In 1996 a drunken Randy Meeks stumbled and slurred his way onto our screens screaming at his peers: “You don’t know the rules! There are certain rules one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie! For instance, number one: you can never have sex. Big no no! Big no no! Sex equals death, okay? Number two: you can never drink or do drugs. The sin factor! It's a sin. It's an extension of number one. And number three: never, ever, ever under any circumstances say, "I'll be right back." Because you won't be back. …[]... See, you push the laws and you end up dead.” [Scream. 1996. Williamson.].
Hello, welcome to the Unhinged Binge. I am Le Gault… and I rant a lot. On this episode where I document my ever declining insanity… we gonna talk about sex baby! And how doin-it as an unmarried teen will lead to you being brutally killed by Michael Myers if you’re home, or Jason Vorhees if you’re camping.
Inspired by a study I read, the Perils of Living Dangerously in a Slasher Film and a statistic I read in the Teen Slasher Movie Book I decided, smartly, to spend three months worth of down time researching this like a maniac with murder board. However, before we dive in I need to explain some terms and the downfall of society before I get to that! Ya know. Context!
A well known trope in horror movies is, sex equals death.
I’d like to unpack this a bit… a lot a bit. Maybe too much? Let’s see how it goes. This is 23 pages…
First, I think I need to narrow things down a bit. The ‘sex equals death’ is a trope in a subgenre of horror. Specifically in slashers. Additionally there is a targeting of virgins in vampire and cult (like Satanic-Panic) movies.
Next, what is a trope? I found a great definition from No Film School,
“A film or TV trope is the consistent or expected use of certain characters, situations, settings, and time periods across a specific genre. The word has come to be used for common recurring rhetorical devices, motifs or even clichés within creative works.”
They further differentiate between a trope and a cliche, “A cliche is a way you'd describe a trope that has been seen so many times that it feels tired or worn out. It's an overused and exhausted idea.” - link.
I think it’s safe to assume we all know what death is.
So we can move on to the last part of this equation. Sex.
What is a virgin? - someone who has not yet had sex. Sounds like a simple definition, but is it?
Because, what is sex? If you’re a Sapphic deity like myself you may have been told that you’re still a virgin because sex is a penis penetrating a vagina… but, is it?
That’s a completely heteronormative, and let’s be real, vanilla, definition of sex.
As it turns out… virginity is a social construct. Don’t worry I won’t go on a radical Marxist Feminist rant.
To let the uncredited writer for Therapy for Women define it, a social construct is, “something we’ve made up. It isn’t tangible– it’s a story or an idea created by society. Social structures are how humans make sense of our existence.” - link. They go on to say,
“The idea of virginity dates back to a primitive era when paternity was essential to maintaining control and ownership of land. This ownership meant ownership of women, and in order to ensure one had ownership, one needed control. And to control, there also had to be fear of consequence. The policing of women’s bodies further intensified when Mariology emerged (the study of Mary, Mother of Jesus, the Blessed Mother, and The Virgin Mary, the most revered feminine figure in Christianity, particularly Catholicism).”
I will amend what they say, while it is Mariology, we could also just say Christianity.
Lindsay Betros explains in her second argument for a Medium article ‘5 Reasons why Virginity is a Social Construct’,
“Virginity is based on patriarchal concepts and is not a medical term. Virginity isn’t innate. It is a human creation. We typically think [of] the origin of “virginity” from Christian principles, however the term is from Greek Origin. Depending on the context, Greek writers would even use the term in a metaphorical sense. With the virgin Mary, virginity became hand in hand with purity and chastity.” - link.
I thought the evolution of the concept of virginity from Greek mythology to Christian mythology (yeah mythology, I said it!) was interesting. So I read further!
An article from Sutter Health, Defining Virginity, explains further:
““Virgin” originated from the Greek and Latin word “virgo,” or maiden. It was used often in Greek mythology to classify several goddesses, such as Artemis (also known as Diana) and Hestia. …[]... Virginity and virgin were once terms of power, strength and independence, used to describe the goddesses who were immune to the temptations of Dionysus, Greek god of seduction and wine. ...[]... In medieval times, virginity became a sexual term for a heterosexual woman who had not been penetrated by a penis. Virginity was classified as a gift from the Christian God only to be released by a husband. It was expected for a woman to remain chaste (a virgin) until marriage; a woman broke her family’s honor and was often punished if she was not chaste. …[]... In the past few decades, the term “virgin” has become confusing as people try to label persons of both genders, transgendered persons and all sexual orientations.” - link.
They didn’t include questions of consent, but I’d like to mention it.
I’ve observed from reading books dating back to the 70s to now on Feminist Film Theory which originally heavily relied on Freud, Lacan, and Althusian concepts which were, ya know, phallic and deep deep in the heteronormative, patriarchal, bs… that they just read as frustrating non-sense. It’s not limited to Feminist Film Theory, but academia in general, when Queer Theory is introduced (or rather accepted) in an argument that definitions change.
People get very up in arms when definitions change, or expand to embrace what they see as new concepts. Language, words, definitions, historically were created by a specific and rather narrow demographic that held power… yeah the cis-het white man. Over time as more people, black people, women, queer and trans people were allowed to enter scholastic spaces, to speak and be heard, in those spaces… they began to call into question the validity of some of those terms and definitions for various reasons from they were lacking, offensive, not comprehensive, or downright inaccurate. Meaning, it’s not so much that there are new terms or that definitions are changing, but rather that the original term/definition was corrected.
Virginity isn’t real. It’s not based in medical fact or science. It’s a socially constructed idea used to control women and empower men.
Virginity is typically focused on women. Men are encouraged to have sex, women are encouraged to wait. A man’s… ‘manhood’ is questioned if he has not yet had sex. Yet a woman’s moral character is in jeopardy if she has ‘premarital sex’. Which is a wild contradiction, laughable paradox, and worse, society (men) puts the responsibility of sex in the women’s hands and unintentionally labels women as the gatekeepers of sex… who have to constantly reject men’s uncontrollable advances. Rather than it being a two person agreement… ya know like consent. Yet, women are bad, seductresses, if they give in to the same desires that men have.
There is a difference in gender roles here. Having sex for the first time is considered a rite of passage to manhood. That really isn’t the case for females - the main rite of passage from girlhood to womanhood is menstruation - aka ‘hey you can have babies now’.
Madonna-Whore Complex from Freud is outdated nonsense. Pat Gaudette wrote in Madonna/Whore Complex: Love without Sex - Sex without Love,
“it refers to the sexual dysfunction in which some men believe that sex is a dirty act that is only enjoyed by “bad” women - whores. For these men, all women are divided into two very different groups: the whores [] women who are easily seduced and who enjoy the dirty act of sex; and the Madonnas/virgins - as in the Virgin Mary - pure women of virtue who would never enjoy sex and who should not be degraded by the sex act. …[]... Determining the “good” from the “bad” is simple: a woman either has an intact hymen or she doesn’t.”
Hymen = Virgin and good girl.
Lack of hymen = Whore and bad girl.
On a weird side tangent! I now realize the Myth of the Hymen! Not that hymen aren’t real. They are. But their importance is highly exaggerated. Like, I realized I had no idea what a hymen really was exactly. I had to google it and that turned into a disastrous recreation of the scene from Fried Green Tomatoes. Anyway. This story that equates the hymen to virginity is so inaccurate it’s wild. In fact personally I have no idea how I lost mine and from my research apparently a lot of people don’t. It’s not a big deal.
Back to Madonna! Since the Complex was conceptualized by Frued it’s labeled as “psychology” when this is really a social issue that I like to call: misogyny. Oddly enough Barbara Creed and Molly Haskell, even in the 70’s, had a better description of this issue… phenomenon?
The virgin-whore dichotomy:
Molly Haskell discusses the whore-virgin dichotomy in her book From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies,
“The whore-virgin dichotomy took hold with a vengeance in the uptight fifties, in the dialectical caricatures of the “sexpot” and the “nice girl.” …[]... the split was internalized in the moral code we adopted out of fear as well as out of an instinct for self preservation. The taboos against sex, encoded in the paralyzing edict that no man would marry a woman who was not a virgin…”
She goes on to say that, “The “virgin” was a primal, positive figure, honored and exalted beyond any merits she possessed as a woman (...), while the “whore,” Americanized into the good-bad girl, was publicly castigated and cautioned against - and privately sought by men.”
Allison said it perfectly in the Breakfast Club:
“Well, if you say you haven't, you're a prude. If you say you have, you're a slut. It's a trap. You want to but you can't, and when you do you wish you didn't, right?”
The Virgin-Whore Dichotomy has become an ingrained trope and created archetypes in all genres of not just films but storytelling. But, it’s especially noticeable in horror and teen films. We can even see parodies of it in Cabin in the Woods and Final Girl, where characters are slotted into these roles as if they’re chess pieces… or Clue characters.
In Cabin in the Woods the characters are given specific types/roles to play - the Virgin, the Whore, the Athlete, the Fool, the Scholar… and the Virgin in the film isn’t actually a virgin, she simply does not have sex that weekend. I maybe should have mentioned above to the girls are either the Virgin or the Whore. The rest of the cast is fill out by men who are cast as archetypes that have nothing to do with sex but their personalities, Fool, Athlete, and Scholar. Women/girl’s only worth on screen is their sex appeal… Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze isn’t wrong. Woe.
Also the Whore character is typically depicted not just as sexually active but as sex obsessed.
My takeaway is that there is this black and white, hard this or that, thinking - The Virgin-Whore Dichotomy. Created in a patriarchal structured society to ensure girls (and women) remain chasted/virginal until they are married. This was encouraged through positive and negative reinforcements like social status (reputation). The reason it was important in the past is because men were the property owners; the money earners, the ones allowed to have a job and be educated, the ones who furthered family name and lineage,... really everything. It’s another way to keep women in line. And, ensure paternity.
Women legally relied on a man to be able to live and exist in society. And men were taught they needed/wanted to marry a woman who had a hymen… if I may oversimplify. And buy a house, then have 2.5 children, and worship God.
For some reason this relies on subjugating women. I don’t get it, but it’s a thing.
Virginity is associated with purity? Meaning sex is dirty. Antonyms for purity include: sin, contaminated, corrupted, dishonest, immodest, obscene, tainted, vulgar. Marriage is this sacred situation in which an otherwise dirty act can be forgiven. Does God like porn? Is sex within the confines of marriage just porn for God?
What’s the push for a binding monogamous heteronormative relationship in religions?
It’s about ownership. I’m repeating myself. So let’s talk about the imprisonment known as marriage!, and women’s rights, or the lack there of.
I’ll sum up two articles about marriage. Lauren Everitt wrote ‘Ten Key Moments in the History of Marriage’, for the BBC, and an article simply called ‘Marriage’ on the Encyclopedia Britannica website.
Marriage in its early days was about economics.
“During the 11th Century, marriage was about securing an economic or political advantage. The wishes of the married couple - much less their consent - were of little importance. The bride, particularly, was assumed to bow to her father's wishes and the marriage arrangements made on her behalf.” - Everitt.
Further, the Church placed, and still does, an importance on procreation. Marriage is about money and makin’ babies. It’s easier to indoctrinate children than adults.
Love is a modern myth made up by people who don’t want women to realize they are being sold off to make a new generation of laborers, while having little rights or choices of their own. So yeah, marriage is, in my mind, a form of confinement that women were groomed into believing they wanted so they wouldn’t raise concerns about their own lack of rights…
And everything was going just peachy for the Patriarchy until all those World Wars took said work force of boys and men off to war leaving women and differently abled men to get a chance to really enter the workforce… and didn’t that open some eyes.
According to the US Department of Labor,
“During World War I, the number of women in industry increased greatly and the range of occupations open to them was extended, even though they remained concentrated in occupations such as domestic and personal service, clerical occupations, and factory work. In 1920, women were about 20% of all persons in the labor force. Today, women make up about 47% of the U.S. labor force.” - Link.
Sadly minority groups really have to battle for rights… It's still happening.
Katie McLaughlin wrote an article, 5 Things Women Couldn’t Do In The 1960s, for CNN. Here is her list: 1) serve on a jury. 2) get an Ivy League education. 3) experience workplace equality. 4) get a credit card. 5) go on the birth control pill. - Link.
We’re still fighting for equitable treatment in society and even over the choices we make regarding our own bodies.
To sum up! To maintain the status quo of the Patriarchal order, women need to be relegated to property. This happens through heteronormative marriage and putting the literal fear of God into girls to remain chaste. I guess? Idk. It makes no sense to me as an Atheist who grew up in the 21st Century. I honestly don’t understand the need for virginal weddings, did it have something to do with STDs? Or bloodlines. Probably bloodlines, men wanted to be sure they were in fact, The Father.
Let’s move on slightly to Purity Culture!
I’ll just give a basic Wikipedia definition: “Purity culture places a strong emphasis on abstinence from sexual intercourse before marriage.”
In Abstinence Cinema: Virginity and the Rhetoric of Sexual Purity in Contemporary Film by Casey Ryan Kelly explains,
“Abstinence until marriage is a defining feature of fundamentalist Christian sexual morality.
Christians have purportedly practiced abstinence until marriage for centuries, the rise of the Moral Majority movement in the early 1980s is credited with bringing a biblical understanding of sexuality into the American public sphere.
In a groundbreaking violation of the Baptist church’s longtime separation of religion and politics, Rev. Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority as a national organization designed to mobilize evangelical voters and lobby for the implementation of Christian principles in public policy.
The emergence of abstinence until marriage as the centerpiece of the New Right beginning in the mid-1980s can be explained in part by the movement’s disdain for feminism and the “sexual revolution.”
A lot of censorship efforts in media and schools, push for abstinence education (aka non-education), and purity culture are spearheaded by religious (specifically Christian) organizations. Based on my accidental viewing of Blue Lagoon, I can confirm, knowing where babies come from is super important!
According to Gallup in their article How Religious are Americans: “in 1973, 87% of U.S. adults identified with a Christian religion, …[]... and 5% did not have a religious preference.” In comparison to their 2023 data which I obtained from their nifty chart: fifty years later adults identifying as Christian (or various sect) dropped from 87% to 68%, a 19% drop. Meanwhile, adults who do not have a religious preference rose from 5% to 22%, a 17% rise. So, less people are religious - which is reflective in other data points in their article such as declining Church attendance. - Link.
The Sexual Revolution for those who need a refresher occurred in the 1960-1970’s. The Birth Control Pill went on the market in 1960 which is basically the first time that contraception was something a woman had ownership over (compared to a condom). Roe V. Wade legalized abortions in 1973… writing this in 2024 hurts. Stonewall was 1969. Queer people were fighting for their rights before then but that’s when their battle became more visible. Additionally, importantly, drugs were getting better so in a pre-AIDs world, STDs were easier to treat. Yay. Was the past better?
Another stat I thought was worth adding is teen pregnancy rates from 1974-1980, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Females from 15-19 years old experienced an 8.2% increase in pregnancy. However, the percentage of sexually experienced females decreased by 5.7%. - link.
The issue a lot of religious and political figures had was not that teens were getting pregnant, it was that they weren’t getting married. And somehow people thought the remedy was to teach abstinence in schools? Ok.
Sidenote: To bring the mood down a lot more, purity culture is a facet of rape culture and causes assault victims to feel shame, sometimes even responsibility for their assault. It’s not your fault that someone made the choice to hurt you. And that certainly does not make you a bad person who is worth any less.
We can see this in the 2007 film Teeth (2007.) The Main Character, Dawn, has pledged abstinence. She, being a teen, gets a crush on a boy. But, when he tries to assault her, the teeth in her vagina castrate him. Vagina Dentata powers activated! Through a series of mis-encounters she learns that the teeth only come out when the situation is not consensual. Though she has lost her innocence, she has become empowered.
And I think we also see this in It Follows. I know, I know, it’s called the STD movie. What movie is more sex equals death that It Follows though!?! This is the literal you have sex and die, because you had sex movie. No movie exemplifies this trope more than It Follows. It’s the perfect metaphor. A youth has premarital sex then is stalked by a slasher-ghost-demon thing until it either kills them or moves on to the next sexually active youth, but it’ll come back for you. scary music.
Back to the scheduled program!
To paraphrase what I read in Abstinence Cinema: Virginity and the Rhetoric of Sexual Purity in Contemporary Film by Casey Ryan Kelly: the Moral Majority and Conservative politicians were pushing the “traditional values” agenda to protect the children. I’ll add that we see this in a lot of places from the 60’s to 80’s like the film rating system (which I’ll discuss later), the Parental Advisory stickers for music, and so on.
I do think there are some things children should be shielded from. Absolutely. However, this idea of “childhood innocence” is kind of new and weird.
We couldn’t have this notion of “protecting the children” until pretty recently, well within the last 150 years. Ya know once we started making those pesky Child Labor Laws, before this, ‘kids? oh you mean the lil workers who might continue the family line (if they’re a boy)’.
Julie C. Garlen writes in Interrogating Innocence: “Childhood” as Exclusionary Social Practice that “the construct of childhood innocence is a powerful social myth…”.
She goes on to explain - by paraphrasing Britzman,
“This fantasy of childhood as a blissful epoch of care-free enchantment is a powerful social construct that scripts an expectation for what children’s experiences “should” be like and incites parental anxiety, fueled for some by the nostalgia for our remembered childhoods, and for others by the desire to protect our children from the traumas we ourselves endured. This anxiety drives many parents to great lengths to guard their children from sadness, stress, and even mild discomfort,... …[]... a desire to prolong children’s unawareness of social realities by censoring topics such as sexuality, death, violence, and poverty that constitute forms of “difficult knowledge” (Britzman, 1998).”
So going back to the Virgin/Whore dichotomy! A girl is either a Virgin, locked in naive childhood innocence or a Whore, having shed that purity and entered into the corrupt adult world.
Twilight is an interesting example of this. Not that I tricked everyone into listening to all this so I could rant about Twilight. Lol. that would be maniacal. I know Stephanie Meyers dislikes when people bring up she’s a Mormon but I’m sorry, it’s so shows in the story. Also she dissed Anne Rice so I don’t care about her feelings on this. The Main Character, Bella, is courted by her psycho vampire love interest Edward. They date for like two years? And decide that they’ll be together forever so Edward should change her into a vampire too but he only agrees on the condition that they marry first. Further they can’t have sex until they are married which doesn’t make sense because the argument for abstaining before was that he’s a strong vamp boy and she’s a weak frail human. But… they have sex within the confines of marriage before she’s a vampire and it’s totally fine. Hint hint. She’s so much human that she gets pregnant. Then it becomes an anti-abortian book - even at the expense of the health of the woman. Then she has an evil cgi baby, her werewolf ex-boy toy decides they’re destined to be together (really giving Mormon there dearest), and Edward and Bella live happily ever married after… girl if this isn’t abstinence propaganda I don’t know what is.
Real quick before we get too further into talking about virgin sacrifices and sex=death in slasher I need to add another piece of context. Censorship! Via the rating system.
The movie rating system was instituted by what is now known as the MPA in 1968. The ratings in name and what earned a rating has changed over the past 56 years. But basically we have a general anyone can go [G], a little parental guidance is recommended [PG], the movie is restricted for 17 and older unless accompanied by an adult [R], and restricted to people 18 and older with no exceptions [NC-17]. Later, in 1984 PG-13 was added as a warning that a film is likely not for younger children but is not restrictive like R or NC-17 (meaning a 12 year old can get a ticket for a PG-13 movie without a parent or guardian accompanying them).
What is important to note is how this changed the way sex and nudity could be depicted in a movie - well a movie that wanted to be released in a theater anyway. In that, sex and nudity could be depicted in a movie. Before it was Ricky and Lucy fully dressed sleeping on different beds in their room separated by a nightstand.
We couldn’t have movies about killing virgins until we could show and talk about them in said movies. - sidenote, foreign films were held to their own censorship standards.
The 1970s saw an explosion of sex-ploitation films. SO many lesbian vampire films!
The rating system also allowed a lot more violence than the previous system (the Hays’ Code) did. So, while there were certainly horror movies before 1968, we didn’t get the Father of Slashers until 1978, Halloween. Before then we have what’s known as proto-slashers.
The rating system is still a bit misogynist though. James King explains in his book The Ultimate History of the 80’s Teen Movie in regards to Amy Herckerling’s Fast Times,
“the MPAA- in another blow- had told [Heckerling] she needed to cut out any male nudity if she didn’t want the picture to end up with a restrictive X rating, despite the female nudity seeming to pose no problem.”
It’s pretty well known that the MPA is more harsh about nudity than violence as well. Just as it’s ubiquitous knowledge that sex sells.
The Teenage Slasher Movie Book, 2nd Revised and Expanded Edition by J. A. Kerswell taught me much about the history of the slasher film. If you look through proto-slasher from 1926’s The Bat to 1978’s Halloween and everything in between you’ll find that Halloween was really the first one to be about teenagers.
Doing my own research I cannot say that Rebel Without a Cause from 1955 is the first teen movie but it’s the first big one. Certainly many followed, including horror movies such as The Blob in 1958.
The 1962 Stanley Kubrick adaptation of Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita was from what I’ve observed was the earliest example of a film overtly and explicitly sexualizing a teen on film. And yikes. Just yikes.
The Ultimate History of the 80’s Teen Movie by James King meanwhile taught me much about teen movies. The 70’s saw not only the rise of the slasher, but of the teen movie too! They both exploded into the mainstream at the end of the 70’s and carried the 80’s. From American Graffiti to Porkey’s and The Outsiders to John Hughes’ filmography a little later. Teen movies were huge and many remain classics to this day.
For the slasher sub-genre to rise the powers that be (financers) needed to realize that teenagers were a willing audience with money to spend. And they did!
To sum up: with the institution of the MPA’s rating system sex and violence could be depicted on screen, this coincided with the Sexual Revolution, and a rise in movies marketed to and about teenagers. It’s a perfect storm.
Virgin Sacrifice! Well that’s a segue.
I don’t know about anyone else but I always thought that at some point in history virgin sacrifices were common… or at least something that happened like the Inquisition or the Witch trials. But I tried to do research on it and found very little. Not nothing… but it wasn’t a common practice and there wasn’t a famous case… that I could find.
In film however… the virgin sacrifice isn’t uncommon at all. From Conan the Barbarian, Dragnet, and The Babysitter to The Wicker Man it can be found across genres, dating from modern films to the 70’s.
Typically a ‘virgin’ or pure sacrifice is needed for a cult to get powers or crops… I guess? Because Pagan deities and Satan like people who haven’t had sex… I guess…?
I found it interesting that The Babysitter and The Wicker Man both used males as the virginal sacrifice. Almost inverting the gender role, first as the focus of the horror film, and second as someone who’s sex status matters. Culturally speaking men are supposed to abstain from premarital sex but their moral character is not hinging on that; plus there is an expectation that men are obsessed with sex.
In 2009 this is used for great subversion of expectation in Jennifer’s Body where a non-virgin who was sacrificed is able to return as an empowered succubus and get her revenge. Then it turns into A Nightmare on Elm Street II. -.-
A similar plot can be seen in Belladonna of Sadness from 1973.
Vampires needing virgin blood starting in the 70’s (I think)... I assume it has something to do with viewing virgins as more pure/clean… I have no basis in this, it’s just a theory.
Vampires are Us: Understanding Our Love Affair with the Immortal Dark Side by Margot Adler, writes:
“Le Morte d'Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory. This 1485 compilation of romantic tales includes one from 1470, which features a woman vampire. She needs the blood of royal virgins to survive.”
I wonder if that was inspired by Erszebet Bathory but upo Googling I found that she wasn’t accused of murdering anyone until the 1600s. I’ll just give a lil Wikipedia background on this,
“The most common motif of these works was that of the countess bathing in her virgin victims' blood to retain beauty or youth. This legend appeared in print for the first time in 1729, in the Jesuit scholar László Turóczi's Tragica Historia, the first written account of the Báthory case.”
The earliest occurrence of this plot point I’ve found in film was from Blood for Dracula in 1974. It’s shown that non-virginal blood makes Dracula violently ill - as if their previous ‘dirty act’ poisoned his blood. Further, Dracula needs virginal blood specifically to remain young, by not getting it he ages. Later, to save a girl from being bitten by Dracula a man assaults her so that she’s no longer a virgin… this movie is really weird.
By 1985 it was used for parody in Once Bitten. In this movie’s lore a female vampire needs to drink the blood of a virgin three times before a full moon to remain young. She complains how difficult it is to find a virgin in this age so she’s relegated to drinking the blood of a nerdy teen boy (Jim Carey).
In Monster Squad from 1987 a Virgin is required to read from a magical book that sucks all the monsters into it. The boys contract one of their older sisters for the job but find it doesn’t work because she’s not technically a virgin, because you know, “Steve doesn’t count”. They end up having to use his toddler sister to do it… because I guess none of the 12 year old boys are Virgins? Nope has to be a Virginal girl because girls are the only ones that matter… ridiculous.
To sum up! Historically virgins in stories (well horror stories) were used as victims for cults to sacrifice and vampires to lure in to remain young.
Now, finally, we can talk about slashers. I am one long winded monster. Whoops.
I was originally inspired to write this massive existential spiral after I saw this study, On the Perils of Living Dangerously in the Slasher Horror Film: Gender Differences in the Association Between Sexual Activity and Survival by Andrew Walsh.
This is a quantitative study that looked at 50 North American slasher films that were released between 1960 and 2009. Which, I think is way too wide of a year span to analyze. I wouldn’t look at anything made before the MPA’s rating system was instituted in 1968. Even then, I probably wouldn’t consider anything a slasher before 1974 at the very earliest, 1978 to be more fair. Especially if your sample size is only 50 films. Anyway!
To quote Walsh in the abstract,
“The slasher horror film has been deplored based on claims that it depicts eroticized violence against predominately female characters as punishment for sexual activities.” He goes on to explain that, “Results indicated that sexual female characters were less likely to survive and had significantly longer death scenes as compared to those female characters who did not engage in sexual behaviors.”- Link.
I’ll add that “female characters were less likely to survive and had significantly longer death scenes” in comparison to male characters who also engaged in sexual activity.
A similar analysis was done by J.A. Kerswell in his book The Teenage Slasher Movie Book, 2nd Revised and Expanded Edition:
“Despite women shedding their clothes in classic slasher movies, when up against a psycho with a machete it was more dangerous to be a man. In the 175 films made between 1978 and 1984, some 558 of the 1,046 on-screen fatalities were male, as opposed to 488 female deaths.”
175 films from 1978 to 1984 is a way better time frame and sample size - just as a side. Anyway...
That would be, for the math impaired, 53.3% men and 46.7% women.
Sarah Lukowski states in her essay Female Victimization in the 1970s and 1980s Slasher Film:
“Although research states that men are killed more in slashers, conflicting with slasher film definitions, content analyses have found scenes of women being tortured are extended for the pleasure of the male audience.”
Lukowski sites Weaver (Are ‘Slasher’ Horror Films Sexually Violent? A Content Analysis) where they analyzed 10 films from the 1970s-80s:
“female victims are displayed on screen in fear longer than their male counterparts. The average death scene for female characters was 217.2 seconds compared to the scenes involving males at 107.7 seconds. Although, women are victimized at a greater time length…”
Lukowski paraphrases Cowan and O’Brien (Gender and Survival vs Death in Slasher Films: A Content Analysis) who analyzed 56 films from the 1970’s-80s:
“with a total of 474 victims. They found female and male victims were portrayed equally. However, when discussing survival, women were more likely to survive than men, going against the common conception in slasher definitions and public perception. This is echoed in their results; of 242 male victims, 90% resulted in death.
Their research revealed a large portion – 33% to 35% – of all nonsurviving victims engaged in sex prior to their death, suggesting and supporting similar research that with sex, comes violence.
Female nonsurvivors were more promiscuous than male nonsurvivors by wearing revealing clothing or showing nudity on screen and therefore, they more frequently engaged in sexual acts before their deaths.”
Lukowski also looked at Molitor and Sapolsky’s study (Sex, Violence, and Victimization in Slasher Films) where they analyzed 30 slasher films released in the 1980s:
“44.4% female and 55.6% male, supporting the previous studies.
The juxtaposition of violence following sex rarely occurred. Of the 1,877 violent incidents coded, there were only 92 scenes that displayed violence during or preceding sexual activity, regardless of gender.
They examined the extent to which characters are shown in fear and found slasher lms put fear on display for an average of 679.8 seconds. According to the researchers, women were shown in fear for an average of 566.1 seconds and men for only 113.7 seconds.”
Lukowski concludes, “Men are killed more quickly, resulting in more male deaths, but women more slowly for the pleasure of the audience.”
Lastly on this subject I’d like to quote Ashley Wellman’s essay, Lady and the Vamp: Roles, Sexualization, and Brutalization of Women in Slasher Films where she analyzed 48 slasher films released from the 1960s-2010s:
“Sexualization …[]... strength, aws, brutalization, and fate were coded for 252 female characters. Results indicate that purity was significantly related to lower brutalization and lower rates of death for all women.
actual/potential victims were brutalized and killed most for their sexualization. These messages reinforce ideas of gender roles, stereotypes, and relationship expectations by punishing female sexualization and demonizing female sex. Issues of violence against women, toxic masculinity, rape culture, and the normalization of combining violence and sex are …[]... significant concerns.” - link.
I am concluding that males are more often victims in slasher films but women are shown in fear longer and are more likely to experience violence in a state of undress, which often makes their death scenes longer and more memorable. This, intentionally or not, relates sex to violence. Which, simply is an unhealthy connection.
Why do we consider a knife stabbing a person (fangs penetrating) a metaphor for a penis entering a vagina? Like why are we making the allegory an assumed violence against women. Also sex should not be painful. AND a knife actually is not phallic.
Do better! Stop scaring girls. Also, stop making men and sex seem more violent than it is. It’s weird. It’s untrue. It’s propaganda for rape culture - in my opinion.
Culturally we can and should have a way healthier relationship to sex.
Slumber Party Massacre II! Works as a metaphor for fear of sex… and not only because the of the Driller Killer’s phallic weapon. Ok now a drill IS kinda phallic. A knife still isn’t. This film has a survivor from the previous film now confronting her sexuality (not like in a queer way, she just likes a boy). So getting into those repressed sexual thoughts gives you weird dreams Freudian bs. She has nightmares about a rockabilly guitar playing killer with a drill… that warns her about going all the way.
This is from Wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt. Daniel Farrands who wrote many treatments for Halloween 6,
“Farrands describes Michael as a "sexual deviant". According to him, the way Michael follows girls around and watches them contains a subtext of repressed sexuality. Farrands theorizes that, as a child, Michael became fixated on the murder of his sister Judith, and for his own twisted reasons felt the need to repeat that action over and over again, finding a sister-like figure in Laurie who excited him sexually.”
I tried to do some research on sexually motivated serial killers but long story short, I bounced off that topic. It’s too dark for my simple soul. But, sexual violence is most often perpetrated against women. Men are more often victims of homicide, but women are more likely to be the victims of a serial killer. Though typically if a woman is murdered it’s by her partner… and they say it’s safer to get married psh.
Side note, the whole ‘mad man escaped from a hospital and is killing people’ is ableist af.
Ultimately I find the sex after death trope does demonize sexual activity when it’s a perfectly normal act. Further horror slasher do exploit women’s bodies and while the final girl does get to be an action hero, any other women in the movie are shown as terrorized victims of violence which can be an unhealthy depiction.
My takeaway is misogyny!
Men are killed more but women have longer, more grotesque death scenes. I think that’s because there is a larger sample size of men in film. Meaning, because more men are cast in movies (aka hire more men for jobs), and because there is more likely to be a female survivor, the kill counts tend to be male heavy.
Women still are more likely to be killed post sex, nude or in a state of undress, and have longer on-screen murder scenes.
To me, given I’m biased, these numbers scream misogyny. But… it’s not misogyny in the way you might be thinking.
Fine! I’ll talk about Halloween… I’m only on page 17 of my notes. My best segue yet!
For a little background: John Carpenter by Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc writes:
“Carpenter’s next project came about after an approach by producer Irwin Yablans. He had an idea for a cheap horror film called ‘The Babysitter Murders’ where a small town is subject to the attention of a serial killer who targets, you guessed it, babysitters.
Carpenter, working with Debra Hill, expanded this basic concept and suggested that it should be played out on one night, on a holiday renowned for its scary associations.
Debra Hill provided most of the realism, basing matters on her own babysitting experiences and fears,....
The result was to become the biggest independent film of its time and one of the most influential horror pictures ever.”
The sex equals death trope is attributed often to John Carpenter’s 1978 film Halloween. However, I consider it to have been cemented as a trope by Victor Miller and Sean S Cunningham in their 1980 film Friday the 13th. They were the real culprits.
As related in David Konow’s book Reel Terror The Scary, Bloody, Gory, Hundred-Year History of Classic Horror Films, Miller was forced to see Halloween by Cunningham because he wasn’t really familiar with horror, his takeaways were:
“And I saw the most important things with Halloween were you had to have a prior evil that happens before the movie begins, you had to have a location or a set of circumstances that prohibited the adult world from coming to the rescue of the sexually active adolescents. I needed a group of absolutely wonderful Pepsi Generation kids to come in, about to have the most wonderful time of their lives, as long as it included getting laid, and there’s a force working behind the scenes you couldn’t see until the very end. Then it was a question of establishing them, taking them out one by one, and justifying why nobody knows what’s going on. ...()... The other hard thing is justifying going in there, as in, don’t go in there!” And, of course, after seeing Halloween so many times, the you-have-sex-you-die edict also became part of the road map.”
Let’s look at the actual kill counts and the context of them.
In Halloween Michael kills an undressed Judith post sexual activity but lets her boy toy live. 15 years later he kills Annie in a state of undress on her way to Bob. Then he kills Paul and Linda both in a state of undress post-coitus. He also killed a trucker and stole his jumpsuit. The survivors are Sheriff Bracket, Dr. Loomis, and good-girl Laurie. Kills Count is 5! Survivor Count is 3!
In Friday the 13th Mrs. Voorhees kills a boy and girl in the opening who are making out. Cut to the end present time. A fully clothed Annie is killed. Ned, Brenda, Bill, and Steve Christie are killed off screen. Jack and Marcy are killed post-boot knockin - Jack fully clothed, and Marcy pantless. Kill Count is 9! Survivor Count is 2! [Crazy Ralph and Alice].
Further, Mrs. Voorhees was specifically killing the yut because they were making love when they should have been watching Jason. She is targeting the sexually active youth, Michael just happened upon them.
There are movies where the killer specifically targeted sexually active youths:
Friday the 13th: I already mentioned.
Silent Night Deadly Night: Poor Billy got tortured by Mother Superior then was forced to face his traumas and snapped. He went on a killing spree, taking the life of anyone he deemed naughty, which definitely included the sexually active.
The sex equals death in the slasher is one of the most defining tropes of slashers. To quote It Was All A Dream: An Anthology of Bad Horror Tropes Done Right by Brandon Applegate:
“jaded audiences prefer familiarity while also craving the unknown. …[]... Instead of resisting, one might choose to go with the weight of a century of genre tradition, genre conditioning, formula, and convention. …[]... What an author can’t break, they subvert.”
Contrast this in movie Parodies and Subversions
Cabin in the Woods (2011) and Final Girls I already mentioned briefly...
Scream (1996): This isn’t the first meta horror movie, but it’s probably the biggest. This movie pointed out the 80’s trope overtly - as I quoted in the opening. And, it subverted it. The repressed final girl has sex, with the killer, and lives! Hazah! The trend has thus been broken!
Cherry Falls (1999): This movie is so weird. The killer is specifically targeting virgins, rather that sexually active teens. So the teens of Cherry Falls (get is CHERRY Falls) decide to have an orgy to lose their virginities to protect themselves from the killer. Does this movie make any sense? No, not really. Is it hilarious? YES! It needs a remake.
Ultimately, the trope is another form of slut-shaming. We don’t know for a cannon fact that Laurie Strode (Halloween 1978) is a virgin. Maybe she’s so shy because she dated an asshole and now she’s closed off. Many of these films suppose that if a teen has had sex once they are out fucking their brains out every weekend. Which is… not true. I think it’s common for someone to not have sex regularly when they’re younger. Like they have their first time and maybe not again for sometime later, especially if their first time wasn’t good, which often in high school it’s not.
It goes back to the Virgin-Whore Dichotomy. It’s either or. If you’ve had sex, then you’re having sex, and you’re a slut and die. It reminds me of learning about queer topics in my public school education - if you’re gay and have sex, you’ll get AIDS and die. Or even teen pregnancy. If you’re a teen and have sex, you’ll get pregnant, and die. Public school in the US is great and totally healthy.
What I’m saying is: just because a teen girl, who is babysitting a child btw, is not having sex on Halloween… does not mean in any way that she’s a virgin.
Further! on the slut-shaming train. Introverted girls aren’t necessarily virgins. Just like extroverted girls aren’t necessarily sexually active.
I don’t know who needs to hear this but I’ll add clothing has nothing to do with sexual activity either. Thank you for your time.
Cultural Bias!: def according to the APA Dictionary of Psychology: “the tendency to interpret and judge phenomena in terms of the distinctive values, beliefs, and other characteristics of the society or community to which one belongs.” Link.
I also think this is a part of interpellation. From Notes on Interpellation:
“The term interpellation was an idea introduced by Louis Althusser (1918-1990) to explain the way in which ideas get into our heads and have an effect on our lives, so much so that cultural ideas have such a hold on us that we believe they are our own. Interpellation is a process, a process in which we encounter our culture’s values and internalize them.
Interpellation expresses the idea that an idea is not simply yours alone …()... but rather an idea that has been presented to you for you to accept. Ideologies – our attitudes towards gender, class, and race – should be thought of more as social processes. Accepting or not accepting a culture’s given attitudes places one in a particular relationship with power.
Ideologies, therefore, play a crucial role first in constructing our identities and then giving us a particular place in society. To say that someone is fully interpellated is to say that he or she has been successfully brought into accepting a certain role, or that he or she has accepted values willingly.” - Link.
An example is girls liking pink. It’s likely they didn’t come to that on their own but rather were taught that they should like pink, and therefore do. Same with boys and blue.
This Virgin-Whore dichotomy is something that is learned through our culture and reinforced by media and education (unfortunately). It becomes a vicious cycle that’s hard to break. You need to see the problem before you can snap out of it.
To me, this is what was happening to John Carpenter and Debra Hill when making Halloween in 1978. They had been interpellated into the Virgin-Whore dichotomy and gender roles presented to them by our culture.
I think the logic is two sided - 1) from within the context of the film, 2) and from the external context of selling the film.
Within the internal context of the film it makes sense to have a character distracted, with their mind on sex, and in a vulnerable state of undress, less likely to be able to fight back against a killer.
From the external logic, well, we know sex sells. Get that obligatory tit shot!
Laura Mulvey was right about The Male Gaze. Women’s bodies are sexualized to be sold. Fact.
It's not about virginity, it’s about having sex (or not) on screen during the runtime of the film… the argument is about how distracted and vulnerable the person is. That makes total sense. Behind the scenes it’s also about showing a nude woman to get boys and men to come see the movie. Having a kill post sex scene just makes sense. It really does. But, unintentionally it reinforces very negative representations of sexual activity and promotes purity culture.
Further, I believe it unintentionally shows the creators have accepted the Virgin-Whore dichotomy to be a truth.
We, and by we and mean I, didn’t even get into the women being villainized for their sexual empowerment which started back in the 1940s - according to Molly Haskell in From Reverence to Rape. Which you can see in the Femme Fatal character and which later evolved into the bisexual in the late 80’s through the early 00’s..
To summarize my 24 pages worth of nonsense… the sex equals death trope sucked and blew it’s way through 70s to the 90s and exists due to sexist attitudes towards women, albeit subconsciously. Let women be sexual without it being equated to violence and to sell the movie to men. Damn. We still need more empowerment.
That’s it. That’s the end. Let women be sexual without negative repercussions.
Thank you for listening. Please forgive my nonsense.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some oozing to do. Stay with the rainbows!
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