Danishka Esterhazy’s Slumber Party Massacre remake feels as invigorating to the modern horror landscape as Wes Craven’s Scream did in 1996. While it is thrillingly fun in its satirical deconstruction of the slasher genre while morphing itself into a shining example of the genre itself, the film also acts as a biting act of film criticism — peeling back the layers on the context of the original film’s feminism and misogyny as it wrestles with the legacy of a slasher franchise written and directed by women that was still forced to adhere to the expectations of the male gaze.
In 1982, Amy Holden Jones needed to fit her own perspective within the sandbox of the slasher picture. She married blood and sex expertly to craft a thrilling picture that played to audience expectations, while still finding room for subversion to make it feel like her own. In many ways, The Slumber Party Massacre is a simple slasher about a maniac with a power drill terrorizing young women while the parents are away. If you view the genre through the lens of the killer’s weapon as an extension of the killer’s phallus, then the symbol of a power drill with a cartoonishly long drill bit makes that specific metaphor feel all the more concrete. Having a shot in the movie where we are viewing the killer from the waist down from behind — and between his legs, we see one of his female victims slinking against the wall in terror as the drill bit splits the screen down the middle — it feels like a pointed commentary on the societal prioritization of male sexuality over female sexuality, and how men wield their libido like a weapon. You can see this commentary in a lot of slashers if you view them through this lens, but it is usually a subtextual element that feels almost accidental. Holden Jones brought this commentary to the forefront.
The original 1982 masterpiece has always felt like a satire to me, an exaggeration of the slasher that uses the screen to explore gender and sexuality within the slasher picture. Beyond the phallic imagery and killer’s aesthetic, Holden Jones also uses the camera as a voyeuristic tool that highlights the male gaze, leering on female bodies and using nudity as a way to turn the camera back on the audience because of the methodical pace of the shots. One of the opening shots of the film is a young woman waking up, getting out of bed, and taking off her top to put on a blue dress. The camera stays still, placed on a mirror as we watch her change, in full view of her body. This shot is here so Holden Jones can adhere to the expectations placed on her by the audience and studio. However, it is also a shot that implicates the audience in this young woman’s objectification. We are watching her through glass, as if we are spying on her, with the camera staying locked on the mirror. Later, there is another shot where the camera is locked on a woman’s back as she showers, and then the camera methodically moves down her naked body, and then back up. Again, it is a shot that feels exploitative, but it is also a shot where the camera is used to mirror the audience’s own gaze. It is giving us what we expect from the genre, but the exaggeration of the gaze implicates the audience in the film’s exploitation.
And yet, because the original movie has so many moments that feel like an exaggerated version of the male gaze — and this gaze is weaponized against women — it can also be read as just another teen slasher flick, full of nudity, possibilities of sex, and lots of blood. Are we really expecting teenage boys to forget about their hormones and read into the subtleties of the film’s critiques? This is where Esterhazy’s remake feels vital, because it has the freedom to break free from the constraints of the 80’s slasher, and in doing so, she creates an incredibly funny sendup of the slasher by repurposing the heightened male gaze from the original and aims it at the male body. The remake draws our attention to the absurdities of the gaze itself, and around this critique is an emotionally affecting story of female friendship and generational trauma. Whereas the 2018 Halloween revival (and other nostalgia cash-ins of late) are blinded by their reverence for the original, Esterhazy’s movie has enough reverence for the original to understand the contradiction at its center, which allows her to explore the contradictions of a genre that both empowers and exploits women in equal measure.
Esterhazy’s remake is a fascinating piece of deconstruction, criticism, and commentary — structured as if it’s a legacy sequel to itself. We open with a 10-minute sequence that takes place in the early 90’s, where a group of girls is terrorized by the driller killer and, of course, we have a final girl that survives. And then we transition to the present day, where Dana (Hannah Gonera), the daughter of the original final girl, returns to the secluded lake house where the first massacre takes place. It’s just in time for another massacre, where Dana now plays the role of her mom, surrounded by a cast of friends that leap off the screen. The movie shines when it centers itself around a cast of young women that feel like genuine friends, and who share a camaraderie that is exploited to mine both humor and terror. Part of this franchise’s legacy is defined by each entry being written and directed by women, and in each movie, that legacy shines through in the way the women are written. While there was still plenty of objectification in the original trilogy, these characters never felt like canon fodder, or characters who existed to be exploited, and this remake carries on with that legacy.
This movie feels like an update on Scream, remembering how to match comedy with horror to create a macabre experience. The remake satirizes an entire subgenre by drawing attention to itself, while highlighting the absurdities of a horny camera, and pokes at why the camera is mostly aimed at women in slasher movies. Esterhazy borrows the exaggerated male gaze from the original movie and turns it on the male body, directly pointing out the absurdity in the hyper-sexualization of women within the genre. For Dana and her friends, Suzanne Kelly‘s screenplay depicted them as these genre archetypes before letting them shed that skin and become actual people, and through this dimensionality, Esterhazy’s camera treats them as real people. The objectification is saved for the male characters in the cabin across the lake, who exist in this movie solely to be objectified and to die.
In the 1982 movie, we have these two male characters spying on our main cast through a window, and they are watching them get undressed and while it’s a moment for gratuitous nudity, it is also easy to intellectualize this moment as voyeuristic — purposeful on Holden Jones’ part to make the audience aware of how wrong this feels. But also, it’s a moment to get women out of their tops, and the context can get lost. In this update however, we have a gender flipped callback where the women are watching these men through a window, and these men are having a shirtless pillow fight, rife with feathers falling in slow motion, and it is one of the sexiest scenes of last year. There is a dolly shot following a man’s ass as he walks into the cabin. Another moment mimics the movement of the original film’s shower scene, except this time it’s focused on a man’s body. While Esterhazy is calling attention to the double standard, she is also creating moments that are as titillating as anything the genre has to offer, but because the gaze is flipped to accommodate male bodies, we are left asking ourselves why this discrepancy of objectification still exists between men and women.
The genre as a whole has gotten more inclusive in regards to who is represented on screen, and the films are no longer told strictly from a heteronormative perspective. However, instead of evening the playing fields with regards to male and female sexuality on screen, it feels like these filmmakers have gotten rid of sexuality altogether. Characters can still be in love or be in a relationship on screen, but the camera is a lot more respectful, and the genre no longer feels like it is being steered by horny teenagers. While this can feel like progress, Esterhazy offers an alternative route. She is returning the horny gaze to a genre suffering from an identity crisis, and we are being reminded to not overthink this. Both men and women are capable of having a sexy pillow fight, so why have we gone so long without the former? The answer to a legacy of the objectification of women within the genre isn’t to simply get rid of that objectification altogether. It’s to turn the camera and remember that the male body also deserves our attention.
This remake spends its entire second act making fun of itself and the genre, reminding us that these movies don’t have to be so self-important that they wallow in the misery of their own nostalgia. In the age of the legacy sequel, Slumber Party Massacre creates the template for what should be expected moving forward. A genuinely smart, thrillingly original work that updates the original instead of redoing it, offering a new perspective instead of resorting to the generic superficiality of trauma. Trauma is of course worth exploring in art, but at this point, it’s become a buzzword within the genre, where movies can use trauma as a shield from critique, masquerading as a serious work of art when underneath that pretension, your movie is really just about a dude in a mask going on a murder spree. Of course, this remake actually is about generational trauma and seeking closure to help heal someone you love, even if you’ll end up wounding yourself in the process, but in being about this general idea, Slumber Party Massacre doesn’t forget that it’s supposed to be a movie watched at slumber parties and sleepovers. When the movie switches from parody to horror in the final act, it does become a genuine slasher with good kills and characters being picked off, however, that section of the film feels like an expertly crafted payoff to a second act that spent its time deflating the genre by pointing out its misogyny. We are lulled into a spell of comedy before being hit with horror, and Esterhazy is able to transition between the two seamlessly.
It’s clear that Esterhazy and Kelly have a genuine love for the original movies in the franchise, especially the first two, from how this film homages them. But you can also tell that they had trouble reconciling the feminism of a female writer/director duo with the misogyny of an exploitative camera, and they set out to create a film that shows us the way they interpret the franchise as a whole. The most recent Scream is satirizing legacy sequels by making a bad legacy sequel while pointing out how bad this legacy sequel is, while Slumber Party Massacre is using the structure of a legacy sequel to wrestle with the legacy of a franchise rooted in contradiction, parsing through the wreckage to find meaning in the minutiae. One of these feels creatively destitute, while the other feels creatively thrilling. Slumber Party Massacre was shot in 18 days with the budget of a SyFy original movie, and yet, it feels more alive and purposeful than most other modern examples of its genre. This is the new standard.
