W
hile Carol J. Clover’s 1992 book Men, WoMen, and Chain saWs: Gender in the Modern horror FilMGave birth to the notion oF the FeMinist protaGonist (the “Final Girl”) in the slasher film, it has never been a level playing field. After all, you only get to be the Final Girl after the first girl, the penultimate girl and all the girls in between have ended up on the business end of a power tool.
Of course, we all know the rules the Final Girl must live by: she can dress, talk
and fight like a man with impunity, but to make love like one or imbibe like one has long remained off limits. Filmmakers have subverted the trope for decades. Long before Scream earned critical kudos and box office millions by deconstructing the Final Girl and her battleground in the 1990s, the Slumber Party Massacre fran- chise laid the foundation. The three films – recently re-released on DVD as part of
Shout! Factory’s Roger Corman’s Cult Classics series – might seem unsophisticated when viewed through the post- modern lens of movies such as High Tension and Behind the Mask, but SPM and its two official sequels occupy an important niche in horror’s cultural landscape. A full decade before Clover’s book, SPM recognized the Final Girl trope and turned it on its bloody ear. The first film was released in 1982 – the year that saw Pol-
tergeist joined E.T. as one of the top box office earners; and the Friday the 13th and Halloween series both released their third installments; the previous year had already given us such cult faves as The Burning and My Bloody Valentine. The slasher genre was thriving, and legendary exploitation producer Roger Corman was eager to cash in. At the same time, a young editor was looking to make her
directorial debut. Amy Holden Jones, then 26, found a strange little curiosity gathering dust in whatever passed for a vault at Corman’s New World Pictures: a horror script by feminist au- thor Rita Mae Brown, best known for her lesbian coming-of- age novel Rubyfruit Jungle (think Catcher in the Ryewith more oral sex). The script, titled Don’t Open the Door, was intended as a feminist take on the slasher genre. Without bothering to ask permission, Jones enlisted a few student actors and her cinematographer husband, Michael Chapman, to shoot a pro- logue for the script. Jones cut the reel together on her pal Joe Dante’s editing table, using music cues from Dante’s The Howling. Chapman, a noted cinematographer, was fresh from shooting Raging Bull, so the prologue looked damn good – good enough to convince Corman to commit $200,000 to com- plete the film and hire Jones to direct it. “I did it as a directing sample only; I was shocked when
Roger decided he wanted me to finish the film,” recalls Jones. “I had never even read the rest of the script. When I did, I real- ized it was a mess. That was also the beginning of my career as a screenwriter, as the first thing I did was rewrite.” Since Jones had never seen a slasher film, she had serious
catching up to do. She recalls, “When I sat down and looked at Halloween and
Friday the 13th, I realized how derivative [Brown’s] original script was. I set out to both fulfill the requirements of the genre and make it somewhat unique. I was afraid of making something politically incorrect, but I also re- sented the label. By this time, directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme and Martin Scorsese had all made exploitation films for Corman, so why not me?” Jones doesn’t remember much about
Brown’s original script – only that there was a slumber party and a killer with a big, um, drill. According to her, Brown’s take on the genre was a fairly serious one, so she added liberal doses of humour.
Tool’s Out: Kim (Debra Deliso, left) and Trish (Michelle Michaels) stalked by Russ Thorn (Michael Villella).
“The rewrite was enormous,” she recalls. “I wrote all the set pieces, changed or cre-
ated all the deaths, and reworked most of the characters. But the drill metaphor is Brown’s. Most good horror scripts are a metaphor for an underlying fear. This one is about a teenage girl’s terror of getting laid for the first time.” In true Corman fashion, SPM was shot in only twenty days. The crew had to be re-
sourceful, since Corman’s business model didn’t allow for extravagant luxuries, such as, well, sets and electricity. “Sometimes Roger would take away our generator, saying we could light scenes using car headlights,” Jones says. “Those days our grips would tap into city power lines. You could see the streetlights dim for miles.” Helped along by its iconic, phallic poster (Jones also directed
the poster’s photo shoot – see the iconic image on facing page), SPM was a success, which could only mean one thing: a sequel. This time around, directorial duties fell to Deborah Brock, who was head of post production at Corman’s company. Brock had written a comedy script that failed to rouse Cor- man’s interest, but he offered her a chance to direct a film he’d already sold to European distributors on its title alone: Slumber Party Massacre II. There was no script to go along with the title, though, so she wrote one. “As long as it was a horror movie involving high school girls
and a drill, I could make it pretty much what I wanted it to be,” Brock recalls. “It was originally called Don’t Let Go: Slumber Party Massacre II. We dropped the last part of the title while shooting because people don’t particularly want to rent their house to a movie with the word ‘Massacre’ in the title.” So, was Corman’s selection of a female director for the se-
quel intentional or coincidental? Brock isn’t certain, but she hazards a guess: “Roger is very un-sexist. He’s given more women first jobs as directors and producers than anyone in Hollywood. I don’t know that he had hiring a woman specifi- cally in mind, but he was always open to it. I think, mainly, Roger had a problem – he’d already sold the rights to the pic- ture and he had to get it made. I told him I wanted to write and direct, and it was a match.” The film Brock made is unlike anything else that came out
of that era (or any other). Part slasher film and part rockabilly musical, 1987’s SPM II is completely insane and ridiculously entertaining. Heavily influenced by A Nightmare on Elm Street, it’s a surreal blend of dream sequences, musical numbers and stalk-and-drill slasher fare. “I wanted to do something unique that commented on the
genre at the same time that it followed the form of a horror movie,” asserts Brock. “[SPM II] is actually a decon- structed horror movie with a lot of dark humour and musical elements. It’s the only horror movie I know of with a singing, dancing rockabilly villain.” Though the film is tame in the gore de-
partment, it ruffled feathers in England, getting itself banned by the country’s Board of Censors. “They thought the mixture of sex, violence and rock music was particularly upset- ting,” recalls Brock. “Someone should have told them it was a comedy.” The franchise took a sig-
nificantly darker turn in 1990 with its third install- ment. Corman stuck with the winning formula and hired a female staffer to helm the film: creative executive
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