This art icle was downloaded by: [ Glasgow Caledonian Universit y] , [ Cat riona Miller] On: 12 May 2014, At : 07: 32 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK International Journal of Jungian Studies Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ rij j 20 You can't escape: inside and outside the ‘slasher’ movie Cat riona Miller a a Social Sciences, Media and Journalism, Glasgow Caledonian Universit y, Glasgow, UK Published online: 08 May 2014. 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Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm sand- condit ions International Journal of Jungian Studies, 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19409052.2014.907820 You can’t escape: inside and outside the ‘slasher’ movie Downloaded by [Glasgow Caledonian University], [Catriona Miller] at 07:32 12 May 2014 Catriona Miller* Social Sciences, Media and Journalism, Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow, UK (Received 18 March 2014; accepted 20 March 2014) Since the 1970s, the ‘slasher’ movie, with its violence towards women and the surviving ‘final girl’, has been a constant presence in the horror genre to the delight of some and the perplexed dismay of others. Traditional academic approaches to the genre have tended to make assumptions about who is watching these films and why. This article uses a Jungian-inflected approach to reconsider the potential meaning of the genre, suggesting that the violence in the films is less an exhortation to violence against women, but rather a representation of women’s experience of patriarchy, with the ‘final girl’ as a figure of resistance. The article also considers the meaning of the more contemporary ‘final girl as perpetrator’ slasher films. Keywords: slasher movie; final girl; Jung; horror; feminism; film theory ‘Slasher’ movies are a dark presence lurking in the basement of the horror genre. Lacking any of the literary cachet of the likes of Frankenstein or Dracula, they are regularly considered aesthetically bereft, morally questionable, and narratively predictable. These are sticky, relentless, savage films that are difficult to get away from, both for the characters and the audiences with their open-ended narratives; for even if someone does survive (which is not always the case), it is temporary closure at best. There is always a new film, a remake, or a reboot just around the corner, ready to begin the terror all over again. Watching a slasher film can be a very physical experience for the audience: eyes are covered, breath is held then released in a shriek, muscles become tense; one may even jump in one’s seat. For some, it is fun, it is exciting – an invitation to participate in mediated terror, within the context of a well-known and well-practised narrative, like a child who wants to hear the same story over and over again. They have proved perennial favourites of both audiences and industry alike. For others, the films are just too intense, or indeed, too far-fetched. The level of excitement associated with the genre is a clue to its importance. As Hockley has noted: To use Jungian vocabulary, part of the cinematic experience can involve the activation of the deep structures in the unconscious whose presence is characterised by affect, namely the archetypes, and these temporarily invade consciousness … An invasion can be recognised because consciousness stops articulating the details of what is happening and the experience becomes embodied. Such moments have a strong affect and understanding them has a crucial role to play in seeing how individuals come to create meaning from experiences, cinematic and otherwise. (Hockley, 2013, p. 110) *Email: C.Miller@gcu.ac.uk © 2014 Taylor & Francis 2 C. Miller Downloaded by [Glasgow Caledonian University], [Catriona Miller] at 07:32 12 May 2014 While begging some indulgence for all too briefly summing some complex debates due to the confines of an article of this sort, the aim here is to twist the theoretical kaleidoscope in relation to the slasher film, to consider the genre in the light of some reassessments in film theory … inside and out. First, the genre Before going any further, it is essential to consider the repertoire of elements that constitute the genre: narrative structure, iconography and spatio-temporal location. The narrative structure of slasher movies, as already suggested, does tend to be rather repetitive. Typically the genre features a group of young people who are in some way isolated – camping in the country, visiting a derelict asylum, on a road trip, or even simply ‘next door’ – who are one by one brutally murdered by an unseen assailant, the slasher killer, until the survivor (if there is one) manages to escape. It is also worth pointing out that, even though this is an enormously protean genre, one of its hallmarks is that the slasher killer is often a human being, not a supernatural monster, even if they appear to have almost superhuman powers. Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), Michael (Tony Moran) in Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) and Mrs Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) in Friday 13th (Sean S Cunningham, 1980), to choose three characters from the first cycle of slasher films, are not demons, ghosts, zombies or any other kind of arcane creature. As violent and terrifying as they are, the killers are human, only made inhuman by psychological trauma. The iconography of the films tends to be one of contrasts. The mise en scène utilises lighting, costume and figure action to place the vivacious, well-dressed, bright smiles of the teenagers next to the shadowy, drab, misshapen figure of the killer. There is likewise a comparison drawn between the well-formed limbs and bodies of the teenagers before the killer strikes (in montage sequences, for example, tinged with an air of nostalgia even at the start of films) and after, with an emphasis upon special effects depicting copious amounts of blood and body parts. The iconography of the films also foreground the killer’s weapons – axes, knives, chainsaw, shards of glass; essentially, anything other than guns – which often become the focus of marketing materials. Spatio-temporal location is often the least useful element when considering generic hallmarks, but in the case of slasher movies it does provide a useful point. These films do not concern themselves with the gothic monsters of Old Europe, such as vampires and werewolves, or the Cold War monsters of outer space and atomic mishap. Instead, the horror is relocated from ‘out there’ to ‘right here’. They tend to be set in a contemporary moment i.e. when the film was made, and they tend to be set in America (occasionally Britain or Australia). There have been a number of historical accounts of the slasher genre, most notably Games of Terror (Dika, 1990) and Going to Pieces (Rockoff, 2002), or Blood Money (Nowell, 2011) but there are plenty of other books on the horror genre more generally that also make mention of the genre to a greater or lesser degree. The progenitors of the slasher movie are generally accepted as being Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) and Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) though Cherry (2009) prefers the term ‘precursor’ and includes Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974) in that category. Fourteen years after Psycho, in 1974, came Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which revised the template by dropping the budget and upping the violence a considerable degree. Cherry Downloaded by [Glasgow Caledonian University], [Catriona Miller] at 07:32 12 May 2014 International Journal of Jungian Studies 3 concurs with Dika in tracing the peak of the slasher film to the period between 1978 and 1981 – though that may extend into the mid to late 1980s, if all the sequels are taken into account. The classics of this era – the canon, if you will – include Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and Friday the 13th. (Some writers would also include A Nightmare on Elm Street [Wes Craven, 1984], but the killer, Freddy [Robert Englund], has the supernatural power to enter his victim’s dreams; and that marks it out as belonging to a different limb of the horror body.) However, from the underground success of Texas Chainsaw Massacre onwards, the commercial potential of the genre was noticed. Nowell argues that right from the start, ‘teen slasher films offered independent filmmakers a low-risk opportunity to realise their commercial objectives’ (Nowell, 2011, p. 9) and from May 1980 to August 1981, there was an average of one new slasher movie every six weeks (Nowell, 2011, p. 5). Paul Lynch even described his film Prom Night (1980) as the ‘Procter and Gamble method of making movies’ (Dowler, 1980, p. 32). The commercial appeal of such Fordian replicability for studios certainly accounts at least in part for the predictable nature of the genre and for the correspondingly large number of sequels. To date, Texas Chainsaw Massacre can boast four sequels and three remakes; Halloween, eight sequels and two remakes; and Friday the 13th, 10 sequels (11, if one counts the Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2013) mash-up1) and one remake. There was, however, something of a lull from the late 1980s until Scream appeared in 1996, directed by Wes Craven, who had previously helmed the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise with seven sequels (again eight, if the mash-up with Friday the 13th is included) and one remake. Scream marked a reawakening of a subtly evolved genre that has been called the ‘postmodern’ slasher movie. In an outbreak of intertextuality, the protagonists are all too aware of the conventions of the earlier cycle of slasher films. In Scream, Craven even has one of his characters Randy (Jamie Kennedy) explain to the other party-goers the rules of the genre: Rule No. 1: You can never have sex. Big no, no. Sex equals death. Rule No 2, an extension of rule no. 1, the sin factor: You can never drink or do drugs. Rule No 3: ‘Never, ever, ever under any circumstances say “I’ll be right back”, because you won’t be right back. You push the laws and you end up dead. (Scream, 1996) Other films from this era include I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie, 1997), Cherry Falls (Geoffrey Wright, 2000) and Valentine (Jamie Banks, 2001), as well as the Scary Movie (Keenan Wayens, 2000) series which, as of 2013, had four sequels, though they were not all related to the slasher movie. The genre’s mutation did not stop there, as the success of Wrong Turn (Robert Schmidt, 2003) and its four sequels indicate; but increasingly, rather than new franchises, the industry moved towards reboots of the old franchises. As the head of marketing at distribution company Lionsgate noted in 2013, ‘it is easier if the brand is already built to capitalise on that and expand on it’ (Sandwell, 2013). However, a quick search of the Internet Movie Database (Internet Movie Database [IMDB], n.d.) for the keyword ‘slasher’ in the last 10 years produced a total of 222 films. So, on average, a little over 22 films have been released each year that could be called slasher movies. Some are big budget, most are not. Final Girl (Tyler Shields) is due for release in 2014, suggesting that the genre is far from in its death throes just yet. Downloaded by [Glasgow Caledonian University], [Catriona Miller] at 07:32 12 May 2014 4 C. Miller Next, understanding the genre In 1981, Roger Ebert, influential critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, published an essay entitled ‘Why Movie Audiences Aren’t Safe Anymore’. It was the culmination of a campaign led by Ebert and fellow critic Gene Siskel against what they termed ‘women in danger’ films. In the essay, Ebert described the ‘brutal directness of style’ of I Spit on Your Grave (Zarchi, 1978) and considered it to be cruder, more raw and more vile of spirit than the horror movies he had seen up to that point (Ebert, 1981). For him, these films were clearly designed against women, a point of view that was popularly adopted as the received wisdom on the subject. In the era of the second wave of feminism, these films were seen as depicting a masculine revenge upon women – particularly those who dared to be sexual. The genre certainly became a focus for censorship, especially in the wake of the video revolution. Many of the films that Mary Whitehouse (founder of the campaigning group National Viewers and Listeners Association) dubbed ‘video nasties’ were slasher films. A compilation of the worst offenders was shown at the Tory party conference in 1983, where the audience was so horrified by what they saw that a Private Members’ Bill was introduced by the Conservative MP Graham Bright and the 1984 Video Recordings Act made it a legal requirement for video recordings to be classified. The British Board of Film Classification was designated by the Home Secretary as the authority charged with making the arrangements to classify videos and for the first time Britain had statutory censorship. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was denied a video release in Britain for many years, and was only shown for the first time on terrestrial television in 2000, 26 years after its first cinema release. So in its first cycle, the slasher movie was taken at face value, and for many the genre revealed a ‘particularly vicious normalising of misogyny. Very few fall short of being hate-women-movies’ (Hayward, 2000, p. 189). The genre was presumed to be a masculine discourse, and the audience was said to be predominantly male; and feminists had pointed out that in many horror fictions, the victims of the monster’s grisly onslaughts are sexually active adolescent women, who were in some sense being ‘taught a lesson’. In 1992, however, Carol Clover, working from a largely psychoanalytic perspective, put forward a more recuperative approach and argued against interpretations that had categorised slasher films as displaying a male sadistic-voyeuristic desire against the female body. As she recounts the story, the inspiration for her book came from being dared to actually go and see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for herself, which led her to question the orthodox view that the camera is a solely mastering male gaze. She pointed out that slasher films actually called on the viewer to adopt a variety of positions and character sympathies in the early phases of the story, but as the plot goes on, becomes far more victim-identified than the traditional reading would have it (Clover, 1992). Clover began to think that such films in fact presented a more uncertain sense of sexual identity and in the end, instead of a victorious male hero, the slasher movie confronted one surviving female: the final girl. For Clover, this was significant and shifted the overall tone of the genre from an oppressive one, to a more progressive stance. As she pointed out, it is the final girl who alone looks death in the face, but [it is also] she alone who finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued, or to kill him herself. But in either case, from 1974 on, the survivor figure has been female. (Clover, 1992, p. 35) Downloaded by [Glasgow Caledonian University], [Catriona Miller] at 07:32 12 May 2014 International Journal of Jungian Studies 5 For Clover, the final girl, was both active and passive. She was frightened by the killer’s assault, but eventually vigorously defended herself; so, for Clover, the final girl takes on a male aggressive stance, while the predominantly male audience (an assumption that Clover only in part queried) passively submit to thrills and shock effects. Suffering fear and terror but eventually winning through, the final girl embodied a paradoxical gender position, involving male spectators undergoing masochistic experiences via the cinematic female body. It was an important critical intervention in the understanding of the slasher genre, reexamining some assumptions about the supposed masculine essence of horror in the context of the slasher subgenre. Clover’s emphasis on the fluidity of point of view and spectator identification argued that these movies, which had previously been understood as misogynistic, might rather hold some value for feminism. In a riposte to Mulvey’s famous Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), Clover argued that slasher films reveal an obsession with feminism, displaying plots concluding with images of masculinised female power, offering visual pleasures structured not according to a sadistic male gaze but more around a victim-identified point of view involving masochistic pleasures. However, Clover only went so far in her reassessment of the genre. As she pointed out: 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 … constitute a visible adjustment in the terms of gender representations. 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 upward, is of no small interest in the study of popular culture. (Clover, 1992, p. 64) The theoretical framework adopted by Clover would only permit a little movement towards a rehabilitation of the slasher genre. The psychoanalytic perspective insisted upon equating the viewers’ activity and mastery of the image with the masculine spectator, and has struggled to offer an account for the female spectator that does not require either masochism or the taking-up of a borrowed transvestite identity. However, Clover was not the only theorist tackling the genre in the early 1990s. Linda Williams is credited with being instrumental in another reorientation, with her article ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess’ (1991). In it, she makes a case for a certain category of film (pornography, slasher horror and melodrama) to be considered a ‘body genre’, noting that the success of these genres ‘is based on their abilities to raise our affective or bodily responses that mirror, to a certain extent, those of screen characters … the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost in voluntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen’ (Williams, 1991, p. 4). However, in trying to grapple with this issue, Williams also struggles to get beyond that problematic psychoanalytic vocabulary. Through the 1990s, the terms of the debate began to shift towards a more cognitivist vocabulary, but remained focused around the issue of ‘identification’. Various writers – such as Smith (1995), following in the footsteps of Metz (1991), and Bordwell (1985) – discussed the role of narration in constructing that connection with the viewer. However, a fresh way forward was offered by Sobchack in The Address of the Eye (1991), who moved even further away from what had been the standard model for film analysis – that mixture of structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalysis, which tended to reduce all film to Downloaded by [Glasgow Caledonian University], [Catriona Miller] at 07:32 12 May 2014 6 C. Miller a known system of codes and conventions and systems of signification, nostalgically reiterating the moment of primal rupture of the Oedipal moment and the founding of the unconscious. This method, she argued, had ‘reduced film spectatorship to being a process undertaken by disembodied eyes (and to a lesser extent ears) and against such claims Sobchack was determined to give spectators their bodies back’ (Rushton & Bettison, 2010, p. 178). However, the question of identification had not entirely gone away, but now, instead of being framed largely in terms of narrative, it was reframed as a discussion around how film might more directly ‘touch’ an audience. Marks, for example, suggested that ‘the texture of haptic imagery touches the viewer’s body in a direct, effective manner instead of just working through characterisation or through acts of categorisation and narrative interpretation’ (Marks, 2000, p. 164). Barker took the idea further and suggested that ‘particular structures of human touch correspond to particular structures of the cinematic experience’ such as ‘texture, spatial orientation, comportment, rhythm and vitality’ (Barker, 2009, p. 2). The film has a body, she argues, not unlike the body of the viewer; and she explored this through the concepts of skin (haptic, textural qualities), muscle (kinetic qualities) and viscera (rhythmic qualities). This resiting of cinematic identification to the body suggests that an audience does more than identify with the characters and aspects of the display; they also draw on personal and cultural experience as a response to cinematic elements (Branigan & Buckland, 2013, p. 5). However this ‘bring back the body’ approach does not entertain any consideration of the unconscious within the schema, and – at least within Jungianinflected film theory – there has been a move towards a ‘bring back the unconscious’ approach (see for example Hockley, [2013] and Singh [2014]). Barker and the phenomenologists insist that the key to understanding meaning lies between viewer and viewed. ‘Watching a film,’ reminds Barker, ‘we’re certainly not in the film, but we are not entirely outside it either. We exist and move and feel in that space of contact where surfaces mingle and our musculatures entangle’ (Barker, 2009, p. 12). Barker, of course, chooses a physical analogy; but Hockley, drawing from clinical experience and an analytical psychology perspective, has called it a cinematic ‘third image’ (Hockley, 2013). Hockley conceives of three images in the cinema. To paraphrase rather crudely, the first is the image on the screen; the second is the viewer’s largely conscious, intellectual engagement with the first image. The third image is felt through the body. It is an affectladen response that overwhelms us. ‘What we experience is a personal affect as our unconscious temporarily invades consciousness. […] Meaning comes from the intermingling of our individual psychology with the film, its narrative, images and sounds, in order to create a new meaning’ (Hockley, 2013, p. 135). It comes from the relationship between the viewer’s body and the film body. The concept of the ‘third image’ described is helpful for several reasons. First, as meaning is co-created between the body of the film and the body of the viewer, and exists in the space between the two, touching both, it leaves room for individual responses. Secondly, it reintroduces the unconscious to the equation, opening up ‘new avenues through which to explore the interiority of meaning in the cinema’ (Hockley, 2013, p. 6). Thirdly, however, it reiterates a ‘fundamental insight of Jungian psychology … that the individual is both personal and collective – just like the cinema where meaning is partly inscribed in the film and partly negotiated on an individual basis’ (Hockley, 2013, p. 7). It sounds simple; but this is a complex set-up, a theoretical approach that demands an effort Downloaded by [Glasgow Caledonian University], [Catriona Miller] at 07:32 12 May 2014 International Journal of Jungian Studies 7 to encompass all the levels at which film and viewer may be operating – in fact, calling for the analyst to be simultaneously alert to many elements. In no particular order (meaning that I do not intend to set up a hierarchy of importance here), the film analyst might examine the construction of the film body, a combination of collective and individual forces. Collectively, the creation of any film will depend upon industrial environment, markets and production techniques. On a more individual level (meaning the individual film project as opposed to the individuals participating, although that too can have bearing on the construction of the film project), there is the content of the film body itself – elements such as narrative, mise en scène, camera, editing and sound. Films are not random collections of sounds and images, but carefully orchestrated systems. Next, there is the addition of the viewer to the equation. Even without returning to ‘apparatus theory’ itself, the context of viewing is likely to have a bearing on the quality of the interface between viewer and image. The distracted viewing of internet clips on a mobile phone, or certain kinds of television within a domestic setting, is recognised as being qualitatively different, as discussed by Singh (2014, pp.184 ff), to the avid viewing of an audience within an actual cinema, although even this is an assumption. Bollywood audiences, for example, are known to take a very different approach to the cinematic experience (Srinivas, 2002). Then there is the question of the body of the viewer itself and its responses, a dance between conscious engagement and unconscious engagement, where a complex is activated by the touch of the film, denoted by physical reaction and the arousal of affect. However, just as the film body is both collective and individual, so too the psyche is not separate from the collective environment in which it exists. Whether one takes a broadly social constructionist view, or an analytical-psychology perspective (which has begun to consider the role of cultural complexes; see Singer & Kimbles, 2004), there is a recognition that society and culture has a role in shaping the individual and the individual psyche – a society and culture that, among other things, is mediated through the consumption of film. The co-creation of meaning between film body and viewer body, between cultural, social and individual contexts, is an intricate interweaving of sometimes centrifugal (throwing outward) and sometimes centripetal (pulling inward) forces. It may appear chaotic, but it is chaotic only in the physics understanding of the term – as a system so complex that it appears unpredictable owing to its sensitivity to even very small changes. To tackle film from this point of view is intimidating, but it can potentially lead to more nuanced understanding of the role that these ubiquitous cultural constructs (let us keep calling them ‘films’ for the sake of simplicity) play in contemporary culture. The slasher genre is a curious cultural phenomenon. It has gone through phases of marked popularity, which begin to fade away but never quite disappear, only to return once more invigorated. The cyclical nature of the genre illustrates well why a correspondingly circular theoretical approach is helpful: industrial context, the body of the film, the body of the spectator, the wider cultural contexts intermingle, back and forth, as the genre rises, dies away, then arises once more. Slashers: outside, inside and outside again Consideration of the industrial context of the slasher genre helpfully tells us two things. Firstly, regardless of critical reception, the genre was and remains popular, as evidenced Downloaded by [Glasgow Caledonian University], [Catriona Miller] at 07:32 12 May 2014 8 C. Miller by the constant stream of slasher film releases; secondly, the audience for the films was not and is not exclusively (or even predominantly) male. Hard data are difficult to come by, but there have been some attempts to look more closely at the industrial context of slasher movies. Nowell’s Blood Money (2011), for example, discusses the fact that even in the era of the classic slasher movie, the films were designed to appeal as much to young women as young men – a fact that he insists lies at the root of their box office success. For example, Nowell considers Prom Night (Paul Lynch, 1980) in some detail, pointing out that the creators of Prom Night ‘made female youth the film’s prime target audience … angling teen slashers to female youth not only offered filmmakers a competitive edge in the battle for distribution deals, but offered distributors a way of generating profit in a crowded marketplace’ (Nowell, 2011, p. 10). This idea has not gone away. An article in industry newspaper Variety (Mohr, 2006) noted the importance of the female audience. More recently, the head of marketing for StudioCanal pointed out that the ‘audience that has really made a lot of horror films work is the younger female audience’ (Sandwell, 2013). Even if critics are unsure, the industry appears to know that there is a significant audience of young women for horror in general and slasher movies in particular. The next element, to follow Sobchack and Barker’s lead, is to look at the film’s body to consider what its perspective might be. To begin with Barker’s suggestion that ‘touch and movement, temperatures and textures, and in the ways the materiality permeates the film experience’ the ‘tactile and tangible patterns and structures of significance’ (Barker, 2009, p. 25), it is noticeable even at a superficial level that within the slasher genre there is a lot of touching; and to touch is to be touched. It has been noted on many occasions that for the characters to engage in sexual activity is to render them vulnerable to attack. In fact, one study, after carefully coding 50 films, concluded that ‘sexual female characters were less likely to survive and had significantly longer death scenes as compared to those female characters who did not engage in sexual behaviours’ (Welsh, 2010). This may be a rather more literal reading of touch than Barker intends, but it is not a very subtle genre. The viewer is usually softly engaged by the film in the first few scenes. Lighting is often warm; sometimes it is even in soft focus, such as in Prom Night, and the characters are attractive young people going about their lives. At the same time, the editing may be uneven and sharp, the camera may be juddering, the music foreboding. As the narrative advances, the balance shifts and the images become darker (literally darker in many cases), forcing the viewer to pay ever closer attention – peering into the shadows, alert to background noise, or changes in the music, drawing us towards the screen. As the audience leans forward, trying to decipher the images and puzzle out the source of the danger, the images erupt into quick editing, whip pans and screeching noise (screams and music with a high tessitura). Towards the end, an uneasy calm may be reinstated, such as the end of Friday the 13th, only to be destroyed with one more brutal intervention. The surprise ending where the killer returns is a standard of the genre. The viewer’s body has already been invoked here in describing the film’s textures. It is a difficult job to prise apart the film body and the viewer’s response to it, as they are intimately related to one another and analytical psychology may be developing the best vocabulary to encompass this. A viewer deeply engaged in the film may not be separate from it, feeling enmeshed within its touch. For the audience of the slasher film, there is possibly excitement about watching the forbidden (perhaps literally, in terms of the age rating). There is also the anticipation of seeing something extreme, and the shock when one does. Slasher film audiences are not silent. They gasp and scream and shout out their excitement. Downloaded by [Glasgow Caledonian University], [Catriona Miller] at 07:32 12 May 2014 International Journal of Jungian Studies 9 For the youthful audience of slasher films, the films demonstrate a tense juxtaposition between sensual touching and violent touching; between erotic touching and brutality – one that, at least to an extent, may very well mirror the reality of their situation. This observation brings us to the intersection between individual psyche and culture and a return to the issue of gender, which slasher movies so starkly foreground; because gender is both individual and collective, and it is difficult to separate it from the changes in culture and society that happened (at least in the West) during the second half of the twentieth century. The level of affect may be key in highlighting the importance of the experience: ‘affect occurs at the point at which our adaptation is weakest and at the same time exposes the reason for its weakness’ (Samuels, Shorter, & Plaut, 1986/1991, p. 11). The relative youth of the assumed audience may offer a clue to the question of adaptation. One of Jung’s ideas is that of the individuation process, a lifelong narrative of becoming that ‘entails living life as the person you are while at the same time accepting that we are always in relationship with others and our culture at large’ (Hockley, 2013, p. 60), and the first part of this process entails adaptation to outward reality. For young females, in particular, the outward reality they encounter is likely to be patriarchal in tone. As they move from childhood to adolescence, they must come to terms with changing bodies and emotions; but they must also come to terms with society’s changing responses to them. It may come in the form of a father’s altered attitude, unable to accept their little girl becoming a woman. It may come in the form of a freshly urgent note of jealousy and competition among friends and potential boyfriends. It may come in the form of male strangers in the street accosting them, or passing comment on their appearance, as even a brief glance at the entries on the Everyday Sexism Project website (Everyday Sexism Project, n.d.) makes clear. Despite several decades of feminist campaigning, it appears that sexuality still spells potential danger for young women. Thus it may be looking at the phenomenon from the wrong perspective to insist that the films depict a repressive violence against women; rather, they may be a particularly stark representation of what it feels like to be female within a patriarchal society. Instead of a backlash against women, the advent of second-wave feminism created a crack in the façade of hegemony of male power and permits this violence against women to be brought to consciousness and to be depicted in the first place. As Williams noted, these films, which may seem to violent and inimical to women, cannot be dismissed as evidence of a monolithic and unchanging misogyny … Their very existence and popularity hinges upon rapid changes taking place in relations between the ‘sexes’ and by rapidly changing notions of gender – what it means to be a man or a woman. (Williams, 1991, p. 12) The final girl, in this context, is less a proxy for the boys in the audience and instead more a heroic figure for the girls. Slasher movies offer not only a depiction of desire, but also a mode of resistance. The final girl is one who perceives the danger and feels terror, but nonetheless finds a way to resist and even fight back. Sally (Marilyn Burns) in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre may manage little more than the wit to keep trying to run away; but she does survive, while Laurie in Halloween is more resourceful – fashioning a weapon from the wire coat-hangers in the wardrobe where she hides, and overcoming her assailant. The final girl offers images of resistance and survival. However, in more recent times there has been a new twist to the genre. In some cases, the final girl has in fact become the perpetrator. In the self-referential Scream 4 (Wes Craven, 2011) Jill (Emma Roberts) sets up the murders herself in order to become the final Downloaded by [Glasgow Caledonian University], [Catriona Miller] at 07:32 12 May 2014 10 C. Miller girl. In Shrooms (2007), Tara (Lindsey Haun) is the hallucinating killer. In Switchblade Romance (Alexandre Aja, 2003), Marie (Cécile De France) is the schizophrenic killer, projecting her violence as an imagined middle-aged man. This may seem like a retrograde step, a return to the monstrous feminine; but I would argue that instead, this might be seen as a depiction of internalised oppression (Wehr, 1987), or as the ‘internalised psychic reception of patriarchy’ (Rowland, 2002, p. 50). These final girls, often in an altered state of consciousness, embody and enact the violence of patriarchal values. However, I would like to conclude by considering a film that does not appear to conform to the standard ‘final girl’ scenario, nor quite fit the idea of the internalised patriarchy sketched above; for in Jonathan Levine’s 2007 film, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, the final girl perpetrator appears to get a happy ending. Coda: All the Boys Love Mandy Lane All the Boys Love Mandy Lane presents a thought-provoking variation on the theme. It was a low-budget film, costing around $750,000, and despite being dogged by release issues – it finally got a North American theatrical release in 2013 – it built up an almost credible reputation amongst critics and fans alike. In the film, Mandy Lane (Amber Heard) is the object of lust for the boys at her school. She is invited to a pool party by Dylan (Adam Powell), but does not appear to be interested in his advances. Instead, Mandy’s weird best friend, Emmet (Michael Welch), persuades Dylan to try jumping off the house roof into the pool in order to impress her. Dylan dies. Some months later, Mandy, now apparently best friends with the dead boy’s gang, is invited to a remote Texan ranch for the weekend. The boys’ purpose is clear: they each wish to take Mandy’s virginity; but instead, they each meet their deaths. Emmet has followed them and picks them off one by one, until it is revealed that he and Mandy planned the whole thing. The film is brimming over with unfulfilled desire, as might be expected when the central character is repeatedly presented as virginal; but the opening shots of the film demonstrate the tense juxtaposition between that desire and the potential for violence, choreographed between camera, mise en scène, music and editing. Before the audience is shown Mandy’s face, they are introduced in slow motion to Mandy’s breasts. The camera lingers, moving before Mandy, tracking with her, inviting the audience to be seduced by her, as all those teenage boys and girls watch her walk down the school corridor. The camera floats, the lighting is soft, the music is a melodious pop song; but the texture of the editing is sharp and quick, and the song is called In Anticipation of Your Suicide. As pointed out in one review, the film ‘goes from sweetly charming through uncomfortably intense to profoundly sick’ (Newman, 2007, p. 54). Mandy is surrounded by desiring males: Dylan, who invites her to his party; Red (Aaron Himelstein), who boldly announces the challenge of Mandy’s virginity; Bird (Edwin Hodge), who claims to be unlike the others, saying that he only wants to hold her hand, but who then tries to kiss her; Jake (Luke Grimes), who engineers a power cut to spend time alone with her; even Emmet, the killer, appears to be doing it for Mandy and expects to end it in a double suicide – together for ever. Mandy kisses him, asking if that was what he wanted, then refuses to die with him. Emmet pleads with her, ‘I did it right. I did it for you’; but Mandy only replies ‘You shouldn’t do anything for me’, and runs away. Emmet chases and they end up wrestling in a pit filled with rotting cattle corpses. Mandy clubs him to death, then returns to the farmhouse. Like Dylan, Emmet dies attempting to impress Mandy. The only male who does not overtly accost her is Garth Downloaded by [Glasgow Caledonian University], [Catriona Miller] at 07:32 12 May 2014 International Journal of Jungian Studies 11 (Anson Mount), the handsome ranch hand, who has attracted Mandy’s eye. She is the desiring one, and so he survives. Mandy does not appear to be any closer to the two girls in the group, who collude with and conform to accepted patterns of feminine behaviour designed to gain male attention. Marlin (Melissa Price) most straightforwardly simply uses sex to keep Jake’s attention – a futile effort, as it turns out. Indeed, the most gruesome death is reserved for Marlin: a shotgun is rammed down her gullet. Chloe (Whitney Able), the alpha female, is the most conventionally beautiful of the girls, and who makes remarks about Marlin’s weight to keep her in line. However, Chloe has the lowest self-esteem, demonstrated by the breast-enhancing inserts in her bra and by her telling Mandy that she’s far more beautiful. In one scene, Chloe claims to have seen someone outside the house. She has; but Mandy escorts the drunk Chloe to the bathroom, where she strokes her, cossets and soothes her, distracting her from the idea. It is a scene of gentle eroticism and barely repressed desire (Chloe notices Mandy’s hands are shaking), yet perhaps it is anticipation of violence – for it is Chloe whom Mandy kills with her own hands. Chloe, running for her life, comes towards an encouraging Mandy, who then ensures she runs into her embrace and onto the hunting knife she is holding – an example of that juxtaposition of soft touching and brutal touching, held in contradiction within the character of Mandy. That contradiction is all the audience has to go on, as her motives are far from clear – as fans continue to discuss on IMDb.com (fresh posts still appearing, even though it is eight years since its first release). Mandy’s character is beautiful, but, as her expression in the final shot of the film suggests, not sweet. The enigma of motivation is the only openended element of the narrative. Mandy may be a killer but she is not insane, traumatised or even punished. She is instead left as a powerful, ambiguous individual, who has controlled events from the start; but then, as Homs notes, ‘virginity … is inseparable from autonomy’ (Heuer, 2011, p. 243). In the end, everyone else is dead and Mandy drives away with Garth. ‘You did it,’ he says, seated low in the passenger seat, looking up at the radiant Mandy at the steering wheel; ‘You rescued us’, he tells her, as the strains of Bobby Vinton’s Sealed with a Kiss (1972) drift around them. Perhaps, at last, the first inklings that escape may be possible after all have begun to appear. Note 1. The term ‘mash-up’ was included in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. A mash-up is a fusion or combination of two disparate elements – sometimes musical, sometimes digital files, sometimes diegetic. In this case, it is a fusion of the hitherto separate story-worlds of Friday the 13th and Halloween. A high-profile superhero mash-up, the as yet untitled Batman vs. Superman project, directed by Zack Snyder, is due for release in 2016. Notes on contributor Dr Catriona Miller is a senior lecturer in media at Glasgow Caledonian University where her research interests include the discourses, ideology and archetypal dimensions of science fiction, horror and fantasy. She has published on television, film and other transmediatised phenomenon. References Barker, J. (2009). The tactile eye: Touch and the cinematic experience. 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