SamKeeper

@SamKeeper

Then Eve, Being A Force

Laughed At Their Decision

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SamKeeper
@SamKeeper
Video-Game-King
@Video-Game-King
SamKeeper
@SamKeeper

ok is "don't have sex if you want to survive a horror movie" a real thing

or is that just something they said in Scream that everyone decided to repeat? because like, it's, only sort of true at best of a lot of the slashers I've watched so far? and yet it's repeated as this absolute sociological insight about how "unfeminist" horror movies or at least slasher films were before a certain deconstructive period. people who have sex die in Friday 13th. so do a bunch of people who don't! being "pure" doesn't save you and doesn't even let you be the main character because those movies don't have a lot of ideas of their own so keep returning to the Psycho Main Character Switcheroo trick. it's... sort of true of Halloween I guess? Poltergeist is a bit of a different breed but the characters not only have a visible positive sex life they even smoke weed while they fuck, it's charming as hell. meanwhile Texas Chainsaw is more concerned with amassing layers and layers of Awful Vibes. I haven't seen many Nightmares on Elm Street and there's some stuff to unpack about the second one in particular (watch Scream, Queen!, it's a good documentary). but like... over the last few years I've watched a LOT of horror movies from a LOT of periods and I'm struggling to find anything that fits this dynamic that everyone seems to agree is just "how horror movies were".

if nothing else I feel like maybe some greater precision is called for here

Video-Game-King
@Video-Game-King

Tangentially related:

I'm reminded of that one joke from Ralph Breaks the Internet whose punchline is, "Vanellope isn't like those other Disney princesses - meek, traditionally feminine, waiting for a prince to come along to save her. She's a strong, independent woman six year old girl."

Putting aside the fact that she kinda does need a prince to initiate her arc in the first movie, half those fucking princesses were themselves responses to the exact same problem Ralph Breaks the Internet reduces them to. Merida isn't conventionally attractive. Jasmine sneaks out of the palace so she can live her own life. Ariel wants to go to the surface world because she's interested in the surface world itself, separate from her attraction to Prince Eric. Belle is an intellectual woman who goes out to rescue her father even when the town chauvinist won't. Don't get me started on Mulan.

But because Disney needs to sell moviegoers the idea that this Disney heroine represents significant progress compared to past Disney heroines (while also continuing to sell us that same ideal they've supposedly refuted; don't think about it too hard), all those other characters get flattened out into The Disney Princess™, and this heroine is represented as an explicit rejection of them, IE a tomboy whose rejection of conventional femininity empowers her. The irony, of course, is that opposing femininity to empowerment represents, if anything, a regression from those other characters.

SamKeeper
@SamKeeper

oh this kind of move drives me up the wall! like people portraying the MCU or Star Wars as these ultra diverse franchises that are saving hollywood action movies from the evil white male film bros, as though Disney hasn't dominated culture for the last decade with mediocre white dudes named Chris, and everything from Blade to Kill Bill just doesn't count for some reason.

and I guess the Elevated Horror moment can feel a bit similar. like, oh our horror films are About Things now and have Thoughts about Issues. like... as opposed to what, Night of the Living Dead or Romero's other Dead movies? Videodrome? Possession? Godzilla??

it can all start to feel very "Bang! Pow! Comics aren't just for kids anymore!"

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Video-Game-King
@Video-Game-King

It depends on what you mean by "inception." While the identification of this cliché dates back to Men, Women, and Chainsaws (published in 1992), the author details many more horror film clichés besides this, and the bones for all of them are definitely there in Psycho, which is where she begins her analysis anyway. Other clichés include the killer as a hypermasculinized manchild with a bad relationship with his mother (often with a shrine or hidden location detailing the roots of his trauma), and...actually, that's about all I can remember without getting overly broad.

One of the inevitable problems with this analysis is, being written in 1992, it can't account for any of the movies made after 1992, much less its impact on the horror genre as a whole, which had already become heavily commercialized at this point, and would go on to respond to the book's criticisms in that ironic, self-aware meta way. The Cabin in the Woods is especially bad about this, elevating genre to this kind of metaphysical truth. Another problem, though, is that most of the films Clover analyzes date from around the 70s and 80s, which is when the concept of the male gaze still held cache among film critics. Make of that what you will.

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SamKeeper
@SamKeeper

thanks for the book rec.

I'd be curious to read this now as it kinda feels like the films that have actually survived that period as like, worth continuing to revisit more often than not buck these cliches... and a lot of criticism from this period has itself not aged particularly well, being very informed by some of the shakiest aspects of second wave feminist crit. it also feels weird because I've identified more of what I'd call open misogyny in hays code era films, but I suppose that violence and nudity is a lot more eye catching. from that perspective though it does feel significant that she takes up the argument with Psycho rather than a later slasher...

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