men women and chainsaws gender in the modern horror film

Nancy’s exasperation at Glen doesn’t suggest discomfort, but distraction-Freddy’s wrath hasn’t yet had real-world implications, but Nancy seems to sense something her friends don’t. After Tina and Rod giggle their way upstairs, Glen tries to make moves, but Nancy sighs him off-“Not now, Glen”-preoccupied by a nightmare Tina had the night before Nancy’s over at her house to begin with because Tina didn’t want to sleep alone.Ī Gentler, Better Way to Change Minds Arthur C.

Nancy also sleeps apart from her boyfriend, Glen (played by a baby-faced Johnny Depp), when he and her friend Tina’s guy, Rod, crash the girls’ sleepover. She dresses in barely varying shades of baby pink, from her sweater-vests to an enviable football jersey, which she uses as a nightshirt. If the Final Girl is narratively rewarded with survival for exhibiting constrictive and conservative modes of femininity, Nancy more or less meets the mark. Nancy is an oft-cited example of Final Girldom-though the label, in certain respects, is an imperfect fit. As Randy, the meta-voice of Craven’s '90s comedy/slasher Scream, informs a party of potential teenage murder victims: “There are certain rules you must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie. She survives, in part, by virtue of being both virginal and vice-free.

Clover in her book Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, the Final Girl is a filmic trope referring to the last female character left alive after a string of serialized murders. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th-particularly that of the Final Girl. Nightmare shares plenty of rhetorical patterns with its turn-of-the-decade predecessors-John Carpenter’s Halloween, Ken Wiederhorn Eyes of a Stranger, Sean S. And so, too, should his original vanquisher, Nancy Thompson: an obstinate, foul-mouthed, hyper-feminine high schooler, who remains one of the most progressive female representations in the teen horror genre. Its infamous villain, Freddy-disfigured by burns, bursting with bile, armed with knife-fingers and the power to show up uninvited in teenage dreamscapes-was born to the '80s low-budget boom he has since resurfaced in sequels, spinoffs, crossovers, and one (awful) 2010 remake.įreddy still manages to resonate. Wes Craven’s 1984 supernatural slasher, A Nightmare on Elm Street, earned back its paltry production costs after just one week of theater runs, having ensnared its targeted teen demographic with the lure of body horror. Freddy Krueger turns 30 this Halloween season.

Men women and chainsaws gender in the modern horror film