Book: Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978-1986
Year: 2002
Author: Adam Rockoff
Rating: 8/10.
Bottom line: Whoa. Good book.
Originally, it was [Jack] Palance, not Erland Van Lidth, who was supposed to kill the guard on duty, but Palance maintained that he did not believe in violence, and balked at having to do the scene. When [Alone in the Dark director Jack] Sholder explained that it was necessary for the audience to understand that his character had a capacity for violence, Palance stared at him, steely-eyed, and said, 'I think they'll know.'
Despite their many disputes, Sholder looks back fondly on his time spent with Palance, who beneath his gruff exterior was not only a 'very interesting actor but a very cultured guy.' Sholder is an accomplished musician and both he and Palance shared a love for classical music and high culture, which made it all the more ironic that for his first film he found himself 'in the middle of the night telling people how to stab each other.'
The Good:
Adam Rockoff sets out to write a history of the heyday of the slasher film, and succeeds admirably.
People, I haven't even heard of half these films. My Netflix account just burst into flames. And as history textbooks go, this one's incredibly engaging and well-written--I read the whole thing today while stapled to my couch (one of the few physical activities not catalogued in this book). I especially liked Chapter 1, entitled "What Is a Slasher?", which provides a handy schema for determining whether you're watching a slasher film (rather than say, a South American soccer match, or the Republican National Convention), which I will summarize here because it's so darn useful:
1. Killer is usually an ordinary peron who has suffered some terrible trauma which must be avenged! Implictly male and generally asexual but prone to voyeurism, the killer's also Timex-tough, able to withstand shooting, stabbing, burning and beheading, for a start.
2. They slash, hence the name. With a knife or some other blade-driven instrument, instead of a gun, bomb or flamethrower. In the interests of scholarship, I appreciate Rockoff's quantitative comparison of supposedly gore-driven slashers with such action blockbusters as the Rambo cycle and everything Arnold Schwartzenegger has ever done, because hello, it's clear that although slashers get blamed for everything, judged on body-count alone, the governor of California is one very successful homicidal maniac.
3. Slasher-movie killings are always up close and personal, rather than being a horde of weird jungle mercenaries reduced to "camouflage-patterned confetti" in one fell swoop.
4. Holy crap are they gory.
5. "Because the audience for these films is predominantly teenage, as are the characters with whom they identify, the location is often a universally recognized place associated with adolescence: summer camp...high school...college...or even the comforting streets of suburbia." The locations wind up isolated in some way, preventing escape or rescue.
6. The vast majority of the victims not only commit some moral transgression (sex, drugs, bullying, homicide), but also have the common sense of socks.
7. Very few functional adults appear in the movies; when they do, they're one of three types: the wise elder who presents advice on how to defeat the killer (before dying), the ineffectual authority figure who refuses to believe there's any danger (before dying), or the killer (um, before dying. Although sometimes after, too).
8. Well, Rockoff's at least willing to admit to the existence of the Final Girl.
The Bad:
However, Rockoff staunchly refuses to believe that the Final Girl, or indeed any other part of a slasher movie has anything to do with gender commentary.
Yeah, just take a minute with that. Whoever checked my copy of this book out previously did, and then they went through and highlighted all the parts where Rockoff denies films have any relevance to gender studies; there's quite a few angry little pen marks going on, which is cracking me right up.
Anyway. Despite his blithe dismissal of an entire subsection of film criticism, Rockoff cheerfully marches around commenting that a lot of slasher films seem awfully well, misogynistic and sex-based but let him be clear, people: these films are not about sex or gender. Tra la la la!
Seriously, the guy just goes on and on about the Final Girls. Way to bury your point there, tiger*.
While Rockoff's a top-notch historian with a flair for making his subject sparkle, he has some difficulty pulling off actual criticism. In addition to his refusal to see a big shiny penetrating knife as anything other than a piece of cutlery, Rockoff has a weakness for grade-school name-calling. He refers to the British film advisory commission (who notoriously ban many slashers) as the "effete English", and introduces a quote from an unfavorable review of Friday the 13th Part 2 thusly:
Corry, who obviously thinks he's being far more witty than he actually is, says that in the original Friday the 13th, 'a crazy momma's boy killed a lot of counselors.' As anybody who has seen the film knows, Jason, the aforementioned 'momma's boy,' doesn't kill anybody, his mother does. Unfortunately, critics like Corry are hardly the exception. If I had a dollar for every time someone referred to Jason as the 'hockey-masked killer of Friday the 13th,' I'd have a sum larger than the budget of most slashers.
Oh, snap.
My understanding of academia was that you disagreed with someone by saying that x is right, and because This Guy says not(x), he is wrong; in Text1, x happens. And then in Text2, x happens again. And in Text3, x happens three separate times before painting itself purple and launching "X: The Musical".
If I'm wrong, and academic publishing can all be boiled down to This Guy's a Poopyhead, then I spent way too much time on my master's thesis.
The Meta:
Oh y'all, I can't even go there. Trying to find meta in a history of low-budget 80s horror films could disrupt the very fabric of time and space as we know it. Not to mention what it would do to the USA Network's latenight programming schedule.
*Yeah, that was a not-so-veiled sex reference. Unless of course, you ask Rockoff.