpretation, as Robin Wood puts it, as "at once the personal dreams of their makers and the collective dreams of their audiences-the fusion made possible by the shared structures of a common ideology."23 And just as attacker and attacked are expres- sions of the same self in nightmares, so they are expressions of the same viewer in horror film. Our primary and acknowledged identification may be with the victim, the adumbration of our infantile fears and desires, our memory sense of ourselves as tiny and vulnerable in the face of the enormous Other;but the Other is also finally another part of ourself, the projection of our repressed infantile rage and desire (our blind drive to annihilate those toward whom we feel anger, to force satisfaction from those who stimulate us, to wrench food for ourselves if only by actually devouring those who feed us) that we have had in the name of civilization to repudiate. We are both Red Riding Hood and the Wolf; the force of the experience, the horror, comes from "knowing" both sides of the story- from giving ourselves over to the cinematic play of pronoun functions. It is no surprise that the first film to which viewers were not admitted once the theater darkened was Psycho. Whether Hitchcock actually meant with this measure to intensify the "sleep" experience is unclear, but the effect both in the short run, in establishing Psycho as the ultimate thriller, and in the long run, in altering the cinema-going habits of the nation, is indisputable. In the current understanding, horror is the least interruptable of all film genres. That uninterruptability itself bears witness to the compulsive nature of the stories it tells.

Whatever else it may be, the slasher film is clearly "crucial enough to pass along." Profits and sequels tell much of the story. Halloween cost $320,000 to make and within six years had grossed over $75,000,000; even a highly produced film like The Shining has repaid itself tenfold.24 The Hills Have Eyes, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Alien (a sci-fi/slasher hybrid) are currently at Part Two. Psycho and A Nightmare on Elm Street are at Part Three. Halloween is at Part Four, and Friday the Thirteenth is at Part Six. These are better taken as remakes than sequels; although the later part purports to take up where the earlier part left off, it in most cases simply duplicates with only slight variation the plot and circum- stances-the formula-of its predecessor. Nor do different titles indicate dif- ferent plots; Friday the Thirteenth is set at summer camp and Halloween in town, but the story is much the same, compulsively repeated in those ten films and in dozens like them under different names. The audience for that story is by all accounts largely young and largely male-most conspicuously groups of boys who cheer the killer on as he assaults his victims, then reverse their sympathies to cheer the survivor on as she assaults the killer.25 Our question, then, has to do with that particular audience's stake in that particular nightmare; with what in the story is "crucial" enough to warrant the price of admission, and what the implications are for the current discussion of women and film.

The Slasher Film

The immediate ancestor of the slasher film is Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). Its elements are familiar: the killer is the psychotic product of a sick family, but still recognizably human; the victim is a beautiful, sexually active woman; the location is not-home, at a Terrible Place; the weapon is something other than a gun; the attack is registered from the victim's point of view and comes with shocking suddenness. None of these features is original, but the unprecedented success of Hitchcock's particular formulation, above all the sex- ualization of both motive and action, prompted a flood of imitations and varia- tions. In 1974, a film emerged that revised the Psycho template to a degree and in such a way as to mark a new phase: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper). Together with Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), it engendered a new spate of variations and imitations.

The plot of Texas Chain Saw is simple enough: five young people are driving through Texas in a van; they stop off at an abandoned house and are murdered one by one by the psychotic sons of a degenerate local family; the sole survivor is a woman. The horror, of course, lies in the elaboration. Early in the film the group picks up a hitchhiker, but when he starts a fire and slashes Franklin's arm (having already slit open his own hand), they kick him out. The abandoned house they subsequently visit, once the home of Sally's and Franklin's grandparents, turns out to be right next door to the house of the hitchhiker and his family: his brother Leatherface; their father; an aged and only marginally alive grandfather; and their dead grandmother and her dog, whose mummified corpses are cere- monially included in the family gatherings. Three generations of slaughterhouse workers, once proud of their craft but now displaced by machines, have taken up killing and cannibalism as a way of life. Their house is grotesquely decorated with human and animal remains-bones, feathers, hair, skins. The young people drift apart in their exploration of the abandoned house and grounds and are picked off one by one by Leatherface and Hitchhiker. Last is Sally. The others are attacked and killed with dispatch, but Sally must fight for her life, enduring all manner of horrors through the night. At dawn she manages to escape to the highway, where she is picked up by a passing trucker.

Likewise the nutshell plot of Halloween: a psychotic killer (Michael) stalks a small town on Halloween and kills a string of teenage friends, one by one; only Laurie survives. The twist here is that Michael has escaped from the asylum in which he has been incarcerated since the age of six, when he killed his sister minutes after she and her boyfriend parted following an illicit interlude in her parents' bed. That murder, in flashback, opens the film. It is related entirely in the killer's first person (I-camera) and only after the fact is the identity of the perpetrator revealed. Fifteen years later, Michael escapes his prison and returns to kill Laurie, whom he construes as another version of his sister (a sequel clarifies that she is in fact his younger sister, adopted by another family at the time of the earlier tragedy). But before Michael gets to Laurie, he picks off her high school friends: Annie, in a car on her way to her boyfriend's; Bob, going to the kitchen for a beer after sex with Lynda; Lynda, talking on the phone with Laurie and waiting for Bob to come back with the beer. At last only Laurie remains. When she hears Lynda squeal and then go silent on the phone, she leaves her own baby- sitting house to go to Lynda's. Here she discovers the three bodies and flees, the killer in pursuit. The remainder of the film is devoted to the back-and-forth struggle between Laurie and Michael. Again and again he bears down on her, and again and again she either eludes him (by running, hiding, breaking through windows to escape, locking herself in) or strikes back (once with a knitting needle, once with a hanger). In the end, Doctor Loomis (Michael's psychiatrist in the asylum) rushes in and shoots the killer (though not so fatally as to prevent his return in the sequels).

Before we turn to an inventory of generic components, let us add a third, more recent example: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre II, from 1986. The slaughter- house family (now named the Sawyers) is the same, though older and, owing to their unprecedented success in the sausage business, richer.26 When Mr. Sawyer begins to suspect from her broadcasts that a disk jockey named Stretch knows more than she should about one of their recent crimes, he dispatches his sons Leatherface and Chop Top (Hitchhiker in Part One) to the radio station late at night. There they seize the technician and corner Stretch. At the crucial moment, however, power fails Leatherface's chainsaw. As Stretch cowers before him, he presses the now still blade up along her thigh and against her crotch, where he holds it unsteadily as he jerks and shudders in what we understand to be orgasm.

After that the sons leave. The intrepid Stretch, later joined by a Texas Ranger (Dennis Hopper), tracks them to their underground lair outside of town. Tum- bling down the Texas equivalent of a rabbit hole, Stretch finds herself in the sub- terranean chambers of the Sawyer operation. Here, amidst all the slaughterhouse paraphernalia, the Sawyers live and work. The walls drip with blood. Like the decrepit mansion of Part One, the residential parts of the establishment are quaintly decorated with human and animal remains. After a long ordeal at the hands of the Sawyers, Stretch manages to scramble up through a culvert and beyond that up onto a nearby pinnacle, where she finds a chainsaw and wards off her final assailant. The Texas Ranger evidently perishes in a grenade explosion underground, leaving Stretch the sole survivor.

The spiritual debt of all the post- 1974 slasher films to Psycho is clear, and it is a rare example that does not pay a visual tribute, however brief, to the ancestor- if not in a shower stabbing, then in a purling drain or the shadow of a knife- wielding hand. No less clear, however, is the fact that the post-1974 examples have, in the usual way of folklore, contemporized not only Hitchcock's terms but also, over time, their own. We have, in short, a cinematic formula with a twenty- six-year history, of which the first phase, from 1960 to 1974, is dominated by a film clearly rooted in the sensibility of the 1950s, while the second phase, brack- eted by the two Texas Chain Saw films from 1974 and 1986, responds to the values of the late sixties and early seventies. That the formula in its most recent guise may be in decline is suggested by the campy, self-parodying quality of Texas Chain Saw II, as well as the emergence, in legitimate theater, of the slasher satire Buckets of Blood. Between 1974 and 1986, however, the formula evolved and flourished in ways of some interest to observers of popular culture, above all those con- cerned with the representation of women in film. To apprehend in specific terms the nature of that mutation, let us, with Psycho as the benchmark, survey the genre by component category: killer, locale, weapons, victims, and shock effects.

Killer.

The psychiatrist at the end of Psycho explains what we had already guessed from the action: that Norman Bates had introjected his mother, in life a "clinging, demanding woman," so completely that she constituted his other, con- trolling self. Not Norman but "the mother half of his mind" killed Marion-had to kill Marion-when he (the Norman half) found himself aroused by her. 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. Just as Norman wears his mother's clothes during his acts of violence and is thought, by the screen characters and also, for a while, by the film's spectators, to be his mother, so the murderer in the Psycho- imitation Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980), a transvestite psychiatrist, seems until his unveiling to be a woman; like Norman, he must kill women who arouse him sexually. Likewise, in muted form, Hitchhiker/Chop Top and Leatherface in the Texas Chain Saw films: neither brother shows overt signs of gender confusion, but their cathexis to the sick family-in which the mother is conspicuously absent but the preserved corpse of the grandmother (answering the treated body of Mrs. Bates in Psycho) is conspicuously present-has palpably arrested their develop- ment. Both are in their twenties (thirties, in Part Two), but Hitchhiker/Chop Top seems a gangly kid and Leatherface jiggles in baby fat behind his butcher's apron. Like Norman Bates, whose bedroom still displays his childhood toys, Hitchhiker/ Chop Top and Leatherface are permanently locked in childhood. Only when Leatherface "discovers" sex in Part Two does he lose his appetite for murder. In Motel Hell, a sendup of modern horror with special reference to Psycho and Texas Chain Saw I, we are repeatedly confronted with a portrait of the dead mother, silently presiding over all manner of cannibalistic and incestuous doings on the part of her adult children.

No less in the grip of boyhood is the killer in The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978). The son of a hooker, a hysterical woman gone for days at a time, the killer has up to now put his boyish anger to good use in police work-the film makes much of the irony-but the sight of Laura's violent photographs causes it to be unleashed in full force. The killer in Hell Night is the sole member of his family to survive, as a child, a murderous rampage on the part of his father; the experience con- demned him to an afterlife as a murderer himself. In Halloween the killer is a child, at least in the first instance: Michael, who at the age of six is so enraged at his sister (evidently for her sexual relations with her boyfriend) that he stabs her to death with a kitchen knife. The remainder of the film details his return ram- page at the age of twenty-one, and Dr. Loomis, who has overseen the case in the interim, explains that although Michael's body has attained maturity, his mind remains frozen in infantile fury. In It's Alive, the killer is literally an infant, evi- dently made monstrous through intrauterine apprehension of its parents' ambiv- alence (early in the pregnancy they considered an abortion).

Even killers whose childhood is not immediately at issue and who display no overt gender confusion are often sexually disturbed. The murderer in Nightmare on Elm Street is an undead child molester. The killer in Slumber Party Massacre says to a young woman he is about to assault with a power drill: "Pretty. All of you are very pretty. I love you. Takes a lot of love for a person to do this. You know you want it. You want it. Yes." When she grasps the psychodynamics of the situation in the infamous crotch episode of Texas Chain Saw II, Stretch tries a desperate gambit: "You're really good, you really are good," she repeats; and indeed, imme- diately after ejaculation Leatherface becomes palpably less interested in his saw. The parodic Motel Hell spells it out. "His pecker don't work; you'll see when he takes off his overalls-it's like a shrivelled prune," Bruce says of his killer-brother Vincent when he learns of Terry's plans to marry him. Terry never does see, for on her wedding night he attempts (needless to say) not sex but murder. Actual rape is practically nonexistent in the slasher film, evidently on the premise-as the crotch episode suggests-that violence and sex are not concomitants but alter- natives, the one as much a substitute for and a prelude to the other as the teenage horror film is a substitute for and a prelude to the "adult" film (or the meat movie a substitute for and prelude to the skin flick).27 When Sally under torture (Texas Chain Saw I) cries out "I'll do anything you want," clearly with sexual intention, her assailants respond only by mimicking her in gross terms; she has profoundly misunderstood the psychology.

Female killers are few and their reasons for killing significantly different from men's. With the possible exception of the murderous mother in Friday the Thir- teenth I, they show no gender confusion. Nor is their motive overtly psychosexual; their anger derives in most cases not from childhood experience but from specific moments in their adult lives in which they have been abandoned or cheated on by men (Strait Jacket, Play Misty for Me, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman). (Films like Mother's Day, Ms. 45, and I Spit On Your Grave belong to the rape-revenge category.) Friday the Thirteenth I is something of an anomaly. The killer is revealed as a middle-aged woman whose son, Jason, drowned years earlier as a consequence of negligence on the part of the camp counselors. The anomaly is not sustained in the sequels (Parts Two to Six), however. Here the killer is Jason himself, not dead after all but living in a forest hut. The pattern is a familiar one; his motive is vengeance for the death of his mother, his excessive attachment toward whom is manifested in his enshrining of her severed head. Like Stretch in the crotch episode of Texas Chain Saw II, the girl who does final combat with Jason in Part Two sees the shrine, grasps its significance (she's a psych major), and saves herself by repeating in a commanding tone, "I am your mother, Jason; put down the knife." Jason, for his part, begins to see his mother in the girl (I-camera) and obeys her.

In films of the Psycho type (Dressed to Kill, Eyes of Laura Mars), the killer is an insider, a man who functions normally in the action until, at the end, his other self is revealed. Texas Chain Saw and Halloween introduced another sort of killer: one whose only role is that of killer and one whose identity as such is clear from the outset. Norman may have a normal half, but these killers have none. They are emphatic misfits and emphatic outsiders. Michael is an escapee from a distant asylum; Jason subsists in the forest; the Sawyer sons live a bloody subterranean existence outside of town. Nor are they clearly seen. We catch sight of them only in glimpses-few and far between in the beginning, more frequent toward the end. They are usually large, sometimes overweight, and often masked. In short, they may be recognizably human, but only marginally so, just as they are only marginally visible-to their victims and to us, the spectators. In one key aspect, however, the killers are superhuman: their virtual indestructibility. Just as Michael (in Halloween) repeatedly rises from blows that would stop a lesser man, so Jason (in the Friday the Thirteenth films) survives assault after assault to return in sequel after sequel. Chop Top in Texas Chain Saw II is so called because of a metal plate implanted in his skull in repair of a head wound sustained in the truck accident in Part One. It is worth noting that the killers are normally the fixed elements and the victims the changeable ones in any given series.

Terrible Place.

The Terrible Place, most often a house or tunnel, in which the victims sooner or later find themselves is a venerable element of horror. The Bates mansion is just one in a long list of such places-a list that continues, in the modern slasher, with the decaying mansion of Texas Chain Saw I, the abandoned and haunted mansion of Hell Night, the house for sale but unsellable in Halloween (also a point of departure for such films as Rosemary's Baby and Amityville Horror), and so on. What makes these houses terrible is not just their Victorian decrepi- tude but the terrible families-murderous, incestuous, cannibalistic-that occupy them. So the Bates mansion enfolds the history of a mother and son locked in a sick attachment, and so the Texas Chain Saw mansion/labyrinth shelters a lawless brood presided over by the decaying corpse of the grandmother. Jason's forest hut (in the Friday the Thirteenth sequels) is no mansion, but it houses another mummified mother (or at least her head), with all the usual candles and dreadful paraphernalia. The terrors of the Hell Night mansion stem, we learn, from an early owner's massacre of his children. Into such houses unwitting victims wander in film after film, and it is the conventional task of the genre to register in close detail those victims' dawning understanding, as they survey the visible evidence, of the human crimes and perversions that have transpired there. That perception leads directly to the perception of their own immediate peril.

In Texas Chain Saw Massacre II, house and tunnel elide in a residential laby- rinth underground, connected to the world above by channels and culverts. The family is intact, indeed thrives, but for reasons evidently having to do with the nature of their sausage business has moved residence and slaughterhouse under- ground. For Stretch, trying desperately to find a way out, it is a ghastly place: dark, full of blind alleys, walls wet with blood. Likewise the second basement of the haunted mansion in Hell Night: strewn with decaying bodies and skeletons, lighted with masses of candles. Other tunnels are less familial: the one in Body Double that prompts Jake's claustrophobic faint, and the horror-house tunnel in He Knows You're Alone in which the killer lurks. The morgue episode in the latter film, certain of the hospital scenes in Halloween II, and the bottom-cellar scenes from various films may be counted as Terrible Tunnels: dark, labyrinthine, exit- less, usually underground and palpably damp, and laced with heating ducts and plumbing pipes. In Hell Night, as in Texas Chain Saw II, Terrible House (the aban- doned mansion) and Terrible Tunnel (the second basement) elide.

The house or tunnel may at first seem a safe haven, but the same walls that promise to keep the killer out quickly become, once the killer penetrates them, the walls that hold the victim in. A phenomenally popular moment in post- 1974 slashers is the scene in which the victim locks herself in (a house, room, closet, car) and waits with pounding heart as the killer slashes, hacks, or drills his way in. The action is inevitably seen from the victim's point of view; we stare at the door (wall, car roof) and watch the surface break with first the tip and then the shaft of the weapon. In Hitchcock's The Birds, it is the birds' beaks we see penetrating the door. The penetration scene is commonly the film's pivotal moment; if the victim has up to now simply fled, she has at this point no choice but to fight back.

Weapons.

In the hands of the killer, at least, guns have no place in slasher films. Victims sometimes avail themselves of firearms, but like telephones, fire alarms, elevators, doorbells, and car engines, guns fail in the squeeze. In some basic sense, the emotional terrain of the slasher film is pretechnological. The preferred weapons of the killer are knives, hammers, axes, icepicks, hypodermic needles, red hot pokers, pitchforks, and the like. Such implements serve well a plot pred- icated on stealth, 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 nonuse of such relatively silent means as bow and arrow, spear, catapult, and even swords,28 would seem to suggest that closeness and tactility are also at issue. The sense is clearer if we include marginal examples like Jaws and The Birds, as well as related werewolf and vampire genres. Knives and needles, like teeth, beaks, fangs, and claws, are personal, extensions of the body that bring attacker and attacked into primitive, animalistic embrace. In I Spit On Your Grave, the heroine forces her rapist at gunpoint to drop his pants, evidently meaning to shoot him in his genitals. But she changes her mind, invites him home for what he all too readily supposes will be a voluntary follow-up of the earlier gang rape. Then, as they sit together in a bubble bath, she castrates him with a knife. If we wondered why she threw away the pistol, now we know: all phallic symbols are not equal, and a hands-on knifing answers a hands-on rape in a way that a shooting, even a shooting preceded by a humiliation, does not.30

Beyond that, the slasher evinces a fascination with flesh or meat itself as that which is hidden from view. When the hitchhiker in Texas Chain Saw I slits open his hand for the thrill, the onlookers recoil in horror-all but Franklin, who seems fascinated by the realization that all that lies between the visible, knowable outside of the body and its secret insides is one thin membrane, protected only by a col- lective taboo against its violation. It is no surprise that the rise of the slasher film is concomitant with the development of special effects that let us see with our own eyes the "opened" body.

Victims.

Where once there was one victim, Marion Crane, there are now many: five in Texas Chain Saw I, four in Halloween, fourteen in Friday the Thirteenth III, and so on. (As Schoell puts it, "Other filmmakers figured that the only thing better than one beautiful woman being gruesomely murdered was a whole series of beautiful women being gruesomely murdered."')3' Where once the victim was an adult, now she is typically in her teens (hence the term "teenie-kill pic"). Where once she was female, now she is both girl and boy, though most often and most conspicuously girl. For all this, her essential quality remains the same. Marion is first and foremost a sexual transgressor. The first scenes show her in a hotel room dressing at the end of a lunch hour, asking her lover to marry her. It is, of course, her wish to be made an honest woman of that leads her to abscond with $40,000, an act that leads her to the Bates motel in Fairvale. Here, just as we watched her dress in the opening sequences, we now watch her undress. Moments later, nude in the shower, she dies. A classic publicity poster for Psycho shows Janet Leigh with a slightly uncomprehending look on her face sitting on the bed, dressed in a bra and half-slip, looking backward in such a way as to outline her breasts. If it is the task of promotional materials to state in one image the essence of a film, those breasts are what Psycho is all about.

In the slasher film, sexual transgressors of both sexes are scheduled for early destruction. The genre is studded with couples trying to find a place beyond purview of parents and employers where they can have sex, and immediately afterwards (or during) being killed. The theme enters the tradition with the Lynda-Bob subplot of Halloween. Finding themselves alone in a neighborhood house, Lynda and Bob make hasty use of the master bedroom. Afterwards, Bob goes downstairs for a beer. In the kitchen he is silently dispatched by the killer, Michael, who then covers himself with a sheet (it's Halloween), dons Bob's glasses, and goes upstairs. Supposing the bespectacled ghost in the doorway to be Bob, Lynda jokes, bares her breasts provocatively, and finally, in irritation at "Bob's" stony silence, dials Laurie on the phone. Now the killer advances, strangling her with the telephone cord, so that what Laurie hears on the other end are squeals she takes to be orgasmic. Halloween II takes the scene a step further. Here the victims are a nurse and orderly who have sneaked off for sex in the hospital therapy pool. The watching killer, Michael again, turns up the thermostat and, when the orderly goes to check it, kills him. Michael then approaches the nurse from behind (she thinks it's the orderly) and strokes her neck. Only when he moves his hand towards her bare breast and she turns around and sees him does he kill her.

Other directors are less fond than John Carpenter of the mistaken-identity twist. Denise, the English vamp in Hell Night, is simply stabbed to death in bed during Seth's postcoital trip to the bathroom. In He Knows You're Alone, the student having the affair with her professor is stabbed to death in bed while the professor is downstairs changing a fuse; the professor himself is stabbed when he returns and discovers the body. The postcoital death scene is a staple of the Friday the Thirteenth series. Part Three offers a particularly horrible variant. Invigorated by sex, the boy is struck by a gymnastic impulse and begins walking on his hands; the killer slices down on his crotch with a machete. Unaware of the fate of her boyfriend, the girl crawls into a hammock after her shower; the killer impales her from below.32 Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill presents the infamous example of the sexually desperate wife, first seen masturbating in her morning shower during the credit sequence, who lets herself be picked up later that day in a museum by a man with whom she has sex first in a taxi and later in his apartment. On leaving his place in the evening, she is suddenly attacked and killed in the elevator. The cause-and-effect relationship between (illicit) sex and death could hardly be more clearly drawn. All of the killings in Cruising occur during (homo)sexual encounters; the difference here is that the killer is one of the par ticipants, not a third party.

Killing those who seek or engage in unauthorized sex amounts to a generic imperative of the slasher film. It is an imperative that crosses gender lines, affecting males as well as females. The numbers are not equal, and the scenes not equally charged; but the fact remains that in most slasher films after 1978 (fol- lowing Halloween), men and boys who go after "wrong" sex also die. This is not the only way males die; they also die incidentally, as girls do, when they get in the killer's way or try to stop him, or when they stray into proscribed territory. The victims of Hell Night, Texas Chain Saw, and the Friday the Thirteenth films are, respec- tively, those who trespass in Garth Manor, those who stumble into the environs of the slaughterhouse family, and those who become counselors at a cursed camp, all without regard to sex. Boys die, in short, not because they are boys but because they make mistakes.

Some girls die for the same mistakes. Others, however, and always the main one, die-plot after plot develops the motive-because they are female. Just as Norman Bates's oedipal psychosis is such that only female victims will do, so Michael's sexual anger toward his sister (in the Halloween series) drives him to kill her-and after her a string of sister surrogates. In much the same way, the trans- sexual psychiatrist in Dressed to Kill is driven to murder only those women who arouse him and remind him of his hated maleness. In The Eyes of Laura Mars, the killer's hatred of his mother drives him to prey on women specifically-and, sig- nificantly, one gay male. He Knows You're Alone features a killer who in consequence of an earlier jilting preys exclusively on brides-to-be.

But even in films in which males and females are killed in roughly even num- bers, the lingering images are inevitably female. The death of a male is always swift; even if the victim grasps what is happening to him, he has no time to react or register terror. He is dispatched and the camera moves on. The death of a male is moreover more likely than the death of a female to be viewed from a distance, or viewed only dimly (because of darkness or fog, for example), or indeed to happen offscreen and not be viewed at all. The murders of women, on the other hand, are filmed at closer range, in more graphic detail, and at greater length. The pair of murders at the therapy pool in Halloween II illustrates the standard iconography. We see the orderly killed in two shots: the first at close range in the control room, just before the stabbing, and the second as he is being stabbed, through the vapors in a medium long shot; the orderly never even sees his assailant. The nurse's death, on the other hand, is shot entirely in medium closeup. The camera studies her face as it registers first her unwitting complicity (as the killer strokes her neck and shoulders from behind), then apprehension, and then, as she faces him, terror; we see the knife plunge into her repeatedly, hear her cries, and watch her blood fill the therapy pool. This cinematic standard has a venerable history, and it remains intact in the slasher film. Indeed, "tits and a scream" are all that is required of actresses auditioning for the role of victim in "Co-Ed Frenzy," the fictive slasher film whose making constitutes the frame story of Blow-Out. It is worth noting that none of the auditioners has both in the desired amount, and that the director must resort to the use of doubles: one for the tits, one for the screams.

Final Girl.

The image of the distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl. She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. 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. She alone looks death in the face; but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B). She is inevitably female. In Schoell's words: "The vast majority of contemporary shockers, whether in the sexist mold or not, feature climaxes in which the women fight back against their attackers-the wandering, humorless psychos who pop- ulate these films. They often show more courage and levelheadedness than their cringing male counterparts."33 Her scene occupies the last ten to twenty minutes (thirty in the case of Texas Chain Saw I) and constitutes the film's emphatic climax. The sequence first appears in full-blown form (ending A) in Texas Chain Saw I with Sally's spirited self-defense and eventual rescue. Her brother and compan- ions were dispatched suddenly and uncomprehendingly, one by one, but Sally survives the ninth round: long enough to see what has become of her fellows and is in store for her, long enough to meet and even dine with the whole slaughter- house family, long enough to undergo all manner of torture (including the ancient grandfather's effort to strike a fatal hammer blow on the temple as they bend her over a washtub), and long enough to bolt and rebolt, be caught and recaught, plead and replead for her life, and eventually escape to the highway.

For nearly thirty minutes of screen time-a third of the film-we watch her shriek, run, flinch, jump through windows, sustain injury and mutilation. Her will to survive is astonishing; in the end, bloody and staggering, she finds the highway, Leatherface and Hitchhiker in pursuit. Just as they bear down on her, a truck comes by and crushes Hitchhiker. Minutes later a pickup driver plucks Sally up and saves her from Leatherface. The final shots show us Leatherface from her point of view (the bed of the pickup): standing on the highway, wounded (having gashed open his abdomen during the truck episode) but upright, waving the chainsaw crazily over his head.

Halloween's Final Girl is Laurie. Her desperate defense is shorter in duration than Sally's but no less fraught with horror. Limping from a knife wound in the leg, she flees to a garden room and breaks in through the window with a rake. Neighbors hear her screams for help but suspect a Halloween prank and shut the blinds. She gets into her own babysitting house-by throwing a potted plant at a second-story window to rouse the children-just as the killer descends. Minutes later he comes through the window and they grapple; she manages to fell him with a knitting needle and grabs his butcher knife-but drops it when he seems dead. As she goes upstairs to the children, the killer rises, takes the knife, and goes after her. She takes refuge in a closet, lashing the two doorknobs together from the inside. As the killer slashes and stabs at the closet door-we see this from her inside perspective-she bends a hanger into a weapon and, when he breaks the door down, stabs him in the eye. Again thinking him vanquished, she sends the children to the police and sinks down in pain and exhaustion.The killer rises again, but just as he is about to stab her, Doctor Loomis, alerted by the children, rushes in and shoots the killer.

Given the drift injust the four years between Texas Chain Saw and Halloween- from passive to active defense-it is no surprise that the films following Halloween present Final Girls who not only fight back but do so with ferocity and even kill the killer on their own, without help from the outside.34 Valerie in Slumber Party Massacre (a film directed by Amy Jones and scripted by Rita Mae Brown) takes a machete-like weapon to the killer, striking off the bit from his drill, severing his hand, and finally impaling him. Alice assaults and decapitates the killer of Friday the Thirteenth. Pursued by the killer in Hell Night, Marti pries the gate key from the stiff fingers of a corpse to let herself out of the mansion grounds to safety; when the car won't start, she repairs it on the spot; when the car gets stuck in the roadway, she inside and the killer on top, she releases it in such a way as to cast the killer on the gate's upper spikes. The grittiest of the Final Girls is Nancy of Nightmare on Elm Street I. Aware in advance that the killer will be paying her a visit, she plans an elaborate defense. When he enters the house, she dares him to come at her, then runs at him in direct attack. As they struggle, he springs the contraptions she has prepared; he is stunned by a swinging sledge hammer, jolted and half incinerated by an electrical charge, and so on. When he rises yet again, she chases him around the house, bashing him with a chair.35 In Texas Chain Saw II, from 1986, the Final Girl sequence takes mythic measure. Trapped in the underground slaughterhouse, Stretch repeatedly flees, hides, is caught, tortured (at one point forced to don the flayed face of her murdered technician com- panion), and nearly killed. She escapes with her life chiefly because Leatherface, having developed an affection for her after the crotch episode, is reluctant to ply his chainsaw as the tyrannical Mr. Sawyer commands. Finally Stretch finds her way out, leaving the Texas Ranger to face certain death below, and clambers up a nearby pinnacle, Chop Top in pursuit. At the summit she finds the mummified grandmother, ceremoniously enthroned in an open-air chamber, and next to her a functional chainsaw. She turns the saw on Chop Top, gashing open his abdomen and tossing him off the precipice. The final scene shows her in extreme long shot, in brilliant sunshine, waving the buzzing chainsaw triumphantly overhead. (It is a scene we are invited to compare to the final scene of Texas Chain Saw I, in which the wounded Leatherface is shown in long shot at dawn, staggering after the pickup on the highway waving his chainsaw crazily over his head.) In Part One the Final Girl, for all her survivor pluck, is, like Red Riding Hood, saved through male agency. In Part Two, however, there is no male agency; the figure so desig- nated, the Texas Ranger, proves so utterly ineffectual that he cannot save himself, much less the girl. The comic ineptitude and failure of would-be "woodsmen" is a repeated theme in the later slasher films. In Slumber Party Massacre, the role is played by a woman-though a butch one (the girls' basketball coach). She comes to the slumber party's rescue only to fall victim to the drill herself. But to focus on just who brings the killer down, the Final Girl or a male rescuer, is-as the easy alternation between the two patterns would seem to suggest-to miss the point. The last moment of the Final Girl sequence is finally a footnote to what went before-to the quality of the Final Girl's fight, and more generally to the qualities of character that enable her, of all the characters, to survive what has come to seem unsurvivable.

The Final Girl sequence too is prefigured, if only rudimentarily, in Psycho's final scenes, in which Lila (Marion's sister) is caught reconnoitering in the Bates mansion and nearly killed. Sam (Marion's boyfriend) detains Norman at the motel while Lila snoops about (taking note of Norman's toys). When she perceives Nor- man's approach, she flees to the basement. Here she encounters the treated corpse of Mrs. Bates and begins screaming in horror. Norman bursts in and is about to strike when Sam enters and grabs him from behind. Like her generic sisters, then, Lila is the spunky inquirer into the Terrible Place: the one who first grasps, however dimly, the past and present danger, the one who looks death in the face, and the one who survives the murderer's last stab.

There the correspondences end, however. The Psycho scene turns, after all, on the revelation of Norman's psychotic identity, not on Lila as a character-she enters the film midway and is sketchily drawn-and still less on her self-defense. The Final Girl of the slasher film is presented from the outset as the main char- acter. The practiced viewer distinguishes her from her friends minutes into the film. She is the girl scout, the bookworm, the mechanic. Unlike her girlfriends (and Marion Crane) she is not sexually active. Laurie (Halloween) is teased because of her fears about dating, and Marti (Hell Night) explains to the boy with whom she finds herself sharing a room that they will have separate beds. Although Stretch (Texas Chain Saw II) is hardly virginal, she is not available, either; early in the film she pointedly turns down a date, and we are given to understand that she is, for the present, unattached and even lonely. So too Stevie of Carpenter's The Fog, like Stretch a disk jockey; divorced mother and a newcomer in town, she is unattached and lonely but declines male attention. The Final Girl is also watchful to the point of paranoia; small signs of danger that her friends ignore she takes in and turns over. Above all she is intelligent and resourceful in extreme situations. Thus Laurie even at her most desperate, cornered in a closet, has the wit to grab a hanger from the rack and bend it into a weapon; Marti can hot-wire her getaway car, the killer in pursuit; and the psych major of Friday the Thirteenth II, on seeing the enshrined head of Mrs. Voorhees, can stop Jason in his tracks by assuming a stridently maternal voice. Finally, although she is always smaller and weaker than the killer, she grapples with him energetically and convincingly.

With the introduction of the Final Girl, then, the Psycho formula is radically altered. It is not merely a question of enlarging the figure of Lila but of absorbing into her role, in varying degrees, the functions of Arbogast (investigator) and Sam (rescuer) and restructuring the narrative action from beginning to end around her progress in relation to the killer. In other words, Psycho's detective plot, revolving around a revelation, yields in the modern slasher film to a hero plot, revolving around the main character's struggle with and eventual triumph over evil. But for the femaleness, however qualified, of that main character, the story is a standard one of tale and epic.

Shock.

One reason that the shower sequence in Psycho has "evoked more study, elicited more comment, and generated more shot-for-shot analysis from a technical viewpoint than any other in the history of cinema" is that it suggests so much but shows so little.36 Of the forty-odd shots in as many seconds that figure the murder, only a single fleeting one actually shows the body being stabbed. The others present us with a rapid-fire concatenation of images of the knife-wielding hand, parts of Marion, parts of the shower, and finally the bloody water as it swirls down the drain. The horror resides less in the actual images than in their sum- mary implication.

Although Hitchcock is hardly the first director to prefer the oblique rendition of physical violence, he may, to judge from current examples, be one of the last. For better or worse, the perfection of special effects has made it possible to show maiming and dismemberment in extraordinarily credible detail. The horror genres are the natural repositories of such effects; what can be done is done, and slashers, at the bottom of the category, do it most and worst. Thus we see a head being stepped on so that the eyes pop out, a face being flayed, a decapitation, a hypodermic needle penetrating an eyeball in closeup, and so on.

Hypodermic needle penetrating an eyeball in closeup, and so on. With this new explicitness also comes a new tone. If the horror of Psycho was taken seriously, the "horror" of the slasher films is of a rather more complicated sort. Audiences express uproarious disgust ("gross!") as often as they express fear, and it is clear that the makers of slasher films pursue the combination. More particularly: spectators fall silent while the victim is being stalked, scream out at the first stab, and make loud noises of revulsion at the sight of the bloody stump. The rapid alternation between registers-between something like "real" horror on one hand and a camp, self-parodying Horror on the other-is by now one of the most conspicuous characteristics of the tradition. In its cultivation of inten- tionally outrageous excess, the slasher film intersects with the cult film, a genre devoted to such effects. Just what this self-ironizing relation to taboo signifies, beyond a remarkably competent audience, is unclear-it is yet another aspect of the phenomenon that has lain beyond criticism-but for the time being it stands as a defining characteristic of the lower genres of popular culture.

The Body

On the face of it, the relation between the sexes in slasher films could hardly be clearer. The killer is with few exceptions recognizably human and dis- tinctly male; his fury is unmistakeably sexual in both roots and expression; his victims are mostly women, often sexually free and always young and beautiful ones. Just how essential this victim is to horror is suggested by her historical dura- bility. If the killer has over time been variously figured as shark, fog, gorilla, birds, and stomato, the victim is eternally and prototypically the damsel. Cinema hardly invented the pattern. It has simply given visual expression to the abiding propo- sition that, in Poe's famous formulation, the death of a beautiful woman is the "most poetical topic in the world."37 As slasher director Dario Argento puts it, "I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or a man."38 Brian De Palma elaborates: Women in peril work better in the suspense genre. It all goes back to the Perils of Pauline.... If you have a haunted house and you have a woman walking around with a candelabrum, you fear more for her than you would for a husky man."39 Or Hitchcock, during the filming of The Birds: I always believe in following the advice of the playwright Sardou. He said 'Torture the women!' The trouble today is that we don't torture women enough."40 What the directors do not say, but show, is that "Pauline" is at her very most effective in a state of undress, borne down upon by a blatantly phallic murderer, even gurgling orgasmically as she dies. The case could be made that the slasher films available at a given neighborhood video rental outlet recommend themselves to censorship under the Dworkin-MacKinnon guidelines at least as readily as the hard-core films the next section over, at which that legislation is aimed; for if some victims are men, the argument goes, most are women, and the women are brutalized in ways that come too close to real life for comfort. But what this line of reasoning does not take into account is the figure of the Final Girl. Because slashers lie for all practical purposes beyond the purview of legitimate criticism, and to the extent that they have been reviewed at all have been reviewed on an individual basis, the phenomenon of the female victim-hero has scarcely been acknowledged.

It is, of course, "on the face of it" that most of the public discussion of film takes place-from the Dworkin-MacKinnon legislation to Siskel's and Ebert's reviews to our own talks with friends on leaving the movie house. Underlying that discussion is the assumption that the sexes are what they seem; that screen males represent the Male and screen females the Female; that this identification along gender lines authorizes impulses toward sexual violence in males and encourages impulses toward victimization in females. In part because of the massive authority cinema by nature accords the image, even academic film criticism has been slow- slower than literary criticism-to get beyond appearances. Film may not appro- priate the mind's eye, but it certainly encroaches on it; the gender characteristics of a screen figure are a visible and audible given for the duration of the film. To the extent that the possibility of cross-gender identification has been entertained, it has been in the direction female-with-male. Thus some critics have wondered whether the female viewer, faced with the screen image of a masochistic/narcis- sistic female, might not rather elect to "betray her sex and identify with the mas- culine point of view."'4' The reverse question-whether men might not also, on occasion, elect to betray their sex and identify with screen females-has scarcely been asked, presumably on the assumption that men's interests are well served by the traditional patterns of cinematic representation. Then too there is the matter of the "male gaze." As E. Ann Kaplan sums it up: "Within the film text itself, men gaze at women, who become objects of the gaze; the spectator, in turn, is made to identify with this male gaze, and to objectify the women on the screen; and the camera's original 'gaze' comes into play in the very act of filming."42 But if it is so that all of us, male and female alike, are by these processes "made to" identify with men and "against" women, how are we then to explain the appeal to a largely male audience of a film genre that features a female victim-hero? The slasher film brings us squarely up against a fundamental question of film analysis: where does the literal end and the figurative begin; how do the two levels interact and what is the significance of the particular interaction; and to which, in arriving at a political judgment (as we are inclined to do in the case of low horror and pornography), do we assign priority?

A figurative or functional analysis of the slasher begins with the processes of point of view and identification. The male viewer seeking a male character, even a vicious one, with whom to identify in a sustained way has little to hang on to in the standard example. On the good side, the only viable candidates are the schoolmates or friends of the girls. They are for the most part marginal, unde- veloped characters; more to the point, they tend to die early in the film. If the traditional horror film gave the male spectator a last-minute hero with whom to identify, thereby "indulging his vanity as protector of the helpless female,"43 the slasher eliminates or attenuates that role beyond any such function; indeed, would-be rescuers are not infrequently blown away for their efforts, leaving the girl to fight her own fight. Policemen, fathers, and sheriffs appear only long enough to demonstrate risible incomprehension and incompetence. On the bad side, there is the killer. The killer is often unseen, or barely glimpsed, during the first part of the film, and what we do see, when we finally get a good look, hardly invites immediate or conscious empathy. He is commonly masked, fat, deformed, or dressed as a woman. Or "he" is a woman: woe to the viewer of Friday the Thir- teenth I who identifies with the male killer only to discover, in the film's final sequences, that he was not a man at all but a middle-aged woman. In either case, the killer is himself eventually killed or otherwise evacuated from the narrative. No male character of any stature lives to tell the tale. The one character of stature who does live to tell the tale is of course female. The Final Girl is introduced at the beginning and is the only character to be developed in any psychological detail. We understand immediately from the attention paid it that hers is the main story line. She is intelligent, watchful, level- headed; the first character to sense something amiss and the only one to deduce from the accumulating evidence the patterns and extent of the threat; the only one, in other words, whose perspective approaches our own privileged under- standing of the situation. We register her horror as she stumbles on the corpses of her friends; her paralysis in the face of death duplicates those moments of the universal nightmare experience on which horror frankly trades. When she downs the killer, we are triumphant. She is by any measure the slasher film's hero. This is not to say that our attachment to her is exclusive and unremitting, only that it adds up, and that in the closing sequence it is very close to absolute.

An analysis of the camerawork bears this out. Much is made of the use of the I-camera to represent the killer's point of view. In these passages-they are usu- ally few and brief, but powerful-we see through his eyes and (on the sound track) hear his breathing and heartbeat. His and our vision is partly obscured by bushes or windowblinds in the foreground. By such means we are forced, the argument goes, to identify with the killer. In fact, however, the relation between camera point of view and the processes of viewer identification are poorly under- stood; the fact that Steven Spielberg can stage an attack inJaws from the shark's point of view (underwater, rushing upward toward the swimmer's flailing legs) or Hitchcock an attack in The Birds from the birds-eye perspective (from the sky, as they gather to swoop down on the streets of Bodega Bay) would seem to suggest either that the viewer's identificatory powers are unbelievably elastic or that point- of-view shots can sometimes be pro forma.44 But let us for the moment accept the equation point of view = identification. 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 story line as well as camera position. By the end, point of view is hers: we are in the closet with her, watching with her eyes the knife blade stab through the door; in the room with her as the killer breaks through the window and grabs at her; in the car with her as the killer stabs through the convertible top, and so on. With her, we become if not the killer of the killer then the agent of his expulsion from the narrative vision. If, during the film's course, we shifted our sympathies back and forth, and dealt them out to other characters along the way, we belong in the end to the Final Girl; there is no alternative. When Stretch eviscerates Chop Top at the end of Texas Chain Saw II, she is literally the only character left alive, on either side.

Audience response ratifies this design. Observers unanimously stress the readiness of the "live" audience to switch sympathies in midstream, siding now with the killer and now, and finally, with the Final Girl. As Schoell, whose book on shocker films wrestles with its own monster, "the feminists," puts it:

Social critics make much of the fact that male audience members cheer on the misogynous misfits in these movies as they rape, plunder, and murder their screaming, writhing female victims. Since these same critics walk out of the moviehouse in disgust long before the movie is over, they don't realize that these same men cheer on (with renewed enthusiasm, in fact) the heroines, who are often as strong, sexy, and independent as the [earlier] victims, as they blow away the killer with a shotgun or get him between the eyes with a machete. All of these men are said to be identifying with the maniac, but they enjoy his death throes the most of all, and applaud the heroine with admiration.45

What filmmakers seem to know better than film critics is that gender is less a wall than a permeable membrane.46

No one who has read "Red Riding Hood" to a small boy or participated in a viewing of, say, Deliverance (an all-male story that women find as gripping as men) or, more recently, Alien and Aliens, with whose space-age female Rambo, herself a Final Girl, male viewers seem to engage with ease, can doubt the phenomenon of cross-gender identification.47 This fluidity of engaged perspective is in keeping with the universal claims of the psychoanalytic model: the threat function and the victim function coexist in the same unconscious, regardless of anatomical sex. But why, if viewers can identify across gender lines and if the root experience of horror is sex blind, are the screen sexes not interchangeable? Why not more and better female killers, and why (in light of the maleness of the majority audience) not Pauls as well as Paulines? The fact that horror film so stubbornly genders the killer male and the principal victim female would seem to suggest that represen- tation itself is at issue-that the sensation of bodily fright derives not exclusively from repressed content, as Freud insisted, but also from the bodily manifestations of that content.

Nor is the gender of the principals as straightforward as it first seems. The killer's phallic purpose, as he thrusts his drill or knife into the trembling bodies of young women, is unmistakeable. At the same time, however, his masculinity is severely qualified: he ranges from the virginal or sexually inert to the transvestite or transsexual, is spiritually divided ("the mother half of his mind") or even equipped with vulva and vagina. Although the killer of God Told Me To is repre- sented and taken as a male in the film text, he is revealed, by the doctor who delivered him, to have been sexually ambiguous from birth: "I truly could not tell whether that child was male or female; it was as if the sexual gender had not been determined . . . as if it were being developed."48 In this respect, slasher killers have much in common with the monsters of classic horror-monsters who, in Linda Williams's formulation, represent not just "an eruption of the normally repressed animal sexual energy of the civilized male" but also the "power and potency of a non-phallic sexuality." To the extent that the monster is constructed as feminine, the horror film thus expresses female desire only to show how mon- strous it iS.49 The intention is manifest in Aliens, in which the Final Girl, Ripley, is pitted in the climactic scene against the most terrifying "alien" of all: an egg-laying Mother.

Nor can we help noticing the "intrauterine" quality of the Terrible Place, dark and often damp, in which the killer lives or lurks and whence he stages his most terrifying attacks. "It often happens," Freud wrote, "that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place, however, is an entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning.... In this case too then, the unheimlich is what once was heimisch, familiar; the prefix 'un' ['un-'] is the token of repression."50 It is the exceptional film that does not mark as significant the moment that the killer leaps out of the dark recesses of a corridor or cavern at the trespassing victim, usually the Final Girl. Long after the other particulars have faded, the viewer will remember the images of Amy assaulted from the dark halls of a morgue (He Knows You're Alone), Sally or Stretch facing dismemberment in the ghastly dining room or under- ground labyrinth of the slaughterhouse family (Texas Chain Saw I-II), or Melanie trapped in the attic as the savage birds close in (The Birds). In such scenes of convergence the Other is at its bisexual mightiest, the victim at her tiniest, and the component of sadomasochism at its most blatant.

The gender of the Final Girl is likewise compromised from the outset by her masculine interests, her inevitable sexual reluctance (penetration, it seems, con- structs the female), her apartness from other girls, sometimes her name. At the level of the cinematic apparatus, her unfemininity is signaled clearly by her exer- cise of the "active investigating gaze" normally reserved for males and hideously punished in females when they assume it themselves; tentatively at first and then aggressively, the Final Girl looks for the killer, even tracking him to his forest hut or his underground labyrinth, and then at him, therewith bringing him, often for the first time, into our vision as well.5' When, in the final scene, she stops screaming, looks at the killer, and reaches for the knife (sledge hammer, scalpel, gun, machete, hanger, knitting needle, chainsaw), she addresses the killer on his own terms. To the critics' objection that Halloween in effect punished female sex- uality, director John Carpenter responded:

They [the critics] completely missed the boat there, I think. Because if you turn it around, the one girl who is the most sexually uptight just keeps stabbing this guy with a long knife. She's the most sexually frustrated. She's the one that killed him. Not because she's a virgin, but because all that repressed energy starts coming out. She uses all those phallic symbols on the guy.... She and the killer have a certain link: sexual repression.52

For all its perversity, Carpenter's remark does underscore the sense of affinity, even recognition, that attends the final encounter. But the "certain link" that puts killer and Final Girl on terms, at least briefly, is more than "sexual repression." It is also a shared masculinity, materialized in "all those phallic symbols"-and it is also a shared femininity, materialized in what comes next (and what Carpenter, perhaps significantly, fails to mention): the castration, literal or symbolic, of the killer at her hands. His eyes may be put out, his hand severed, his body impaled or shot, his belly gashed, or his genitals sliced away or bitten off. The Final Girl has not just manned herself; she specifically unmans an oppressor whose mas- culinity was in question to begin with. By the time the drama has played itself out, darkness yields to light (often as day breaks) and the close quarters of the barn (closet, elevator, attic, basement) give way to the open expanse of the yard (field, road, lakescape, cliff). With the Final Girl's appropriation of "all those phallic symbols" comes the quelling, the dispelling, of the "uterine" threat as well. Con- sider again the paradigmatic ending of Texas Chain Saw II. From the underground labyrinth, murky and bloody, in which she faced saw, knife, and hammer, Stretch escapes through a culvert into the open air. She clambers up the jutting rock and with a chainsaw takes her stand. When her last assailant comes at her, she slashes open his lower abdomen-the sexual symbolism is all too clear-and flings him off the cliff. Again, the final scene shows her in extreme long shot, standing on the pinnacle, drenched in sunlight, buzzing chainsaw held overhead.

The tale would indeed seem to be one of sex and parents. The patently erotic threat is easily seen as the materialized projection of the dreamer's (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. Carpenter's equation of the Final Girl with the killer has more than a grain of truth. The killers of Psycho, The Eyes of Laura Mars, Friday the Thirteenth II-VI, and Cruising, among others, are explicitly figured as sons in the psychosexual grip of their mothers (or fathers, in the case of Cruising). The difference is between past and present and between failure and success. The Final Girl enacts in the present, and successfully, the parenticidal struggle that the killer himself enacted unsuccessfully in his own past-a past that constitutes the film's backstory. She is what the killer once was; he is what she could become should she fail in her battle for sexual selfhood. "You got a-choice, boy," says the tyrannical father of Leatherface in Texas Chain Saw II, "sex or the saw; you never know about sex, but the saw-the saw is the family."

But the tale is no less one of maleness. If the early experience of the oedipal drama can be-is perhaps ideally-enacted in female form, the achievement of full adulthood requires the assumption and, apparently, brutal employment of the phallus. The helpless child is gendered feminine; the autonomous adult or subject is gendered masculine; the passage from childhood to adulthood entails a shift from feminine to masculine. It is the male killer's tragedy that his incipient femininity is not reversed but completed (castration) and the Final Girl's victory that her incipient masculinity is not thwarted but realized (phallicization). When De Palma says that female frailty is a predicate of the suspense genre, he pro- poses, in effect, that the lack of the phallus, for Lacan the privileged signifier of the symbolic order of culture, is itself simply horrifying, at least in the mind of the male observer. Where pornography (the argument goes) resolves that lack through a process of fetishization that allows a breast or leg or whole body to stand in for the missing member, the slasher film resolves it either through elim- inating the woman (earlier victims) or reconstituting her as masculine (Final Girl). The moment at which the Final Girl is effectively phallicized is the moment that the plot halts and horror ceases. Day breaks, and the community returns to its normal order.

Casting psychoanalytic verities in female form has a venerable cinematic his- tory. Ingmar Bergman has made a career of it, and Woody Allen shows signs following his lead. One immediate and practical advantage, by now presumably unconscious on the part of makers as well as viewers, has to do with a prees- tablished cinematic "language" for capturing the moves and moods of the female body and face. The cinematic gaze, we are told, is male, and just as that gaze "knows" how to fetishize the female form in pornography (in a way that it does not "know" how to fetishize the male form),53 so it "knows," in horror, how to track a woman ascending a staircase in a scary house and how to study her face from an angle above as she first hears the killer's footfall. A set of conventions we now take for granted simply "sees" males and females differently.

To this cinematic habit may be added the broader range of emotional expres- sion traditionally allowed women. Angry displays of force may belong to the male, but crying, cowering, screaming, fainting, trembling, begging for mercy belong to the female. Abject terror, in short, is gendered feminine, and the more con- cerned a given film with that condition-and it is the essence of modern horror- the more likely the femaleness of the victim. It is no accident that male victims in slasher films are killed swiftly or offscreen, and that prolonged struggles, in which the victim has time to contemplate her imminent destruction, inevitably figure females. Only when one encounters the rare expression of abject terror on the part of a male (as in I Spit on Your Grave) does one apprehend the full extent of the cinematic double standard in such matters.54

It is also the case that gender displacement can provide a kind of identifica- tory buffer, an emotional remove, that permits the majority audience to explore taboo subjects in the relative safety of vicariousness. Just as Bergman came to realize that he could explore castration anxiety more freely via depictions of hurt female bodies (witness the genital mutilation of Karin in Cries and Whispers), so the makers of slasher films seem to know that sadomasochistic incest fantasies sit more easily with the male viewer when the visible player is female. It is one thing for that viewer to hear the psychiatrist intone at the end of Psycho that Norman as a boy (in the backstory) was abnormally attached to his mother; it would be quite another to see that attachment dramatized in the present, to experience in nightmare form the elaboration of Norman's (the viewer's own) fears and desires. If the former is playable in male form, the latter, it seems, is not.

The Final Girl is, on reflection, a congenial double for the adolescent male. She is feminine enough to act out in a gratifying way, a way unapproved for adult males, the terrors and masochistic pleasures of the underlying fantasy, but not so feminine as to disturb the structures of male competence and sexuality. Her sexual inactivity, in this reading, becomes all but inevitable; the male viewer may be willing to enter into the vicarious experience of defending himself from the possibility of symbolic penetration on the part of the killer, but real vaginal pen- etration on the diegetic level is evidently more femaleness than he can bear. The question then arises whether the Final Girls of slasher films-Stretch, Stevie, Marti, Will, Terry, Laurie, and Ripley-are not boyish for the same reason that the female "victims" in Victorian flagellation literature-"Georgy," "Willy"-are boyish: because they are transformed males. The transformation, Steven Marcus writes, "is itself both a defense against and a disavowal of the fantasy it is simul- taneously expressing-namely, that a "boy is being beaten-that is, loved-by another man."55 What is represented as male-on-female violence, in short, is fig- uratively speaking male-on-male sex. For Marcus, the literary picture of flagel- lation, in which girls are beaten, is utterly belied by the descriptions (in My Secret Life) of real-life episodes in which the persons being beaten are not girls at all but "gentlemen" dressed in women's clothes ("He had a woman's dress on tucked up to his waist, showing his naked rump and thighs.... On his head was a woman's cap tied carefully round his face to hide whiskers") and whipped by prostitutes. Reality, Marcus writes, "puts the literature of flagellation out of the running ... by showing how that literature is a completely distorted and idealized version of what actually happens."56 Applied to the slasher film, this logic reads the female- ness of the Final Girl (at least up to the point of her transformation) and indeed of the women victims in general as only apparent, the artifact of heterosexual deflection. It may be through the female body that the body of the audience is sensationalized, but the sensation is an entirely male affair.

At least one director, Hitchcock, explicitly located thrill in the equation victim = audience. So we judge from his marginal jottings in the shooting instructions for the shower scene in Psycho: "The slashing. An impression of a knife slashing, as if tearing at the very screen, ripping the film."57 Notjust the body of Marion is to be ruptured, but also the body on the other side of the film and screen: our witnessing body. As Marion is to Norman, the audience of Psycho is to Hitchcock; as the audiences of horror film in general are to the directors of those films, female is to male. Hitchcock's "torture the women" then means, simply, torture the audience. De Palma's remarks about female frailty likewise contemplate a male-on-"female" relationship between director and viewer. Cinefantastic horror, in short, succeeds in the production of sensation to more or less the degree that it succeeds in incorporating its spectators as "feminine" and then violating that body-which recoils, shudders, cries out collectively-in ways otherwise imagin- able, for males, only in nightmare. The equation is nowhere more plainly put than in David Cronenberg's Videodrome. Here the threat is a mind-destroying video signal and the victims television viewers. Despite the (male) hero's efforts to defend his mental (and physical) integrity, a deep, vagina-like gash appears on his lower abdomen. Says the media conspirator as he thrusts a videocassette into the victim's gaping wound, "You must open yourself completely to this."

If the slasher film is "on the face of it" a genre with at least a strong female presence, it is in these figurative readings a thoroughly strong male exercise, one that finally has very little to do with femaleness and very much to do with phal- locentrism. Figuratively seen, the Final Girl is a male surrogate in things oedipal, a homoerotic stand-in, the audience incorporate; to the extent she "means" girl at all, it is only for purposes of signifying phallic lack, and even that meaning is nullified in the final scenes. Our initial question-how to square a female victim- hero with a largely male audience-is not so much answered as it is obviated in these readings. The Final Girl is (apparently) female not despite the maleness of the audience, but precisely because of it. The discourse is wholly masculine, and females figure in it only insofar as they "read" some aspect of male experience. To applaud the Final Girl as a feminist development, as some reviews of Aliens have done with Ripley, is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly gro- tesque expression of wishful thinking.58 She is simply an agreed-upon fiction, and the male viewer's use of her as a vehicle for his own sadomasochistic fantasies an act of perhaps timeless dishonesty.

For all their immediate appeal, these figurative readings loosen as many ends as they tie together. The audience, we have said, is predominantly male; but what about the women in it? Do we dismiss them as male-identified and account for their experience as an "immasculated" act of collusion with the oppressor?59 This is a strong judgment to apply to large numbers of women; for while it may be that the audience for slasher films is mainly male, that does not mean that there are not also many female viewers who actively like such films, and of course there are also women, however few, who script, direct, and produce them. These facts alone oblige us at least to consider the possibility that female fans find a meaning in the text and image of these films that is less inimical to their own interests than the figurative analysis would have us believe. Or should we conclude that males and females read these films differently in some fundamental sense? Do females respond to the text (the literal) and males the subtext (the figurative)?60

Some such notion of differential understanding underlies the homoerotic reading. The silent presupposition of that reading is that male identification with the female as female cannot be, and that the male viewer/reader who adjoins feminine experience does so only by homosexual conversion. But does female identification with male experience then similarly indicate a lesbian conversion? Or are the processes of patriarchy so one-way that the female can identify with the male directly, but the male can identify with the female only by transsexu- alizing her? Does the Final Girl mean "girl" to her female viewers and "boy" to her male viewers? If her masculine features qualify her as a transformed boy, do not the feminine features of the killer qualify him as a transformed woman (in which case the homoerotic reading can be maintained only by defining that "woman" as phallic and retransforming her into a male)? Striking though it is, the analogy between the Victorian flagellation story's Georgy and the slasher film's Stretch falters at the moment that Stretch--turns on her assailant and unmans him. Are we to suppose that a homoerotic beating fantasy suddenly yields to what folklorists call a "lack-liquidated" fantasy? Further: is it simple coincidence that this combination tale-trials, then triumph-bears such a striking resemblance to the classic (male) hero story? Does the standard hero story fea- turing an anatomical female "mean" differently from one featuring an anatomi- cal male?

As Marcus perceived, the relationship between the Georgy stories of flagel- lation literature and the real-life anecdote of the Victorian gentleman is a mar- velously telling one. In his view, the maleness of the latter must prove the essential or functional maleness of the former. What his analysis does not come to full grips with, however, is the clothing the gentleman wears-not that of a child, as Mar- cus's "childish" reading of the scene contemplates, but explicitly that of a woman.6' These women's clothes can of course be understood, within the terms of the homoerotic interpretation, as a last-ditch effort on the part of the gentleman to dissociate himself from the (incestuous) homosexuality implicit in his favored sexual practice. But can they not just as well, and far more economi- cally, be explained as part and parcel of a fantasy of literal femaleness? By the same token, cannot the femaleness of the gentleman's literary representatives- the girls of the flagellation stories-be understood as the obvious, even necessary, extension of that man's dress and cap? The same dress and cap, I suggest, haunt the margins of the slasher film. This is not to deny the deflective convenience, for the male spectator (and filmmaker), of a female victim-hero in a context so fraught with taboo; it is only to suggest that the femaleness of that character is also conditioned by a kind of imaginative curiosity about the feminine in and of itself.

So too the psychoanalytic case. These films do indeed seem to pit the child in a struggle, at once terrifying and attractive, with the parental Other, and it is a rare example that does not directly thematize parent-child relations. But if Freud stressed the maternal source of the unheimlich, the Other of our films is decidedly androgynous: female/feminine in aspects of character and place (the "intra- uterine" locale) but male in anatomy. Conventional logic may interpret the killer as the phallic mother of the transformed boy (the Final Girl), but the text itself does not compel such a reading. On the contrary, the text at every level presents us with hermaphroditic constructions-constructions that draw attention to themselves and demand to be taken on their own terms.

For if we define the Final Girl as nothing more than a figurative male, what do we then make of the context of the spectacular gender play in which she is emphatically situated? In his essay on the uncanny, Freud rejected out of hand Jentsch's theory that the experience of horror proceeds from intellectual uncer- tainty (curiosity?)-feelings of confusion, induced by an author or a coincidence, about who, what, and where one is.62 One wonders, however, whether Freud would have been quite so dismissive if, instead of the mixed materials he used as evidence, he were presented with a coherent story corpus-forty slashers, say- in which the themes of incest and separation were relentlessly played out by a female character, and further in which gender identity was repeatedly thematized as an issue in and of itself. For although the factors we have considered thus far- the conventions of the male gaze, the feminine constitution of abject terror, the value for the male viewer of emotional distance from the taboos in question, the special horror that may inhere, for the male audience, in phallic lack, the homo- erotic deflection-go a long way in explaining why it is we have Pauline rather than Paul as our victim-hero, they do not finally account for our strong sense that gender is simply being played with, and that part of the thrill lies precisely in the resulting "intellectual uncertainty" of sexual identity.

The "play of pronoun function" that underlies and defines the cinefantastic is nowhere more richly manifested than in the slasher; if the genre has an aes- thetic base, it is exactly that of a visual identity game. Consider, for example, the by now standard habit of letting us view the action in the first person long before revealing who or what the first person is. In the opening sequence of Halloween I, "we" are belatedly revealed to ourselves, after committing a murder in the cine- matic first person, as a six-year-old boy. The surprise is often within gender, but it is also, in a striking number of cases, across gender. Again, Friday the Thirteenth I, in which "we" stalk and kill a number of teenagers over the course of an hour of screen time without even knowing who "we" are; we are invited, by conven- tional expectation and by glimpses of "our" own bodily parts-a heavily booted foot, a roughly gloved hand-to suppose that "we" are male, but "we" are revealed, at film's end, as a woman. If this is the most dramatic case of pulling out the gender rug, it is by no means the only one. In Dressed to Kill, we are led to believe, again by means of glimpses, that "we" are female-only to discover, in the denouement, that "we" are a male in drag. In Psycho, the dame we glimpse holding the knife with a "visible virility quite obscene in an old lady" is later revealed, after additional gender teasing, to be Norman in his mother's clothes.63 Psycho II plays much the same game. Cruising (in which, not accidentally, trans- vestites play a prominent role) adjusts the terms along heterosexual/homosexual lines. The tease here is whether the originally straight detective assigned to the string of murders in a gay community does or does not succumb to his assumed homosexual identity; the camerawork leaves us increasingly uncertain as to his (our) sexual inclinations, not to speak of his (our) complicity in the crimes. Even at film's end we are not sure who "we" were during several of the first-person sequences.64

The gender-identity game, in short, is too patterned and too pervasive in the slasher film to be dismissed as supervenient. It would seem instead to be an inte- gral element of the particular brand of bodily sensation in which the genre trades. Nor is it exclusive to horror. It is directly thematized in comic terms in the recent "gender benders" Tootsie (in which a man passes himself off as a woman) and All of Me (in which a woman is literally introjected into a man and affects his speech, movement, and thought). It is also directly thematized, in the form of bisexual and androgynous figures and relations, in such cult films as Pink Flamingos and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (Some version of it is indeed enacted every few minutes on MTV.) It is further thematized (predictably enough, given their bodily concerns) in such pornographic films as Every Woman Has a Fantasy, in which a man, in order to gain access to a women's group in which sexual fantasies are discussed, dresses and presents himself as a woman. (The degree to which "male" pornography in general relies for its effect on cross-gender identification remains an open question; the proposition makes a certain sense of the obligatory lesbian sequences and the phenomenal success of Behind the Green Door, to pick just two examples.65) All of these films, and others like them, seem to be asking some version of the question: what would it be like to be, or to seem to be, if only temporarily, a woman? Taking exception to the reception of Tootsie as a feminist film, Elaine Showalter argues that the success of "Dorothy Michaels" (the Dustin Hoffman character), as far as both plot and audience are concerned, lies in the veiling of masculine power in feminine costume. Tootsie's cross-dressing, she writes,

is a way of promoting the notion of masculine power while masking it. In psychoanalytic theory, the male transvestite is not a powerless man; according to the psychiatrist Robert Stoller, in Sex and Gender, he is a "phallic woman" who can tell himself that "he is, or with practice will become, a better woman than a biological female if he chooses to do so." When it is safe or necessary, the transvestite "gets great pleasure in revealing that he is a male- woman.... The pleasure in tricking the unsuspecting into thinking he is a woman, and then revealing his maleness (e.g., by suddenly dropping his voice) is not so much erotic as it is proof that there is such a thing as a woman with a penis." Dorothy's effectiveness is the literal equivalent of speaking softly and carrying a big stick.66

By the same literalistic token, then, Stretch's success must lie in the fact that in the end, at least, she "speaks loudly" even though she carries no "stick." Just as "Dorothy's" voice slips serve to remind us that her character really is male, so the Final Girl's "tits and scream" serve more or less continuously to remind us that she really is female-even as, and despite the fact that, she in the end acquits herself "like a man."67 Her chainsaw is thus what "Dorothy Michaels's" skirt is: a figuration of what she does and what she seems, as opposed to-and the films turn on the opposition-what she is. The idea that appearance and behavior do not necessarily indicate sex-indeed, can misindicate sex-is predicated on the understanding that sex is one thing and gender another; in practice, that sex is life, a less-than-interesting given, but that gender is theater. Whatever else it may be, Stretch's waving of the chainsaw is a moment of high drag. Its purpose is not to make us forget that she is a girl but to thrust that fact on us. The moment, it is probably fair to say, is also one that openly mocks the literary/cinematic conven- tions of symbolic representation.

It may be just this theatricalization of gender that makes possible the willing- ness of the male viewer to submit himself to a brand of spectator experience that Hitchcock designated as "feminine" in 1960 and that has become only more so since then. In classic horror, the "feminization" of the audience is intermittent and ceases early. Our relationship with Marion's body in Psycho halts abruptly at the moment of its greatest intensity (slashing, ripping, tearing). The considerable remainder of the film distributes our bruised sympathies among several lesser figures, male and female, in such a way and at such length as to ameliorate the Marion experience and leave us, in the end, more or less recuperated in our (presumed) masculinity. Like Marion, the Final Girl is the designated victim, the incorporation of the audience, the slashing, ripping, and tearing of whose body will cause us to flinch and scream out in our seats. But unlike Marion, she does not die. If Psycho, like other classic horror films, solves the femininity problem by obliterating the female and replacing her with representatives of the masculine order (mostly but not inevitably males), the modern slasher solves it by regen- dering the woman. We are, as an audience, in the end "masculinized" by and through the very figure by and through whom we were earlier "feminized." The same body does for both, and that body is female.

The last point is the crucial one: the same female body does for both. The Final Girl 1) undergoes agonizing trials, and 2) virtually or actually destroys the antagonist and saves herself. By the lights of folk tradition, she is not a heroine, for whom phase 1 consists in being saved by someone else, but a hero, who rises to the occasion and defeats the adversary with his own wit and hands. Part 1 of the story sits well on the female; it is the heart of heroine stories in general (Red Riding Hood, Pauline), and in some figurative sense, in ways we have elaborated in some detail, it is gendered feminine even when played by a male. Odysseus's position, trapped in the cave of the Cyclops, is after all not so different from Pauline's position tied to the tracks or Sally's trapped in the dining room of the slaughterhouse family. The decisive moment, as far as the fixing of gender is concerned, lies in what happens next: those who save themselves are male, and those who are saved by others are female. No matter how "feminine" his experi- ence in phase 1, the traditional hero, if he rises against his adversary and saves himself in phase 2, will be male.

What is remarkable about the slasher film is that it comes close to reversing the priorities. Presumably for the various functional or figurative reasons we have considered in this essay, phase 1 wants a female: on that point all slashers from Psycho on are agreed. Abject fear is still gendered feminine, and the taboo anx- ieties in which slashers trade are still explored more easily via Pauline than Paul. The slippage comes in phase 2. As if in mute deference to a cultural imperative, slasher films from the seventies bring in a last-minute male, even when he is ren- dered supernumerary by the Final Girl's sturdy defense. By 1980, however, the male rescuer is either dismissably marginal or dispensed with altogether; not a few films have him rush to the rescue only to be hacked to bits, leaving the Final Girl to save herself after all. At the moment that the Final Girl becomes her own savior, she becomes a hero; and the moment that she becomes a hero is the moment that the male viewer gives up the last pretense of male identification. Abject terror may still be gendered feminine, but the willingness of one immensely popular current genre to re-represent the hero as an anatomical female would seem to suggest that at least one of the traditional marks of heroism, triumphant self-rescue, is no longer strictly gendered masculine.

So too the cinematic apparatus. The classic split between "spectacle and nar- rative," which "supposes the man's role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen," is at least unsettled in the slasher film.68 When the Final Girl (in films like Hell Night, Texas Chain Saw II, and even Splatter University) assumes the "active investigating gaze," she exactly reverses the look, making a spectacle of the killer and a spectator of herself. Again, it is through the killer's eyes (I-camera) that we saw the Final Girl at the beginning of the film, and through the Final Girl's eyes that we see the killer, often for the first time with any clarity, toward the end. The gaze becomes, at least for a while, female. More to the point, the female exercise of scopic control results not in her annihilation, in the manner of classic cinema, but in her triumph; indeed, her triumph depends on her assumption of the gaze. It is no surprise, in light of these developments, that the Final Girl should show signs of boyishness. Her symbolic phallicization, in the last scenes, may or may not proceed at root from the horror of lack on the part of audience and maker. But it certainly proceeds from the need to bring her in line with the epic laws of Western narrative tradition-the very unanimity of which bears witness to the historical importance, in popular culture, of the literal representation of heroism in male form-and it proceeds no less from the need to render the reallocated gaze intelligible to an audience conditioned by the dom- inant cinematic apparatus.

It is worth noting that the higher genres of horror have for the most part resisted such developments. The idea of a female who outsmarts, much less out- fights-or outgazes-her assailant is unthinkable in the films of De Palma and Hitchcock. Although the slasher film's victims may be sexual teases, they are not in addition simple-minded, scheming, physically incompetent, and morally defi- cient in the manner of these filmmakers' female victims. And however revolting their special effects and sexualized their violence, few slasher murders approach the level of voluptuous sadism that attends the destruction of women in De Palma's films. For reasons on which we can only speculate, femininity is more conventionally elaborated and inexorably punished, and in an emphatically mas- culine environment, in the higher forms-the forms that are written up, and not by Joe Bob Briggs.

That the slasher film speaks deeply and obsessively to male anxieties and desires seems clear-if nothing else from the maleness of the majority audience. And yet these are texts in which the categories masculine and feminine, tradi- tionally embodied in male and female, are collapsed into one and the same char- acter-a character who is anatomically female and one whose point of view the spectator is unambiguously invited, by the usual set of literary-structural and cin- ematic conventions, to share. The willingness and even eagerness (so we judge from these films' enormous popularity) of the male viewer to throw in his emo- tional lot, if only temporarily, with not only a woman but a woman in fear and pain, at least in the first instance, would seem to suggest that he has a vicarious stake in that fear and pain. If it is also the case that the act of horror spectatorship is itself registered as a "feminine" experience-that the shock effects induce bodily sensations in the viewer answering the fear and pain of the screen victim- the charge of masochism is underlined. This is not to say that the male viewer does not also have a stake in the sadistic side; narrative structure, cinematic pro- cedures, and audience response all indicate that he shifts back and forth with ease. It is only to suggest that in the Final Girl sequence his empathy with what the films define as the female posture is fully engaged, and further, because this sequence is inevitably the central one in any given film, that the viewing experi- ence hinges on the emotional assumption of the feminine posture. Kaja Sil- verman takes it a step further: "I will hazard the generalization that it is always the victim-the figure who occupies the passive position-who is really the focus of attention, and whose subjugation the subject (whether male or female) expe- riences as a pleasurable repetition from his/her own story," she writes. "Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the fascination of the sadistic point of view is merely that it provides the best vantage point from which to watch the masochistic story unfold."69

The slasher is hardly the first genre in the literary and visual arts to invite identification with the female; one cannot help wondering more generally whether the historical maintenance of images of women in fear and pain does not have more to do with male vicarism that is commonly acknowledged. What distinguishes the slasher, however, is the absence or untenability of alternative perspectives and hence the exposed quality of the invitation. As a survey of the tradition shows, this has not always been the case. The stages of the Final Girl's evolution-her piecemeal absorption of functions previously represented in males-can be located in the years following 1978. The fact that the typical patrons of these films are the sons of marriages contracted in the 1960s or even early seventies leads us to speculate that the dire claims of that era-that the women's movement, the entry of women into the workplace, and the rise of divorce and woman-headed families would yield massive gender confusion in the next generation-were not entirely wrong. We may prefer, in the eighties, to speak of the cult of androgyny, but the point is roughly the same. The fact that we have in the killer a feminine male and in the main character a masculine female-parent and Everyteen, respectively-would seem, especially in the latter case, to suggest a loosening of the categories, or at least of the equation sex = gender. It is not that these films show us gender and sex in free variation; it is that they fix on the irregular combinations, of which the combination masculine female repeatedly prevails over the combination feminine male. The fact that masculine males (boyfriends, fathers, would-be rescuers) are regularly dismissed through ridicule or death or both would seem to suggest that it is not masculinity per se that is being privileged, but masculinity in conjunction with a female body-indeed, as the term victim-hero contemplates, masculinity in conjunction with femininity. For if "masculine" describes the Final Girl some of the time, and in some of her more theatrical moments, it does not do justice to the sense of her character as a whole. She alternates between registers from the outset; before her final struggle she endures the deepest throes of "femininity"; and even during that final struggle she is now weak and now strong, now flees the killer and now charges him, now stabs and is stabbed, now cries out in fear and now shouts in anger. She is a physical female and a characterological androgyne: like her name, not masculine but either/or, both, ambiguous.70

Robin Wood speaks of the sense that horror, for him the by-product of cultural crisis and disintegration, is "currently the most important of all American [film] genres and perhaps the most progressive, even in its overt nihilism.' Like- wise Vale and Juno say of the "incredibly strange films," mostly low-budget horror, that their volume surveys: "They often present unpopular-even rad- ical-views addressing the social, political, racial, or sexual inequities, hypocrisy in religion or government."72 And Tania Modleski rests her case against the stan- dard critique of mass culture (stemming from the Frankfurt School) squarely on the evidence of the slasher, which does not propose a spurious harmony; does not promote the "specious good" (but indeed often exposes and attacks it); does not ply the mechanisms of identification, narrative continuity, and closure to provide the sort of narrative pleasure constitutive of the dominant ideology.73 One is deeply reluctant to make progressive claims for a body of cinema as spectacularly nasty toward women as the slasher film is, but the fact is that the slasher does, in its own perverse way and for better or worse, constitute a visible adjustment in the terms of gender representation. That it is an adjustment largely on the male side, appearing at the furthest possible remove from the quarters of theory and showing signs of trickling upwards, is of no small interest.

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