‘The Slumber Party Massacre’ Conundrum: Vile Trash or Smart Satire?

Amy Holden Jones’ The Slumber Party Massacre is neither fish nor fowl. It is a satire of slasher films that indulges in what some would call the worst sins of the subgenre (leering nudity, stilted performances, rote progression); it’s a picture about exploitation that fails to avoid being exploitative itself. It’s slippery in that it’s easy to like it for all the reasons it’s ostensibly criticizing its audience for liking it. (It’s also part of The Criterion Channel’s “80s Horror” collection, so make of that what you will.)

Its best moment, the one where the intent of the exercise comes clear, comes about an hour in when the eventual “final girl,” high-schooler Valerie (Robin Stille) watches a stalking sequence from a slasher film on television while outside one of her male classmates is stalked by escaped mental patient Russ Thorn (Michael Villela). The climax for both occurs at the same time and Jones, an editor who had worked with Hal Ashby, Joe Dante and Matthew Robbins who was slated to cut E.T. when she decided to make her directorial debut here instead, switches back and forth between the violent, stabbing murders of the young woman in the film-within-a-film and the young man being butchered outside Valerie’s window. That transference between a woman victim to a male victim is the best thesis statement The Slumber Party Massacre makes about the way it treats its men as fragile at best, inconsequential at worst, to the central feminine drama at its center. It functions as clarification for how the men in the picture — even the drill-killer Thorn — only intersect into the awareness of its women characters as irritating distractions; sometimes violent interlopers into a place they’re occasionally tolerated but never welcome.

Take, for example, the well-meaning Mr. Contant (Rigg Kennedy), the neighbor to popular girl Trish (Michelle Michaels) who’s tasked by her parents to keep an eye on her while they’re out of town. She looks at him with the mild distrust of a pretty young woman used to being gawked at by creepy old men, and with the patronizing power of a pretty young woman who knows she’s in charge of the power dynamic so long as things remain theoretical. Mr. Contant pops up throughout the film, usually as a “cat through the window” variety of jump scare: the fake startle before the real startle. When things get real, Mr. Contant proves as ineffective as the other “good” men in the picture in saving the young women at Trish’s slumber party from Thorn. Consider, too, the stalking murder of young Linda (Brinke Stevens) through a curiously-abandoned high school. Thorn gives her a terrible wound on the arm but Linda gets away, locking herself in a storage closet, but her inability to staunch her bleeding gives away her hiding place. The suggestion of “deflowering” is a powerful one made more explicit by Linda grabbing a white towel to try to disguise her situation. There is a culturally-encoded shame attendant to menstruation and Linda’s death, betrayed by blood, feels like exactly the kind of metaphor screenwriter Rita Mae Brown would have appreciated.

The first time through Slumber Party Massacre for me in high school was as unambiguous for me as a first-time pass through Brian DePalma’s Body Double and Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer — all three films in which the mad dog killer wields an industrial power drill as a magnification of the “stabbing as penetration” symbolism of the slasher genre’s sublimated, angry sexuality. They were each prurient delights, full of the nudity I was hunting for in the pre-Internet days where the mass-adoption of VCR technology was first making porn into a middle-class pursuit instead of a Times Square raincoat squad pastime. It’s only later that the subtext of these pictures comes clear when the fantasy of frustrated virgins mellows into a different kind of curiosity.

I remembered for thirty-some years the shower sequence in Slumber Party Massacre — a long, uninterrupted time spent with young women after a gym class, planning what they’ll do with Trish’s parents out of town. What I didn’t remember was the equally-distended basketball scrimmage preceding the shower. The girls are competitive and capable and some hint of how they’ve identified Valerie as the “new girl” and resent her for her coltish athleticism comes clear. Later, as mean girl Diane (Gina Smika Hunter) says unkind things at a volume I think intended for Valerie to overhear, it became clear to me that as the teenage me was getting my cheap thrills from the nudity, the film was more interested in developing these women as human beings trying to navigate the choppy waters of their interpersonal relationships. Valerie is invited to the party and, humiliated, she declines and runs away. She’ll spend most of that terrible night with her bratty little sister Courtney (Jennifer Myers).

Courtney is in the Tatum O’Neal/Jodie Foster mold of “bad girls”: tough-talking, just-presexual young women who, more often than not, serve as oracles in films like this. Her budding sexuality but lack of sexual experience makes her best-suited to diagnose the sex-driven violence between men and women from a position of relative objectivity. She wants to be included but she hasn’t been indoctrinated yet. Soon, but not yet.

Valerie banters with her sister as the other girls are picked off, one by one, along with the two boys who have come over to act the voyeur through their uncurtained windows and a pizza guy who has his eyes drilled out. The theme of “looking” is a prominent one in the picture: the boys peeping, the pizza guy (that stalwart stock character of porn) with his eyes destroyed, and us as well, the presumed audience of 18-24 year old young men who comprise the “ideal” demographic for horror films. “Ideal” in the sense that horror movies were great date fare and this was the audience that would watch the films more than once.

The scholar Carol Clover blew my mind in her book Men, Women and Chain Saws, when she observed that slasher films were the only genre in which the audience of inexperienced young men were generally encouraged to gain absolute empathy with an equally inexperienced young woman doing her best to survive to the end. Courtney, as she has her hair done by her big sister and plays at putting on makeup, diagnoses that Valerie has been excluded from her peers’ get together, and it’s Courtney again at the very end who bears witness to Valerie’s castration of Thorn (she whacks off his drill with a machete) and becomes at that moment “experienced” in the ugliness of male sexual violence. Holden underscores the transference of terrible knowledge by dissolving Valerie into Courtney (still made-up to “look just like [Valerie]”) and then back again. The rite of passage for women in this culture is first being confronted by how men don’t really see women as human beings; and then witnessing how that dehumanization allows for any variety of abuse.

There are two sequels to Slumber Party Massacre, as well as a well-received 2021 remake. Taken as a whole, they present variations on this same theme of women engaged in their lives, intruded upon by a subvocal man who wants to drill them. Other men don’t help until it’s too late and even the “good” ones are mainly pulled into the mortal dramas of women because they would also like to be physically involved with them. I love the moment in this first film where Jeff (David Millbern” and Neil (Joseph Alan Johnson), two nebbishes whose attempts at heroism are hilariously ineffectual, plot to get an eyeful and then worry that they’ll get their “asses kicked” by the women just like they’d had them kicked by them so many times before. It’s a slasher flick, then, about female power: a movie where the women characters are whole without men. Even Diane who has a jock boyfriend John (Jim Boyce), tells him she won’t have sex with him because she’s promised her friends they’ll have a slumber party and that, for her, is absolutely more important. Incidentally, he can’t save anyone, either. Women whose lives are complete but for the intrusion of violent men looking for victims and objects. What Thorn finds instead is the wrong end of a sword used for hacking away underbrush in tangled terrain. With Thorn cleared, as it were, the path forward for Courtney is presented as something as fraught as Little Red Riding Hood’s caution to stick to the trails, but so long as she does there’s a chance she might make it out of the woods alive.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for pre-order. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.