ABSTRACT
On the face of it, the relation between the sexes in slasher films could hardly be clearer. The
killer is with few exceptions recognizably human and distinctly male; his fury is unmistakably
sexual in both roots and expression; his victims are mostly women, often sexually free and
always young and beautiful ones. Just how essential this victim is to horror is suggested by
her historical durability. If the killer has over time been variously figured as shark, fog, gorilla,
birds, and slime, the victim is eternally and prototypically the damsel. Cinema hardly invented
the pattern. It has simply given visual expression to the abiding proposition that, in Poe’s
famous formulation, the death of a beautiful woman is the “most poetical topic in the world.”1
