RESEARCH General Arts

MOVIES
Decade of divorce set stage for message of teen horror films

Craig Chamberlain, Education Editor
(217) 333-2894; cdchambe@uiuc.edu

5/1/02

Photo by Bill Wiegand Contrary to conventional wisdom, it wasn't just screams and blood that made the "teen slasher" movie popular, says Pat Gill, a professor of media studies. There was a message that came with the mayhem, rooted in the times, and it struck a chord with teenagers.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- "Jason X" is now in theaters, film number 10 in the "Friday the 13th" series. And yet another "Halloween," number eight, is due in July.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it wasn't just screams and blood that made the "teen slasher" movie popular, says Pat Gill, a professor of media studies at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. There was a message that came with the mayhem, rooted in the times, and it struck a chord with teenagers.

The slashers began in the late 1970s, after a decade of explosive growth in the divorce rate, Gill notes in a forthcoming paper, "The Monstrous Years: Teens, Slasher Films, and the Family," accepted for publication in the Journal of Film and Video. She may be the first to make that historical connection.

In all of the films, starting with the trendsetter "Halloween" in 1978, the focus is on kids who have to save themselves and others "because the parents aren’t there," Gill said. Even when they are, "they are stupid, they are selfish, they don’t listen, they don’t seem to care about their kids. Or if they do care, they are unable to help their kids face the nightmares of the everyday world."

The kids who become victims are similarly selfish and flawed, Gill noted. The kids who survive are those who care about others and play the parental role. These were themes that not only reflected on the absent parent, but on perceived excesses of the "Me Decade" of the '70s, she said.

The message essentially is a conservative one, of "family values," played up in part through clever references to 1950s-era family television shows such as "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Leave It to Beaver," Gill said. The slasher films often mock these shows and their portrayal of an idealized and safe family life. "But the mockery reveals a strong yearning at the same time for a 'real' family," she said, or at least help in dealing with "a world that seems so much more complicated than the world depicted in those black and white shows."

Gill grew up watching those shows, as a child of the '50s and '60s, "and we all knew this was fiction." But she believes succeeding generations, watching the shows as reruns, perceive them as closer to reality. "In a way, they know it wasn't perfect like that, but they also know (or believe) their parents had a simpler life, the '50s were simpler, things were easier."

The slasher films therefore reflect and reinforce what Gill believes is an exaggerated perception of parental neglect and family dysfunction, contrasted against a "myth" of past family harmony.
It’s something she and her students addressed this past semester in a one-time course on the teen slasher genre. They also dealt with questions of art, literature, philosophy, religion, race and gender.

"Popular culture is remarkably important, and important to study, because it offers people an interpretive frame," said Gill, who notes that Shakespeare's plays were the popular culture of his day. "And there are very, very scary creatures in every mythology in the world."