How is Gender Affected in a Slasher Film.

The genre of slasher films is almost wholly defined by what roles men and women play in the films; roles that have been shaped and changed by time and changing cultural landscape. What once was one woman against an angry man has become a group of people getting picked off one by one, usually with a woman as the final victim or sole survivor. What was once an adult woman has now become teenagers, and the feminine girl has become a phallic survivor. Despite these changes, the roles of sex within slasher films have not been affected.  In the film, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, each character plays up their role in standard fashion, especially the women.

The biggest part of any slasher film is the deaths of the characters and the way the deaths are depicted, hinges on whether the character dying is a man or a woman. The men are killed off quickly, usually with a single blow (Kirk, Jerry, and Franklin are all attacked and killed with a single blow). The women are forced to suffer through their deaths. When Pam is caught she is put on a meat hook and forced to watch Kirk get dismembered. The camera chooses to focus on her screaming and not Kirk as he is being cut up by Leatherface. Sally is attacked and forced to run and be injured repeatedly for the final third of the movie. Every injury and scream requiring a close up of her face. Women’s deaths are drawn out and focused on while men are often killed quickly. 

Men tend to be been ascribed to the role of “hero” in most forms of media. The big hot-headed tough guy who saves the (usually female) people in crisis. But slasher films tend to take the opposite approach to these archetypes, the big tough guy is usually the villain and the damsel is forced to save herself. The image of the angry man becomes the source of fear. In Texas Chainsaw Massacre the entirety of the still-living Sawyer family (the name given to Leatherface and his family in subsequent films) are all male. The only female presence in the family is the corpse of the siblings’ grandmother. The absence of a woman is a large part of these films. The death of a mother or sister, resentment of a female family member, or the sexual frustration the slasher faces at not having a woman in his life often acts as his source of motivation to go on these killing sprees. In Texas Chainsaw Massacre the grandmother’s corpse suggests that the Sawyer men are only able to live the way they do because of the lack of female oversight in their lives. 

The biggest role for any woman in a slasher film is as the “Final Girl”, she is not depicted to be like the other girls around her. She is not sexually available to any of the men, she becomes focused on the issue to the chagrin of those around her, and she has more masculine traits. The traits being her ability to fight back against the slasher. They appear sporadically and disappear when she becomes a victim again. Sally was capable of running away from Leatherface and could even fight back to an extent. But the second she is cornered or in any way victimized she loses these abilities. She is only given power when she can take no pleasure in it. 

It is easy to dismiss these choices as something made for male pleasure and another form of misogyny, but to do so would dismiss their function as a source of cultural problem-solving.  The popularity of these tropes was most explored in the 70’s-the late ’80s, a time when there was a shift in what it meant to be a woman and what it meant to be a man. The rapid changes in sex and gender in this era are the parts of culture that films of the time were trying to figure out. By turning gendered conventions on its head and exploring what it means to have a phallic-based power. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is able to explore these ideas without having to rely on the previous expectations set by the horror genre.