ABSTRACT
Since 9/11, a common trend in horror film criticism has been to focus on the genre as a way of understanding and processing the trauma of the terrorist attacks that forever changed the cultural landscape of America, and of the world. This approach is warranted, as several shifts in horror production and consumption have been noticeable since 9/11. We have seen a simultaneous increase in the number of horror films with successful box office returns; the proliferation of new subgenres, such as “‘torture porn,’ ‘post-millennial horror road movie,’ ‘military horror movie,’ and ‘post-torture porn retro-slasher’” (Wetmore 2012: 18); and the rebirth of various tropes that had lain nearly dormant for decades, including zombies and vampires (both of which have been co-opted away from horror and turned into teen melodrama in various ways). There has also been a staggering number of remakes of horror films, including seminal titles like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974/2003) (the original film’s spelling is “chain saw,” while the remake is spelled “chainsaw”), Halloween (1978/2007), and Dawn of the Dead (1978/2004) and other lesser-known films, including I Spit on Your Grave (1978/2010) and House of Wax (1953/2005), among dozens of others.1 It is clear, then, that producers are creating new genre templates and successfully reinterpreting past texts to act as the allegories of a post-9/11 world. The criticism that explores these changes in terms of cultural trauma is, therefore, necessary and wholly justified. As a byproduct of this shift in cultural studies to a focus on trauma studies, and concurrent
with the shift toward the problematic term “post-feminism,”2 gender criticism in horror has largely fallen by the wayside in the past decade and a half. This is perhaps nowhere more strongly stated than in Kevin J. Wetmore’s Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (2012) wherein he argues that because terrorism is indiscriminant in its victims (men, women, and children are all fair game), the horror films that variously recreate terror in the post-9/11 era should not be approached through gender-inflected criticism (which he lumps into the categories of psychology/psychoanalysis and sex/sexual politics) (14-16). His brief nod to acceptable gender criticism of the last decade and a half ’s horror films is Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dreams (2007), which discusses, among many topics, the idea that we recreate the events of 9/11 through a gendered lens-men are heroes and women are victims, widows, or caretakers (ibid. 57; Wetmore 2012: 15). Wetmore’s commentary reenacts the misogyny of American culture at large, and of the “post-feminist” era specifically, by making moves to
discount the importance of upholding the vigilance of gender-based political struggle in favor of more “important” political causes. For Wetmore, the dismissal of feminism manifests itself in the utilization of the trends mentioned above; culturally, it manifests itself in many ways, one of which is a divergence of the political parties along the lines of both sexuality and gun rights, whereby conservatives champion both traditional gender roles and the use of weapons domestically and abroad as a two-pronged defense against the dangers of the post-9/11 era (women’s rights/effeminate men, and terrorists). This approach to horror studies is unacceptable, and while Wetmore has many excellent observations in his book, this essay offers a response to many of the trauma-theory based examinations of the current horror landscape by reclaiming a position of primacy for feminism, including a brief look at the place of the mother in the domestic space of horror and a reexamination of the onceiconic Final Girl. I do so while considering genre conventions, aesthetic and narrative choices, and comparisons to past films. As a way of demonstrating how feminist film studies can productively complicate the
already dynamic landscape of post-9/11 horror studies, I have chosen to focus on a set of five recent films that are all remakes of classic 1970s slasher films, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974/2003),Halloween (1978/2007), Friday the 13th (1980/2009), Friday the 13th II (1981/2009) and Halloween II (1981/2009). In terms of their historical moment, the original films typify the nihilism of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era in which the US was no longer assured of the inherent goodness of a foreign policy based on Manifest Destiny. Domestically, social roles based on gender and race had begun to shift in the continued ripples following the feminist and civil rights movements, changes that left traditional social codes and behaviors in flux. These films were also products of a poststudio production period, another traditional structural system that was crumbling during the era. These independently produced films captured the attention of surprising and unprecedented numbers of viewers. They continue as canonical classics of their time and genre, offer up plots that manipulate traditional social myths, and work to ignore the past or the future through three main narrative trends:
ignoring traditionally feminine traits for heroines, such as complacency, inaction, or romanticized visions of courtly love;
complicating, distorting, or dismissing the sex drives of male and female characters; presenting very non-traditional versions of motherhood so as to deny both birth (the
past), and death (the future).
