Who's Behind the Mask?
A group of teenagers take a trip (or go to a party, or a sleep-away camp, or some other independent activity) where they drink (and smoke pot, and play loud music, among other risk behaviors) and have sex (or dance naked, or go skinny-dipping, or find other excuses to declothe), before a masked man with a knife (or an axe, or a power drill, or some other tool repurposed for malice) slits their throats (or pins them to a wall, or drowns them in a hot tub, or finds some other creative way to brutalize them).
It really seems like a simple setup. Kids do bad things, then they get punished by a stranger for it—these “bad things,” of course, being defined by the Reagan administration. It was America in the 1980s, and the panic of stranger danger, Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, and the ideal of the nuclear family didn’t leave much room for sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. Slasher movies were a simple and easy way to commercialize the conservative government’s propaganda of piety. More transparently, they were just a good time.
As these teenagers removed their bras and got chopped to pieces, the whereabouts of their parents likely weren’t on viewers' minds. But maybe they should’ve been. After all, where the hell were these kids’ parents? The vast majority of these classic slashers are almost entirely devoid of adult characters, centralizing teenagers who’ve been left to their own devices. We’ve all heard our own parents tell us about how free and unconstrained they were back in the day—romantic stories about wandering the neighborhood alone at a young age or throwing house parties when no one’s home (as well as less romantic ones about vandalism or maybe drunk driving)—but slasher movies seem to exaggerate or at least exemplify this distant dream of childhood. They provide a distinctly amusing (or perhaps disturbing) lens through which the parenting of the 1980s, as well as its repercussions, can be explored.
The parents of the slasher universe seem to do everything in their power not to watch their children. Oftentimes, this means paying someone else to do it. This is where the babysitter trope, which Halloween popularized and Scream satirized, emerges from: Kids end up watching even younger kids, left alone in an empty house, free to party, but also vulnerable to intruders. The sleepaway camp, such as that in Sleepaway Camp, presented these parents with an opportunity to offload their children for an entire summer. With even more dopamine-seeking teenagers and even less adult supervision, summer camps like Camp Crystal Lake of the first two Friday the 13th movies presented rich epicenters for risk behaviors and easy teen targets. Other times, these teenagers simply isolate themselves with a secluded getaway, like in the following two Friday the 13th installments, or perhaps a slumber party, like in The Slumber Party Massacre, and never do their parents stop to ask where they’re going. Time and time again, slasher parents demonstrate unfathomable senselessness.
As legal guardians, these parents must be at least partially liable for all of the first-degree murder that eventually occurs. The slasher sets it up as though the children are to blame, and the masked man is merely the “Hand of God” punishing them for their sins, but oblivious parents might be just as culpable. Even further, the parenting could be the original sin, as the teenagers’ cravings for sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll might be only a rebellious reaction to their absent mothers and fathers. These teenagers turned to artificial stimulation because they lacked love, nurture, and family—so are they really to blame?
Of course, one could very easily argue that even if these helpless teenagers are the real victims, the serial killer should be blamed before their parents. Yet, an investigation of the backgrounds and motivations of slasher villains only proves that parents lie at the origins of the terror. In the opening of Prom Night, a group of children playing unsupervised in the woods leads to a harmless prank-turned-deadly fall. The rest agree to never tell anyone about their friend’s death, except for the victim’s brother, who returns years later for vengeance. In Graduation Day, a girl dies of blood clots after a track meet because her coach pushes her too hard. Naturally, her ex-boyfriend begins a murderous rampage. Most famously, Jason Voorhees was a young boy who drowned in a lake because his camp counselors weren’t watching him. Quite literally, they were too busy having sex. Slashers consistently emerge from mismanaged supervision—parents, or at least parental figures, failing to take adequate care of children. In other words, slashers start with trauma.
Some slashers allude to trauma even more obviously. Silent Night, Deadly Night follows a boy that witnesses the murder of his parents by a man dressed as Santa Claus, who starts a killing spree when his job at a department store forces him to wear a Santa costume. The Sleepaway Camp killer suffers disturbing abuse: His family dies in a boating accident, and his aunt suppresses his gender identity by raising him as his deceased twin sister. Yet, one film stands alone as a poignant portrait of 1980s teenage psychology. A Nightmare on Elm Street is among the only classic slashers that grants significant screentime to its victims’ parents, and it doesn’t flatter them. Nancy Thompson’s mother is a divorced alcoholic, seen perpetually carrying a bottle of vodka. Her boyfriend Glen’s parents embrace the philosophy of “You’ve just gotta be firm with these kids,” as his father disdainfully decrees moments before Freddy Krueger blends his son. These parents aren’t just not absent, they’re overbearing and repressive. They ignore their children’s pleas, lock them in their house, and actually withhold life-saving information from them. Freddy Krueger’s logline perfectly corroborates the antagonization of parents in slasher films: When a former convicted child murderer escapes his sentence on a formality, the neighborhood parents band together as vigilantes and burn him alive. Years later, when he returns to haunt their children in their dreams (very Freudian), they deny and suppress the trauma until it's too late.
In all likelihood, slasher movies were made to inspire fear of crime, show teens the consequences of risk behaviors, and above all, make some money. Heavily commercialized 1980s socio-political propaganda. Yet, they also provide an insightful glimpse into the psychology of teenagers in the 1980s. Perhaps all that drinking, smoking, and undressing was only reactionary behavior. Perhaps all of the dismembering, impaling, and decapitating was truly a trauma response. And perhaps all along, the mysterious murderer behind the mask was actually just parents.