The Slashological Strata of Fate: HALLOWEEN to THE TERMINATOR (1978-1984)

The early 80s --being the decade of the slasher craze --was for many impressionable, alienated teens like myself, a time of great personal fear, paranoia, isolation, and in our frightened half-sleepy state, a budding militarism. Even if you never went to see a Friday the 13th in its original run, and thought those who did were Philistines, the type who got killed for sex with their cheap dates rather than the virginal nerds awake the mundane despair all around, --a 'final girl' before the phrase was coined. The slasher films were an inescapable part of the landscape: TV commercials, newspaper print ads relentlessly ogling cowering girls from the perspective of killers; and it was before internet, so we couldn't really find like-minded people, the dungeon masters and Atari nerds beyond our immediate circle of societal rejects. While we suffered for the women, we sneered at humanity in general, and how sex and booze made them sloppy and indifferent to their own self preservation. We'd later get sloppy too, but for now, age circa 12-16, the borderline to such knowledge was heavily patrolled by a legion of masked, silent, shambling butcher knife wielding, unkillable automatons.We who saw the line dared not cross. Instead we carefully quietly armed ourselves for future battles, preparing for the time when we would need to open fire on the shambling army of Jasons and Michaels due any moment.


The automaton killer who won't die visiting suburbia en masse originated in the scared imagination of anyone who saw Halloween, which was everyone, really. I hadn't even seen it but I was traumatized from when Siskel and Ebert showed on the special episode of Sneak Previews devoted to "Dead Teenager" movies, wherein they taught me to turn my queasy dread onto outraged feminism, where it would remain until I read Carol Clover's Men Women and Chainsaws and learned that was the whole point...

Feminism or not, we all thought of what we would do if Michael or Jason or some version thereof came home, and the thought he was never going to stop coming held us in a giddy grip that made it necessary to keep the TV or radio on, and a nightlight on, while sleeping, to drown out the scrapings of trees against the house, and the creaking footsteps we couldn't be sure we heard. We had butcher knives stored under our mattresses, the 80s equivalent of duct tape and a flashlight. I learned after watching Battle of the Bulge one night that just thinking about WW2 erased my fear, stopped me thinking about slashers. If that's not an encapsulation of the rise of 80s action movie militarism I don't know what is. So, retrace the steps and wonder... did Halloween cause the Iraq war?


The thing you have to remember is Laurie Strode didn't have a Laurie Strode before her to teach her to not drop the knife by the killer just because he's temporarily playing dead. Myers was the first of this type, this emerging breed of mute, indestructible automaton killers patrolling suburbia and Jamie Lee doesn't yet know he's got nine hundred lives and you need to take drastic steps like defenestration, or what I eventually determined was an unbeatable and less messy course of action: thumb removal (no thumbs, no strangling or holding weapons, all he can do is lunge and snap like a turtle).


Every kid had their own late night strategy for tackling a Michael Myers / Jason variety killer and in hindsight it's clear Laurie Strode's ignorance was the root force for the 80s action movie surge. The new heroes killed their enemies eight dozen ways at once, obliterated them. Sometimes they even tangled with indestructible psychos personally: Chuck Norris went on a round of futile karate kicks against an modified killer in Hero and the Terror (1988) and Charlie Bronson struggling against liberal laws trying to protect a freaky psycho who kills while buck naked in Ten to Midnight (1983) and Clint tangled with a kinky leather man in Tightrope (1984).Let's not forget Schwarzenegger whose career had seemingly nose-dived after Conan. Seeing the original previews at the drive-in for Terminator (1984) while waiting for Christine we thought it looked like an low budget Italian knock-off slasher/action sci fi hybrid; Arnold dressed like he should be riding a scooter in Rome, using a laser sight at a phony looking 'Tech Noir' bar. We were stunned with incredulity when we read the glowing reviews and heard the record box office. Seeing the film we understood why: this time the opponent knew all the unstoppable killer's tricks before the movie even started, so it was like the final girl finally had a guy who understood her. There would be no more dropping butcher knives, not anymore.

Get thee to a gunnery: Blue Steel, Escape from New York, Aliens

The idea that kept us up at night was there there might be some crazy killer who has us earmarked for death for reasons beyond understanding: maybe your friend called him a creep when he drove past you on the street, but we could take hope now that for every Moby Dick monster there would be an Ahab and vice versa. In Halloween the same essential dynamic takes place, just substitute Donald Pleasance's quiver-voiced shrink, with his pistol permit, for Michael Biehn.


To help lay all this out I've assembled the following horror strata map Most crap horror film directors never get past the topography, while a few get all the way down to the bottom, which is the universal top, for this pyramid:

Topographical:The male in overalls, axe, chainsaw, screaming woman, corridors advanced down stealthily, shocks around the corners, cowering, rising up, sudden face in the mirror, closet doors. A killer presumably killed sitting slowly up.
Textual:Condemnation of lustful behavior; warning to never take your security for granted; taking the 'safety bars' of first world social order consumerist entitlement for granted  (i.e. Marie Antoinette letting them eat cake).
Subtextual: Feminism; homophobia; collapse of the American Family; critique of sexual repression's inherent evil; man's inherent savagery; castration anxiety; psychosexual pre-genital jouissance
Structural:The uncanny rhythm of slowed down time and sense of danger erupting from even normal things - closet doors, darkened laundry rooms, cars, darkness, bushes outside the house, staircases, mirrors, telephones, porches, windows (only classics get here - the first four Carpenter films
Core:Death Drive; initiation from child to adult through endurance and conquering of fear; the learning of aggression; rise to violence / fascism inherent; the encouragement of militarism; distrust of neighbors and people walking past your house (i.e. itchy trigger-finger neighborhood watches)

It's in this last one we see how, in its way, The Terminator, Rambo, and Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, are all illegitimate sequels to the slasher movie craze, and just maybe so is our modern trend of abducted girls, torture porn, and NRA zealotry.
You can't say that era didn't have long term repercussions for those of us who survived. Maybe we never had a midnight visitor with a laser sight or a knife but it hardly mattered. I still can't sleep in dead silence, I need a white noise machine, old radio shows, a whirring AC, the TV left on all night on low volume, or all of the above; I moved to the city that never sleeps--which after seeing The Warriors and Escape from New York I vowed to never do, but the crime of the 70s was my boon, because dead bolts, steel doors, small apartments on high floors all made one's safety from outside monsters easily secured; even here Park Slope I live right across the street--the the point I wave to the flower guy sometimes when I close the window for the night and turn out the lights--from one of 7th Avenue's few 24 hour bodegas; the only thing missing would be a big guard dog but on the fourth floor of a tiny place it would just be too much hassle. My little brother though has two, and a gun locker and lives in a city that encourages concealed weapons permits. Is this all the fault of Michael and Jason?

I would say, maybe.

The 70s was a time of great personal freedom, for both kids and adults, which began to end in the early 80s, coincidentally the same time slasher movies were widely available on video, where moms and little kids could see them and gradually lose all faith in mankind as kids could easily procure movies never meant to be seen outside of sleazy NYC grindhouses, but which were exhumed from in droves to cash in on the slasher craze. Most of it was innocuous, even laughable, but the cumulative effect--the sheer number of them available, even just looking at a shelf of the covers--was traumatizing.


At least one good thing came of all that fear and mistrust: Woman got a gun and learned to be her own Dr. Loomis; she kept watching the dark, and would never fall for a killer playing possum ever again. By Terminator 2, she had arsenals stashed away in Mexico just waiting... the fan was shit-caked and the Blockbusters were busted. There was nothing left now to save us... not even the bomb.
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