The Slumber Party Massacre: The Feminist Slasher in Disguise

The facts of the production are so improbable that people assume the internet made them up. A slumber-party slasher, released by Roger Corman’s New World in 1982, at the absolute peak of the Friday the 13th gold rush. Screenplay by Rita Mae Brown — the author of Rubyfruit Jungle, a landmark lesbian coming-of-age novel, and a figure from the American feminist movement’s front rank. Directed by Amy Holden Jones, who quit an editing job on a Spielberg production to do it. Killer’s weapon: a power drill with a bit the length of a man’s forearm, which he carries at his hip and points ahead of himself at all times.

It is real, all of it, and the film has spent forty years being fought over by people who each have a defensible position.

How it happened

Brown wrote it as a parody. Her draft was called Sleepless Nights and it was, by her account, sending the whole cycle up — the mechanics of the slasher rendered absurd by being taken seriously. New World bought it and did what New World did, which was to look at a script and see a poster.

Amy Holden Jones wanted to direct. She was working as an editor, she had cut for Corman before, and she understood exactly how that shop functioned: turn up with something finished. She shot a sequence at her own expense to prove she could handle it, showed Corman the result, and got the film. She was in her late twenties. She went on to write Mystic Pizza, Beethoven and Indecent Proposal, which is a career trajectory nobody would predict from a driller killer.

The most durable fact about the franchise is that the two sequels, in 1987 and 1990, were also directed by women — Deborah Brock and Sally Mattison. Three films, three women behind the camera, in the most consistently misogynist corner of the American film industry, at a moment when women directing horror meant a handful of names in a decade. Nobody planned this as a statement. It happened because New World hired cheaply and did not care much who did the work, which is a genuinely strange route to a distinction.

What Jones actually shot

The film runs about seventy-seven minutes and it is built like an edit, which figures. Jones cuts fast, holds nothing longer than it earns, and drops most of the connective tissue a normal 1982 slasher would waste twenty minutes on. There is no prologue in a swamp. There is a man who has escaped, there are girls in a house, and the film gets to the house.

The direction has two consistent virtues. First, the geography is legible — a suburban house, a garage, a neighbour’s place across the way, a phone, and Jones establishes all of it before she needs it, so that the last act can move without explaining itself. Second, she is very good at the reveal that costs nothing: a figure standing in a doorway behind an actress who is talking to someone else, held for a beat too long, no sting on the soundtrack. Carpenter had proved four years earlier in Halloween that the cheapest scare in cinema is a person in the wrong part of the frame. Jones learned it and uses it repeatedly without ever quite quoting it.

The killer, Russ Thorn, is given almost no mythology. He escaped. He has a drill. That is his entire character sheet, and the film’s refusal to explain him is Brown’s parody surviving into the finished product — the slasher’s compulsion to account for its monster, to supply a drowning or a fire or a mother, is a compulsion this film simply declines. He is a man with a drill. What more did you want.

The drill

The joke is the drill and everybody sees the joke, which is the first thing to say about it. This is not a subtext that requires excavation. The weapon is at crotch height. It is enormous. He advances with it. Characters comment on its size. The film is not being coy for one second.

What is genuinely interesting is what the visual does structurally. The giallo had spent fifteen years making the murder weapon into a fetish object — the black glove, the razor, the camera lingering on the instrument as an erotic thing, a tradition Argento perfected and which is laid out in the giallo canon. The American slasher imported the fetish and stripped the eroticism out of it, or claimed to: the machete is just a machete, the audience is just watching craft.

Brown’s script calls that bluff by making the weapon so literally phallic that the pretence collapses. Once you have seen the drill you cannot un-see what the machete was doing. That is criticism performed as a prop, and it works on every slasher you watch afterwards, which is a considerable achievement for a film that also contains a very long shower scene.

The case against, honestly

That shower scene is the case against, and it deserves a fair hearing rather than a wave.

Jones has said the nudity was a requirement — New World’s condition, a quota. The film contains an extended sequence of naked young women in a locker room, shot from the height and angle you would expect, and it is not ironised. There is no camera move that makes it a comment. It is exactly the thing the poster promised, delivered without a wink, and it goes on.

The generous reading says the satire survives the exploitation, because a film cannot critique the male gaze from outside the system that pays for it, and the compromise is the point. The hostile reading says a satire that delivers the goods with total sincerity for four minutes is doing the thing rather than mocking it, and that we praise this film for its intentions because its intentions are unusually well documented. Both readings are looking at the same footage.

My position, for what it is worth: the film is a satire that lost several arguments with its financier and won the important one. It lost the shower. It won the drill, it won the ending, and it won the right to have three films in a row directed by women in a genre that had none. That is a better outcome than most 1982 scripts got, and it is also a compromise, and pretending otherwise flatters nobody. There is a wider version of this fight in the final girl rule and the films that broke it — Carol Clover’s framework was built to explain exactly this kind of double-bind, and Slumber Party Massacre is the film that arrives already knowing about it.

One more piece of craft worth naming, because it is the film’s quietest good decision. Jones keeps putting the party and the killing in the same house at the same time. The girls are downstairs with a record on and a pizza coming while the drill is working upstairs, and the film cuts between the two without ever letting the party notice. Ordinary noise covers murder. That is a structural gag Brown almost certainly wrote as satire — the point being that a slumber party is loud enough to hide anything, and that the genre’s usual convention of everyone conveniently wandering off alone is a screenwriter’s cowardice. Jones stages it as suspense instead of comedy, and it becomes the most effective forty minutes in the film. Both women were right about it, for different reasons.

The real ancestor

People reach for Halloween and Friday the 13th, and the borrowing is obvious. The real grandparent is Peeping Tom — Michael Powell in 1960, a film about a man who murders women with a modified camera, which is to say a film that makes the apparatus of looking into the murder weapon and then hands it to the audience. Powell was destroyed for it. Twenty-two years later a Corman quickie ran the identical argument with a power tool and nobody noticed, because it had a poster with girls on it.

That is the collector’s note. Watch Peeping Tom, then watch this, and the drill stops being funny.

The film’s other real weakness is that it is thin. Seventy-seven minutes is admirable discipline and it is also, at points, an absence: several of the girls have no interior life whatsoever, and the film’s willingness to treat them as a group rather than as people cuts against the argument it is otherwise making. A satire of how the slasher processes young women is undermined a little when the satire also processes them. Jones does what she can — the group is at least allowed competence — and there is only so much a first-time director on a Corman schedule can smuggle past the people signing the cheques.

Where to find it: it is easy to come by, and the boutique restorations have been kind to it. Watch the first film before the sequels; the second is a fascinating disaster and a different conversation.

Spoilers below

The ending is the thesis statement, and it is the reason the parody reading holds.

Valerie, the neighbour who has been outside the party for most of the film, comes back into it with a machete. She does not shoot Thorn. She does not outrun him to a car. She takes the blade and cuts the bit off the drill — severs it, cleanly, and leaves the man holding a motor. The castration is not a subtext at that point. It is the plot.

What follows is the detail people forget: the film does not end there. It has to finish him afterwards, awkwardly, with a wounded man still coming, and the survivors have to do it together rather than in a single heroic beat. The last act is three women dealing with a problem, in a garden, in stages. There is no one final girl standing above a body in a triumphant frame. The image the film chooses to end on is exhaustion.

The other thing Brown’s script does, and it survives Jones’s straightening of the tone, is that Thorn talks. He manages very little of use. He explains himself in the terms these men always explain themselves — desire framed as love, murder framed as intimacy. He believes he is the romantic lead. A slasher that gives its killer a rationale usually does so to make him grand. This one does it to make him embarrassing, which is a far more hostile choice, and it is the moment the parody comes fully back to the surface after seventy minutes underwater.

He is a man who thinks the drill is a personality. The film has been telling you that since the first frame, and it turns out the audience was the only one who needed it spelled out.