“You Know How Girls Love to Scream”: THE SLUMBER PART MASSACRE'S Commentary on Female Horror Characters

Rating: 🍕🍕🍕🍕

Since the inventions of the negligee and pillow fight, female horror tropes have proven to slay (not in a good way) victim after victim. Running through the woods in your underwear (which somehow always matches and doesn’t look like it’s out of a Hanes underwear pack from Walmart), only to look back, trip, fall, and get carved like an Easter ham. Having sex, only to get filleted for your fornication. Causally hosting a slumber party where clothing is optional, makeup is required, and there’s an unfortunate lack of junk food (no judgment if those are the sleepovers you have). Amy Holden Jones’s The Slumber Party Massacre sheds light on a variety of female horror tropes by using the latter. 

As shocking as it might be, The Slumber Party Massacre was shot as a geinuine movie. Writer Rita Mae Brown meant for this to be a satire (think along the lines of Student Bodies), but the producers shot it as a regular teen scream. Regardless, it watches like a total comedy, down to the scene where we cut to the girls’ locker room and hear someone offscreen say, “I think your tits are getting bigger,” only to have an entire gaggle of girls question in unison, “Mine?” (Come on). The kills are over the top. Everyone makes every rookie mistake possible. Our vivacious victims are at a high school slumber party in lingerie. (Again, come on). 

The entire premise of The Slumber Party Massacre focuses on an escaped serial killer who decides to torture terrified teenagers, with, um, a drill (yes, of course it represents his manhood and everything) and still has time in his busy schedule to make grotesque moaning noises and essentially lobotomize the pizza guy. Michelle Michaels plays Trish, a teenage girl whose parents conveniently go out of town for the weekend (what are the odds), leaving her with nothing but chips under the sink (what even) and an unusually cool neighbor to keep her from total drill destruction. Naturally, Trish invites over all of her friends leading to a fight with Gina Smika Hunter’s Diane about inviting Robin Stille’s Valerie because Diane thinks Valerie is too tall and pretty to be friends with (which is shockingly the least ridiculous plot point of this movie). Seeing as how the locker room has an airy floor plan, with only rows of lockers as buffers, Valerie unsurprisingly hears EVERY SINGLE TERRIBLE THING DIANE SAID, so she declines Trish’s invite and opts to stay home with her precocious little sister, Jennifer Meyers’s Courtney, doing what sisters do best: fighting, making up, and reading Playgirl. 

After getting a taste for power tool puncturing by comically throwing the hot, blonde phone repair technician into her van for some slicing and dicing that watches very similar to Randy Meeks’s death scene in Scream 2, Micheal Villella’s Russ Thorn goes from serial killer to serial driller. Alas, the phone technician didn’t make a video to help us decipher horror tropes from beyond the grave, so Thorn’s gristly gusto has no guidelines. (Coming from someone who has broken blow dryers by looking at them wrong, I’m impressed this man can keep a drill running with such longevity, but I digress). After a multitude of murders, including everyone but Trish and Courtney, Valerie swoops in and saves the day (she may be too tall and pretty, but she’s also too smart to get murdered by a psychopath) by brutally turning Thorn’s own drill against him aka reclaiming the female protagonist in horror movies to making her closer to the survivor girls we’ve come to know and love. 

Throughout the entire film, we’re given prime examples of the “girly” goofy tropes presented by horror movies. A guy gets murdered because Courtney is too busy talking to a friend on the phone about sucking face to hear his cries for help. Andree Honore’s Jackie not only runs downstairs to open the door during a killing spree without checking to see who might be on the other side (spoiler: it’s Thorn), but she also eats some of the pizza the dead pizza guy was still holding. Cats bolt out of closets for jump scares. We cut from Diane getting drilled to bits (I think that’s an accurate tool pun) to the blender making strawberry margaritas. There’s even a scene where Thorn goes in for a Janet Leigh shower kill, only to find Trish’s delicates hanging on a coat hanger. We’re absolutely immersed in female horror tropes, but unlike Thorn, we aren’t drowned by them. 

Before writing this piece, I had only watched The Slumber Party Massacre II (if you know me or know my writing, that should track). I knew The Slumber Party Massacre had been created with satirical intent, but I had no clue how blatantly obvious it truly was. Although it was allegedly filmed with no humor in mind, The Slumber Party Massacre is another piece of meta comedy horror done well. There are scenes so ridiculous they’re genuinely comedic gold, including the scene where Valerie tries to run upstairs with a saw, only to realize it isn’t cordless and is jerked back by the power cord.

Valerie helps to reiterate the importance of Laurie Strode while paving the way for Sydney Prescott all while challenging why we had to call out the depiction of women in horror to begin with. By slicing off the tip of Thorn’s drill, she reclaims the female horror movie victim by showing she doesn’t need to be saved. Let’s go easy on the Maui Wowie, but let’s never stop making badass survivor girls.