Death is blasphemous and pornographic. We react to it and its symbols the same way that we react to pornography. We avoid it. We deny it exists. We avert our eyes from its presence.

[ Kalish in Powers 1995 ]

My current work is an exploration of violence and death. I choose photographs of crime victims and mediate them twice: once through Photoshop and again through painting, making their final aesthetic cinematic, almost candy like, and extremely exaggerated. When considering my intention behind making such paintings it is imperative to know that I have an extreme love affaire with slasher horror films, the more violent and visceral the better.

At the very bottom, down in the cinematic underbrush, lies—horror of horrors—the slasher (or splatter or shocker) film: the immensely generative story of a psycho-killer who slashes to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until he is himself subdued or killed, usually by the one girl who has survived.

[ Clover 1987 p. 187 ]

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

The premiere film of this genre of horror is usually attributed to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), followed closely by Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978). While in general critics had nothing good to say about slasher films, they did receive some acclaim during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. In his book, The Horror Film, Peter Hutchings (2004) says however, that it is the slasher film’s cheapness, crudeness, formulaic repetitiveness, not to mention their apparent pandering to unsophisticated teenage audiences (p. 193), that was the reason they were seen as degrading experiences, much the same way earlier types of horror had been viewed when they first appeared on the scene. I, however, believe it is exactly those qualities that make them accessible, almost comical to watch. If films depicting serial murders were too realistic, why would anybody want to watch them? They rely on scenarios of extreme violence and thrive on their dumb, exploitative nature. In addition to this, Hutchings (2004) says, “the slasher’s reliance on the stalking and terrorization of women lead to a new charge, that of misogyny, with the films themselves branded as violent and pernicious reactions against feminism” (p. 193).

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

I am going to cite both The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Halloween (1978) (among others) throughout this essay as the prime examples of slasher films to illustrate first, what constitutes such a horror film, why people go to see them, and discuss if they are in fact misogynistic at their core. The basic plot of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) follows a group of five college students out to explore the abandoned house in Texas where the grandfather of two of them, Franklin and Sally Hardesty, once lived. They pick up a crazy hitchhiker who slashes himself and Franklin, so they kick him out of their van. Out of gas, they stop at a gas station that has none and then go to the house. Wandering to an adjacent property, two of the kids come under attack from the demented family that lives there. A large man wearing a human-skin mask kills the boy with a sledgehammer and hangs his girlfriend on a meat hook. He then uses a chainsaw to cut up the boy. Their disappearance draws the others and two of them are killed as well. Sally is the lone survivor, and she manages to get out of the house, flag down a truck and leave Leatherface in the road behind, wielding his chainsaw in frustration (Ramsland ch. 1).

Michael Myers in Halloween (1978)

In Halloween (1978), a psychotic killer named Michael stalks a small town on Halloween night killing a string a teenage friends, one by one, and only Laurie survives. The twist in the story is that Michael has escaped from the asylum where he had been incarcerated since the age of six after he killed his sister directly after she and her boyfriend had been having sex in their parent’s bed. That murder, seen in flashback, opens the film. After he escapes fifteen years later, he is on a chase for Laurie but kills her friends first: Annie in a car on the way to see her boyfriend; Bob going to the kitchen for a beer after having sex with Lynda; Lynda while she is talking on the phone to Laurie as she waits for Bob to get back with the beer. The remainder of the film is a relentless struggle between Michael and Laurie until at the end, Dr. Loomis (Michael’s psychiatrist in the asylum) shoots the killer, but not so fatally that he cannot return in the sequels (Clover 1987 p. 193).

The Killer

Carol Clover (1987) suggests that the ancestor to all slasher films is in fact Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).

The killer is the psychotic product of a sick family, but is still recognizably human; the victim is a beautiful, sexually active woman; the location is not-home, at a Terrible Place; the weapon is something other than a gun; the attack is registered from the victim’s point of view and comes with shocking suddenness

[ Clover 1987 p. 192 ]

Marion in Psycho (1960)

Clover (1987) explains that the killer in these slasher horror films is “propelled by a psychosexual fury, more particularly a male in gender distress” (p. 194). In Psycho (1960), Norman Bates introjected his mother, a “clinging, demanding woman,” so much so that she became his other half. In the film the “mother half of his mind” killed Marion—had to kill Marion when he (the Norman half) found himself sexually aroused by her. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), neither brother shows overt signs of gender confusion but their issues seem to stem from their sick family in which the mother is conspicuously absent however the preserved corpse of their grandmother (much like in Psycho) is present, and Clover (1987) asserts that this is the reason for the boys’ arrested development (p. 195). She goes on to explain that like Norman Bates, both Hitchhiker and Leatherface are permanently trapped in childhood. It is only when Leatherface discovers “sex” in the sequel does he lose his appetite for murder (p. 195). (In Texas Chainsaw II, when the main character Stretch realizes the psychodynamics of the situation in the infamous crotch scene, she attempts to quell the danger by saying, “You’re really good, you really are good,” and immediately after what we assume is ejaculation, Leatherface seems much less interested in his saw).

Actual rape is practically nonexistent in the slasher films, evidently on the premise—as the crotch episode suggests—that violence and sex are not concomitants but alternatives, the one as much a substitute for and a prelude to the “adult” film

[ Clover 1987 p. 196 ]

Psycho (1960)

Another characteristic of the killer is such that he is an insider who functions normally until in an instant his other self is revealed. He is usually large, sometimes overweight and often masked. While he may be recognizably human, he possesses superhuman strength, for example Michael in Halloween (1978). He seems virtually indestructible as he repeatedly rises from blows that would easily stop a lesser man (Clover 1987 p. 196). Usually they will survive assault after assault because come on, how else will they return in the sequel?

Carrie (1976)

In Aviva Briefel’s (2005) essay, “Monster Pains: Masochism, Menstruation, and Identification in Horror Film,” she describes the vast differences between male and female killers in horror films. “Masochism is central to the construction of male monsters, who initiate their sadistic rampages with acts of self-mutilation” (Briefel 2005 p. 16). She states that before a male killer sets off to harm others, he first revels in masochistic acts. An example of this was mentioned earlier when describing a scene from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Hitchhiker grabs a knife from one of the teens and slices his own hand while laughing maniacally. What this does, Briefel (2005) suggests, is suspend our identification with both the monster and the teenagers. In the original Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Freddy Krueger prefaces his killings with self-mutilation and says to his intended victims, “Watch this!” while he cuts off his real fingers with his razor claws or slicing his own head open.

Regan from The Exorcist (1973)

Female monsters, Aviva (2005) asserts, do not inflict pain on themselves before taking on their sadistic rampage. Instead, “they commit acts of violence out of revenge for earlier abuse by parents, partners, rapists, and other offenders” (p. 20). Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976) presents a perfect model of this example. Preceding the fiery destruction of her teachers and peers, Carrie White is physically and emotionally abused by her mother, pelted with tampons by her teenage peers in the locker room, and humiliated when pig’s blood is dumped on her during her brief moment as prom queen. Briefel (2005) says, “while male monsters wound themselves before turning to violence, female monsters menstruate. Violence in horror film is often initiated by the female monster getting her period, an event either suggested or overtly displayed” (p. 21). Using Carrie (1976) as an example again, the film graphically shows that menstruation is a precursor to her committing acts of violence. Briefel (2005) describes that both The Exorcist (1973) and Audrey Rose (1977) “imply that menstruation heralds monstrosity, as both of their victims become possessed once they reach puberty” (p. 21).

Terrible Place

House on the Hill, Psycho (1960)

In slasher films the violence occurs in some outside place, most often a house or a tunnel. This is where the victims find themselves in a moment of unrelenting horror. The Bates mansion is one example of this and in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), yet another decaying mansion is the location of the teenagers’ inescapable doom. It is not necessarily the physicality of the old, Victorian houses that induces the terror but rather what goes on inside them: the murderous, incestuous families and cannibalistic behavior. “Into such houses unwitting victims wander in film after film, and it is the conventional task of the genre to register in close detail those victim’s dawning understanding, as they survey the visible evidence, of the human crimes and perversions that have transpired there. That perception leads directly to the perception of their own immediate peril” (Clover 1987 p. 197).

Weapons

Guns have no place in a slasher film, something much more physical and visceral is required to get the job done right. The preferred weapons of the killers are knives, axes, hammers, ice picks, hypodermic needles, pitchforks, etc. The slasher, says Clover (1987), displays a fascination with flesh or meat. When Hitchhiker slits his hand open the group recoils in disgust and horror; all but Franklin who finds it fascinating. “It is no surprise that the rise of the slasher film is concomitant with the development of special effects that let us see what with our own eyes the “opened” body” (Clover 1987 p. 198).

Victims

Wound 1, oil on canvas, 3’x3’ 2008

Where once there was one victim, now there are many. “As Schoell puts it, ‘other filmmakers figured that the only thing better than one beautiful woman being gruesomely murdered was a whole series of beautiful women being gruesomely murdered’” (Clover 1987 p. 199). Is it true that slasher films portray a gratuitous amount of sexually active, beautiful, young teenagers getting brutally attacked and murdered more often than they depict such brutality against a male? Barry S. Sapolsky, Fred Molitor, and Sarah Luque (2003) have extensively studied and compared slasher films of the 1980’s to those more recent incarnations of the 1990’s and have found that in fact, the number of deaths to males and deaths to females is actually about the same. After studying eighty-three different slasher films they discovered that “…fewer than half of innocent victims were females” (p. 3). The difference, however, is that females are shown in serious distress and fear far longer than males, according to Sapolsky, Molitor, and Luque (2003) an average of 566 seconds per film versus 114 seconds for males (p. 6).

Wound 2, oil on canvas, 3’x3’ 2008

It is in those massively disproportionate seconds of female distress where I got the inspiration for my series of paintings entitled, The Wound Series. I have been an admirer of the slasher film since I was very young. The first instance of horror that I can remember is watching Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1983) with my father. What I remember most is the color; the darkness and the richness. I remember the black of night and the red of his jacket with his piercing yellow eyes. Growing up I would watch The Childs Play (1988) films, also with my father, followed by countless others.

Wound 3, oil on canvas, 3’x3’ 2008

I would have to say, however, that the most influential film for me is House of 1000 Corpses (2003), written and directed by Rob Zombie. In this film, two young men are crossing the state with their girlfriends on Halloween Eve in 1977. They are writing a book about weird roadside attractions around the state, and conveniently, as they run out of gas, they pull off on an exit that directs them to Captain Spaulding’s Museum of Monsters and Madmen. Spaulding takes them on his tour of serial killers where they learn about a local legend named Dr. Satan who performed primitive surgery on mentally handicapped patients with the hopes of creating a super race of humans. After he was caught and hung, his body strangely vanished. When the tour ends, Spaulding tells them that the place where Dr. Satan was hung is close by, and draws a map for them to find it. While on their way to the spot, they pick up a hitchhiker named Baby who says she lives not far from the spot they are trying to find and can show them where it is located. R.J., Baby’s brother, shoots out their tire, and they end up heading back to Baby’s place where they wait for their car to be repaired. It is at Baby’s house where the foursome gets to meet the rest of her weird, psychotic family. They don’t know it at the time, but this family has recently kidnapped five high school cheerleaders and are torturing them in their basement. One of the girls’ father, Don Willis, becomes concerned that her daughter and her friends never arrived at his place as she said they would, so he calls the Sheriff to check up on her. By this point, the family has already set upon torturing their new houseguests and it is now just a matter of survival. The film is beautifully shot with colors that stimulate all the senses. It highlights both the human and psychotic nature of people that actually live this way; people that torture and kill for sport. The sequel, The Devils Rejects (2005) made a similar impact on me and when introduced to Zombie’s remake of Halloween (2007) the obsession took on a life of its own. While the aesthetic of “horror” has been with me since childhood, it was these three films that led me to create my own horror series.

What makes horror “crucial enough to pass along” is, for critics since Freud, what has made ghost stories and fairy tales crucial enough to pass along: its engagement of repressed fears and desires and its reenactment of the residual conflict surrounding those feelings.

[ Clover 1993 p. 191 ]

Wound 5, oil on canvas, 3’x3’ 2008

In this series I am confronting my own fears about death and more specifically dying in an utterly painful way, by magnifying them to the point where they cannot be denied; they cannot be repressed. I want the viewer to see the horror in the imagery and the beauty in the painting; its nuances and style. Consider that beauty can exist in unassuming places, in the stillness and absoluteness of death.

Wound 6, oil on canvas, 3’x3’ 2009

In my paintings I use images of real crime victims that I then manipulate and paint. It is no question why I am a painter as it is the color of horror that intrigues me. The first painting of the series, Wound 1, is a brutal image of a young girl who was slashed across her throat multiple times. The original photograph was quite disturbing yet the painting is somehow exquisite. What happens during the painting process that transforms the image into something that people would actually want to admire rather than turn their face from in horror and disgust? Not to sound like a complete narcissist but what happens to it is me…I give life to this girl with every choice I make about composition, color, style. I chose to make the figure appear hazy while the wound seems to pop off of her skin. Wound 2 represents a woman whose mouth was literally ripped apart at either side (I call this one Fishhook unofficially). What makes the painting digestible is its graphic nature, as in design not in detail. The wound almost looks pixilated. Wound 5 is beautiful because the woman looks like she is sleeping peacefully. The viewer may not even notice at first the gunshot wound in her head or that her shirt is covered in blood. Wound 3 (unofficially called Hatchet), is one of the more gruesome and depicts a woman who was bludgeoned with a hatchet to her forehead. Her eyes are bruised and cut up and her lips are discolored and slit. To counteract the reality of the wounds I used a palette that seemed to take her to a more fantastical place; the final image looking more like a still from a horror film than something that could ever happen in real life. That is what I do with all of my paintings. I take them from a place of misery and ugliness and transform them into something beautiful and almost unreal. Consider the gun shot wound in the center of the victim’s chest in Wound 4. The magenta stain under the almost floral design of the blood splatter only alludes to what it is representing. The entire image is abstract and it is slightly difficult to discern where on the body the wound even is. The first five paintings share many things in common including the color palette, yet more importantly they share a simplicity that adds a certain mystery to the work. The girls exist in some landscape, a setting that is unknown to the viewer and hopefully leaves the viewer questioning. There is something real in that empty space. Just as in a horror film, the suspense scenes leading up to a murder can frighten more than the action itself. It is the waiting that kills us. In my paintings it is the space.

Wound 4, oil on canvas, 3’x4’ 2008

The last two paintings in the series, Wound 6 and Wound 7, mark a definite shift in style yet I feel they still fit quite well with the others. These two are much more detailed and the palette shifted from that of yellows, greens and blues to more reds and oranges. There is no definition of space around the girl in Wound 6, similar to the earlier paintings, yet in Wound 7 I bring details to the background that suggest the girl is outdoors. To me these paintings are a transition into what is coming next. What happens when we stop focusing on what is outside? We discover what is inside. By giving the viewer details they were not privy to earlier in the series, I am choosing to focus more on the internal wound. Given that this painting depicts a rape, the physical wound is internal. My next series of paintings will shift away from the physical and highlight internal or mental wounds.

Wound 7, oil on canvas, 3’x5’ 2009

Similar to my paintings, some aspects of horror films are also taken from life. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), for example, is said it be based on true events. The killer in the film, Leatherface, is said to be modeled after serial killer Ed Gein. Ed Gein lived alone, after his parents had passed away, in Plainfield, Wisconsin. His father was an alcoholic, his mother an antisocial religious fanatic. His brother Henry had died in a fire. One day, when authorities were wanting to question Gein about a local woman who had gone missing and he was not at home, they decided to look around. They discovered in his home a human female corpse, hung headless, feet first, slit from her genitals to her neck with her legs splayed apart. They found body parts all over the old farmhouse including skin, a heart in a frying pan, a box of cut-off noses, a skin vest with female breasts and genitals, and the head of the woman they were inquiring about in a bag with nails driven through the ears. Ed Gein is said to be a serial killer, cannibal, and grave robber. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), “the house where this character [Leatherface] resides with his family is similar to Gein’s: isolated, cluttered, full of body parts, and generally disgusting” (Ramsland ch. 3). He too, is a grave robber and cannibal.

In the slasher film, sexual transgressors of both sexes are scheduled for early destruction. The genre is studded with couples trying to find a place beyond purview of parents and employers where they can have sex, and immediately afterwards (or during) being killed.

[ Clover 1987 p. 199 ]

Michael Myers killing Lynda in Halloween (1978)

As cited earlier, the Lynda-Bob subplot of Halloween (1978) follows said description. Finding themselves alone in a neighbor’s house, they make hasty use of the bedroom. Just after, while Bob goes to kitchen for a beer, he is silently killed by Michael who then covers himself in a sheet, ascends the stairs to Lynda (her bare breasts provocatively shown before him), and strangles her with a telephone cord.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Does this mean, as critics suggest, that teens that engage in sexual acts (or some other “immoral” behavior) are promised to die? “(Don’t do drugs, don’t have sex…or else you die!)” (Hutchings 2004 p. 199). Clover (1987) asserts that killing those who seek or engage in unauthorized sex is quite simply a generic imperative of the slasher film, one which crosses gender lines and affects both males and females. (p. 200). In slasher films boys who go after “wrong” sex die. They also die when they get in the killers way or try to stop him. In short, they die because they make mistakes. Girls, however, Clover (1987) suggests, die because they are female (p. 200). “Just as Norman Bates’s Oedipal psychosis is such that only female victims will do, so Michael’s sexual anger toward his sister (in the Halloween series) drives him to kill her—after a string of surrogates” (Clover 1987 p. 200). But even in films where the male character is killed as often as the female, the images that linger with us are inevitably female. “The death of a male is always swift; even if the victim grasps what is happening to him, he has no time to react or register terror” (Clover 1987 p. 200). Often times, in the case of the male murder scenes, the camera moves away from the image quickly. Sometimes it is viewed only dimly due to fog or darkness and other times the action happens off screen and the viewer sees nothing at all. “The murders of the women, on the other hand, are filmed at closer range, in more graphic detail, and at greater length” (Clover 1987 p. 210).

The Final Girl

The image of the distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl. She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject horror personified.

[ Clover 1987 p. 201 ]

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

In the last twenty to thirty minutes of any slasher film the only character left leads the ultimate fight to save her life. Throughout the film she has endured unbelievable acts of violence and witnessed the deaths of her friends and/or family. In his book The Horror Film, Hutchings (2004) describes Clover’s opinions of the Final Girl. She believes that what separated her from the other women in the film, so far as her gender identity was concerned, is her boyishness: ‘her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from the other girls and ally her, ironically, with the very boys she fears and rejects, not to speak of the killer himself.” Not unlike the killer…the final girl hovered uncertainly between masculinity and femininity” (p. 202).

Jamie Lee Curtis: Final Girl in Halloween (1978)

My series of murdered women has no final girl, the reason being that the final girl is a tactic used by filmmakers to make slashers easier to be viewed by female audiences. During the course of a true slasher, countless victims are graphically tortured and murdered. As we have learned the ratio of men to women victims is almost equal but the brutality and fear is extremely one sided towards women. My paintings uncover the women directly after the violence, the moment when the fear is gone. They are painted softly with an overt element of pop that softens the blow to the viewer and makes them easier to be seen. In a slasher film the camera moves quickly away after the murder takes place. My paintings are like a freeze frame of the moment after…the moment when the terror is long gone and a peace has taken its place. I alter the color too, so as to make the image more accessible and to play with reality. The color and style of painting offer us a kind of rose-colored lens through which to view. They almost mask the truth that real life was taken that I then paint. The truth is that seven people were killed. The truth is that my paintings now exist.

Who Sees These Films and Why?

Lonnie Martin writes in his essay “Horror Movies 101: The Moral Majority Massacre” (Part 2 of 4), that the slasher film is reviled and loved because it appeals to the baser nature of humans. He believes that to many males, the lure of the slasher lies in the rape fantasy element. “…Rape is more an act of power than sex. The killer is exerting his power over what are usually buxom, sensual, attractive women” (Martin p. 2). He goes on to explain that in the mind’s eye there are no boundaries to keep out what is not “socially acceptable” and thus what is a frightening (and perhaps a little interesting) is that while a man can be scared by a well done slasher film, he is also titillated by it, even if on a subconscious level. Women, “sensing this, get frightened because they believe that perhaps the very same urges that the onscreen killer possesses, may exist somewhere in the recesses of their boyfriend’s/husband’s mind (Martin pg. 2). In a New York Times article, Violence Against Women in Films dated August 28, 1984, Daniel Goleman describes various studies performed on male and female viewers of slasher horror films. “Several researchers have found…that repeated viewings of such films as Friday the 13th (1980) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) instill attitudes in the minds of the viewers that are similar to those found in rapists” (Goleman 1984). According to this study as well, films that portray extreme violence against women sexually stimulate nearly a third of all men (Goleman 1984). “So, maybe the ultimate lure of the slasher film is that those horrible, socially unacceptable urges are there, that they’re somehow hardwired into us from those ancient days when we were still less than human” (Martin p. 2).

Conclusion

For me, the allure of the slasher film exists within the rich, dramatic, exaggerated imagery, so much so that said imagery inspired seven original works of art. There is something about the absolute over-the-top ridiculousness about a well-made slasher that makes me somehow feel safe. I can laugh at it and I can appreciate the campy feel. But the question remains: Are slasher movies grossly exploitative and degrading to women, or can we find a shred of feminist empowerment in the Final Girl? I can easily rationalize both arguments, finding it difficult to choose a permanent side. On one hand, the terrorization of women is undeniable, not to mention the crude nudity depicted when the killer murders his victims during sex. The insurmountable fear that exists for the female victim is powerful and the disproportionate time spent filming female as opposed to male victims obviously gives the audience a sense of exploitation and misogyny. But all along there is one girl who fights harder than any, one girl who gets away if not kills the killer. Is the image of that one girl enough to erase from our minds the countless scenes of brutality that took place prior? Sometimes it is. Sometimes, since it is the last image we see, we focus on it as representative of hope or of a happy ending, regardless of how many people were slain before she got away. So maybe it is okay to acknowledge both sides. My paintings are not meant to be misogynistic. They are not meant to be exploitative although some may think they are. They are meant to be beautiful, thoughtful, and perhaps a little shocking. Please do not look away. They were painted to be seen.

By Lauren C. Schwarz
April 14, 2009