Don’t Look (Behind You) Now

With slashers, I’ve always been in John Carpenter’s camp: these people aren’t getting punished for having sex, they’re getting killed while naked simply because that’s when they’re the most vulnerable, the least likely to be looking around the room. However, like Jim Rockford says, If fifty people tell you you’re drunk, then maybe it’s time to lie down, right? Meaning, when the slasher was busy getting codified back in the seventies (Black Christmas, Jaws, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, on up, to, say, Tourist Trap and Friday the 13th and Just Before Dawn and The Burning), this killed-for-having-sex dynamic wasn’t so much in play. But it soon would be. Just because everybody was saying it. And, really, I don’t know if  the critics started pushing that first—Clover & Co.—or if all the films trying to cash in on Halloween etc made it real. Or if that was just the talk around the popcorn machine, and soon it was real enough that Scream and Cherry Falls could even play with it some, invert it, hang it out to dry, throw it against the wall to see what sticks. However it happened, it quickly got to the point where killed-for-having-sex, that was considered de rigueur, pretty much, or a delimiting factor, anyway—see Behind the Mask: Leslie Vernon, say. If you don’t have some of that going on in your slasher, then how can you even call it a slasher? It’s not ideal, and it goes a long way towards re-inscribing America’s preoccupation with villainizing sex and thus custom-making  . . . → → →</a