Boobs, Blood and Cheese
Remembering “Slumberparty Massacre” and its role in feminist horror cinema.
Hot, half-naked girls are stalked and killed by a nondescript creep. Sex leads to death. Boobs and blood are everywhere. The killer dies, comes back, and is killed a final time. Shot for gratuitous shot, “Slumberparty Massacre” feels like more of the same familiar slasher film bullshit.
Now, I love cheese fests as much as the next gal. But I also like my horror movies with a side of lore and, for some reason, this film never left my mind. There was something deeper to it that I was missing; there was something under the cheese.
Turns out it was a thick, saucy layer of satire with underlying feminist dough.
See, “Slumberparty Massacre” was originally written by feminist Rita Mae Brown as a parody of the slasher genre. It was 1982. “Friday the 13th,” “Halloween,” and “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” were already tearing their way through multiple women in multiple sequels. Slashers weren’t even a decade old yet, but some audience members — mainly the ones watching themselves get naked and murdered on screen- were already sick of them.
“Slumberparty Massacre” director Amy Holden Jones, however, saw the film as her ticket from editor to director. And the head of the studio, a man, wanted it shot straightforward with the traditional blood and boobs.
So the film got the “Jennifer’s Body” treatment, meaning that it was shot/marketed in a way that suggested heaping helpings of fanservice and male gazing. It was then written off by critics and audiences upon release when they found out it was more “girly.”
Instead, “Slumberparty Massacre” became both a feminist and cult classic and an example of why women should enjoy and produce more “low-brow” content.
I grew up desensitized to these tropes. As a teenage girl, blood and boobs were already a big part of my life when I got into horror movies. Other people’s blood and boobs didn’t concern me. I somehow didn’t notice the startling amount of sexist skeletons in my favorite genre’s closet.
We see this old school mentality early on in “Slumberparty.” Before we get to the actual sleepover, the teens leave school and walk by a dumpster in broad daylight that clearly has a murdered female electrician in it. They don’t notice her. The same thing tends to happen in most slashers. The higher the body count gets, the less likely you are to pay attention or care.
Then our protagonist Trish (Michele Michaels) decides to have a slumber party with her friends. The local recently-escaped asylum patient decides to crash the party. Cue the murder, the laughter, and the subtle slasher deviation.
Yes, we do eventually get the expected shot of the girls showering together. But the camera pans over their bodies in an almost forced, obligatory way. We get the girls changing in front of an open window, unaware that their two male classmates are ogling them. But the girls are having a conversation and the nudity’s treated as natural.
“Slumberparty” takes our usual cookie cutter women and reworks them into normal, believable teenage girls. They’re not horror movie prop dolls. They make fun of each other. They have conversations that last longer than half a scene before they get murdered.
They even eat a pizza that a now-dead delivery boy brought them because, dammit, you can’t fight off a psycho on an empty stomach. It’s real and genuine, a rarity in slasher flicks. This may be a horror movie, but girls still get hungry.
If anything, it’s the men that are mocked and objectified more in the “Slumberparty” universe.
A young teenage girl checks out a “Playgirl” magazine while her sister yells at her to not steal the centerfold again. The two ogling male classmates are swiftly killed as they try to find help.
The first has his inevitable murder cut over with the sounds of a woman screaming. The other is treated to a lengthy death scene, a dubious pleasure typically reserved for female victims of the genre. As the killer advances, he begs, pleads, and cries for mercy.
And the killer himself is an unremarkable weirdo murdering people with a drill used as a thinly veiled phallic symbol. He holds it between his legs, penetrates people with it, and eventually gets the tip of it cut off in a clear castration metaphor before he dies.
“You know you want it,” he says to Trish at one point, standing over her and brandishing the weapon. “You’ll love it.”
It’s far from subtle, but “Slumberparty” wasn’t exactly looking to sweep the awards circuit. It simply had fun with itself.
Men have gotten to produce and star in fucktons of mediocre horror movies over the years and no one ever bitches about them. Stick one woman behind the camera, though, and suddenly your film has to be the next Best Picture contender.
To that double standard, I say this: if Eli Roth is allowed to be repeatedly produce shitty torture porn films because he thinks modern horror is “watered down” — aka missing the orgy of boobs and blood — I’m allowed to enjoy “Slumberparty Massacre.”
Despite its muddled origins, “Slumberparty” is a cornerstone of feminist horror cinema. It was a bizarre passion project and a pointed stab at those who usually do the stabbing. It was a corny, weird little horror film that ended up being beloved.
And — like a fine cheese does — it’s going to age well.
