Dissections Horror E-Zine

Painting 'Eternity'

(Painting 'Eternity' by June Pullium)

Sexually Ambiguous or Liminal? Some Thoughts on Carol Clover’s Final Girl in the Teen Slasher Film

June Pulliam

In Men, Women and Chainsaws, Carol Clover hypothesizes that the female who survives the maniac’s wrath in the slasher film lives not just because of her virginity (or momentary lack of interest in sex), but because of an incipient masculinity which permits her to disarm and unman the killer who is in some sort of gender distress. Clover dubs this lone survivor Final Girl, and sees her as similar to her pursuer in that both are sexually ambiguous. When the slasher is killed/subdued by Final Girl, she symbolically castrates him, coding him as feminine and thereby resolving any ambiguity in his gender identity. At this point, Final Girl’s own gender is also no longer ambiguous: the act of ‘castrating’ her pursuer and surviving his wrath permits her to more fully realize her incipient masculinity instead of someone whose victimization would code her as feminine.

Clover’s theories about gender and the slasher film are based on a random and more general sampling of the genre. However, there are subtle differences when Final Girl is an adolescent. Teen Final Girl’s virginity, liminality and femininity are all crucial qualities that permit her to survive while her sexually active sisters (and brothers) are cut down by the killer. Because Teen Final Girl has not yet become sexually active, she is liminal in that she is not fully adult (or woman), at least not in a teenaged context. Teen Final Girl’s liminality is important because it gives her a mental flexibility: she has access to two ways of thinking. Teen Final Girl’s ability to view the world in the more magical way associated with children permits to her believe in the supernatural, which in turn allows her to fully comprehend the serious nature of what she faces so that she can more effectively fight her pursuer. But Teen Final Girl can also view the world in a logical, adult way, permitting her to apply reason to outwit the killer. Furthermore, in spite of her frequently boyish appearance, Teen Final Girl’s behaviour is more feminine than masculine, and these behaviours help her survive the maniac’s wrath. When the killer chases Teen Final Girl, she runs and hides instead of making a suicidal show of masculine bravado against someone who is bigger and better armed. I see Teen Final Girl’s boyish appearance combined with her feminine behaviour as making her androgynous rather than someone with an incipient masculinity that is completed when she kills her attacker. To see Teen Final Girl as possessing an incipient masculinity is to emphasize the binaries of gender at work in shaping her subjectivity, whereas describing her as androgynous emphasizes how her subjectivity is a flexible mélange of masculinity and femininity that provides her more resources than are available to both her male and female peers, whose gender identities are less fluid. This distinction is important to understanding how Teen Final Girl’s survival is not a triumph of conservative values in a universe that seems to punish female sexuality, but is instead a critique of those values.

Before I embark on analyzing Teen Final Girl, it is first necessary to clarify my definitions. For my purposes, a teenager is anyone who is approximately high school age and still lives with her parents. While most college freshmen are adolescents, they have crossed an important threshold into adulthood in that they are now living away from parental control and are no longer immersed in an environment with people who still see them as children. In the family home, the teen is often treated as a child by her parents who are still more directly responsible for her care. Because Teen Final Girl’s parents are more likely to see her as a child, they unwittingly perpetuate her ability to persist in a magical way of thinking characteristic of childhood, even when she is fully capable of logical thought. Teen Final Girl’s peers who are sexually active are more fully adult (or believe themselves to be anyway) because they have been initiated into the world of grown-up heterosexuality: this transition costs them their ability to view the world magically. Instead, they are in the process of completely adopting the adult mindset that precludes the existence of a reality that cannot be observed and documented by ‘grown up’ rules of logic, so they become easy prey for the slasher. My definition of adolescence in this essay is relevant in that I will not examine some slasher films that are nevertheless popular with teens such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, the Friday the 13th franchise or Urban Legend, since their Final Girls are not teens according to this rubric. Instead, I concentrate on Halloween, several of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, Slumber Party Massacre, The Stepfather and Scream, films whose Final Girls are all unquestionably adolescents.

Virginity, Liminality and Androgyny
Because Teen Final Girl has not yet become sexually active, she is liminal in that she is not fully adult (or woman in a teenaged context, which equates maturity with engaging in penile/vaginal intercourse). While Teen Final Girl is teased by peers for what they see as her lack of maturity, she is wise to forestall embracing this brand of adult womanhood, since from the perspective of adolescence, the condition has little to recommend it. Teens have relatively conservative ideas about gender, and for adolescent girls, being appropriately feminine often necessitates obsessing over the minutia of dress and an exacting scrutiny of the body, while suppressing any unladylike interest in intellectual pursuits in the interests of becoming pleasing to a hypothetical masculine audience. Lyn Mikel Brown documents this narrowly proscribed femininity, often communicated to girls who aren’t even in their tweens. Girls as young as seven:

learn from the media and sometimes from adults that they should be preoccupied with what boys think of them (even though real life boys this age aren’t thinking about them at all that much). . . . If being with boys means either being like a boy – giving up less important “girl” things in order to play what the boys want to play – or hanging with girls, but being the kind of girl a boy might someday choose as a romantic partner, the girls’ desires and experiences are secondary. (Brown 46)

The formation of this feminine identity requires girls not only dress and comport themselves in a certain way, but actively compete with other girls for male attention. Girls demonstrate their own femininity by calling into the question the femininity of others: policing the borders of acceptable of femininity through calling other girls sluts and bitches, obsessing over weight, and disguising their own competence in certain areas, thereby ‘unwittingly mirroring and supporting a status quo that has long controlled and trivialized girlness and femininity’ (Brown 97). Girls are seduced by the status quo particularly ‘because it affords them special protection and security,’ at least for white girls, who, if they ‘play their cards right, are promised good white boys, the eventual power brokers’ (Brown 97-98). Sadly, women have much to gain when they police the borders of femininity and educate others like them to be ‘good’. ‘Those white girls and girls of colour who are different, who refuse or resist, threaten to reveal the awful compromises perfect girls and good women have made. They threaten to reveal the fraudulence, the failure, the psychological and relational damage’ (Brown 97-98) that occurs as a result of conforming to this model. It is no wonder that by adolescence, many girls are troubled by what they see as their future as women, entangled in a subjectivity that encourages them to suppress their own desires in favour of a piece of the patriarchal pie that is not all that appealing in the first place.

By adolescence, teen girl subjectivities are being shaped through multiple and competing discourses. Lynn Phillips identifies several discourses that ‘weave through and help constitute’ (77) the subjectivities of young women. The Pleasing Woman Discourse and the Together Woman Discourse present competing ideas of what it is to be a Good Woman, ‘addressing woman’s agency, desires, entitlement, and “proper” roles, particularly within their hetero-relationships and encounters’ (Phillips 38). In the Pleasing Woman Discourse, ‘women are assumed to lack, or at least to ignore, their desires [and] urged to cherish the feminine “virtues” of modesty, attractiveness, and sacrifice to others, particularly men.’ (Phillips 39) The Pleasing Woman Discourse does ‘not portray [women] as active subjects in their own decision making, relationships, or sexualities,’ but instead, as someone who is to ‘sit sweetly in wait for a man to act,’ (Phillips 39), while deriving a sense of power from being needed. The competing Together Woman Discourse is an offshoot of liberal feminism, promoting ‘the notion that a “together” woman is free, sexually sophisticated, and entitled to accept nothing less than full equality and satisfaction in her sexual encounters and romantic relationships’ (Phillips 47). It accepts uncritically ‘the liberal, andocentric “ideals” of total autonomy, self-direction, and entitlement to sex and relationships without personal responsibility,’ urging women that they can, and must ‘“have it all” and that they can, with sufficient determination, refuse to let anything hold them back from their own pleasure and fulfillment’ (Phillips 47). ‘Although this discourse appears on the surface to promote complete sexual freedom, that “freedom” is confined to hetero-sexuality’ (Phillips 49) and ironically this concept of self is ‘often put forth as an effective new way of attracting men’ (Phillips 48). So, as Brown and Phillips have observed, womanhood is presented as a state where the women can only be completely fulfilled in heterosexual relationships.

Meanwhile, discourses about ‘normal’ male heterosexuality do not make these heterosexual relationships seem very appealing. The Male Sexual Drive Discourse ‘tells [women] that men possess a natural sexual drive that is inherently compelling and aggressive in its quest for fulfillment’ (Phillips 58). This discourse denies male responsibility for violence against women:

and is fueled by and reflected in countless implicit and explicit messages, practices and priorities woven throughout mainstream Western culture. It is what assures women (and men) that sexualized male aggression, from street harassment to gang rape, is neither a crime nor an act of violation, but just another case in which ‘boys will be boys.’ It is what tells us that ‘working out a yes’ from a non-consenting woman is not rape, but merely what any ‘red-blooded American male’ would do when aroused. It is what allows defense lawyers to ‘justify’ such behaviors as fraternity gang rape on college campuses and acquaintance rape of women who are drunk and unconscious (Phillips 58)

So, when male responsibility is denied in this way, ‘boys’ “experimentation” is often seen as being provoked by girls and young women’ (Phillips 58). Competing with the idea that all men have violent sexualities is the Normal/Danger Dichotomy Discourse, which suggests that there are ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’, and it is easy to distinguish between the two because ‘Western society abhors violence and holds that “normal” heterosexual encounters, relationships, and men are inherently distinct from those that are “dangerous” or “exploitative”’ (Phillips 52). While there are good guys who are easy to spot, the Male Sexual Drive Discourse nevertheless indicates that even kind and normal men have a violent sexuality lurking beneath a benign surface.

It is not surprising then that Teen Final Girl prefers to study and baby sit, and to have platonic rather than erotic relationships with boys. If mature femininity is exemplified through attracting and keeping the attentions of a man who might be inherently violent, even if he is a nice guy, then Teen Final Girl’s virginity and androgyny can be read as more than demonstrations of her virtue or sexual immaturity; they are attempts to resist an adult female identity that is represented as undesirable.

In The Stepfather, Slumber Party Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween and Scream, Stephanie, Valerie, Nancy, Laurie and Sidney are all in no particular hurry to become what their peers see as mature women, as it necessitates that that they be consumed with the desire to have and maintain boyfriends to the exclusion of everything else. The world of adult heterosexuality is represented as, at best, a condition that will make them infantilized and subservient to men, and at worst, victims of physical violence, even without the threat of the slasher.

In Halloween, the virginal Laurie would like to date, but is never asked, presumably because boys are intimidated by her intelligence. Meanwhile, she is too shy to make the first move. Laurie seems less than thrilled by the prospect of ‘mature’ female sexuality as embodied by her friends Annie and Lynda, who make out with their boyfriends in the boys’ locker room, or tryst in strangers’ houses. Laurie is androgynous like her sister Teen Final Girls: her slight build gives her an appearance that is neither overly feminine nor overly masculine, and she dresses in loose-fitting, gender-neutral clothing.

In The Stepfather, sixteen-year-old Stephanie is similarly in no hurry to embrace an adult female sexuality. Her recently widowed mother Susan has just married Jerry Blake, a man who has modelled himself on the benign pater familias of 1950s television sitcoms. Unknown to either Stephanie or Susan, Jerry is a serial killer who marries widowed women with children and slaughters them when he is inevitably disappointed after they fail to fulfill what he sees as their appropriate role within the family structure. When we first see Stephanie and Susan, they are playing in the leaves, behaving more like friends than parent and child. But when Jerry returns from work, their relationship is disrupted: a noticeable change comes over Susan – she abruptly ceases the horseplay with Stephanie, takes the leaves from her hair, and runs to meet Jerry as a dutiful wife should, encouraging Stephanie to similarly behave as a dutiful daughter. Clearly, Susan privileges her relationship with her new husband over her existing relationship with her daughter. This downgrading of their relationship’s importance in her life is not very different from how tween female friendships are transformed when one girl gets a boyfriend. As the film progresses, Susan becomes Jerry’s puppet, demurring to his opinion instead of making her own decisions. Susan is clearly someone who has been formed by the Pleasing Woman Discourse. Throughout the film, Susan is seen doing domestic chores, particularly in the kitchen or dining room, and now consults Jerry, a newcomer to this family, on parenting decisions affecting Stephanie rather than making those decisions on her own or in conjunction with her daughter. It will be Susan’s adherence to this traditional idea of femininity that nearly gets her killed because she views Jerry’s overly controlling behavior not as a sign of danger, but as normal masculinity.

Nancy in Nightmare on Elm Street is also in no hurry to take her friendship with Glen to the next level. Her best friend Tina’s relationship with her boyfriend Rod is a cautionary tale. When the film opens, the couple is feuding, but by that evening they are back together. Nancy and Glen are supposed to spend the night at Tina’s house to spare her the prospect of sleeping alone during a time when she is having nightmares so disturbing that she does physical harm to herself. But when Rod shows up to reclaim his girlfriend and wants to stay the night, Tina begs Nancy and Glen to stay, playfully protesting that her boyfriend is an animal. There is an unsettling quality to Tina’s mock protests, indicating a very real fear that Rod might do violence to her. Tina is an adherent to what Phillips terms the Love Hurts Discourse, an expansion of the Male Sexual Drive Discourse that ‘lets young women know that they should not expect too much from men in their relationships’ (65), thereby ‘condoning men’s irresponsibility’ (66) because ‘cruelty, callousness, coldness [and] menace are all equated with maleness and treated as a necessary part of the package’ (Phillips 65). Older women in Nightmare are also not appealing role models for Nancy. Tina’s mother is too concerned with sleeping with her sleazy boyfriend of the moment to stay home and take care of her daughter. Nancy’s divorced functional alcoholic mother’s life revolves around caring for her daughter to a smothering degree. And Glen’s mother is rigid and judgmental. So it is not surprising that Nancy too is not eager to embrace what she sees as an ‘adult’ female identity.

In Slumber Party Massacre, Valerie similarly declines to imitate her more ‘mature’ female peers. The film opens not with Valerie, but with Trish, one of the other young women who will become a victim of the slasher before the night is over. Trisha awakens on her 18th birthday, eager to celebrate a day she sees as signifying her definitive transition into adulthood. She sweeps her room of childish things, dumping her stuffed animals and Barbie dolls into a trash bag and leaving them at the curb on her way to school. Because Trish’s parents will be leaving town for a weekend trip, she will also be on her own overnight for the first time. It is at this moment we realize that the camera is more than an impartial observer, but is instead the gaze of the killer, who is watching her, and nearly seems to have been summoned the moment Trish declared her maturity by dispensing with her toys and parting with her parents. Later, when we first see Valerie in the girls’ locker room, it is clear that she is not as fully ‘adult’ as her peers: she does not participate in the bawdy talk and is put off by the bitchiness of some of the more mature girls. When Valerie overhears Diane, the queen bitch of the group and one of Trish’s guests for the evening, make nasty comments about her as the new girl, she declines Trish’s invitation to her slumber party, opting to spend the evening at home with her little sister Courtney. Trish’s gathering is a soft-core porn version of the slumber party: the girls smoke pot, drink alcohol and parade around in negligees. Even in the privacy of Valerie’s home it is clear that the girls are preparing themselves for a hypothetical male gaze. Meanwhile, Valerie is trying to set a more positive example of adult femininity for her tween sister Courtney, who is laughably and disturbingly mature for her years. During the evening, Courtney gets a call from a boyfriend and reveals her secret stash of Playgirls, and it is not clear if she is making a double entendre when she claims to have ‘been beating off boys since the fifth grade’. Still, Courtney clearly idolizes her virginal big sister, and asks Valerie to do her hair so they will look alike.

Scream offers the most horrific examples of adult female sexuality. A year before the film begins, Sidney’s mother was raped and murdered, and the crime unsettled their small town. Until the end of the film, Sidney believes the official story of her mother’s death –that she was raped and murdered by a stranger who now awaits his fate on death row. But it is hinted that Sidney cannot be oblivious to rumours that her mother was having an affair with her boyfriend Billy’s father, which ultimately caused Billy’s mother to leave Instead, Sidney denies that her mother is not only a flawed person, but a sexual being. As a result, Sidney, who was on her way to taking her relationship with Billy to an NC17 rating, downgraded it to PG13.

And if the prospect of an adult womanhood so centred on winning and keeping the attention of men to the exclusion of everything else is unappealing, the world of adult male sexuality is also frightening. Even before they know of the existence of the slasher, Stephanie and Nancy have seen as part of ‘normal’ heterosexual relationships overly controlling husbands and violent boyfriends. And the slasher is the epitome of a terrifying male sexuality. Clover describes the slasher as someone who, in spite of his ‘phallic purpose as he thrusts his drill or knife into the trembling bodies of young women’ has a ‘masculinity [that] is severely qualified’ in that it ‘ranges from the virginal to the sexually inert to the transvestite or transsexual, and is even spiritually divided (“the mother half of his mind”) or even equipped with vulva and vagina’ (47). But in the teen slasher film, the killer is frequently the epitome of pathological masculinity taken from the Normal/Danger Dichotomy Discourse. If it is possible to know the difference between good and bad men, then the slasher is a very bad man. Freddy Kreuger in A Nightmare on Elm Street is the embodiment of the bad man parents warn their children about, someone whose twisted masculinity compels him to harm rather than protect children.

Frequently, the slasher is such a caricature of masculinity that his face is an emotionless mask, as is the case with Michael Myers in Halloween or Russ Thorn in Slumber Party Massacre. Michael’s face is literally a mask, and Russ Thorn, with his phallic porn star name, is the embodiment of the type of maleness described in the Male Sexual Drive Discourse. Russ is nearly always photographed in an overtly phallic way. In many shots, Russ’s manly weapon of choice, his long drill, dangles suggestively between his legs. When we finally see more than fragments of Russ, he is the most decidedly male of all the characters. Dressed in a blue jumpsuit, Russ has an impassive and angular countenance. Contrary to what Clover says about the slasher being a man confused about his gender role, Russ exhibits no such ambiguity. Russ embodies the pathological masculinity as exemplified by the Normal/Danger Dichotomy Sexual Discourse. When he finally speaks, it is to tell Trisha that all of them are very pretty and that he loves them because ‘it takes a lot of love for a person to... do this’ (indicating the murders he has committed that evening). Clearly Russ equates male sexuality with violence. As Russ is about to dispatch Trish, he tells her that she knows she wants it, mouthing one of those phrases employed by men who believe that their pressing sexual needs entitle them to ‘work out a yes’ from a partner who does not initially consent.

If Russ, Freddy and Michael are the embodiment of the Normal/Danger Dichotomy Sexual Discourse, then Jerry, Billy and Stewie exemplify the Male Sexual Drive Discourse. Throughout most of The Stepfather, others dismiss Stephanie’s dislike of Jerry as due to her own inability to accept that her mother is entitled to an adult relationship. Because Jerry appears to be a clean-cut old fashioned man whose greatest joy lies in being part of a family, it is difficult for outsiders to comprehend Stephanie’s dislike of him. And if Jerry is to be evaluated through the Normal/Danger Dichotomy Discourse, then he would be the normal and unthreatening man. However, Jerry as killer reveals the inherent weakness in the binary thinking undergirding the Normal/Danger Dichotomy Discourse. Jerry is best understood through the rubric of the Male Sexual Drive Discourse. If all men have inherently violent sexualities, and Jerry is a man, then Jerry has an inherently violent sexuality. Stephanie glimpses some of this violence when she finds Jerry alone in the basement during a party that he and her mother are hosting. Jerry mutters to himself that someone is a very bad boy as he stabs a photograph of a child that Stephanie does not recognize. When Jerry catches Stephanie looking at him, he uses an explanation based on the Male Sexual Drive Discourse to explain his aberrant behavior: he is under a lot of pressure, and talking to himself in the basement, while seemingly bizarre, is his way of relieving it.

In Scream, Billy’s and Stewie’s love of slasher films is predicated on what they see as a world with fairly logical and unthreatening ideas about traditional gender roles and the requisite punishments for transgression. Their reasoning seems to be that if more people were aware of the rules of horror film, then the world would be an orderly and much happier place. So when Sidney finally agrees to have sex with Billy, she has crossed the boundary from virgin to whore and must be killed. Billy and Stewie embrace the Male Sexual Drive Discourse as a way of understanding their own masculinity, since it relieves them of all responsibility for their actions. Thus, when they do things such as rape and murder Sidney’s mother, they honestly believe that they were driven to ‘put her out of her misery’ because she was a ‘ho bag’. Billy’s and Stewie’s desire to punish those they see as guilty of sexual transgression can be understood through Carol Gilligan’s description of how men experience relationships. Building upon the work of Nancy Chodorow, Gilligan says that

Relationships, and particularly issues of dependency, are experienced differently by women and men. For boys and men, separation and individuation are critically tied to gender identity since separation from the mother is essential for the development of masculinity. For girls and women, issues of femininity or feminine identity do not depend on the achievement of separation from the mother or on the progress of individuation. Since masculinity is defined through separation while femininity is defined through attachment, male gender identity is threatened by intimacy while female gender identity is threatened by separation. Thus, males tend to have difficulty with relationships while females tend to have problems with individuation. (8)

Billy’s and Stewie’s need to kill, then, demonstrates to what degree they are threatened by intimacy. Billy has seen first hand how intimacy can lead to suffering when his mother left the family due to his father’s infidelity with Sidney’s mother. Slasher films are appealing to the boys, since the genre takes a dim view of all illicit relationships, and the killer makes pre-emptive strikes against those who could potentially cause others to suffer through intimacy.

Billy’s and Stewie’s love of the slasher film is the same reason that critics excoriate the genre as misogynist: since the killer’s wrath falls most heavily on sexually active female victims while the virgin survives, it is implied that for females, sex equals death. While I argue that the slasher film offers a critique of narrowly defined gender roles, certainly the killer himself is of the mindset that there is something inherently disturbing about female sexuality. According to Susan Griffin, to the mind of the pornographer:

eros and nature...are made into one force, and this force is personified as woman. But this is simultaneously a fatal and an evil force.... Thus eros, nature, and woman, in the synapses of this mind, bring death into this world, and desire, this mind imagines, leads one to die. (13).

This mind, so terrified of woman and nature, and of the force of eros, must separate itself from what it fears. ‘In this mind, because the woman desires, she is imagined as evil through and because of her carnality. The fulfillment of her desire inevitably brings about her humiliation and at the same time implies the loss of her soul’ (Griffin 23-24). And in this way, Griffin’s pornographer exhibits what Gilligan describes as a typical masculine sense of self threatened by intimacy.

In the slasher film, what Griffin describes as the mind of the pornographer typifies the mentality of the killer, who is similarly disturbed by female desire, and so must exterminate what he fears. It is painfully obvious how Russ Thorn and Billy and Stewie fear female desire. But Jerry Blake too fears female desire. We get a hint of this phobia the one time we see Jerry and Susan having sex in the marital bed. In a scene that is otherwise uncharacteristic of their extremely patriarchal relationship, Susan straddles Jerry. Susan’s eyes are closed in ecstasy, so she does not see Jerry grimacing to stoically bear her thrusting. But it is Stephanie’s, not Susan’s, sexuality that eventually prompts Jerry to embark on another killing spree. When Jerry catches Stephanie sharing a relatively chaste good night kiss with her friend Paul, he explodes into a rage, threatening to have the boy arrested for statutory rape. Susan is summoned by the ensuing commotion and hears her daughter protest that it is none of Jerry’s business who she kisses and furthermore, Jerry is just all hung up about sex. Susan attempts to play the dutiful wife, slapping Stephanie as punishment for her insubordination to her stepfather, but she also cannot hide her anger towards Jerry’s bizarre reaction. Jerry objects that he caught Paul ‘nearly raping’ Stephanie on their front porch. Susan challenges this interpretation, pointing out that she has known Paul much longer than him, and can vouch for Paul’s character. It is at this moment in the film that we see a subtle change come to Jerry’s face, indicating that he is in the process of disengaging himself from this family, which has disappointed him, and it won’t be long before he attempts to hack them to pieces just as he did his previous family in the film’s opening. In the next scene, we see Jerry travelling to a new place, changing his appearance yet again, so that he can begin a new life after he will presumably methodically eradicate the current family, presumably because of Stephanie’s dangerous ability to provoke desire and her mother’s refusal to see this ability as unacceptable.

If these narrowly proscribed and extreme expressions of masculinity are frightening for women, they can be similarly terrifying for men. Nightmare on Elm Street, Part II, is explicitly concerned with how teen boys can view the prospect of adult masculinity as horrifying. Freddy’s revenge manifests itself when he attempts to ‘educate’ the adolescent Jesse about his possible future gender role, which can best be described as fitting into the Male Sexual Drive Discourse. Similar to Teen Final Girl, Jesse is virginal and therefore liminal. Furthermore, he is not so controlled by the machismo that dictates the actions of most boys his age in that he does not feel compelled to engage in sexual activity, since the prospect is still a bit frightening to him. What scares Jesse is not so much catching an STD or getting a girl pregnant or even being unable to perform, but the prospect of becoming a sexual being whose identity is so extremely masculine that it is bestial. When Lisa, the film’s most desirable girl, brings Jesse to a private spot where he can have his way with her, he is paralyzed by images of his tongue transforming into a long, protruding slug. This hallucination is courtesy of Freddy, who is continually enjoining Jesse to emulate his own deviant sexuality and take up his razor-fingered gloves. One of Jesse’s previous nightmares has put him on the victim end of a sexual encounter where the person who would have abused him is instead killed. Jesse dreams that his sadistic gym teacher, Coach Schneider, meets him in a gay leather bar. The coach, viewing Jesse as new meat to be dominated, seizes his hand and brings him back to the school gym intending to bind and sodomize him. Instead, Freddy arrives. Acting as Jesse’s stand in, Freddy ties up the coach and slaughters him. If Freddy’s and Coach Schneider’s sexualities are read through the lens of the Male Sexual Drive Discourse, they are not necessarily deviant, but instead can be accommodated at the logical extreme of this discourse. Both possess sexual drives that are always potentially violent because they are ‘inherently compelling and aggressive in [their] quest for fulfillment’ (Phillips 58). So if Teen Final Girl fears male sexuality, then Teen Final Boy has similar misgivings.

Femininity and Survival
Teen Final Girl’s androgyny and virginity are rejections, conscious or unconscious, of a world of adult sexuality which, seen through adolescent eyes, seems none too inviting. Yet her androgyny and virginity are more than a psychic anorexia permitting her to remain on the sidelines of adult female development: in the slasher film, they are positive attributes that give her freedoms that a wholly feminine identity would not provide. And when Teen Final Girl does engage in what is coded as feminine behaviour, those reactions are assets rather than liabilities.

Because Teen Final Girl is less preoccupied with finding and keeping a boy than are her more ‘mature’ counterparts, her attention is not diverted from the dangers that surround her. In The Stepfather, Slumber Party Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream and Halloween, Teen Final Girl is the first to sense that all is not well. Nancy in Nightmare and Stephanie in The Stepfather are the first to believe that there is a maniac in their midst. Teen Final Girl is also able to survive because of her liminality, which manifests itself in two ways. First, Teen Final Girl is liminal due to her androgyny, which permits her to straddle the boundaries between masculinity and femininity. And second, Teen Final Girl is liminal as a teenager, who is no longer fully a child, but also not an autonomous adult subject. Teen Final Girl’s liminality gives her a flexibility lacking in her peers who are more wholly adult and less ambiguously masculine or feminine. While Teen Final Girl has the logical reasoning capabilities of an adult, she is also firmly rooted in the magical type of thinking from childhood. And she is able to switch between masculine and feminine strategies for responding to her environment, allowing her to survive while others die.

In The Stepfather, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Nightmare on Elm Street, Part III, Stephanie and Nancy are the first to fully grasp that they are in mortal peril. When Nancy’s friend Tina is plagued by nightmares so vivid that she emerges from her slumbers with her clothing slashed, Nancy immediately believes Tina is being hounded by something more than the results of undigested pizza, since she has had the same disturbing dreams. Jonathan Markovitz notes how both Nancy and Tina exhibit a specifically feminine paranoia in reaction to the dream in the beginning of the film. But ‘Tina’s sense of paranoia is never fully developed [because] the guys thwart her efforts at communication, which might have justified her heightened concerns’ (216). When Tina first brings up her dream with Nancy, she is interrupted by Rod, who boasts that the only thing he awoke with this morning was a hard on. Later, at Tina’s house, when she and Nancy have another opportunity to compare notes, they are shut down, first by Glen, who declares the impossibility of Freddy being anything more than a dream, and then by Rod, who interrupts the gathering and drags Tina off to bed. Markovitz sees male intervention as only part of the reason that Tina is insufficiently paranoid, blaming some of her failing on her own inherent ability to be easily distracted (216). But I see Tina’s inability to be sufficiently paranoid as deriving from her a more ‘adult’ identity which prohibits her from fully appreciating the danger posed by Freddy, because he does not operate according to the rules of logic, and can only be understood through a more childish and magical way of viewing the world, a way of thinking that the sexually precocious Tina has disavowed. Glen too has dreamed of Freddy, but does not fully accept Nancy’s fears that he is dangerous, since, according to the rules of logic, dreams are not real and therefore cannot actually harm the dreamer. After Tina is brutally murdered, Nancy fully accepts that her friend’s death was Freddy’s, rather than Rod’s, doing because her own magical thinking permits her to accommodate the supernatural into her concept of reality. Glen is convinced of Rod’s innocence not so much out of a belief in Freddy, but instead because he does not think Rod is capable of committing the crime. Nancy’s magical thinking allows her to survive while others die because it helps her understand how to fight Freddy. Nancy’s mother and the other adults around her insist on treating her nightmares as just disturbing dreams that someone more adult would dismiss as frightening, but not real.

In Halloween, Laurie is similarly the first to sense the presence of Michael Myers. As Annie and Lynda chatter about their sexual exploits, Michael passes slowly in the car he has stolen to escape from the mental institution. Laurie immediately notices that something is not right while her friends mock her reactions, one of them yelling ‘speed kills’ at the back of Michael’s slow-moving vehicle, causing him to stop the car for a heart-wrenching second. Laurie is particularly careful on the way home from school after having been spooked by Michael’s presence. When she thinks she sees someone hiding behind a hedge, she hesitates before passing it rather than making light of the possible danger and rushing towards it as her friend does. At home in her room, Laurie is again startled when she sees movement outside behind the laundry drying on the clothesline. Interestingly, Laurie’s vigilance decreases as she too begins to overtly think about boys. Before arriving for her babysitting job of the evening, Laurie discusses with Annie her secret crush on a boy at school, which seems connected to her decreasing ability to believe in the boogie man. Laurie watches Tommy that evening, and he claims to see the boogie man after spying Michael carrying Annie’s limp body into the house across the street where she is baby sitting. Laurie confidently dismisses Tommy’s fears as nonsensical since, according to the adult way of viewing the world, there is no such thing as the boogie man.

Stephanie in The Stepfather also senses that there is something not right about Jerry, and when she reads a small article in the newspaper about an unsolved murder that occurred last year about 100 miles from her home, instinct leads her to wonder whether or not her stepfather is involved. Indeed, this instinct would have permitted Stephanie to learn Jerry’s identity fairly quickly had he not been able to intervene. Stephanie’s hunch prompts her to send a letter to the reporter who wrote the story and asks for a picture of the murderer under the guise that she is working on a school project about serial killers. Stephanie would have received the picture confirming Jerry’s identity as the killer if he had not been screening her mail and intercepted the damning reply.

Of all the Teen Final Girls, Sidney in Scream engages in magical thinking later than her counterparts. In the beginning of the film, her suspicions that Billy is the killer (or one of them) are correct, but are based on pure logic rather than hunch, as is the case with Stephanie’s more improbable suspicions about Jerry. After Sidney is attacked in her home, Billy inexplicably arrives to rescue her. She immediately suspects that he was her masked attacker when a cell phone falls from his pocket, signifying that he was the only person who could have possibly called her prior to the attack. The would-be killer, who was on the phone with Sidney prior to the assault, can describe where Sidney is in the house in a way that only someone inside the dwelling could possibly know. Cell phones were still fairly uncommon in 1996, so Billy’s possession of one is more than a passing coincidence. It is only towards the end of the film that Sidney begins to engage in magical thinking at the urging of her friend Randy, a male virgin who knows all of the rules of slasher films and tutors her so she can confound Billy’s and Stewie’s use of the rules of this genre that they so love. In the end, when Stewie and Billy have apparently been killed, Randy reminds Sidney to beware because this is the time in the slasher film when the killer returns to life for one last scare. True to the rules of the genre, Billy abruptly sits up, only to be promptly shot in the head by Sidney, who now understands what she faces.

Clover identifies the figure of Final Girl as first emerging in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where Sally is distinguished from the earlier women in slasher films who survived in that she is not rescued by a man. In Psycho, for example, while Lila Crane is not hampered by feminine behaviours such as learned helplessness or the need to be deferential to men, she, more than Marion’s boss, her boyfriend Sam, the sheriff or the private detective hired by Marion’s boss, is the driving force to find her sister. But in the end, when she is confronted by the killer, Lila is just a woman who needs a man to save her. When Lila finds Norman’s taxidermied mother, she can only scream hysterically and attempt to flee, which nearly drives her onto the point of Norman’s raised knife before Sam appears from nowhere to tackle her would-be killer. But in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, typically feminine behaviours such as screaming and running save Sally rather than get her killed. Sally’s feminine instinct to run and hide permits her to eventually escape Leatherface, who cuts down with his chainsaw the trucker who gallantly stopped to rescue her. After The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, feminine behaviours such as running and hiding rather than masculine bravado and strength are among the most important skills for surviving the maniac’s wrath.

Running and hiding help Stephanie and Laurie to survive. In Halloween, Laurie spends the last 20 minutes of the film running and hiding from Michael Myers. This strategy not only saves her, but the children she is watching. When Laurie hides in the closet, she is able to divert Michael’s attention from the children so they can escape. The closet is not necessarily the dead end hiding place it might seem either. As Michael hacks his way through the closet doors, Nancy discovers that she is not without weapons and fashions a metal coat hanger into something she can use to poke Michael in the eye. It is also worth noting that the two times Nancy wounds Michael, she uses quintessentially feminine objects to do so—a coat hanger and a knitting needle. However, in the end, Laurie is assisted by Dr. Loomis, who arrives and shoots his patient.

Stephanie in The Stepfather offers the most comprehensive example of a Teen Final Girl whose femininity is an asset rather than a liability. When Stephanie emerges from the bathroom and sees Jerry waiting for her in the hallway with blood on his face and a butcher knife in his hand, she immediately runs. Stephanie is trapped in the house, but running permits her to buy time and debilitate Jerry in various ways. At first, she retreats to the bathroom, locking herself in so she can try and escape through the second story window. But the window will not open, and Jerry is about to burst through the door. Stephanie takes advantage of the remaining seconds to compose herself so when Jerry eventually smashes open the door, shattering the mirror on the back, she can improvise a knife with a large shard of the glass and seriously wound her attacker so that she can escape for the moment. Next, Stephanie leads Jerry on a chase through the attic where she hides among the arrangement of the family’s old possessions that she knows far better than Jerry does. From her hidden spot, Stephanie can wait until Jerry makes himself vulnerable by putting his head through the trap door in an attempt to locate her. At this moment, Stephanie sends an old sled flying across the attic floor, knocking Jerry out long enough so that she can flee this enclosure and take possession of Jerry’s knife.

The wisdom of Stephanie’s strategies are underscored by the death only moments before of Jim Ogilvy, who has been searching throughout the film for the man who murdered his sister and her child a few years earlier. Jim’s strategy for dealing with Jerry is to purchase a gun so he can kill him upon what should be their first and only meeting. Tim’s strategy is not one of a rogue male, but instead, one that is encouraged and endorsed by the police detective who originally worked the case and was unable to get any leads. He tells Jim that if he were in his shoes, as a private citizen, he would ‘get a gun and blow the son of a bitch away’ when he found him. While Jim’s plan for dealing with Jerry might usually work in movies, in real life (or in this film) his strategy is suicidal. When Jerry opens the front door while holding his bloodied knife, Jim is so shocked that he can only draw his laughably tiny gun which jams when he tries to shoot. Jerry, who is accustomed to killing people, calmly runs his knife through Jim before proceeding upstairs to menace his unruly stepdaughter.

A final feminine strategy that permits both Stephanie and Susan to survive is cooperation. As Stephanie is frantically running from Jerry upstairs, a bloodied Susan whose leg was broken when Jerry pushed her down the basement stairs drags herself to the second floor to save her daughter. On her way up, she arms herself with the now deceased Jim’s gun, and mother and daughter collaborate to dispatch Jerry on the stairs. Stephanie stabs Jerry with his own knife, sending him down the stairs, and Susan shoots him when he gets up again so he cannot further harm them. Patricia Brett Erens describes this ending as valorizing ‘women’s maternal role and the strong female bonding that exists between mothers and daughters’ (354).

Sidney in Scream finds herself using similarly feminine strategies to survive. Early in the film, she derides the horror genre, specifically slasher films, because they are all the same, and the female characters are particularly annoying because they are usually running up the stairs into certain danger rather than out the door the way any sensible woman would. But like it or not, Sidney cannot escape from the universe of the horror film with its reactionary ideas about gender, and if she does not wish to die for breaking the rules, then she must behave like Final Girl. Sidney learns this the hard way. When she is menaced by the killer the second time, she finds herself with no option but to run back into the house, and outside is far less safe. This time, she is wounded and tired, and so not able to directly fight the killer as she was the first time he broke into her house, so running and hiding are often better strategies than confrontation. Still, Sidney’s survival skills are more androgynous than those of her sister Teen Final Girls. Sidney is capable of throwing a punch, as tabloid television reporter Gale Weathers can attest, and she is able to survive as much through her ability to engage in physical confrontation with Billy and Stewie as through her propensity to run and hide.

But Sidney survives for a second important reason: cooperation with other women. It is relatively easy for Susan and Stephanie to collaborate to dispatch Jerry since they have a fairly untroubled relationship, but Sidney has to get over her dislike of Gale to work with her. While Gale’s methods of reportage are sleazy, she is ultimately on the side of right because she reveals that the man on death row for killing Sidney’s mother is innocent, something that Sidney is not prepared to even hear, since it will shatter two cherished illusions: that her mother was not having an affair and that the killer has been caught. Interestingly, these illusions are the product of a childish type of thinking that often sees parents as flawless, non-sexual beings and that the criminal justice system is capable of identifying and apprehending dangerous criminals. It is important that when Gale Weathers is finally able to help Sidney, shooting Billy when he is about ready to stab her to death, Sidney has jettisoned these illusions in favor of a mindset that encourages her to question surface appearances.

The virginal Teen Final Girl’s survival in what has been excoriated as one of the most blatantly misogynistic genres of cinema is not a triumph of conservative values. Instead, the death of her peers who are in the throes of reactionary ideas of gender is a critique of these values. Teen Final Girl lives because she questions the narrow choices of womanhood presented to her. The mental flexibility Teen Final Girl brings to her battle with the slasher demonstrates how, after her triumph over the killer, she will be capable of maturing in a way that is less encumbered by a narrowly defined femininity.

Bibliography
Brown, Lyn Mikel (2003) Girlfighting: Betrayal and Rejection among Girls (New York: New York University Press.

Clover, Carol J. (1992) Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press).

Erens, Patricia Brett (1996) ‘The Stepfather: Father as Monster in the Contemporary Horror Film’ in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Austen, TX: The University of Texas Press).

Gilligan, Carol (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Griffin, Susan (1981) Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge against Nature (New York: Harper Colophon).

Markwovitz, Jonathan (2000) ‘Female Paranoia as Survival Skill: Reason or Pathology in A Nightmare on Elm Street’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Vol. 17 (3), pp. 211-20.

Phillips, Lynn M. (2000) Flirting with Danger: Young Women’s Reflections on Sexuality and Domination (New York: New York University Press).

Filmography
Friday the 13th, Sean S. Cunningham, Dir. 1980.

Halloween, John Carpenter, Dir. 1978.

Nightmare on Elm Street, A. Wes Craven, Dir. 1984.

Nightmare on Elm Street, Part II: Freddy’s Revenge, Jack Sholder, Dir. 1985.

Nightmare on Elm Street, Part III: Dream Warriors, Chuck Russell, 1987.

Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock, Dir. 1960.

Scream, Wes Craven, Dir. 1996.

Slumber Party Massacre, The. Amy Holden Jones, Dir. 1982.

Stepfather, The, Joseph Rubin, Dir. 1987.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The, Tobe Hooper, Dir. 1974.

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	(Painting 'Eternity' by June Pullium) Sexually Ambiguous or Liminal? Some Thoughts on Carol Clover’s Final Girl in the Teen Slasher Film June Pulliam In Men, Women and Chainsaws, Carol Clover hypothesizes that the female who survives the maniac’s wrath in the slasher film lives not just because of her virginity (or momentary lack of interest in sex), but because of an incipient masculinity which permits her to disarm and unman the killer who is in some sort of gender distress. Clover dubs this lone survivor Final Girl, and sees her as similar to her pursuer in that both are sexually ambiguous. When the slasher is killed/subdued by Final Girl, she symbolically castrates him, coding him as feminine and thereby resolving any ambiguity in his gender identity. At this point, Final Girl’s own gender is also no longer ambiguous: the act of ‘castrating’ her pursuer and surviving his wrath permits her to more fully realize her incipient masculinity instead of someone whose victimization would code her as feminine. Clover’s theories about gender and the slasher film are based on a random and more general sampling of the genre. However, there are subtle differences when Final Girl is an adolescent. Teen Final Girl’s virginity, liminality and femininity are all crucial qualities that permit her to survive while her sexually active sisters (and brothers) are cut down by the killer. Because Teen Final Girl has not yet become sexually active, she is liminal in that she is not fully adult (or woman), at least not in a teenaged context. Teen Final Girl’s liminality is important because it gives her a mental flexibility: she has access to two ways of thinking. Teen Final Girl’s ability to view the world in the more magical way associated with children permits to her believe in the supernatural, which in turn allows her to fully comprehend the serious nature of what she faces so that she can more effectively fight her pursuer. But Teen Final Girl can also view the world in a logical, adult way, permitting her to apply reason to outwit the killer. Furthermore, in spite of her frequently boyish appearance, Teen Final Girl’s behaviour is more feminine than masculine, and these behaviours help her survive the maniac’s wrath. When the killer chases Teen Final Girl, she runs and hides instead of making a suicidal show of masculine bravado against someone who is bigger and better armed. I see Teen Final Girl’s boyish appearance combined with her feminine behaviour as making her androgynous rather than someone with an incipient masculinity that is completed when she kills her attacker. To see Teen Final Girl as possessing an incipient masculinity is to emphasize the binaries of gender at work in shaping her subjectivity, whereas describing her as androgynous emphasizes how her subjectivity is a flexible mélange of masculinity and femininity that provides her more resources than are available to both her male and female peers, whose gender identities are less fluid. This distinction is important to understanding how Teen Final Girl’s survival is not a triumph of conservative values in a universe that seems to punish female sexuality, but is instead a critique of those values. Before I embark on analyzing Teen Final Girl, it is first necessary to clarify my definitions. For my purposes, a teenager is anyone who is approximately high school age and still lives with her parents. While most college freshmen are adolescents, they have crossed an important threshold into adulthood in that they are now living away from parental control and are no longer immersed in an environment with people who still see them as children. In the family home, the teen is often treated as a child by her parents who are still more directly responsible for her care. Because Teen Final Girl’s parents are more likely to see her as a child, they unwittingly perpetuate her ability to persist in a magical way of thinking characteristic of childhood, even when she is fully capable of logical thought. Teen Final Girl’s peers who are sexually active are more fully adult (or believe themselves to be anyway) because they have been initiated into the world of grown-up heterosexuality: this transition costs them their ability to view the world magically. Instead, they are in the process of completely adopting the adult mindset that precludes the existence of a reality that cannot be observed and documented by ‘grown up’ rules of logic, so they become easy prey for the slasher. My definition of adolescence in this essay is relevant in that I will not examine some slasher films that are nevertheless popular with teens such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, the Friday the 13th franchise or Urban Legend, since their Final Girls are not teens according to this rubric. Instead, I concentrate on Halloween, several of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, Slumber Party Massacre, The Stepfather and Scream, films whose Final Girls are all unquestionably adolescents. Virginity, Liminality and Androgyny Because Teen Final Girl has not yet become sexually active, she is liminal in that she is not fully adult (or woman in a teenaged context, which equates maturity with engaging in penile/vaginal intercourse). While Teen Final Girl is teased by peers for what they see as her lack of maturity, she is wise to forestall embracing this brand of adult womanhood, since from the perspective of adolescence, the condition has little to recommend it. Teens have relatively conservative ideas about gender, and for adolescent girls, being appropriately feminine often necessitates obsessing over the minutia of dress and an exacting scrutiny of the body, while suppressing any unladylike interest in intellectual pursuits in the interests of becoming pleasing to a hypothetical masculine audience. Lyn Mikel Brown documents this narrowly proscribed femininity, often communicated to girls who aren’t even in their tweens. Girls as young as seven: learn from the media and sometimes from adults that they should be preoccupied with what boys think of them (even though real life boys this age aren’t thinking about them at all that much). . . . If being with boys means either being like a boy – giving up less important “girl” things in order to play what the boys want to play – or hanging with girls, but being the kind of girl a boy might someday choose as a romantic partner, the girls’ desires and experiences are secondary. (Brown 46) The formation of this feminine identity requires girls not only dress and comport themselves in a certain way, but actively compete with other girls for male attention. Girls demonstrate their own femininity by calling into the question the femininity of others: policing the borders of acceptable of femininity through calling other girls sluts and bitches, obsessing over weight, and disguising their own competence in certain areas, thereby ‘unwittingly mirroring and supporting a status quo that has long controlled and trivialized girlness and femininity’ (Brown 97). Girls are seduced by the status quo particularly ‘because it affords them special protection and security,’ at least for white girls, who, if they ‘play their cards right, are promised good white boys, the eventual power brokers’ (Brown 97-98). Sadly, women have much to gain when they police the borders of femininity and educate others like them to be ‘good’. ‘Those white girls and girls of colour who are different, who refuse or resist, threaten to reveal the awful compromises perfect girls and good women have made. They threaten to reveal the fraudulence, the failure, the psychological and relational damage’ (Brown 97-98) that occurs as a result of conforming to this model. It is no wonder that by adolescence, many girls are troubled by what they see as their future as women, entangled in a subjectivity that encourages them to suppress their own desires in favour of a piece of the patriarchal pie that is not all that appealing in the first place. By adolescence, teen girl subjectivities are being shaped through multiple and competing discourses. Lynn Phillips identifies several discourses that ‘weave through and help constitute’ (77) the subjectivities of young women. The Pleasing Woman Discourse and the Together Woman Discourse present competing ideas of what it is to be a Good Woman, ‘addressing woman’s agency, desires, entitlement, and “proper” roles, particularly within their hetero-relationships and encounters’ (Phillips 38). In the Pleasing Woman Discourse, ‘women are assumed to lack, or at least to ignore, their desires [and] urged to cherish the feminine “virtues” of modesty, attractiveness, and sacrifice to others, particularly men.’ (Phillips 39) The Pleasing Woman Discourse does ‘not portray [women] as active subjects in their own decision making, relationships, or sexualities,’ but instead, as someone who is to ‘sit sweetly in wait for a man to act,’ (Phillips 39), while deriving a sense of power from being needed. The competing Together Woman Discourse is an offshoot of liberal feminism, promoting ‘the notion that a “together” woman is free, sexually sophisticated, and entitled to accept nothing less than full equality and satisfaction in her sexual encounters and romantic relationships’ (Phillips 47). It accepts uncritically ‘the liberal, andocentric “ideals” of total autonomy, self-direction, and entitlement to sex and relationships without personal responsibility,’ urging women that they can, and must ‘“have it all” and that they can, with sufficient determination, refuse to let anything hold them back from their own pleasure and fulfillment’ (Phillips 47). ‘Although this discourse appears on the surface to promote complete sexual freedom, that “freedom” is confined to hetero-sexuality’ (Phillips 49) and ironically this concept of self is ‘often put forth as an effective new way of attracting men’ (Phillips 48). So, as Brown and Phillips have observed, womanhood is presented as a state where the women can only be completely fulfilled in heterosexual relationships. Meanwhile, discourses about ‘normal’ male heterosexuality do not make these heterosexual relationships seem very appealing. The Male Sexual Drive Discourse ‘tells [women] that men possess a natural sexual drive that is inherently compelling and aggressive in its quest for fulfillment’ (Phillips 58). This discourse denies male responsibility for violence against women: and is fueled by and reflected in countless implicit and explicit messages, practices and priorities woven throughout mainstream Western culture. It is what assures women (and men) that sexualized male aggression, from street harassment to gang rape, is neither a crime nor an act of violation, but just another case in which ‘boys will be boys.’ It is what tells us that ‘working out a yes’ from a non-consenting woman is not rape, but merely what any ‘red-blooded American male’ would do when aroused. It is what allows defense lawyers to ‘justify’ such behaviors as fraternity gang rape on college campuses and acquaintance rape of women who are drunk and unconscious (Phillips 58) So, when male responsibility is denied in this way, ‘boys’ “experimentation” is often seen as being provoked by girls and young women’ (Phillips 58). Competing with the idea that all men have violent sexualities is the Normal/Danger Dichotomy Discourse, which suggests that there are ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’, and it is easy to distinguish between the two because ‘Western society abhors violence and holds that “normal” heterosexual encounters, relationships, and men are inherently distinct from those that are “dangerous” or “exploitative”’ (Phillips 52). While there are good guys who are easy to spot, the Male Sexual Drive Discourse nevertheless indicates that even kind and normal men have a violent sexuality lurking beneath a benign surface. It is not surprising then that Teen Final Girl prefers to study and baby sit, and to have platonic rather than erotic relationships with boys. If mature femininity is exemplified through attracting and keeping the attentions of a man who might be inherently violent, even if he is a nice guy, then Teen Final Girl’s virginity and androgyny can be read as more than demonstrations of her virtue or sexual immaturity; they are attempts to resist an adult female identity that is represented as undesirable. In The Stepfather, Slumber Party Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween and Scream, Stephanie, Valerie, Nancy, Laurie and Sidney are all in no particular hurry to become what their peers see as mature women, as it necessitates that that they be consumed with the desire to have and maintain boyfriends to the exclusion of everything else. The world of adult heterosexuality is represented as, at best, a condition that will make them infantilized and subservient to men, and at worst, victims of physical violence, even without the threat of the slasher. In Halloween, the virginal Laurie would like to date, but is never asked, presumably because boys are intimidated by her intelligence. Meanwhile, she is too shy to make the first move. Laurie seems less than thrilled by the prospect of ‘mature’ female sexuality as embodied by her friends Annie and Lynda, who make out with their boyfriends in the boys’ locker room, or tryst in strangers’ houses. Laurie is androgynous like her sister Teen Final Girls: her slight build gives her an appearance that is neither overly feminine nor overly masculine, and she dresses in loose-fitting, gender-neutral clothing. In The Stepfather, sixteen-year-old Stephanie is similarly in no hurry to embrace an adult female sexuality. Her recently widowed mother Susan has just married Jerry Blake, a man who has modelled himself on the benign pater familias of 1950s television sitcoms. Unknown to either Stephanie or Susan, Jerry is a serial killer who marries widowed women with children and slaughters them when he is inevitably disappointed after they fail to fulfill what he sees as their appropriate role within the family structure. When we first see Stephanie and Susan, they are playing in the leaves, behaving more like friends than parent and child. But when Jerry returns from work, their relationship is disrupted: a noticeable change comes over Susan – she abruptly ceases the horseplay with Stephanie, takes the leaves from her hair, and runs to meet Jerry as a dutiful wife should, encouraging Stephanie to similarly behave as a dutiful daughter. Clearly, Susan privileges her relationship with her new husband over her existing relationship with her daughter. This downgrading of their relationship’s importance in her life is not very different from how tween female friendships are transformed when one girl gets a boyfriend. As the film progresses, Susan becomes Jerry’s puppet, demurring to his opinion instead of making her own decisions. Susan is clearly someone who has been formed by the Pleasing Woman Discourse. Throughout the film, Susan is seen doing domestic chores, particularly in the kitchen or dining room, and now consults Jerry, a newcomer to this family, on parenting decisions affecting Stephanie rather than making those decisions on her own or in conjunction with her daughter. It will be Susan’s adherence to this traditional idea of femininity that nearly gets her killed because she views Jerry’s overly controlling behavior not as a sign of danger, but as normal masculinity. Nancy in Nightmare on Elm Street is also in no hurry to take her friendship with Glen to the next level. Her best friend Tina’s relationship with her boyfriend Rod is a cautionary tale. When the film opens, the couple is feuding, but by that evening they are back together. Nancy and Glen are supposed to spend the night at Tina’s house to spare her the prospect of sleeping alone during a time when she is having nightmares so disturbing that she does physical harm to herself. But when Rod shows up to reclaim his girlfriend and wants to stay the night, Tina begs Nancy and Glen to stay, playfully protesting that her boyfriend is an animal. There is an unsettling quality to Tina’s mock protests, indicating a very real fear that Rod might do violence to her. Tina is an adherent to what Phillips terms the Love Hurts Discourse, an expansion of the Male Sexual Drive Discourse that ‘lets young women know that they should not expect too much from men in their relationships’ (65), thereby ‘condoning men’s irresponsibility’ (66) because ‘cruelty, callousness, coldness [and] menace are all equated with maleness and treated as a necessary part of the package’ (Phillips 65). Older women in Nightmare are also not appealing role models for Nancy. Tina’s mother is too concerned with sleeping with her sleazy boyfriend of the moment to stay home and take care of her daughter. Nancy’s divorced functional alcoholic mother’s life revolves around caring for her daughter to a smothering degree. And Glen’s mother is rigid and judgmental. So it is not surprising that Nancy too is not eager to embrace what she sees as an ‘adult’ female identity. In Slumber Party Massacre, Valerie similarly declines to imitate her more ‘mature’ female peers. The film opens not with Valerie, but with Trish, one of the other young women who will become a victim of the slasher before the night is over. Trisha awakens on her 18th birthday, eager to celebrate a day she sees as signifying her definitive transition into adulthood. She sweeps her room of childish things, dumping her stuffed animals and Barbie dolls into a trash bag and leaving them at the curb on her way to school. Because Trish’s parents will be leaving town for a weekend trip, she will also be on her own overnight for the first time. It is at this moment we realize that the camera is more than an impartial observer, but is instead the gaze of the killer, who is watching her, and nearly seems to have been summoned the moment Trish declared her maturity by dispensing with her toys and parting with her parents. Later, when we first see Valerie in the girls’ locker room, it is clear that she is not as fully ‘adult’ as her peers: she does not participate in the bawdy talk and is put off by the bitchiness of some of the more mature girls. When Valerie overhears Diane, the queen bitch of the group and one of Trish’s guests for the evening, make nasty comments about her as the new girl, she declines Trish’s invitation to her slumber party, opting to spend the evening at home with her little sister Courtney. Trish’s gathering is a soft-core porn version of the slumber party: the girls smoke pot, drink alcohol and parade around in negligees. Even in the privacy of Valerie’s home it is clear that the girls are preparing themselves for a hypothetical male gaze. Meanwhile, Valerie is trying to set a more positive example of adult femininity for her tween sister Courtney, who is laughably and disturbingly mature for her years. During the evening, Courtney gets a call from a boyfriend and reveals her secret stash of Playgirls, and it is not clear if she is making a double entendre when she claims to have ‘been beating off boys since the fifth grade’. Still, Courtney clearly idolizes her virginal big sister, and asks Valerie to do her hair so they will look alike. Scream offers the most horrific examples of adult female sexuality. A year before the film begins, Sidney’s mother was raped and murdered, and the crime unsettled their small town. Until the end of the film, Sidney believes the official story of her mother’s death –that she was raped and murdered by a stranger who now awaits his fate on death row. But it is hinted that Sidney cannot be oblivious to rumours that her mother was having an affair with her boyfriend Billy’s father, which ultimately caused Billy’s mother to leave Instead, Sidney denies that her mother is not only a flawed person, but a sexual being. As a result, Sidney, who was on her way to taking her relationship with Billy to an NC17 rating, downgraded it to PG13. And if the prospect of an adult womanhood so centred on winning and keeping the attention of men to the exclusion of everything else is unappealing, the world of adult male sexuality is also frightening. Even before they know of the existence of the slasher, Stephanie and Nancy have seen as part of ‘normal’ heterosexual relationships overly controlling husbands and violent boyfriends. And the slasher is the epitome of a terrifying male sexuality. Clover describes the slasher as someone who, in spite of his ‘phallic purpose as he thrusts his drill or knife into the trembling bodies of young women’ has a ‘masculinity [that] is severely qualified’ in that it ‘ranges from the virginal to the sexually inert to the transvestite or transsexual, and is even spiritually divided (“the mother half of his mind”) or even equipped with vulva and vagina’ (47). But in the teen slasher film, the killer is frequently the epitome of pathological masculinity taken from the Normal/Danger Dichotomy Discourse. If it is possible to know the difference between good and bad men, then the slasher is a very bad man. Freddy Kreuger in A Nightmare on Elm Street is the embodiment of the bad man parents warn their children about, someone whose twisted masculinity compels him to harm rather than protect children. Frequently, the slasher is such a caricature of masculinity that his face is an emotionless mask, as is the case with Michael Myers in Halloween or Russ Thorn in Slumber Party Massacre. Michael’s face is literally a mask, and Russ Thorn, with his phallic porn star name, is the embodiment of the type of maleness described in the Male Sexual Drive Discourse. Russ is nearly always photographed in an overtly phallic way. In many shots, Russ’s manly weapon of choice, his long drill, dangles suggestively between his legs. When we finally see more than fragments of Russ, he is the most decidedly male of all the characters. Dressed in a blue jumpsuit, Russ has an impassive and angular countenance. Contrary to what Clover says about the slasher being a man confused about his gender role, Russ exhibits no such ambiguity. Russ embodies the pathological masculinity as exemplified by the Normal/Danger Dichotomy Sexual Discourse. When he finally speaks, it is to tell Trisha that all of them are very pretty and that he loves them because ‘it takes a lot of love for a person to... do this’ (indicating the murders he has committed that evening). Clearly Russ equates male sexuality with violence. As Russ is about to dispatch Trish, he tells her that she knows she wants it, mouthing one of those phrases employed by men who believe that their pressing sexual needs entitle them to ‘work out a yes’ from a partner who does not initially consent. If Russ, Freddy and Michael are the embodiment of the Normal/Danger Dichotomy Sexual Discourse, then Jerry, Billy and Stewie exemplify the Male Sexual Drive Discourse. Throughout most of The Stepfather, others dismiss Stephanie’s dislike of Jerry as due to her own inability to accept that her mother is entitled to an adult relationship. Because Jerry appears to be a clean-cut old fashioned man whose greatest joy lies in being part of a family, it is difficult for outsiders to comprehend Stephanie’s dislike of him. And if Jerry is to be evaluated through the Normal/Danger Dichotomy Discourse, then he would be the normal and unthreatening man. However, Jerry as killer reveals the inherent weakness in the binary thinking undergirding the Normal/Danger Dichotomy Discourse. Jerry is best understood through the rubric of the Male Sexual Drive Discourse. If all men have inherently violent sexualities, and Jerry is a man, then Jerry has an inherently violent sexuality. Stephanie glimpses some of this violence when she finds Jerry alone in the basement during a party that he and her mother are hosting. Jerry mutters to himself that someone is a very bad boy as he stabs a photograph of a child that Stephanie does not recognize. When Jerry catches Stephanie looking at him, he uses an explanation based on the Male Sexual Drive Discourse to explain his aberrant behavior: he is under a lot of pressure, and talking to himself in the basement, while seemingly bizarre, is his way of relieving it. In Scream, Billy’s and Stewie’s love of slasher films is predicated on what they see as a world with fairly logical and unthreatening ideas about traditional gender roles and the requisite punishments for transgression. Their reasoning seems to be that if more people were aware of the rules of horror film, then the world would be an orderly and much happier place. So when Sidney finally agrees to have sex with Billy, she has crossed the boundary from virgin to whore and must be killed. Billy and Stewie embrace the Male Sexual Drive Discourse as a way of understanding their own masculinity, since it relieves them of all responsibility for their actions. Thus, when they do things such as rape and murder Sidney’s mother, they honestly believe that they were driven to ‘put her out of her misery’ because she was a ‘ho bag’. Billy’s and Stewie’s desire to punish those they see as guilty of sexual transgression can be understood through Carol Gilligan’s description of how men experience relationships. Building upon the work of Nancy Chodorow, Gilligan says that Relationships, and particularly issues of dependency, are experienced differently by women and men. For boys and men, separation and individuation are critically tied to gender identity since separation from the mother is essential for the development of masculinity. For girls and women, issues of femininity or feminine identity do not depend on the achievement of separation from the mother or on the progress of individuation. Since masculinity is defined through separation while femininity is defined through attachment, male gender identity is threatened by intimacy while female gender identity is threatened by separation. Thus, males tend to have difficulty with relationships while females tend to have problems with individuation. (8) Billy’s and Stewie’s need to kill, then, demonstrates to what degree they are threatened by intimacy. Billy has seen first hand how intimacy can lead to suffering when his mother left the family due to his father’s infidelity with Sidney’s mother. Slasher films are appealing to the boys, since the genre takes a dim view of all illicit relationships, and the killer makes pre-emptive strikes against those who could potentially cause others to suffer through intimacy. Billy’s and Stewie’s love of the slasher film is the same reason that critics excoriate the genre as misogynist: since the killer’s wrath falls most heavily on sexually active female victims while the virgin survives, it is implied that for females, sex equals death. While I argue that the slasher film offers a critique of narrowly defined gender roles, certainly the killer himself is of the mindset that there is something inherently disturbing about female sexuality. According to Susan Griffin, to the mind of the pornographer: eros and nature...are made into one force, and this force is personified as woman. But this is simultaneously a fatal and an evil force.... Thus eros, nature, and woman, in the synapses of this mind, bring death into this world, and desire, this mind imagines, leads one to die. (13). This mind, so terrified of woman and nature, and of the force of eros, must separate itself from what it fears. ‘In this mind, because the woman desires, she is imagined as evil through and because of her carnality. The fulfillment of her desire inevitably brings about her humiliation and at the same time implies the loss of her soul’ (Griffin 23-24). And in this way, Griffin’s pornographer exhibits what Gilligan describes as a typical masculine sense of self threatened by intimacy. In the slasher film, what Griffin describes as the mind of the pornographer typifies the mentality of the killer, who is similarly disturbed by female desire, and so must exterminate what he fears. It is painfully obvious how Russ Thorn and Billy and Stewie fear female desire. But Jerry Blake too fears female desire. We get a hint of this phobia the one time we see Jerry and Susan having sex in the marital bed. In a scene that is otherwise uncharacteristic of their extremely patriarchal relationship, Susan straddles Jerry. Susan’s eyes are closed in ecstasy, so she does not see Jerry grimacing to stoically bear her thrusting. But it is Stephanie’s, not Susan’s, sexuality that eventually prompts Jerry to embark on another killing spree. When Jerry catches Stephanie sharing a relatively chaste good night kiss with her friend Paul, he explodes into a rage, threatening to have the boy arrested for statutory rape. Susan is summoned by the ensuing commotion and hears her daughter protest that it is none of Jerry’s business who she kisses and furthermore, Jerry is just all hung up about sex. Susan attempts to play the dutiful wife, slapping Stephanie as punishment for her insubordination to her stepfather, but she also cannot hide her anger towards Jerry’s bizarre reaction. Jerry objects that he caught Paul ‘nearly raping’ Stephanie on their front porch. Susan challenges this interpretation, pointing out that she has known Paul much longer than him, and can vouch for Paul’s character. It is at this moment in the film that we see a subtle change come to Jerry’s face, indicating that he is in the process of disengaging himself from this family, which has disappointed him, and it won’t be long before he attempts to hack them to pieces just as he did his previous family in the film’s opening. In the next scene, we see Jerry travelling to a new place, changing his appearance yet again, so that he can begin a new life after he will presumably methodically eradicate the current family, presumably because of Stephanie’s dangerous ability to provoke desire and her mother’s refusal to see this ability as unacceptable. If these narrowly proscribed and extreme expressions of masculinity are frightening for women, they can be similarly terrifying for men. Nightmare on Elm Street, Part II, is explicitly concerned with how teen boys can view the prospect of adult masculinity as horrifying. Freddy’s revenge manifests itself when he attempts to ‘educate’ the adolescent Jesse about his possible future gender role, which can best be described as fitting into the Male Sexual Drive Discourse. Similar to Teen Final Girl, Jesse is virginal and therefore liminal. Furthermore, he is not so controlled by the machismo that dictates the actions of most boys his age in that he does not feel compelled to engage in sexual activity, since the prospect is still a bit frightening to him. What scares Jesse is not so much catching an STD or getting a girl pregnant or even being unable to perform, but the prospect of becoming a sexual being whose identity is so extremely masculine that it is bestial. When Lisa, the film’s most desirable girl, brings Jesse to a private spot where he can have his way with her, he is paralyzed by images of his tongue transforming into a long, protruding slug. This hallucination is courtesy of Freddy, who is continually enjoining Jesse to emulate his own deviant sexuality and take up his razor-fingered gloves. One of Jesse’s previous nightmares has put him on the victim end of a sexual encounter where the person who would have abused him is instead killed. Jesse dreams that his sadistic gym teacher, Coach Schneider, meets him in a gay leather bar. The coach, viewing Jesse as new meat to be dominated, seizes his hand and brings him back to the school gym intending to bind and sodomize him. Instead, Freddy arrives. Acting as Jesse’s stand in, Freddy ties up the coach and slaughters him. If Freddy’s and Coach Schneider’s sexualities are read through the lens of the Male Sexual Drive Discourse, they are not necessarily deviant, but instead can be accommodated at the logical extreme of this discourse. Both possess sexual drives that are always potentially violent because they are ‘inherently compelling and aggressive in [their] quest for fulfillment’ (Phillips 58). So if Teen Final Girl fears male sexuality, then Teen Final Boy has similar misgivings. Femininity and Survival Teen Final Girl’s androgyny and virginity are rejections, conscious or unconscious, of a world of adult sexuality which, seen through adolescent eyes, seems none too inviting. Yet her androgyny and virginity are more than a psychic anorexia permitting her to remain on the sidelines of adult female development: in the slasher film, they are positive attributes that give her freedoms that a wholly feminine identity would not provide. And when Teen Final Girl does engage in what is coded as feminine behaviour, those reactions are assets rather than liabilities. Because Teen Final Girl is less preoccupied with finding and keeping a boy than are her more ‘mature’ counterparts, her attention is not diverted from the dangers that surround her. In The Stepfather, Slumber Party Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream and Halloween, Teen Final Girl is the first to sense that all is not well. Nancy in Nightmare and Stephanie in The Stepfather are the first to believe that there is a maniac in their midst. Teen Final Girl is also able to survive because of her liminality, which manifests itself in two ways. First, Teen Final Girl is liminal due to her androgyny, which permits her to straddle the boundaries between masculinity and femininity. And second, Teen Final Girl is liminal as a teenager, who is no longer fully a child, but also not an autonomous adult subject. Teen Final Girl’s liminality gives her a flexibility lacking in her peers who are more wholly adult and less ambiguously masculine or feminine. While Teen Final Girl has the logical reasoning capabilities of an adult, she is also firmly rooted in the magical type of thinking from childhood. And she is able to switch between masculine and feminine strategies for responding to her environment, allowing her to survive while others die. In The Stepfather, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Nightmare on Elm Street, Part III, Stephanie and Nancy are the first to fully grasp that they are in mortal peril. When Nancy’s friend Tina is plagued by nightmares so vivid that she emerges from her slumbers with her clothing slashed, Nancy immediately believes Tina is being hounded by something more than the results of undigested pizza, since she has had the same disturbing dreams. Jonathan Markovitz notes how both Nancy and Tina exhibit a specifically feminine paranoia in reaction to the dream in the beginning of the film. But ‘Tina’s sense of paranoia is never fully developed [because] the guys thwart her efforts at communication, which might have justified her heightened concerns’ (216). When Tina first brings up her dream with Nancy, she is interrupted by Rod, who boasts that the only thing he awoke with this morning was a hard on. Later, at Tina’s house, when she and Nancy have another opportunity to compare notes, they are shut down, first by Glen, who declares the impossibility of Freddy being anything more than a dream, and then by Rod, who interrupts the gathering and drags Tina off to bed. Markovitz sees male intervention as only part of the reason that Tina is insufficiently paranoid, blaming some of her failing on her own inherent ability to be easily distracted (216). But I see Tina’s inability to be sufficiently paranoid as deriving from her a more ‘adult’ identity which prohibits her from fully appreciating the danger posed by Freddy, because he does not operate according to the rules of logic, and can only be understood through a more childish and magical way of viewing the world, a way of thinking that the sexually precocious Tina has disavowed. Glen too has dreamed of Freddy, but does not fully accept Nancy’s fears that he is dangerous, since, according to the rules of logic, dreams are not real and therefore cannot actually harm the dreamer. After Tina is brutally murdered, Nancy fully accepts that her friend’s death was Freddy’s, rather than Rod’s, doing because her own magical thinking permits her to accommodate the supernatural into her concept of reality. Glen is convinced of Rod’s innocence not so much out of a belief in Freddy, but instead because he does not think Rod is capable of committing the crime. Nancy’s magical thinking allows her to survive while others die because it helps her understand how to fight Freddy. Nancy’s mother and the other adults around her insist on treating her nightmares as just disturbing dreams that someone more adult would dismiss as frightening, but not real. In Halloween, Laurie is similarly the first to sense the presence of Michael Myers. As Annie and Lynda chatter about their sexual exploits, Michael passes slowly in the car he has stolen to escape from the mental institution. Laurie immediately notices that something is not right while her friends mock her reactions, one of them yelling ‘speed kills’ at the back of Michael’s slow-moving vehicle, causing him to stop the car for a heart-wrenching second. Laurie is particularly careful on the way home from school after having been spooked by Michael’s presence. When she thinks she sees someone hiding behind a hedge, she hesitates before passing it rather than making light of the possible danger and rushing towards it as her friend does. At home in her room, Laurie is again startled when she sees movement outside behind the laundry drying on the clothesline. Interestingly, Laurie’s vigilance decreases as she too begins to overtly think about boys. Before arriving for her babysitting job of the evening, Laurie discusses with Annie her secret crush on a boy at school, which seems connected to her decreasing ability to believe in the boogie man. Laurie watches Tommy that evening, and he claims to see the boogie man after spying Michael carrying Annie’s limp body into the house across the street where she is baby sitting. Laurie confidently dismisses Tommy’s fears as nonsensical since, according to the adult way of viewing the world, there is no such thing as the boogie man. Stephanie in The Stepfather also senses that there is something not right about Jerry, and when she reads a small article in the newspaper about an unsolved murder that occurred last year about 100 miles from her home, instinct leads her to wonder whether or not her stepfather is involved. Indeed, this instinct would have permitted Stephanie to learn Jerry’s identity fairly quickly had he not been able to intervene. Stephanie’s hunch prompts her to send a letter to the reporter who wrote the story and asks for a picture of the murderer under the guise that she is working on a school project about serial killers. Stephanie would have received the picture confirming Jerry’s identity as the killer if he had not been screening her mail and intercepted the damning reply. Of all the Teen Final Girls, Sidney in Scream engages in magical thinking later than her counterparts. In the beginning of the film, her suspicions that Billy is the killer (or one of them) are correct, but are based on pure logic rather than hunch, as is the case with Stephanie’s more improbable suspicions about Jerry. After Sidney is attacked in her home, Billy inexplicably arrives to rescue her. She immediately suspects that he was her masked attacker when a cell phone falls from his pocket, signifying that he was the only person who could have possibly called her prior to the attack. The would-be killer, who was on the phone with Sidney prior to the assault, can describe where Sidney is in the house in a way that only someone inside the dwelling could possibly know. Cell phones were still fairly uncommon in 1996, so Billy’s possession of one is more than a passing coincidence. It is only towards the end of the film that Sidney begins to engage in magical thinking at the urging of her friend Randy, a male virgin who knows all of the rules of slasher films and tutors her so she can confound Billy’s and Stewie’s use of the rules of this genre that they so love. In the end, when Stewie and Billy have apparently been killed, Randy reminds Sidney to beware because this is the time in the slasher film when the killer returns to life for one last scare. True to the rules of the genre, Billy abruptly sits up, only to be promptly shot in the head by Sidney, who now understands what she faces. Clover identifies the figure of Final Girl as first emerging in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where Sally is distinguished from the earlier women in slasher films who survived in that she is not rescued by a man. In Psycho, for example, while Lila Crane is not hampered by feminine behaviours such as learned helplessness or the need to be deferential to men, she, more than Marion’s boss, her boyfriend Sam, the sheriff or the private detective hired by Marion’s boss, is the driving force to find her sister. But in the end, when she is confronted by the killer, Lila is just a woman who needs a man to save her. When Lila finds Norman’s taxidermied mother, she can only scream hysterically and attempt to flee, which nearly drives her onto the point of Norman’s raised knife before Sam appears from nowhere to tackle her would-be killer. But in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, typically feminine behaviours such as screaming and running save Sally rather than get her killed. Sally’s feminine instinct to run and hide permits her to eventually escape Leatherface, who cuts down with his chainsaw the trucker who gallantly stopped to rescue her. After The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, feminine behaviours such as running and hiding rather than masculine bravado and strength are among the most important skills for surviving the maniac’s wrath. Running and hiding help Stephanie and Laurie to survive. In Halloween, Laurie spends the last 20 minutes of the film running and hiding from Michael Myers. This strategy not only saves her, but the children she is watching. When Laurie hides in the closet, she is able to divert Michael’s attention from the children so they can escape. The closet is not necessarily the dead end hiding place it might seem either. As Michael hacks his way through the closet doors, Nancy discovers that she is not without weapons and fashions a metal coat hanger into something she can use to poke Michael in the eye. It is also worth noting that the two times Nancy wounds Michael, she uses quintessentially feminine objects to do so—a coat hanger and a knitting needle. However, in the end, Laurie is assisted by Dr. Loomis, who arrives and shoots his patient. Stephanie in The Stepfather offers the most comprehensive example of a Teen Final Girl whose femininity is an asset rather than a liability. When Stephanie emerges from the bathroom and sees Jerry waiting for her in the hallway with blood on his face and a butcher knife in his hand, she immediately runs. Stephanie is trapped in the house, but running permits her to buy time and debilitate Jerry in various ways. At first, she retreats to the bathroom, locking herself in so she can try and escape through the second story window. But the window will not open, and Jerry is about to burst through the door. Stephanie takes advantage of the remaining seconds to compose herself so when Jerry eventually smashes open the door, shattering the mirror on the back, she can improvise a knife with a large shard of the glass and seriously wound her attacker so that she can escape for the moment. Next, Stephanie leads Jerry on a chase through the attic where she hides among the arrangement of the family’s old possessions that she knows far better than Jerry does. From her hidden spot, Stephanie can wait until Jerry makes himself vulnerable by putting his head through the trap door in an attempt to locate her. At this moment, Stephanie sends an old sled flying across the attic floor, knocking Jerry out long enough so that she can flee this enclosure and take possession of Jerry’s knife. The wisdom of Stephanie’s strategies are underscored by the death only moments before of Jim Ogilvy, who has been searching throughout the film for the man who murdered his sister and her child a few years earlier. Jim’s strategy for dealing with Jerry is to purchase a gun so he can kill him upon what should be their first and only meeting. Tim’s strategy is not one of a rogue male, but instead, one that is encouraged and endorsed by the police detective who originally worked the case and was unable to get any leads. He tells Jim that if he were in his shoes, as a private citizen, he would ‘get a gun and blow the son of a bitch away’ when he found him. While Jim’s plan for dealing with Jerry might usually work in movies, in real life (or in this film) his strategy is suicidal. When Jerry opens the front door while holding his bloodied knife, Jim is so shocked that he can only draw his laughably tiny gun which jams when he tries to shoot. Jerry, who is accustomed to killing people, calmly runs his knife through Jim before proceeding upstairs to menace his unruly stepdaughter. A final feminine strategy that permits both Stephanie and Susan to survive is cooperation. As Stephanie is frantically running from Jerry upstairs, a bloodied Susan whose leg was broken when Jerry pushed her down the basement stairs drags herself to the second floor to save her daughter. On her way up, she arms herself with the now deceased Jim’s gun, and mother and daughter collaborate to dispatch Jerry on the stairs. Stephanie stabs Jerry with his own knife, sending him down the stairs, and Susan shoots him when he gets up again so he cannot further harm them. Patricia Brett Erens describes this ending as valorizing ‘women’s maternal role and the strong female bonding that exists between mothers and daughters’ (354). Sidney in Scream finds herself using similarly feminine strategies to survive. Early in the film, she derides the horror genre, specifically slasher films, because they are all the same, and the female characters are particularly annoying because they are usually running up the stairs into certain danger rather than out the door the way any sensible woman would. But like it or not, Sidney cannot escape from the universe of the horror film with its reactionary ideas about gender, and if she does not wish to die for breaking the rules, then she must behave like Final Girl. Sidney learns this the hard way. When she is menaced by the killer the second time, she finds herself with no option but to run back into the house, and outside is far less safe. This time, she is wounded and tired, and so not able to directly fight the killer as she was the first time he broke into her house, so running and hiding are often better strategies than confrontation. Still, Sidney’s survival skills are more androgynous than those of her sister Teen Final Girls. Sidney is capable of throwing a punch, as tabloid television reporter Gale Weathers can attest, and she is able to survive as much through her ability to engage in physical confrontation with Billy and Stewie as through her propensity to run and hide. But Sidney survives for a second important reason: cooperation with other women. It is relatively easy for Susan and Stephanie to collaborate to dispatch Jerry since they have a fairly untroubled relationship, but Sidney has to get over her dislike of Gale to work with her. While Gale’s methods of reportage are sleazy, she is ultimately on the side of right because she reveals that the man on death row for killing Sidney’s mother is innocent, something that Sidney is not prepared to even hear, since it will shatter two cherished illusions: that her mother was not having an affair and that the killer has been caught. Interestingly, these illusions are the product of a childish type of thinking that often sees parents as flawless, non-sexual beings and that the criminal justice system is capable of identifying and apprehending dangerous criminals. It is important that when Gale Weathers is finally able to help Sidney, shooting Billy when he is about ready to stab her to death, Sidney has jettisoned these illusions in favor of a mindset that encourages her to question surface appearances. The virginal Teen Final Girl’s survival in what has been excoriated as one of the most blatantly misogynistic genres of cinema is not a triumph of conservative values. Instead, the death of her peers who are in the throes of reactionary ideas of gender is a critique of these values. Teen Final Girl lives because she questions the narrow choices of womanhood presented to her. The mental flexibility Teen Final Girl brings to her battle with the slasher demonstrates how, after her triumph over the killer, she will be capable of maturing in a way that is less encumbered by a narrowly defined femininity. Bibliography Brown, Lyn Mikel (2003) Girlfighting: Betrayal and Rejection among Girls (New York: New York University Press. Clover, Carol J. (1992) Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press). Erens, Patricia Brett (1996) ‘The Stepfather: Father as Monster in the Contemporary Horror Film’ in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Austen, TX: The University of Texas Press). Gilligan, Carol (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Griffin, Susan (1981) Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge against Nature (New York: Harper Colophon). Markwovitz, Jonathan (2000) ‘Female Paranoia as Survival Skill: Reason or Pathology in A Nightmare on Elm Street’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Vol. 17 (3), pp. 211-20. Phillips, Lynn M. (2000) Flirting with Danger: Young Women’s Reflections on Sexuality and Domination (New York: New York University Press). Filmography Friday the 13th, Sean S. Cunningham, Dir. 1980. Halloween, John Carpenter, Dir. 1978. Nightmare on Elm Street, A. Wes Craven, Dir. 1984. Nightmare on Elm Street, Part II: Freddy’s Revenge, Jack Sholder, Dir. 1985. Nightmare on Elm Street, Part III: Dream Warriors, Chuck Russell, 1987. Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock, Dir. 1960. Scream, Wes Craven, Dir. 1996. Slumber Party Massacre, The. Amy Holden Jones, Dir. 1982. Stepfather, The, Joseph Rubin, Dir. 1987. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The, Tobe Hooper, Dir. 1974. Home Next
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