FRANK HORROR Presents: THE HORROR ANALYSIS Episode 3

THE HORROR ANALYSIS EPISODE 3 - SLASHERS

Welcome to THE HORROR ANALYSIS - a talk-format podcast that takes a psychological deep-dive into all things horror and macabre. 

Runtime: 27:47

Hosted by Frank Juchniewicz, a.k.a., “Frank Horror” - writer, director, filmmaker and podcaster with a background in counseling psychology . . . and Dr. Elliott Rotman, a clinical psychologist in private practice with a background in acting and the arts. 

***Warning: This podcast may contain spoilers, as horror movies, art and literature are discussed .***

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Transcript

Christine Mattschei:

Welcome to The Horror Analysis, a podcast that takes a psychological deep dive into all things horror and macabre. Here are your hosts, Frank Horror, writer, director, filmmaker, and podcaster with a background in counseling psychology and Dr. Elliott Rotman, a clinical psychologist with a background in acting and the arts.

Frank Horror:

Welcome back to The Horror Analysis. We looked at the horror genre as a whole, and we'd like to take a closer look now and examine what are some of the sub-genres of horror? Why do we like them? And what does that say about us? What does that say about our society? Up first, we have slashers. So slasher films. This is, a lot of people think about this when you mention horror, they think of the killer, the masked killer, right? So it becomes kind of synonymous with horror to some people.

Frank Horror:

Slasher films are something that typically have a masked killer or some sort of deranged killer. He's either using a knife, a chainsaw, any kind of a weapon, and he's just hacking down people one at a time, usually young teenagers or young people. This sort of became popular, some people would say fifties, sixties, seventies, but it seemed like it hit its peak in the eighties, and kind of petered out in the nineties. I can't really think of too many slashers currently, although I'm sure they're still being made, but not to the extent that they were back in the eighties. I mean, what was your first experience with a slasher film, Elliot?

Elliott Rotman:

What I'm remembering was probably Halloween, the first one.

Frank Horror:

Yeah. I think people would say that was something that really kicked off the genre. I've heard some people say Psycho was the first slasher, but that's debatable in terms of what sub-genre that fits into.

Elliott Rotman:

Yeah, I'm not sure. I personally would put Psycho in the same category because it had that element of focusing on one person who was violent and seriously disturbed. So Frank, I think it's distinguishing it between an episode of CSI: Special Victims Unit, which I don't think people would classify as horror, although some of the actions described are horrific, because it's kind of self-contained. I mean, you have a murder mystery, somebody stabs something. You go back to the game of clue. We played as kids. Was it Colonel Mustard in the library with the fire poker? But there's something about slasher films where it's the randomness, it's the lack of any kind of personal connection that I think moves it into the horror genre because in terms of like what we were talking about last time, there's that lack of control. That's what instills real fear into us and the lack of predictability.

Frank Horror:

Yeah.

Elliott Rotman:

And just the body count.

Frank Horror:

And the emphasis to make the distinction between the television show, the Law and Order show, the emphasis was on the investigators and uncovering the crime, and it was a mystery. I think the emphasis on a slasher is, you're right, it often isn't a personal motive. It's not a crime of passion, or it is an un-empathetic killer that is methodically cutting people down.

Elliott Rotman:

Which, of course, just in terms of plot development or moral development of the character, there's usually no moral development of the killer. He's just really an object, a killing machine or a terrorizing machine. Any kind of development is really on the victim end. Who's going to survive and why?

Frank Horror:

You mentioned Halloween. We'll hold up Halloween because that is arguably the start of modern slasher sub-genre, and it's a shining example of what a slasher movie can be. And I think that you are looking at a character in Michael Myers, behind that mask, he's so blank. He's a tabula rasa, and he could be anything, and so we project our fears onto them. He's the boogeyman.

Elliott Rotman:

And he's actually described that way in the first movie. I believe it's Donald Pleasence's character. He's the psychiatrist at the institution who just says he's evil. He's the embodiment of evil, so it's perfect. You can just project anything onto that, but it makes him almost all powerful.

Frank Horror:

Yeah.

Elliott Rotman:

Because there's no way to get through. You can't reason with him. And there's no clear motivation

Frank Horror:

What an ambiguous description of him, too. We don't really know much about him, so that's why he's scary.

Elliott Rotman:

Right.

Frank Horror:

We don't know why he's doing what he's doing or how he's managing to survive the way he's surviving against... he's inhuman. And he just comes at you with that William Shatner mask, and that's terrifying.

Frank Horror:

So what are some of the things that we can expect from a slasher film? I think that's, let's get down to the nitty gritty of what makes a slasher film. And it seems like there are always variations, there are always things that deviate from the norm, and sometimes savvy filmmakers will kind of play with the tropes a little bit it seems and tweak them a little bit, so it plays against our expectations every now and then. By and large, what we're looking at are young people, teenagers, at least in the slashers of the eighties, there was some sort of a moral code instilled in it, right? So the people that if you smoke weed off in the woods, he's going to get you. If you have sex, he's going to get you. It was a very conservative, moral code that was enforced, and it was the virginal, pure, final girl would be the one that would survive or face him down or defeat the killer.

Elliott Rotman:

Yeah. You're saying it's moral. I think it's very moralistic, that's implied. It's not like there's an outside code of thou shalt not, but it's like, "Oh, okay. You're engaging in your id. You're looking for pleasure, and you're a teenager, and we can't trust them anyway." But the same way, there's still kids, we want to protect them. And it's that judgment that's implied throughout all of this. It's just how many bad decisions can you make? You make a bad decision, then you're going to suffer for it.

Frank Horror:

And I wonder what does that say about our society at that time, and why aren't slashers as big of a genre, a sub-genre, now? What does that say about us?

Elliott Rotman:

I'm not sure what it says about life in the eighties, other than that was the time that AIDS began to emerge as a disease, and that was certainly viewed as a punishment by some people in a very moralistic, judgemental way. But I think there's always been this notion of teenage misbehavior going back to, I don't know, think about Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean. He was just against the rules, and he's going to drive, and he ends up getting killed at the end by his own actions. Or Reefer Madness, think about all the anti-marijuana films of the 1930s and early forties, where if you smoke devil weed, terrible things are going to happen, and it's usually the men are going to end up on the street as addicts, and the women are going to end up as... they're going to end up the streets, they're going to morally compromise because there's no controls.

Frank Horror:

Or just freak out and jump out of a window.

Elliott Rotman:

Or just jump out of the window as we will.

Frank Horror:

Yeah.

Elliott Rotman:

So if you think about it at the slasher films are not being quite so heavy handed, but it's almost setting up kind of a straw man or a straw woman where you're doing something, you're making out, you're having sex, and it's like, there's going to be some consequence for it. And hence, you've got this figure coming in, targeting them. So I think in slash year films, there's also a theme of the victims all being kind of blank slates as well. They're kind of dumb kids doing dumb things even if it's normal things that kids do, and they're not very smart, they're not very strong except for maybe one or two characters, and so therefore they can be victimized.

Frank Horror:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). And it seems like as a viewer of these movies growing up, there's just, you develop a lack of empathy for them because it becomes more about the kill and how elaborate the next kill's going to be because how many movies are you going to make in a franchise? How many kids are you going to kill off? How many teenagers are you going to kill? And which ways are you going to kill them? And it became more, for the viewer, a body count. And when it's that sort of mentality, who cares about the characters, really?

Elliott Rotman:

So the characters become objectified. They just become objects. And other than one or two characters who make it through the movie and then show some kind of inner strength of some sort and either defeat or try to defeat the killer, but I think the other aspect of slasher films is that it's visceral, quite literally. Just by the name of it, these aren't shoot you with a gun films or poison you films. It's about stabbing or cutting, which is probably the most violent, most intimate kind of death.

Elliott Rotman:

I mean, we talk about if somebody shoots someone, and we hear this in the news now, okay, it's horrible. It's horrific. When you hear about somebody stabbing somebody multiple times, it's taken at a very different level. We are horrified by that because that takes a very deliberate effort to do that. It's intimate, and that's what makes it horrifying and so much more impactful. I think the problem with slasher films is after a while, you start to just step back from it, and you begin to objectify it and intellectualize it of well, how is he going to do this next? And it becomes a kind of a game.

Frank Horror:

Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to have empathy when the kills are much more elaborate, and they're perpetrated against characters that are somewhat shallow, and it's one after the other, after the other.

Elliott Rotman:

And it becomes-

Frank Horror:

Desensitized. Yeah. It's predictable. And so they have to get more outrageous to defeat that boredom from predictability. I remember, was it night, or it was it nightmare, it was Friday the 13th Part Eight, Jason Takes Manhattan. At that point, I think he was fighting with his fists with some kid on a roof of Manhattan. And he punches him, Jason punches a kid, and his head comes clean off and flies out into a dumpster. I mean, that's how ridiculous it has to get in order to keep upping that bar so people watch. And so it gets to the point where, what are you going to do after that? You put Jason in space eventually, and what was it, Jason 10 or whatever it was.

Elliott Rotman:

I would look forward to that.

Frank Horror:

Yeah.

Elliott Rotman:

Well, I think it goes back to what we were talking about last time which was the nature of horror. After a while, if things become so extreme and absurd, then it's no longer scary, it's no longer frightening. It's just, you can look at it and go, "Wow, that's a special effect." And it doesn't have any kind of emotional impact on you. So it just becomes a series of events. I think it's the same thing that happens in a film where there's just so much random violence of shooting. After a while, a bunch of bystanders are on a street, and they all get shot down, and in the way these films are done, I personally really dislike that. They're just a bunch of objects. You don't feel for them. There's no sense of, "Oh, their families are going to be devastated." It's just a prop. And for things to have a real impact, there has to be a level of intimacy and a level of ability to identify with the characters in some way and experience it.

Frank Horror:

So what about, I interact with a lot of horror fans, I want to stay plugged into the horror fans because of the media that I create, be it a podcast or a video or still photos, and I have gotten reactions or feedback from people that there is a level of sexual attraction to things like slashers. And so it seems like over the years, and not so much with supernatural horrors, like The Ring, but like The Killer. And I think at some point is there a fetishization that happens with these slasher flicks? Because so often they incorporate, or at least the ones in the eighties, incorporated sexuality with the killing to the point where, I think the term boobs and blood has been used to kind of sum up, well, there's a B movie slasher.

Elliott Rotman:

Well, I think the whole boobs and blood trope, it goes back to if you sexualize the victims, they're female, you make them attractive and make them particularly attractive, objectify them, it's remarkably sexist. Although if there are males in the film, they're usually good looking, but that's not really not what is emphasized. It's very much a female focus and a very anti-feminist focus. I think where things changed a bit for instance, having a female lead, like Sigourney Weaver, in Alien, where, again, it's not a slasher film, but she's female, she's attractive, and she's strong, and you have a sense of what's going on with her. Otherwise it's just like soft core porn.

Frank Horror:

Yeah.

Elliott Rotman:

And I don't think that would fly these days and really shouldn't.

Frank Horror:

That could be why the genre is starting to fade or change. And I want to talk about that in a second, but I think one of the reasons why that was the trope back in the eighties was conventional wisdom at the time was that you had your audience for your slasher horror film, like Friday the 13th, like Nightmare on Elm Street, are young males, and so they were marketing to young males. They're writing these stories for young males.

Frank Horror:

Now that might have been the lion's share of their audience, but that's not always the case because I had a younger sister, and she would watch some of the same horror movies I would. And a lot of the people I'm talking to now, who were young girls at the time, and they have that, they bought into that sexualization of the slasher film. And so I think that must be a part of it is who they were marketing to at the time. And I think that the demographics have changed now. It seems like there are a lot more women into horror films, and so maybe they are more sensitive overall, and they're not pandering to what they think these prepubescent boys are going to want.

Elliott Rotman:

So, and just a thought in terms of appeal, like why people would be fascinated by slasher movies, where we're talking the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There's a fascination with something that is so transgressive that we can't approach it ourselves. It's something that is absolutely taboo, and therefore it's like the killers in these films are all powerful, and that's where there becomes this non-identification, a kind of fascination with it. And then people take it and incorporate it such as this time of year coming up to Halloween, "Oh, are you going to dress up as Freddy Kruger or some other very identifiable character?" That's also a way to make it safer and more accessible because once you become it as part of a costume, you can incorporate it and kind of develop it a bit, and it becomes a little bit more approachable.

Elliott Rotman:

So the fascination with, I think, killers in these movies is that they can be anything you want, and it doesn't take a lot of work to understand them because there isn't very much to understand. It's just again, and we talked about this before, it's just an expression of id. I'm having a bad day, and I can just take you out, and I'll feel better. It's satisfying some need in me.

Frank Horror:

Mm.

Elliott Rotman:

And that's what I think for the lot of slasher films it is. It's like there's some unknown need in the killer who is viewed as a monster in human form that people would go, particularly the audience of adolescent teenage boys or even older, but people look at that and go, "Yeah. I mean, wouldn't it be cool just if I were having a bad day, I could do this." We, fortunately, as a society, don't do that, for the most part, but that's the impact of it. I think the genre simply got old and once you start making parodies of it, it's hard to take it very seriously.

Frank Horror:

You're right. The parodies sort of scorched the earth behind them, and the genre, I would say, evolved. I think that genre moved into what we would call torture porn films, like Hostile and help me out with some of them, Turistas or-

Elliott Rotman:

Or anything or all the option or Saw.

Frank Horror:

Saw, yeah.

William Rizzo:

House of 10,000 Corpses.

Frank Horror:

Yeah. Or was it House of a Thousand Corpses?

William Rizzo:

Something like that, yeah.

Elliott Rotman:

No, I think there were 10,000 in that house.

Frank Horror:

It felt like 10,000? It felt like a lot.

William Rizzo:

I'm glad you counted.

Frank Horror:

So I mean that's a whole new direction, though, that we're in now. Now that we have like torture porn, and I think that's sort of replaced that role, that niche that the slasher film has served, but it seems like a darker territory now.

Elliott Rotman:

I think it's a much darker territory because you become a voyeur to an individual suffering, and it's no longer, and I don't care for torture porn. The fact that it's called torture porn is saying that you are utterly objectifying characters who are demonstrably in pain and suffering, and the focus on that also goes to mutilation, so you're then experiencing someone intentionally inflicting extended distress.

Frank Horror:

And viewing that as the audience as entertainment.

Elliott Rotman:

Right.

Frank Horror:

And that's disturbing because we're getting close to the territory of, or a hair's breath away from a snuff video or faces of death or seeing something real happening. They're very realistic. They're not ridiculous kills where someone's head gets punched off in a cartoonish way almost.

Elliott Rotman:

Right. And I think the whole thing about faces of death, and I think we can get into that in terms of body horror, that's basically like documentary body horror. Because we don't want to face what really happens when something catastrophic happens to our bodies, so again, it's subjectification, you can look and go, "Oh that's terrible." It's like looking at somebody who has a terrible wasting disease and just using that for entertainment. I think that goes to a part of our psyche that is very dark and where it represents part of us, certainly. I mean, torture as entertainment goes back into history.

Frank Horror:

So horror pushes taboo.

Elliott Rotman:

Yes.

Frank Horror:

It challenges us, and something that we can watch now, and it still a fantastic movie, it still holds up, and we'll talk about this in a little bit, but a movie like the Exorcist. When that first came out, people were fainting, people were throwing up, people were running out of the theater, so it challenged a lot of people. And I guess my point is that horror is all about pushing those taboos, making people feel uncomfortable. Are we saying that torture porn is pushing those taboos a little too far? Are we saying that this is past the line? Or where is that line as society?

Elliott Rotman:

Well, we generally like to think of ourselves, regardless of your religious upbringing, that we are generally moral people, and we don't believe in causing intentional suffering. People who torture animals, who hold dog fights, who do something to cause intentional pain to dogs and cats, we condemn them. And in fact, in terms of films that have torture, so-called torture porn, like Hostile and whatever, doesn't involve animals. It's like that's another taboo right there because animals can't defend themselves.

Elliott Rotman:

But if you put a human in that position, even if they're innocent, it's like, "well, they're a person. They'll have to figure this out." It's the same way that torturing children is considered taboo and hopefully will remain that way. But look, human cruelty runs through history. I mean, hangings up until fairly recently were family entertainment. Everybody would come out and certainly going back to medieval times, and if someone were considered a traitor or a criminal, that was part of it. Think of the movie Braveheart.

Frank Horror:

Yeah.

Elliott Rotman:

Where at the end, his character is disemboweled, and then they would have, the body would be drawn and quartered. People came out to see this.

Frank Horror:

Executions in the public square.

Elliott Rotman:

Absolutely. What allowed that to happen is people would decide that that was morally justified, ethically justified because this person did something wrong. What I think this genre does is then take it into another area where you really can't justify it. And that's what brings it into horror. That's what brings it into arguably something being pornographic because there's no reason for this person who's been abducted who's then being subjected to all sorts of terrible things. There's no moral underlining. There's no lesson to be taught.

Elliott Rotman:

So in some senses, I think it's very much like slasher films except it's much more up close and personal and visceral. And I think taps into a much darker part of a lot of people. There are a lot of people who simply will not watch that, and it's something that I have seen, but I personally avoid. I don't go to that as entertainment because there's nothing that I get from it. But again, it pushes taboos, it creates discomfort, it's something that one even can I identify that, "Well, if I were in that situation, what would I do?" And that's what keeps that going.

Elliott Rotman:

There's also a kind of emotional release. Eli Roth was talking to soldiers in Afghanistan and who sometimes would have viewings at night of his films like Hostile. And he asked them about like, "Why do you want to watch this? Do you see this happening every day?" And the answers he got were, "Because during the day when we see all of this, we can't react to it. We just have to keep moving and moving. And it's about survival. So at night this is a huge emotional release. It's like, we can yell, we can scream. We can talk at the screen. It's a kind of cathartic thing."

Frank Horror:

And again, that takes us back to a theme that we've talked about before of horror, or watching horror films, as a way to either prepare for or mitigate trauma.

Elliott Rotman:

In the case of these soldiers, it was a kind of release. Now you would think it's counterintuitive that why would you reactivate or trigger trauma that you've just examined, but what the film allowed them to do was step back from it and objectify it and just react to someone else's distress and just get some of that pain out, get some of that insanity out. Doesn't work for everyone, certainly doesn't work for most people, but in that instance, that's a purpose that it served. And again, Eli Roth himself was confused about how this works, but that was a function that it served.

Frank Horror:

And that just goes to show you in that instance, there may be an unexpected therapeutic value in horror films. And on that note, I want to once again, thank the listeners for joining us and for your continued morbid curiosity.

Frank Horror:

The next episode, we're going to continue this discussion around horror films reflecting trauma, but in a much more broader level, like on a societal level, a global scale. So come back, join us for the next episode where we examine the sub-genre of post-apocalyptic horror.

Frank Horror:

The Horror Analysis is a Frank Horror production, and is brought to you by Frank Juchniewicz, Elliott 

Rotman, and William Rizzo. Audio engineering and the original theme music to the Horror Analysis were 

provided by William Rizzo. Audio editing provided by Frank Juchniewicz. Sound mastering was provided 

by David Parsons. The opening credits introduction was voiced by Christine Mattschei. To learn more 

about our show, visit us online at frankhorror.com