"There's More Than One Way to
Lose Your Heart": The Annerican
Film Industry, Early Teen Slasher
Filnns, and Female Youth
by RICHARD NOWELL
Abstract: Whereas scholars have suggested that early teen slasher films like Halloween
(John Carpenter, 1978) and Prom Night (Paul Lynch, 1980) were made primarily for
male youth, this article reveals the extent to which producers and distributors tailored
the films and their marketing campaigns to appeal to teenage girls and young women.
P
osters adverrising the teen slasher film My Bbody Valentine (George Mihalka,
1981) pictured youngsters slow dancing beneath decorarive hearts and featured
the catch phrase "There's more than one way to lose your heart." Releasing
the film around Valenrine's Day weekend of 1981 with a double-edged
tagline and romance iconography, distributor Paramount Pictures sold its tale of
young paramours menaced by a maniacal miner as female-friendly horror. Although
gender issues have dominated scholarly di.scussion of early teen slasher films, the
ways that marketers attempted to secure a young female audience for the films have
ro not been explored. Instead, it has been claimed that films like My Bloody Valentine,
S Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), and Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980)
I- were made to feed the fantasies—misogynisric, masochisric, or sadisric—of young
Ï men. This posirion first emerged in late 1980, when movie reviewers Gene Siskel
^. and Roger Ebert used teen slashers as easily idenrifiable reference points during a
S crusade against low-budget horror films, a crusade on which they embarked to pig¿
gyback debates among cinéastes about cinemaric femicide that emerged in the wake
0 of the adult thriller Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980).' Later, the assumprion
S that teen slashers were fashioned solely for males became entrenched in academic
•^ circles after it provided a cornerstone to the 1987 arricie "Her Body, Himself," in
1 which CarolJ. Clover, having applied psychoanalysis to gender representarion (and
'S having included numerous examples from adult-centered thrillers like Dressed to Kill),
I 1 Roger Ebert, "Why the Movies Aren't Safe Anymore." American Fiim 6. no. 5 (March 1981): 56; Gene Siskel.
^ "Brutal Attacks on Women: Movies Take a Tum for the Worse." Chicago Tribune, September 21. 198C.
>^ \
¿ RichardMuxtt teaches American Cinema at Chartes Uniaersity in Prague. He is the author of Blood Money: A His-
5 tory of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle (Conhnuum, 2011) and atso has articles pubtished or forthcoming in ttie
O Journal of Film and Video, Post Script, Iluminace, and the New Review of Film and Television Studies.
www.cmstudies.org 51 ' No. 1 ' Fall 2011 115
Cinema Journal 51 I No. 1 ' Fall 2011
concluded that male viewers identified with the fums' supposedly ubiquitous boyish
heroines.^ "Cross-gender idendficadon" was received as a major contribudon to Füm
Studies, and Clover was cited routinely as the eminent authority on eariy teen slashers,
even though both Vera Dika and Robin Wood had published more medculous and, I
feel, more measured analyses of slasher füm content.^
The focus on Clover ensured that Siskel and Ebert's position vis-à-vis the films'
target audience proliferated among scholars;'' as a result, scholars would later overstate
the innovadve content of late-1990s teen slashers, innovations which had in fact been
exaggerated wildly in promodon and publicity materials so as to differentiate the new
films from their "disreputable" predecessors.^ Clover's influence extends to the latest
teen slasher film scholarship, underwridng Valerie Wee's thesis that the Scream movies
(Wes Craven, 1996, 1997, 2000) were supremely innovadve teen slashers because of
their female-youth orientation, a claim which hinges on the supposedly male-youth
orientadon of eadier entries.* Such scholarship, while correcdy highlighdng the important
role that conceptions of young female audiences played in the assembly and
promotion of the Scream fums and their contemporaries, serves further to obscure the
important role that concepdons of female youth played in early teen slasher film producdon
and promodon. Thus, pictures like My Bloody Valentine condnue to be misrepresented
as anomalous to American cinemadc horror, which, as several scholars have
demonstrated, has been angled consistendy toward females for at least eighty years.
Cynthia Erb, for example, has detailed how industry professionals attempted to secure
a female audience for King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933);
both Rhona J. Berenstein and Tim Snelson have demonstrated that, during the classical
era, studios commonly made efforts to tnake horror fums appealing to women;
and Thomas Ausdn has explained that more recendy this modvadon contributed to
the producdon and promotion of Bram Stoker's Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992).^
2 Carol J. Clover, "Her Body, Himself," in Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Fiim (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 21-64.
3 Vera Dika, "The Stalker Film, 1978-1981," in American Horrors: Essays on the Modern Horror Film, ed. Gregory A.
Waller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 86-101 ; Robin Wood, "Beauty Bests the Beast," American Film
8, no. 10 (September 1983): 63-65.
4 Gloria Cowan and Margaret O'Brien, "Gender and Survival vs. Death in Slasher Films: A Content Analysis," Sex Roles
23, nos. 3 ^ (August 1990): 187-196; Justin M. Nolan and Gery W. Ryan, "Fear and Loathing at the Cineplex:
Gender Differences and Perceptions of Slasher Films," Sex Roles 42, nos. 1-2 (2000): 39-56; Fred Molitor and
Barry S. Sapolsky, "Sex, Violence and Victimization in Slasher Films," Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media
37 (Spring 1993): 233-242.
5 Valerie Wee, "The Scream Trilogy, 'Hyper-postmodernism' and the Late-Nineties Teen Slasher Film," Joumal of Film
and Video 57, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 44-61; Wee, "Resurrecting and Updating the Teen Slasher: The Case of Scream,"
Journal of Popular Film and Television 35, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 50-61.
6 Wee, "The Scream Trilogy," 44-61; Wee, "Resurrecting and Updating the Teen Slasher," 50-61. For other recent
teen slasher scholarship influenced by Clover, see Kelly Connelly, "From Final Girl to Final Woman: Defeating the
Male Monster in Halloween and Halloween H20," Journal of Popular Film and Television 35, no. 1 (Spring 2007):
12-20; Mikel J. Koven, La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press,
2006), 162-168.
7 Cynthia Erb, Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture {Detroit, Ml: Wayne State University Press,
1998), 41, 61-62; Rhona J. Berenstein, Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship
in Classic Horror Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 70-87; Tim Snelson, "'From Grade B
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Cinema Journal 51 No. 1 i Fall 2011
Similariy, via close readings of horror films such as the female-teen-centered home
invasion narradve The Stepfather (Joseph Ruben, 1987), the lesbian vampire picture
Daughters of Darkness (Harry Kümel, 1971), and the pregnancy- and motherhood-focused
Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), other scholars have illuminated the
lengths to which filmmakers have evidendy gone to address female viewers.^
Rather than explaining film content or markefing as a symptom of broader social
or cultural changes, this essay seeks to fill a void in American film history by revealing
the logic that underwrote, and the strategies that were used to make, eady teen slasher
films that were marketable and attracdve to female youth.' Whereas most scholars have
tended to apply interprefive textual analysis to moments of threat and bloodshed, concluding
that early teen slashers were male oriented, I focus mainly on the nonviolent
content which dominated screen dme, content which featured heavily in the films' promodonal
campaigns and which reveals much about how industry insiders perceived and
cultivated the films' mixed-sex target audience.'" By emphasizing similarides across early
teen slashers, scholars have treated the films somewhat ahistoricaUy, rarely acknowledging
the profound influence that historically specific industrial developments exerted on
teen slasher film producfion, content, and markedng. However, to gain greater insight
into the decision-making processes which shaped early teen slasher content and marketing,
it is necessary, as Gregory A. Waller has pointed out, to focus on disconfinuides
and to examine the ways in which the films intersected with, and were affected by, contemporaneous
trends in film producdon and promodon.'^ Therefore, I combine formal
content analysis and industrial analysis to show that the extraordinary lengths to which
filmmakers and distributors went to make teen slashers attracdve to female youth were
part of, and bound up with, broader developments taking place across the American fikn
industry. I begin by arguing that early female-youth-friendly slashers were products of
their condidons of producdon and distribufion, and of established industry strategies.
Thrillers to Deluxe Chillers': Prestige Horror, Female Audiences, and Allegories of Spectatorship in The Spiral
Staircase (1946)," New Review of Film and Television Studies 1, no. 2 (2009); 173-188; Thomas Austin,
"'Gone with the Wind plus Fangs': Genre, Taste and Distinction in the Assembly, Marketing and Reception
of Bram Stoker's Dracuia," in Genre and Contemporary Hoiiywood, ed. Steve Neale (London: British Film
Institute, 2002), 294-306.
8 Patricia Brett Erens, " The Stepfather. Father as Monster in the Contemporary Horror Film," in The Dread of Difference:
Gender in the Modern Horror Fiim, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 352-363;
Lucy Fischer, "Birth Traumas: Parturition and Horror in Rosemary's Baby," in Grant, The Dread of Difference,
412-432; Bonnie Zimmermann, "Daughters of Darkness: The Lesbian Vampire Film," in Grant, The Dread of Difference,
379-387.
9 The Slumber Party Massacre (Amy Holden Jones, 1982), a film that made little impact commercially when it was
released, has since been discussed in some quarters, based primarily on the assumed contributions of screenwriter
Rita Mae Brown and director Amy Holden Jones, as, at once, a parody of and a feminist comment on teen slasher
conventions. This position generally assumes that earlier teen slashers were made exclusively for male audiences
and does not fully reflect the economic and political forces that shaped the film's production, promotion, and critical
reception. See Richard Nowell, '"Where Nothing Is Off Limits': Genre, Commercial Revitalization, and the Teen
Slasher Film Posters of 1982-1984," Post Script 30, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 46-61.
10 On the logic and conditions that led teen slasher filmmakers to downplay violence, particularly male-on-female
violence, see Richard Nowell, '"Remarkably like a Summer-Time Pepsi-Cola Commercial': The Industrial Logic of
Self-Policing Early Teen Slasher Film Violence," unpublished paper.
11 Waller, introduction to American Horrors, 8-12.
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Then, I show how key industry developments led to depicdons of female bonding, heterosexual
romance, and young female protagonists in teen slashers and their markedng
campaigns between fall 1978 and summer 1981, the period in which the teen slasher
film became established industrially and culturally (and the period in which those films
were released that formed the basis of scholarly assumpdons about the teen slasher as a
film type, including asstimpdons about its target audience). The case of the early femaleyouth-friendly
teen slashers provides a dmely reminder that accounts of film and markedng
content are enriched by consideradon of industrial imperadves. At the same dme,
examinadon of such films illustrates by example the need for industrial historiography
to move beyond canonized films, and the need for the scholarship on horror to move
beyond sequences of fear, loathing, threat, and violence.
Teenybopper Horror: The Business of Early Teen Slasher Films. To understand
why the businesspeople who made and marketed early teen slasher films strove to
make them attracdve to female youth, it is essendal to recognize the commercial objecdves
of teen slasher producers and distributors and the logic that governed their conduct.
Moreover, as these films were rarely made and released by the same company, it
is important to understand the interacdon of producers and distributors, for it was out
of this interacdon that female youth became crucial to industry professionals' goals
vis-à-'vis early teen slashers.
It was distribution executives, not theatergoers, who determined whether teen
slasher film production was a profit-making venture. Early teen slashers were independent
producdons, in the sense that they were made without a major distributor
having provided financial backing or a guaranteed route into theaters, and to turn a
profit on the S300 thousand-S3 million that they invested in producdon, the entrepreneurs
behind early teen slashers needed a company to buy the domesdc theatrical
distribudon rights to their completed films in an arrangement called a "negative
pickup" deal. Teen slasher filmmakers did not target small distributors because modest
operadons like Dimension Pictures, which operated under dght financial constraints,
purchased fums on terms that were unfavorable to producers. ^^ Unable to remit up
front the Sl-|4 million needed to acquire teen slashers, independent distributors could
pay filmmakers only after a film generated revenue, which meant that filmmakers lost
money if the film failed commercially.^^ Yet even if the film was a hit, there was no
guarantee that its makers would see a dime because, in the time it took producers to
receive payments, their profit margins could be erased by the interest they incurred on
the bank loans that they had used to fund production.'" Independent distributors were
also notoriously unstable businesses that often folded as the result of a single box-office
failure—another scenario that could leave filmmakers empty-handed.'^ Furthermore,
12 See Ed Loviry, "Dimension Pictures: Portrait of a 1970s Independent," in Contemporary American Independent
Film, ed. Chris Holmund and Justin Wyatt (London: Routledge, 2005), 41-53.
13 Charies Schreger, "Majors Drain Off Theatre Cash, Indie Distributors Now Forced to Upfront Demand: Tenser,"
Variety, March, 23, 1977, 28; Variety, "Majors More Pickup-Prone," May 7, 1980, 1, 606.
14 Variety, "Majors More Pickup-Prone," 606.
15 Variety. "While Majors Fly High, Indie Distribs Go Bust," February 14, 1979, 5, 40.
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tnany small distributors were thought to be controlled by organized crime syndicates
that routinely withheld filmmakers' payments, a concern borne out by reports detailing
the court batUe of the producers of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper,
1974) for their share of the film's profits after mob-run distributor Bryanston Distributing
filed suddenly for bankruptcy.'^
Under these circumstances, teen slasher producers courted distributors that paid
up front for films, which meant targeting the wealthy members of the Motion Picture
Association of America (MPAA)—the mini-major Avco Embassy, and the majors
Columbia Pictures, MGM/UA, Paramount, Twendeth Century Fox, Universal, and
Warner Bros. It was, however, incredibly difficult to negotiate a negative pickup deal
with one of these companies, because compedtion was fierce. Hundreds of films without
distribution were being made each year, despite the fact that the MPAA members
purchased only a fraction of them.'' With supply having outstripped demand, MPAA
members could afford to be very selective about what films they purchased.
MPAA members, asJon Lewis has noted, bought films that enabled them to capitalize
on lucrative trends more quickly and less expensively than if they bankrolled
similar films themselves.'^ They were interested in specific content which, based on
recent box-office success, appeared likely to generate sufficient ticket sales to enable
them to turn a profit." For instance, in the fall of 1980, MPAA executives drew distinctions
between the commercial potential of horror films featuring serial killers and
those about supernatural possession, with Avco Embassy's Don Borchers expressing
confidence in what he called "knife movies" but warning, "If you spend S6.5m on a
movie starring Ceorge C. Scott about a house that's possessed [The Changeling (Peter
Medak, 1980)], you're not going to make money."^° Teen slasher filmmakers needed
to show gatekeepers like Borchers that an MPAA member stood a reasonable chance
of making money from their films.
As resourceful, opportunistic entrepreneurs, early teen slasher filmmakers attempted
to improve the odds of realizing their commercial objectives by acquiring upto-date
knowledge of industry developments, by monitoring box-office data, and by
scrudnizing distribudon rosters so as to ascertain what types of films MPAA members
had been purchasing. For example, producer Gary Sales revealed that he and his collaborators
began production of Madman (Joe Giannone, 1981) only after MPAA members
had acquired, and enjoyed some commercial success with, similar films. Sales
explained to trade paper Variety that "we realized that you need a project for which
16 Ellen Farley, "Impresarios of Axploitation Movies," Los Angeles Times, November 13, 1977; Nicholas Gage, "Organised
Crime Reaps Huge Profits from Dealing in Pornographic Fiims," New York Times, October 12, 1975.
17 Variety, "10 Year Diary of Fast-Fade 'Indie Pix,'" October 8, 1980, 10.
18 Jon Lewis, Hollywood vs. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved Hollywood (New York: New York
University Press, 2002), 224.
19 Domestic theatrical rentals (monies received by distributors from US and Canadian exhibitors) are taken from
Variety's annual "Big Rental Films" and "All-Time Box Office Champs" charts. Figures will be expressed in the
following abbreviated form: The Exorcist: $66.3m (2nd/1974), meaning that The Exorcist generated $66.3 million
(US dollars) in domestic rentals to rank second of all the films in circulation in 1974.
20 Quoted in William K. Knoedelseder Jr., "The New Dealmakers: Killing Them at the Box Office," Los Angeles Times,
November 9, 1980.
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there is a ready-made market."^' These strategies, while not guaranteeing success,
enabled filmmakers to draw informed conclusions about what content would improve
their chances of securing an MPAA distribution deal.
While up-to-the-minute knowledge of industry developments provided the basis of
research and development for independent teen slasher filmmakers, combining content
drawn from several hit films provided the cornerstone of producrion. Although filmmakers
are naturally rericent to admit publicly that their films are derivarive, early teen slasher
filmmakers' extensive borrowings were pinpointed rourineiy by journalists. For example,
Linda Gross of the Los Angeles Tunes recognized that Final Exam (Jimmy Huston, 1981)
"vacillate [s] between the college-prank humor of an Animal House' [John lundis, 1978]
and a killer-thriller like 'Prom Night' [Paul Lynch, 1980]."^^ Filmmakers combine elements
of hit films, as Rick Altman has argued, to provide distributors v^dth a range of
commercially viable material from which to draw when assembling a film's markering
materials—a strategy that affords marketers considerable fiexibility, enabling them to
spotlight marginal content or downplay prominent material if market condirions indicate
that it is desirable, while permitring distributors, as Altman, Lisa Kernan, and Barbara
Klinger have demonstrated, to promote a film as offering simultaneously diverse attracrions
geared toward different taste formarions and different audience segments.^'
The segment that filmmakers and distributors recognized to be the prime audience
for early teen slashers was youth, which encompassed twelve- to twenty-nine-year-olds
of both sexes and a core of fifteen- to twenty-five-year-olds.^^ Producer Peter Simpson
called Prom Night his "teenybopper horror picture," and Marrin Antonowsky, Columbia
Pictures' president of marketing, noted point blank in discussing Happy Birthday to Me
(J. Lee Thompson, 1981) that "it's teen-agers . . . that's the market for this picture."^^
Teen slasher filmmakers realized that MPAA members valued films with marketing
hooks that would attract the film's target audience.^^ Among the most valuable hooks
were depictions of the target audience itself This view, which was based on the longstanding
belief that spodighring a demographic in a film and its markering campaign
communicated that the film was intended for that demographic without alienating
other demographics, was certainly held by Daniel Grodnik, the writer-producer of the
teen slasher film Terror Train (Roger Sporiswoode, 1980). Terror Train "involved young
21 Quoted in Variety, "Hon-or Pics a Crowded Path to Boxoffice, but Lucrative." March 3. 1982, 20.
22 Linda Gross. '"Final Exam': Some Answers Missing." Los Angeles Times, June 11. 1981.
23 Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute. 2000), 129, 54; Lisa Kernan, Coming Attractions: Reading
American Movie Trailers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004); Barbara Klinger. "Digressions at the Cinema:
Reception and Mass Culture," Cinema Journal 2Ü, no. 4 (Summer 1989). 3-19.
24 A. D. Murphy. "Audience Demographics. Film Future," Variety, August 20. 1975. 3. 74; Murphy. "Demographics
Favoring Films Future." Variety, October 8. 1975. 3. 34.
25 Peter Simpson, quoted in "Canadians Seek 'Any Lessons' in 'Meatballs' and 'Prom Night,'" Variety, November 26,
1980, 36; Martin Antonowsky. quoted in Peter J. Boyle, "To Market, to Market to Peddle a Shocker," Los Angeles
Times, June 4, 1981.
26 For the motives behind, and the conditions which enabled, filmmakers' and marketers' efforts to target early teen
slashers to viewers under seventeen, see Richard Nowell, "New Decade. Old Rules: Discursivity, Distribution, and
Rebranding the American Teen Slasher Film," Iluminace 29 (forthcoming 2012).
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people," explained Grodnik, "because that's the market."^' Robert E. Kapsis's production
history of the contemporaneous teen-centered horror füm Eear No Evil (Robert
I^Loggia, 1981) shows that MPAA members shared Grodnik's stance, with the film's
writer-director revealing that Avco Embassy "found the high school setdng the most
appealing aspect of the picture."^^ It is unsurprising that industry insiders believed that
Eear No Evil and teen slasher fums would be consumed mainly by young people, given
that these tales of youth in jeopardy combined teen pics and horror, two types of film
that American film industry professionals have, since the 1950s, considered to appeal
primarily to young Americans, as Thomas Doherty has explained.^*
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, it made particular sense for independent producers
to offer MPAA members fums that were marketable to young people and for
MPAA members to target those fUms toward young people because, at this dme, youth
was seen as the engine driving the American movie business; market research had
shown repeatedly that twelve- to twenty-year-olds accounted for half of US theatrical
admissions and that attendance was divided fairly evenly between the sexes.''" Understandings
of how gender relations influenced moviegoing choices provided another
incendve to make teen slashers marketable to female youth, with many industry professionals
believing that young women, like their elder peers, tended to select what
fums to view with their partners. For example, the Wheat Brothers, writer-producers
of the teen slasher Silent Scream (Denny Harris, 1980), revealed that—in contrast to
Clover's conclusions—they had written a dynamic female lead to appeal to female
theatergoers and thus to encourage them to suggest the film to their dates, boyfriends,
or husbands. "Women like to see strong women characters," they explained, adding,
"[WJomen decide who goes to the movies more than men."^' Industry insiders also
felt that, if marketed correcdy, horror appealed over other types of film to courdng
youngsters because it provided a socially sancdoned facilitator of heterosexual indmacy.
"You can never go wrong with a movie that makes a girl move closer to her
date," declared Jere Henshaw, vice president of production for American Internadonal
Pictures (AIP).^^ By making teen slashers marketable to female and male youth,
independent fümmakers could offer MPAA members inexpensive fums that could be
angled toward over half of the theatergoing populatiijn of the United States, thus
providing distributors with a reasonable chance of oflsetting the cost of purchasing the
fums, promoting them, and delivering them to theaters. In addidon to maximizing the
]3otendal audience, a teen slasher that could be targeted toward both sexes reflected
27 Quoted in Knoedelseder, "The New Dealmakers."
28 Robert E. Kapsis, Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
163-164.
29 Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s, rev. ed. (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2002).
30 Variety, "U.S. Filmgoing Outstrips Rise in Population," October 24, 1979, 1, 120.
31 Interviewed in "Three All-New Featurettes," Silent Scream, DVD, directed by Denny Harris (Scorpion Releasing,
2009).
32 Quoted in Bob Thomas, Associated Press, February 27, 1980.
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two of New Hollywood's most important, yet often-overlooked, producdon strategies:
MPAA member date movies and female-friendly horror films. Market shifts involving
both of these producdon strategies indicated that the commercial viability of horror
and youth films hinged on young females—both on the screen and in front of it.
"A New Kind of Love Story": Hollywood and Date Movies, 1973-1978. As
products conceived lor and marketed to young people, to the exclusion of other demographics,
teen slasher films, in terms of producdon, content, and markefing, were {as
they still are) affected heavily by the American film industry's youth-market operations.
Yet, although filmmakers and distributors spoke openly about early teen slasher films'
youth target audience, they did not publicly subdivide that audience by sex, class, race,
or other characterisdcs. That teen slashers were rarely discussed publicly by industry
personnel as being oriented primarily toward male youth, female youth, or any other
sub-demographic is unsurprising given that, during the late 1970s and early 1980s,
youth-oriented fare was considered ideally to be made for, marketed to, and attended by
a mixed-sex audience, whether the film was a teen romance like The Blue Lagoon (Randal
Kleiser, 1980), a teen sex comedy like Porky's (Bob Clark, 1981), or a teen slasher
like My Bloody Valentine.^^ In effect, teen slasher filmmakers and marketers considered
themselves to be in the date movie business, meaning, as Geoff King has indmated, that
they targeted not just courting couples but also young people of both sexes.'" Because
the rise of the New Hollywood date movie took place roughly from the mid-1970s to the
mid-1980s, a decade that has been commonly characterized by auteur filmmaking,
the advent of the modern blockbuster, nostalgic pasfiche, and gory splatter movies, the
date movie has, despite being among the most important industrial developments of the
mid- to late 1970s, been a vicdm of the selecdve tradifions that invariably undergird
and shape film historiography and cridcism. We must therefore revise exisdng accounts
of the period in order to illuminate how this important shift influenced the conduct of
industry professionals, including early teen slasher filmmakers and marketers.
In the 1950s and 1960s, AlP-type drive-in movies had sought young viewers on
dates, but the more "legidmate" MPAA members' attempts to attract male and female
youth with date movies came later, beginning tentadvely between late 1973 and late
1976 before increasing considerably thereafter, when MPAA members started targeting
most youth-centered films toward young people of both sexes. The commercial
potential of this approach was signaled by Universal Pictures' surprise blockbuster
American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973).'^* Although much has been written about Universal's
efforts to attract theatergoers in their late twendes and thirties who were, or
were encouraged to be, nostalgic for their teenage years ("Where were you in '62?"
inquired marketing materials), American Graffiti was, first and foremost, targeted toward
male and female youth by way of images of the heterosexual and homosocial
33 Stuart Byron, "Rules of the Game," Viiiage Voice, March 16, 1982, 50; Aljean Harmetz, "The Movie No Theatres
Thought Worth Seeing," New York Times, November 4, 1980.
34 Geoff King, ñ/m/Comeay(London: Wallflower Press, 2002), 73.
35 American Graffiti: $10.3m (lOth/1973); American Graffiti: $41.2m (14th/all-time). Variety, "Big Rental Films of
1973," January 9, 1974, 19; Variety, "Updated All-Time Film Champs," January 8, 1975, 26.
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interacdon of its teenage characters.'® A tagline from the film's theatrical trailer
encapsulated Universal's attempts to attract youth of both sexes (and slighdy older
people): "It's one of those great old movies about romance, racing, and rock 'n' roll,"
announced a narrator over shots of speeding cars, backseat kisses, and youthful high
jinks. American Graffiti may have provided a seemingly lucradve textual and marketing
blueprint, but—possibly because of Hollywood execudves' concerns over depicting
youth, which, as Aniko Bodroghkozy explains, emerged in response to the hosdle
recepdon of its early-1970s counterculture films—only Columbia Pictures emulated
Universal's date movie approach swifdy, by selling ^/oAo, Bobhy and Rose (Floyd Mutrux,
1975) as a "new kind of love story, in the world of top 40 and zero-to-sixty."^' Columbia
also used posters that featured a young couple dancing as others petted in
parked cars to promote Driue-In (Rod Amateau, 1976). "There's nothing but acdon at
the drive-in," promised Columbia's poster, which was somewhat ironic given that the
other MPAA members' hesitancy had allowed the enterprising yet all-but-forgotten
independent producer-distributor Crown Internadonal Pictures to carve itself a profitable
niche by releasing low-budget films about fiin-loving, middle-class youth, which
played mainly in drive-ins. The American distribudon elites were forced to reconsider
their youth-market operadons in light of the financial achievements of Crown's lighthearted,
sun-soaked teen films, pardcularly The Pom Pom Girls (Joseph Ruben, 1976)
and The Van (Sam Grossman, 1977).^^
Crown's flagship date movies—updates of AIP's beach movies that embedded kinetic,
music-laden montages of youth leisure into threadbare narratives in a manner
similar to the "high-concept look" that would soon be embraced by MPAA members—
were made and marketed with a young mixed-sex audience in mind.^^ "Women influence
our box-office," explained Crown's vice president of producdon, Marilyn Tenser.
"They're the ones that decide what movie a couple is going to see.""" By employing
a markedng strategy that execudves dubbed "Crownsmanship," Crown presented its
films as mildly ddlladng and dreamily romande depicdons of young people enjoying
themselves and each other.^' Accordingly, promotional posters often combined taglines
that addressed male youth direcdy and imagery that conveyed "female-friendly"
themes like courtship or sisterhood (Figure 1). To further emphasize that its fums were
female friendly. Crown used a soft-spoken actress to narrate trailers—a rarely used
36 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1991), 18-19; Marc Le Sueur, "Theory Numt)er Five: Anatomy of Nostalgia Films: Heritage and Methods," Journal
of Popular Filmé, no. 2(1977): 187-197; David R. Shumway, "Rock'n' Roll Soundtracks and the Production of
Nostalgia," Cinema Journal 38, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 36-51.
37 Aniko Bodroghkozy, "Reel Revolutionaries: An Examination of Hollywood's Cycle of 1960s Youth Rebellion Films,"
Cinema Journal i l , no. 3 (2002): 38-58.
38 Richard Nowel!, "Crown international Pictures: The Independent That Changed New Hollywood," in Directory of
Worid Cinema: American Independent, vol. 2, ed. John Berra (Chicago: university of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
39 Gary Morris, "Beyond the Beach: AIP's Beach Party Movies," Journal of Popular Film and Television 23, no. 1
(Spring 1993): 2-11; Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: university of Texas
Press, 1994).
40 Quoted in Linda Gross, "A Woman's Place Is in . . . Exploitation Films," Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1978.
41 Variety, "Crown Int'l Pitches for Pix via Indies' Marketing Flexibility," February 21, 1977, 49.
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THEY WERE THE technique that has, only recently, been appropriGIRLS
OF OUR DREAMS... , n ,• i • j ci ii p j .L
ated to sell iemale-onented hims like Sex and the
City (Michael Patrick King, 2008).
Tactics of this sort briefly transformed Crown
from a minor player into a thriving business.''^
At a time of 860-J120 million blockbusters, it is
easy to dismiss the 84.3 million in rentals (monies
received by distributors from US and Canadian
exhibitors) that TTie Pom Pom Girls generated
across 1976 or the $4.5 million made by The Van
in 1977; however, these figures were significant
because they were earned by a small company
operating in a fiercely competitive market in
which, as leading industry analyst A. D. Murphy
( alculated, only 15 percent of the American film
industry's total revenue was up for grabs.^^ An
independent release was deemed a hit, David
Cook explains, "if it earned four or five times
its negative cost.""" With The Pom Pom Girls and
The Van costing only $750 thousand-$l million.
Crown's financial achievements were sufficient
to serve notice to MPAA members that, with
higher production values, more intensive marketing
campaigns, and wider releases, similar films could be incredibly lucrative."^
MPAA members added youth-centered date movies feverishly to their distribution
rosters from late 1976 to early 1977, releasing sixteen youth-centered films between
June 1977 and December 1978, a 300 percent increase over the previous two and
a half years. With minimal recent experience handling a youth-centered product,
MPAA members looked to spread risk and to conduct research and development. "I
figured that if we made enough low-budget pictures to appeal to young audiences,"
explained Columbia Pictures president Frank Price, "we couldn't get too badly hurt
on any of them and we'd strike oil on one.""^ This strategy helped MPAA members
determine what material fueled strong ticket sales and therefore could be replicated in
subsequent films or could be the measure of a pickup candidate's box-office prospects.
Employing their own brand of Crownsmanship, MPAA members angled most of their
youth-centered films toward young males and females by way of marketing campaigns
Figure 1. "Crowhsmanship" in action: Crown
presented its films as mildly titillating and
dreamily romantic depictions of young people
enjoying themselves and each other, as
in this promotional poster for The Pom Pom
G/Ws (Crown International, 1976).
42 Schreger, "Majors Drain," 28.
43 The Pom Pom Giris: $4,3m (46th/1976); The Van: $4.5m (54th/1977), Variety, "Big Rental Films of 1976," January
4, 1977, 14; Variety, "Big Rental Films of 1977," January 4, 1978, 21; A. D. Murphy, "300 Indie Films Pace
Production: Invest $100: Mil Outside Majors," Variety, June 9, 1976, 1, 32.
44 David Cook, "1974—Movies and Political Trauma," in American Cinema of the 1970s, ed. Lester D. Friedman
(Oxford, UK: Berg, 2007), 132.
45 Nowell, "Crown International."
46 Quoted in Harmetz, "The Movie."
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that showcased heterosexual courtship and young females parriciparing in leisure activiries:
disco dancing in Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977), college basketball in
One on One (Lamont Johnson, 1977), skateboarding in Skateboard (George Gage, 1978).
Skateboard's poster promised "Love, laughter, good guys, bad guys and America's greatest
skateboarders"; similarly. One on One's poster explained, "There comes a rime when
love stops being a ball and starts being a woman." The commercial achievements of
the long-forgotten sleeper hit One on One, in conjuncrion with the blockbuster success
oí Saturday Night Fever, ensured that, by early 1978, just before teen slasher film
producrion started to increase, the youth-centered date movie was firmly established
as Hollywood's weapon of choice in its mission to serve its prime audience.'*' Made
at a point when several highly profitable date movies had signaled to independent
filmmakers that MPAA members favored youth-oriented films that were marketable
to young people of both sexes, early teen slashers emerged when targeting horror to
female youth was gaining momentum among MPAA members.
"If Only They Knew She Had the Power": Hollywood and Horror, 1973-1978.
Vivian Sobchack's observation that Hollywood's horror output during the decade that
followed the 1968 release of Rosemary's Baby was dominated by supernatural domesric
melodrama before giving way to youth-centered horror in the late 1970s bespeaks an
effect of one of the major economic objectives that shaped what Waller termed the
"modern era of the American horror film": attracring first mature women and later female
youth to MPAA member horror pictures."** During that period, MPAA members
evidenriy concluded that males could be relied on to attend horror films regardless of
the content of the films or their markering campaigns, and consequenUy began targeting
horror overtly toward female audiences through what Janet Staiger has shown to
have been tried-and-true strategies."*' Thus, angling horror films toward female youth
grew out of one of the most disrincrive markering trends of the 1970s: targering bigbudget
chillers toward mature women in ways that differed both from earlier horror
markering and from the marketing campaigns of contemporaneous independently distributed
horror films. Largely jetrisoned were images of women in jeopardy—partially
dressed, cowering, screaming, and vulnerable—and in their place came, for the most
part, images of strong, focused female characters.
Much like their tentarive response to the blockbuster success of the youth-centered
date movie American Graffiti, MPAA members moved with jaw-dropping lethargy to
capitaMze on the commercial achievements of Rosemary's Baby through the producrion
of similarly lavish supernatural horror films that focused on thirty-something women
and parenthood. This inacrivity meant that half a decade passed before the box-office
triumph of The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) trumpeted the unprecedented financial
47 Saturday Night Fever. $71.4m (lGth/all-time); One on One. $13.lm (24th/1977). Variety, "All-Time Film Rental
Champs." January 3, 1979, 30; Variety, "Big Rental Films of 1977," 21.
48 Vivian Sotxhack, "Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange." in Grant, The Dread of
Difference, 143-164; Waller, introduction to American Horrors, 1-12.
49 Janet Staiger. "Hybrid or Inbred: The Purity Hypothesis and Hollywood Genre History," in Film Genre Reader III, ed.
Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press. 2003), 190-191.
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Cinema Journal 51 I No. 1 Fall 2011
rewards offered by horror fums angled to appeal to mature females. As a big-budget,
calculated blockbuster. The Exorcist required such huge ticket sales to break even that
Warner Bros, tailored marketing materials to attract not just males and young people
but adult women as well. By spotlighting a working woman and motherhood, the
company emphasized that The Exorcist addressed issues assumed to be of direct relevance
to many mature American women. The presence of this content was conveyed
by the film's theatrical trailer, which featured litde of the young gid who is possessed
or the priests who exorcise her and instead concentrated, like the film itself, on Ellen
Burstyn's forty-something character, an actress and single parent who is introduced by
way of the mantra "mother, mother, mother." As one of the biggest hits in history. The
Exorcist influenced the content and markedng of subsequent Hollywood horror films
profoundly, a phenomenon demonstrated by the emphasis placed on adult females and
issues assumed to afTect that demographic in the promotion of three of the MPAA
members' four 1976 horror fums: Burnt Offerings (Dan Curtis, 1976), Lipstick (Lamont
Johnson, 1976), and The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976).^° For example, the first half of
77!^ Omen's trailer focused—again, like the film itself—on a mother's alienation from
her child.
Although the blockbuster returns for The Omen ensured that MPAA members continued
to implement this strategy, signs were already suggesting that oriendng horror
toward mature females did not guarantee financial success. Nowhere was the decrease
in box-office prowess more apparent than in the disappointing performance of lipstick,
a glossy rape-revenge füm that Paramount Pictures had targeted direcdy toward
women by way of a promotional poster that evoked a Vogue cover shot and featured
the taglines "She believed she was the weaker sex until the day she was violated" and
"The story of a woman's outrage and a woman's revenge." While the commercial failure
of Lipstick could have been due to accusadons of misogyny from several reviewers
at mass-circulation newspapers, which may have alienated some of the women that
Paramount was targedng, the similarly poor financial performance of United Ardsts'
Burnt Offerings, which had been spared such critical hostility, seemed to suggest that the
American market had become saturated with horror fums targeted toward mature
women and that promoting horror to that demographic no longer ensured strong
dcket sales. In response to this shift. United Ardsts angled Carrie (Brian De Palma,
1976), the year's last MPAA-member horror release, toward younger females, and in
doing so efTecdvely introduced Crownsmanship to horror.^'
Later idendfied by Variety as one of the most influendal films of the period, Carrie—the
story of a timid high school senior's struggle with her abusive mother, bullying
classmates, romantic yearnings, and telekinesis—marked the high-profüe reemergence
of the horror date movie and signaled the economic viability of horror films that centered
on, and addressed, young females.^^ As a result of the füm's youth-centeredness,
50 The Exorcist: $66.3m (2nd/1974; 5th/all-time). Variety, "Big Rental Films of 1974," January 8, 1975, 24; Variety,
"Updated All-Time Film Champs," January 8, 1975, 26.
51 The Omen: $27.8m (3rd/1976); Lipstick: $4.18m (51st/1976); Burnt Offerings: $1.56m (95th/1976). Variety,
"Big Rental Films of 1976," 14,44.
52 Carl., "He Knows You're Alone," Variety, August 27, 1980, 20.
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Cinema Journal 51 No. 1 i Fall 2011
United Artists had recognized that Carrie's boxoffice
potenfial was limited compared to horror
films with cross-demographic appeal hke The
Exorcist. But United Ardsts had also realized
that Carrie, as a low-cost investment, needed
to sell considerably fewer tickets than prestige
horror films in order to turn a profit. Thus, the
company could reduce the scope of its target
audience while still standing to make money,
in much the same way as AIP had done in the
1950s with cut-price efforts like / Was a Teenage
Werewolf{Gent FowlerJr., 1957).^^ Carrie lent itself
ideally to a youth-oriented marketing campaign
because, unlike contemporaneous horror
films, it was set in a teenage world of small-town
streets, white picket-fenced homes, and high
school. Moreover, United Artists could target
Carrie to young females easily because the film,
as William Paul has argued, handled subjects
of specific relevance to female youth, including
the emodonal turmoil of puberty, burgeoning
sexuality, and the cruelty of female youth interacdon.^" United Artists' date movie approach
was neady encapsulated in Carrie's promotional poster, on which Carrie White
(Sissy Spacek) appeared as both a radiant prom queen and a blood-drenched specter,
and on which were printed two taglines addressing male and female youth separately.
"If you've got a taste for terror," it advised young males, "take Carrie to the prom."
The second tagline—"If only they knew she had the power"—addressed female viewers
by endorsing their percepdons of social dynamics (Figure 2). United Arfists' trailer
expanded on the approach of its poster. Before gesturing to Carrie's vengeance on her
cruel enemies, the trailer focused on her transformadon from unhappy outcast to blissful
young woman who slow dances with "the best looking boy in the senior class" (as he
is described in voiceover), is crowned prom queen, and appears to win the acceptance
of her cohort. By mid-1977, Carrie had achieved a feat that few teen-centered horror
films manage: commercial and critical success.
Robust ficket sales, major Academy Award nominations, and extensive popular
press coverage made Carrie one of the highest-profile films of its day; few industry insiders
could have failed to nofice that it had demonstrated the commercial potential of
oriendng horror toward female youth.^^ Writer-director Brian De Palma, who a few
Figure 2. The hüiiui Jjtc inovie Carrie iargets
both male and female viewers with two
taglines (United Artists, 1976).
53 Gary Arnold, "De Palma's Spectacular Sleeper," Washington Post, November 21, 1976.
54 William Paul, Laughing Screaming: Modern Hoiiywood Comedy and Horror (New York: Columbia university Press,
1994), 362.
55 By January 1978, Carrie had generated $14.5 million in rentals, an amount that, had it been generated in a calendar
year, would have placed the film in the annual top twenty for 1977 or 1978. Variety, "All-Time Film Rental
Champs," January 4. 1978, 82.
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Cinema Journal 51 No. 1 i Fall 2011
years later would be accused of making misogynist films, received considerable praise
from many leading American journalists for his portrayal of female characters. Garnering
De Palma the richest accolades of au was his handling of the subject of young love,
told from the point of view of a female outsider: awkward, lonely Carrie White and a
handsome, athletic male student (William Katt), with whom she has fallen in love, slow
dance and kiss at the "love amongst the stars" prom (a scene featured prominently in
the film's theatrical trailer). The Washington Post's Gary Arnold described this scene as
"far and away the most romande interlude achieved in American movies in years."^
The significance of Carrie's content, box-office performance, and markedng campaign
was underscored by events that took place across the following eighteen months.
Between mid-1977 and the spring of 1978, targedng female youth emerged as
a cost-efTecdve soludon to the dwindling appeal and the plummedng profit margins
of adult-oriented horror. Some of the films released by MPAA members during this
period, including The Sentinel (Michael Winner, 1977) and Audrey Rose (Robert Wise,
1977), simply generated paltry dcket sales.^' Given that most films lost money on their
US theatrical runs, these fiops could have been written ofT as a symptom of standard
market conditions, were it not for the fact that even those expensive chillers that did
attract comparatively large audiences—Exorcist IL The Heretic (John Boorman, 1977)
and The Fury (Brian Dc Palma, 1978)—stayed in the red, as their earnings were diminished
by high producdon and markedng costs.^^ The unprofitability of these two
fairly strong-performing films indicated that the horror audience was no longer large
enough to support costly projects, but that its ranks could turn modestly budgeted films
into lucradve ventures. In addidon, the healthy dcket sales of the two films appeared,
crucially, to confirm that female youth held the key to commercially viable horror.
Both films had been sold on poster art that had emphasized the presence of young
females: eighteen-year-old Linda Blair in Exorcist IL The Heretic and twenty-something
Amy Irving in The Fury. Thus, with the only three horror films that had, in the pre'vious
eighteen months, generated over S10 million in domesdc rentals ha'ving been sold on
their female-youth-centeredness, with MPAA members placing unprecedented confidence
in less frightening youth-centered date movies, and with the much-publicized
sleeper hit Carrie having demonstrated the commercial potential of unidng the two
trends, independent filmmakers started, by early 1978, to target MPAA-member distributors
with low-budget horror date movies, pardcularly teen slasher films.
"Derived from Brian De Palma's 'Carrie'": Halloween and Friday the 13th.
Conceptions of female youth underpinned North American teen slasher film production
and distribudon from 1978 to 1981, during which dme demonstradng marketability
to female youth was a key production strategy, and targedng young female
theatergoers was a key distribution strategy. Although the depicdon of independent
female protagonists, heterosexual courtship, and female bonding shifted across this
56 Gary Arnold, "'Carrie': Brilliant Hair Raising Horror," Washington Post, November 3. 1976.
57 The Sentinel: $4m (57th/1977); Audrey Rose-. $2m (85th/1977). Variety, "Big Rental Films of 1977," 21, 50.
58 Exorcist II: The Heretic: $13.9m (22nd/1977); The Fury: $10m (25th/1978). Variety, "Big Rental Films of 1977,"
21; Variety. "Big Rental Films of 1978," January 3, 1979, 17.
128
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three-year period, as producers and distributors responded to new horror and youthcentered
hits, the important role that female-youth-oriented content played with
respect to the commercial objectives of teen slasher filmmakers and marketers was
already evident from two of the earliest teen slashers, Halloween and Friday the 13th,
The talent behind Halbween was intimately familiar with the horror market in general
and the mid-to-late-1970s youth market in particular. The film was conceived and
produced by Irwin Yablans, whose brother Frank had produced The Fury. Further,
Halloween was co-written, co-produced, and directed byJohn Carpenter (who had just
sold Columbia Pictures a script for a romantic horror film about a clairvoyant career
woman that was being made as Eyes of Laura Mars [Irvin Kershner, 1978]). Crucially,
Debra Hill, who had reeendy worked on a lighthearted mix of Carrie and The Pom
Pom Girls dtled Satan's Cheerleaders (Greydon Clark, 1977), scripted dialogue involving
Halloween's female protagonists, three high school girlfriends—contempladve Laurie
(Jamie Lee Curtis), happy-go-lucky Lynda (P.J. Soles), and self-confident Annie (Nancy
Loomis)—whom industry watchers like Gary Arnold recognized as characters that
had been "derived from Brian De Palma's 'Carrie.'"'' Much of Halloween depicted
this trio of "fun-loving gum-chewing no-better-than-they-should-be baby-sitters," as
Vincent Canby of the New York Times described them, bonding through discussions of
homosocial interaction, heterosexual interaction, and minor personal problems relating
to prom dates, schoolwork, and babysitting.^" This content was deemed so important
to Halbween's commercial prospects that twenty-seven-year-old Hill was given the
task of writing the girls' dialogue because Carpenter felt that he, as an adult male,
could not render female youth plausibly. Like other high-profile women working in
independent filmmaking at the dme, such as Dimension Pictures' Stephanie Rothman
and the aforementioned Marilyn Tenser at Crown International Pictures, Hill wanted
to attract female audiences, confirming that she had tailored the girls' conversations
to make Halbween appealing to young women.^' "Here was a movie," explained Hill,
"that they could go and see, and see themselves."*^
Halloween's distributor, which turned out to be producer Irwin Yablans's own company.
Compass International Films, after MPAA members chose not to purchase the
film, employed a marketing campaign that addressed teenage girls and young women by
highlighting female-youth-centered content and portrayzds of female bonding.^^ Publicity
shots of virtually unknown twenty-year-old actressJamie Lee Curtis striking relaxed
poses were featured on several lobby cards, and another card showed the film's three
girlfriends posing casually together, with P J. Soles in the central position. (Because of
her scene-stealing role in Carrie, Soles was already imbued somewhat with the relaxed,
fun-loving. Southern California fjersona that became a prominent component of the
59 Gary Arnold "'Halloween': A Trickle of Treats," Washington Post, November 24, 1978.
60 Vincent Canby. "Chilling Truths about Scaring," New York Times, January 21, 1979.
61 Gross, "A Woman's Place," 34; Tony Williams, "Feminism, Fantasy and Violence: An Interviewwith Stephanie Rothman,"
Journal of Popular Film and Television 9, no. 2 (1981), 84-90.
62 Debra Hill, "Filmmakers Commentary," Halloween, DVD, directed by John Carpenter, 25th Anniversary Edition
(Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2003).
63 Variety, "Irwin Yablans Hailing 'Halloween' Expectancy Calls Boston Crucial," March 14, 1979, 6.
129
Cinema Journal 51 , No. 1 ; Fall 2011
Star image she developed in subsequent roles in the teen films BreakingAway [Peter Yates,
1979] and Rock 'n' Roll High School [Allan Arkush, 1979] and the hit comedies Prioate
Benjamin [Howard Zieff, 1980] and Stapes [Ivan Reitman, 1981].) Female protagonists
and female friendship—and, by extension, similariries to Crown's drive-in hits, MPAAmember
date movies, and Carrie—were also highlighted in Halloween's trailer, which included
an attenrion-grabbing scene (the only daytime footage featured in the trailer)
during which the girls shared a joint and chatted in hip jargon about the "like totally"
transgressive possibiliries afforded by babysitring. Halloween's solid, albeit subsequently
exaggerated, box-office performance across late 1978 and early 1979 alerted a small
number of independent filmmakers to the commercial potential of tales of youth being
harassed by a shadowy killer, ensuring that 1980 witnessed a small increase in the release
of teen slashers—all of which had been made for, and marketed to, female youth.**
Among the films to follow in Halloween's wake in 1980 was Friday the 13th. To demonstrate
that Friday the 13th was marketable to female youth, the filmmaking partnership
of producer-director Sean S. Cunningham and screenwriter Victor Miller offered
a tough heroine and some romance. The promiscuous teen.s often described as obsessively
pursuing casual liaisons in teen slashers, especially in Friday the 13th, were in fact
all but absent from Friday the 13th and were seldom seen in its contemporaries.*^ In fact,
lieterosexual interacrion in teen slashers has been rourineiy mischaracterized, with
teen slasher filmmakers, at this stage at least, usually painring sex as an emorionally
wrought rite of passage or as a demonstration of affection undertaken by long-term
partners or love-struck young people. The makers of Friday the 13th emphasized courtship
rituals as part of everyday youth interaction, opening with a pair of smitten teenage
paramours before introducing Marcie (Jeannine Taylor) andJack (Kevin Bacon), a
young couple very much in love, and Steve (Peter Brouwer) and Alice (Adrienne King),
two twenty-somethings with an unresolved romantic history.
The mobilization of tnoments of teen romance enabled independent filmmakers to
capitalize on developments in Hollywood horror and on a red-hot, primarily femaleyouth-oriented
production trend, while sidestepping comperition over MPAA-member
pickup deals from more illustrious and bankable filmmakers. By the summer of 1979,
industry insiders' confidence in teenage love stories was at an all-rime high because,
in the previous eighteen months, puppy love had become an increasingly prominent
part of youth-centered hits and their markering campaigns. Significantly, young love
had been emphasized in Paramount's promorion of Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978), the
highest-earning youth-centered film ever, and Columbia's less remembered sleeper hit
Ice Castles (Donald Wyre, 1978) had been adverrised as a teen romance: "When tragedy
struck, love came to the rescue," the trailer proclaimed.**
As a result of these hits, a surge in the producrion of similar films was under way, involving
some of the industry's most astute producers. For example, Randal Kleiser had
64 Sam Allis, "Spooky Profits for a 'Cult Film in Reverse,'" Washington Post, March 18, 1979.
65 Timothy Shary, Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema (Austin: University of
Texas Press. 2002), 148-149; Wood, "Beauty Bests the Beast."
66 Grease. $83m (lst/1979; 4th/ail-time); fce Castles. $9.5m (38th/1979). Variety, "Big Rental Films of 1978." 17;
Variety, "All-Time Film Rental Champs [19791," 30; Variety, "Big Rental Films of 1979." January 9, 1980, 2 1 .
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followed Grease with The Blue Lagoon; Rastar Pictures, the company behind Snwkey and
the Bandit (Hal Needham, 1977), was filming Skatetown, USA. (William A. Levey, 1979);
and even Halloween's Yablans had invested some of Halloween's profits into Roller Boogie
(Mark L. Lester, 1979)." While the filmmakers behind Friday the 13a stood litde chance
of emerging victorious from head-to-head confrontadons with this caliber of opposidon,
making commercially suicidal the production of an out-and-out teen romance, it
seemed possible to capitalize on the trend by incorporadng young love into a different
type of füm, and the conduct of MPAA members and the theatergoing population of
the United States indicated that horror was that type of film. Romance, albeit not of
the adolescent variety, had been used, with some success, by two MPAA members to
reinvigorate dcket sales for presdge horror fums, following the aforemendoned slump
of 1976-1978. "Throughout the ages he has füled the hearts of men with terror," read
Universal's tagline for Dracula (John Badham, 1979), "and the hearts of women with
desire." Similarly, Twentieth Century Fox had billed Maff.c (Richard Attenborough,
1978) as a "terrifying love story." The solid box office returns of Dracula and Magic had
suggested that romance-inflected horror could secure MPAA-member distribudon.
Also designed to provide Friday the 13th's makers with a compedtive edge in the
batde over MPAA-member distribution deals was the füm's masculine heroine, Auce,
an element of content that reflected a high-profile innovation that had been used
to promote Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979). Alien had been a MPAA-member release that,
together with Dracula and Magic, opened after Halloween (but before Friday the 13th was
shot); Alien, Magic, and Dracula were all well posidoned to out-perform Halloween.^^ As
Friday the 13th was being scripted, Twendeth Century Fox was targedng Alien to female
audiences with a trailer in which the confusion, fear, and loathing of male characters
was contrasted against shots of the film's heroine striking focused, determined, and
urgent poses. The tagline, "In .space no one can hear you scream," also angled Alien
toward women by referencing the response to horror that is usuaDy associated with
female viewers. Although Clover has since argued that masculine heroines, or "final
girls," were geared toward males. Alien indicates that Hollywood had idendfied the
character as an invaluable instrument with which to attract females, on the basis that
a projecdon of female empowerment promised to resonate with female dcket buyers.
In fact, the studio was evidendy so confident that such a character would appeal to
women that Alien'% heroine had been allocated a prominent role in the astronomical
S16 million markedng campaign being used to promote a film that had been expected
to emulate Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) commercially, and that, in order to break
even, needed to be among the year's top earners.®' By mining the teen romance trend
and by mobilizing a tough heroine à la. Alien, Cunningham, Miller, and their collaborators
provided a prospecdve distributor with commercially viable content with which to
target Friday the 13th to female, as well as male, youth.
67 Variety, "Film Production," August 22, 1979, 47.
68 Magtc: $12.5m (24th/1979); Dracula: $10.5m (33rd/1979). Variety, "Big Rental Films of 1979," 21.
69 David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), 60-61 ; Jack Pittman, "Fox Gambling on $8-Mil 'Alien' as Another 'Star Wars'
Smash," Variety, July 26, 1978, 28.
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Figure 3. f^any promotional images for Friday the 13th focused on platonic interaction rather than sex or
violence (Paramount, 1980).
Eriday the 13th's distributor. Paramount Pictures, to some extent took advantage of
the opportunities that the film's makers had provided to appeal to teenage girls and
young women by employing lobby cards that highlighted female-youth-oriented material.
The lobby cards were part of the $4.5 million cross-media markedng blitz (a
budgetary scale usually reserved for calculated blockbusters) that had been launched
by Paramount.'" Having profited from mega-hit date movies including Saturday Night
Eever and Grease, the company, pardcularly its vice president of markedng and distribudon,
Frank Mancuso Sn, was acutely aware of the finaneial benefits of angling youthcentered
films toward both sexes. Paramount's lobby cards therefore emphasized
young characters over moments of horror, with female characters featuring heavily,
as romance and female agency were spotlighted over "cheesecake shots." One of the
cards showed a pair of young lovers poised to kiss; a second featured two youths sunbathing
with their heads resdng together indmately. Other lobby cards pictured female
youth interacting platonically with males, staring incredulously at a cop in one, greeting
a man in another (Figure 3). In one lobby card, a young woman helps to rescue a
struggling swimmer. In another, a female youth leaps from a jeep. And in the wryest
depiction of female agency of all, one lobby card even recalibrates a clichéd sexist
joke, as a female character shows a befuddled young man how to change a light bulb.
Taken as a whole, Paramount's lobby cards marked Eriday the 13th as female-youthfriendly
entertainment. By securing MPAA-member distribudon, a large audience.
70 Variety, "After 'Friday 13th' Windfall, Cunningham Explores New Area," July 9, 1980. 25; Aljean Harmetz, "After
2 Good Summers, Film Business Lags," New York Times, June 26, 1980; Harmetz, "Quick End of Low-Budget
Horror-Film Cycle Seen," New York Times, October 2, 1980.
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and a healthy profit, and by signaling that Halloween had not been an anomalous boxoffice
success, Friday the 13th—the most unexpected hit of summer 1980—cemented
the commercial potendal of female-friendly teen slashers, thereby ensuring that industry
insiders' confidence in teen slashers would swell rapidly and that, in conjunction
with parallel developments, the importance of the female youth audience would grow
"A Special Night in the Lives of All of Us": Prom Night and Other Developments.
The events of the late summer and early fall of 1980 erased any lingering
doubts that the industry might have harbored about the commercial viability of fetnale-youth-fiiendly
teen slashers, as the first public statement was made by an MPAA
member regarding the need to target films about maniacs toward young women, as
a primarily female-youth-oriented teen slasher generated strong dcket sales, as an
MPAA member changed a teen slasher film's marketing campaign to attract teenage
girls and young women, and as reveladons about the composidon of teen slasher audiences
were printed in a leading American newspaper.
The Canadian-based filmmakers behind Prom Night had spodighted feinale protagonists,
female bonding, and heterosexual courtship to ofTer MPAA members the
possibility of atoning for underesdmadng the financial promise of Halloween. These
opportunists were well aware of the potendal rewards of recalibrating the target audience
with films that had been modeled on youth-oriented hits because, when Prom
Night went into producdon, the Canadian film industry was reverberating, as Peter
Urquhart has pointed out, from a landmark event in its financially wretched history^^
The long-standing and much-troubled project to deliver what Variety dubbed the
"made-in-Canada blockbuster" had been realized when MPAA-member distribudon
and significant box-office success was enjoyed by Meatballs (Ivan Reitman, 1979), a
teen comedy that, while patterned after Universal's 1978 gross-out comedy blockbuster
hit Animal House, had been made more accessible to children and younger teenagers
through eschewal of the salacious content that had earned Animal House an R
rating and had, in theory at least, excluded unaccompanied minors from screenings.'^
With Meatballs still in theaters, the Canadian-based filmmakers responsible for Prom
Night—along with their countrymen behind Terror Train (examined below)—emulated
Meatballs's production model by using Halloween as a pattern for films which MPAA
members could target specifically to teenage girls.'''
As an exercise in transnational filmmaking. Prom Night was al.so affected by events
that had been taking place in the US film industry, events which provided further encouragement
to orient a teen slasher film primarily toward female youth. As indicated
71 Friday the 13th: $16.5m (20th/1980). Variety, "Big Rental Films of 1980," January 14,1981, 29; Dennis Boyles,
"Hollywood's 'B's Make the Box Office Buzz," New York Times, August 3,1980; Harmetz, "After 2 Good Summers";
Dale Pollock, "2nd Most Successful Film, Scary News: It's 'Friday the 13th,'" Los Angeles Times. June 27, 1980.
72 Peter Urquhart, "You Should Know Something—Anything—about This Movie: You Paid for It," Canadian Journal of
Film Studies 12, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 64-80.
73 Variety, "Made-in-Canada Blockbuster Needed to Buck Up Filmmakers," November 21, 1973, 19; Variety. "Pickups,
TV, Cable for 10 'Canadian Development' Pics Yield $39,100,000 (So Far)," May 9, 1979, 448, 460.
74 Michael Walsh, "Vancouver: Facts, Fantasy as to 'Hollywood of North,"' Variety. November 21, 1979, 48, 70.
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above, teenage female protagonists, young love, and female bonding had proven commercially
viable. Thus, the filmmakers behind Prom Mght replicated features of earlier
hits that had showcased this content: Carrie, Saturday Night Fever, and Grease. As several
journalists recognized, elements of these films had been combined in Prom Night, as
a group of schoolgirls participated in the buildup to, and celebrations of, Hamilton
High's "disco-madness" senior prom.'* Prom Night was therefore a female-youth-centered
film in which a graduation dance was presented as a female rite of passage for
three seniors, Kim, Jude, and Kelly, who each negotiate social challenges arising from
the event, and who provide each other emotional support. Whereas lovesickJude worries
about finding a prom date, and Kelly is being pressured by her bullish boyfriend to
surrender her virginity, Kim, the film's heroine, is mourning the death of her younger
sister and is dealing with a rival who covets her boyfriend and is jealous of the attention
she receives as the elected prom queen.
Casting and characterization suggest that Prom Night's producers saw Kim, in pardcular,
as crucial to the film's marketability, recruidng Jamie Lee Curtis for the role,
a rising star thanks to Halloween, Curtis was presented in interviews as a quick-witted,
laid-back, sexually confident "Valley girl" (she had yet to be subjected to the rumors
of being intersexed that later complicated gender aspects of her star persona).'* It is
a common misconception that teen slashers typically featured tomboy heroines, like
Friday the 13th's Alice." In reality, protagonists who would be considered "conventionally
feminine," by the estimations of those scholars who have written on the subject,
were actually more common than their "boyish" counterparts. Whereas in Halloween
Curtis had famously played a timid babysitter who enjoyed the opposite sex by proxy
(through constant discussions with her sexually active friends), in Prom Night the Curtis
character was transformed into the popular pretty girl, a privileged alpha female who
wears the most stylish clothes, is the best disco dancer in the school, dates the most eligible
boy, and is crowned prom queen. Director Paul Lynch has since gone on record
to explain that he believed that this material made Prom Night potendally appealing
to young females. "We know the prom to be a wonderful event in teenagers' lives,"
explained Lynch, an event "that girls . . . look back on like they do their marriage
[wedding day]."'* The filmmakers responsible for From Night thus oflered a prospective
distributor a wealth of material with which to target female youth, and this opportunity
was taken up by MPAA member (and youth-market specialist) Avco Embassy in
the summer of 1980.
Avco Embassy's marketing campaign for Prom Night placed more emphasis on
female-youth-oriented material than the promotion of any horror film since Carrie
almost four years earlier. Prom Night's content notwithstanding, this approach was by
no means inevitable and was likely catalyzed by the fact that, mere weeks earlier.
75 Gene Siskel, "Prom Night," Chicago Tribune, July 21, 1980.
76 See, for example, William K. Knoedelseder Jr., "Jamie Lee Curtis: A Scream Queen Attracts Attention," Los Angeles
Times, November 16, 1980.
77 Clover, "Her Body. Himself," 35-42.
78 Paul Lynch, interviewed in Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, DVD, directed by Jeff McQueen
(THINKFilm, 2006).
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Figure 4. Prom Night was marketed by appealing to girls' fantasies (Avco Embassy, 1980).
MGM/UA had become the first MPAA member to declare publicly its confidence in
angling tales of psycho-killers toward girls and young women when it announced that
"[p]arricular emphasis v«ll be paid to the fifteen-to-twenty-one-year-old female
audience" in the promotion of He Knows You're Alone (Armand Mastroianni, 1980),
an independendy produced acquisition about a maniac stalking twenty-something
brides-to-be.^^ The box-office potenrial of making teenage girls the primary target
audience for an R-rated youth film had been trumpeted that spring when Paramount's
Little Darlings (Ronald F. Maxwell, 1980), a story about two fifteen-year-old
girls racing to lose their virginity at summer camp, became a hit on the scale of Carrie
and Meatballs; the film's markering campaign had emphasized elements of the film
that showcased, to use Chuck Kleinhans's description, "white young women bonding,
expressing the situarion of girls in a group or pair, and showing the world from their
perspecrive."^° Avco Embassy's attempts to secure that same assumed young female
audience for Prom Night found their fullest expression in audiovisual markering materials,
with Prom Night's trailer sporiighring female protagonists, female bonding, and
romance. Montages showed teenage girls performing beauty rituals, kissing boys, and
disco dancing, and voiceover narration indicated that this material was being angled
mainly toward female youth (Figure 4). "There's a special night in the lives of all of
us," announced the narrator, "a night to be beauriful, to be desirable, a night where
we can break all the rules and make our own." This approach invited girls to anricipate
a film that bore obvious similariries to Carrie, Saturday Night Fever, and Grease, as
well a.s to the contemporaneous disco movies Skatetown, U.S.A. and Roller Boogie. When
79 Spokesman Review, "MGM Enters Horror Picture," July 1, 1980, 15.
80 Little Darlings: $16.7 (19th/1980). Variety, "Big Rental Films of 1980," 29; Chuck Kleinhans, "Girls on the Edge
of the Reagan Era," in Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice: Cinemas of Girlhood, ed. Frances Gateward and Murray
Pomerance (Detroit, Ml: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 73.
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Cinema Journal 51 | No. 1 ¡ Fall 2011
it sold more tickets per screen than Friday the 13th, Prom Night provided a huge incentive
for fümmakers to condnue to make teen slashers that were marketable to female
youth and for distributors to condnue to target the demographic.*'
A second incentive came soon after in the shape of the first public statement about
the composidon of teen slasher audiences. In early October 1980, respected film industry
analyst Aljean Harmetz revealed in the New York Times that market research
had shown that teen slasher films were attracting large numbers of female youth. The
document, she explained, had revealed that 45 percent of tickets for Halloween and
Friday the 13th had been sold to under-seventeen-year-olds, 55 percent of whom were
girls.*^ These data were pardcularly eye-opening because some industry insiders sdll
believed that fifteen- to twenty-five-year-old males dominated horror füm attendance.^^
Harmetz had thus highlighted a causal link between depicdons of female youth, disproportionately
high attendance among young females, and box-office success, and in
doing so, she appeared to have confirmed what filmmakers and distributors had concluded
all along: a female-friendly teen slasher was more likely to become a financially
successful teen slasher.®"
The first tangible sign of the influence of Prom Night's box-office performance and
of the revelations about audience composidon came when Harmetz's source—no
less than Twentieth Century Fox's vice president of advertising and publicity, Robert
Cort—revamped Terror Train'?, marketing materials to make the füm more attracdve
to female youth. Produced by leading Canadian producdon company Astral Bellevue
Pathé at the same time as Prom Night, Terror Train had also been crafted to enable MPAA
members to target female youth, with the füm focusing heavily on a convendonally
feminine heroine, a sorority sister called Alana (Jamie Lee Curds), who comes of age
when she breaks free from a self-centered boyfriend and takes responsibility for her
involvement in a thoughdess initiadon ritual that led to a fellow student being insdtudonalized.
However, Fox did not inidally use this female-youth-oriented material
in its S5 million promotion of Terror Tram, as early poster art featured a masked killer
brandishing a knife and the taghne "What screams in the night isn't the train. It's the
terror at your throat."*^ But following Prom Night's achievements and the findings of its
own market research. Twentieth Century Fox altered Terror Train's marketing materials
to emphasize the presence of youth of both sexes. The final version of the füm's
artwork incorporated an illustradon of college students gathering around a bonfire
and a new tagline: "The boys and girls of Sigma Pi, some will live and some will
die." "Stay with your date," advised Terror Train's theatrical trailer, and lobby cards
81 Prom Night's rentals were lower than those of Friday the 13th because Avco Embassy could only afford to print
291 copies of the film, 1,200 copies fewer than Paramount circulated of Friday the 13th. Prom Night: $6m
(53rd/1980). Variety, "Big Rental Films of 1980," July 30, 1980, 24, 29; Laurie Warner, "Horrors! It's Getting to
Be No Joke!" Los Angeles Times, August 24, 1980.
82 Harmetz, "Quick End."
83 Roger Watkins, "Demented Revenge Hits World Screens," Variety, October 15, 1980, 33.
84 Harmetz, "Quick End."
85 David Novak Associates, "75 Theatre Canadian Release Slated by Astral: Twentieth Century Fox Spends $5 Million
to Launch 'Terror Train' in 1000 Theatres across the U.S.A.," nevus release, September 18,1980, microfilm, British
Film Institute, London; Variety, August 13, 1980, 28-29.
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Cinenna Journal 51 No. 1 I Fall 2011
highlighted the presence of giris flirting with boys and spodighted Curtis instead of her
male co-stars, Oscar-winner BenJohnson and heartthrob Hart Bochner. Developments
that took place across four months in the second half of 1980 had therefore ensured
that filmmakers and distributors would continue to code teen slashers as female-youthfriendly
products when, from fall 1980 to summer 1981, the American film industry's
investment in teen slashers reached its high-water mark.
"Teen-Age Love-and-Meat-Cleaver Films": The Teen Slasher Films of 1981.
Thanks to MPAA-member pickup deals and consistent commercial success, teen
slasher film producdon skyrocketed in late 1980 as independent businesspeople across
North America contributed to what was arguably the most high-profile production
trend of its dme. To demonstrate that their films were marketable to female as well
as male youth, filmmakers balanced content that they had mined from eariier teen
slashers with innovadons, and distributors often took advantage of these opportunides
when promofing the films in 1981.
Most of the new teen slasher films provided prospecdve distributors with ample opportunity
to target female youth. Sequences of teenage girls bonding appeared in teen
slashers such as Miramax's The Burning (Tony Maylam, 1981), Happy Birthday to Me,
and My Bloody Valentine. Slasher filmmakers also continued to spodight heterosexual
courtship as sexual tension simmered in The Prowler (Joseph Zito, 1981) and Hell Night
(Tony De Simone, 1981), young love blossomed in Eriday the 13th Part II {Steve Miner,
1981) and The Burning, and emofions reached the boiling point in Graduation Day (Herb
Freed, 1981) and My Bloody Valentine. Indeed, romance had become so commonplace
in teen slashers that Vmcent Canby of the New York Times had taken to calling Happy
Birthday to Me and its contemporaries "teen-age love-and-meat-cleaver films."®* Teen
slasher filmmakers encouraged the use of such descripfions. For example, fresh from
interviewing producer Irwin Yablans and star Linda Blair on the set of their forthcoming
film Hell Night, Los Angeles Times journalist Ellen Farley described the film as
"derived from Halloween with pop romance overtures."*' In addition to mobilizing material
that their predecessors had used, the makers of several new teen slashers hit on
a novel way of making their films marketable to female youth.
The most significant point of departure for many of the teen slashers of 1981 was
the construcdon of their heroines, with most of the films being built around a girl who
combined the "tradidonally" feminine appearance and heterosexual acumen of Prom
Night's prom queen protagonist and the mascuhne aspects of Eriday the 13th's tomboy
heroine. These characters were essentially younger and less varnished incarnadons of
the "new woman" heroines which, as Elana Levine shows, had risen to prominence
thanks to the heavily publicized hit TV series Wonder Woman (CBS, 1976-1977; ABC,
1977-1979) and Charlie's Angels (ABC, 1976-1981).^ The "new young women" of
slasher films controlled their love lives, invesdgated suspicious activity, and somedmes
86 Vincent Canby, review of Happy Birthday to Me, NewYork Times, May 15, 1981.
87 Ellen Farley, "Linda Blair: Erasing the Demon Image," Los Angeies Times, February 22, 1981.
88 Elana Levine, "Buffy and the New Girl Order: Defining Feminism and Femininity," in Undead TV: Essays on Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, ed. Elana Levine and Lisa Parks (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 168.
137
Cinema Journal 51 No. 1 ¡ Fall 2011
Figure 5. By the early 1980s, the protagonists
of teen slasher films such as Hell
Night were essentially younger incarnations
of the "new woman" heroines that
Elana Levine has identified in Wonder
Woman and Charlie's Angels (Compass
International, 1981).
dispatched the killer. In Hell Mght, for example,
Mard is a capable mechanic and student who,
dressed throughout the film in a low-cut evening
gown, catches the eye of coundess males (Figure
5). Almost two decades before the character type
was employed to draw young female audiences to
TV series like Buß> the Vamptre Skyer (WB, 1997-
2001; UPN, 2001-2003) and to films like Scream,
she was being used to make teen slashers marketable
to female youth.
Casdng often underscored the economic importance
of the female leads, who tended to be
played by potendal future leading ladies or former
child-actors looking to transition to adult stardom.
While HellNighfs Mard was played by Linda Blair,
who, after starring in The Exorcist, had tent-poled
Roller Boogie, Melissa Sue Anderson, a star of the
TV family drama series Little House on the Prairie
(NBC, 1974-1983), headlined Happy Birthday to Me.
Casdng Blair and Anderson enabled prospecdve
distributors to sdmulate the attendance of female youth who, as children or younger
teenagers, had enjoyed their previous work. Although less known female leads did not
ofTer this possibility, they could sdll be spotlighted by distributors to mark teen slashers
as girl-friendly entertainment. The perceived commercial viability of markedng films
to female youth based on the presence of young female leads had increased significantly
across 1980, thanks largely to the sleeper hits Little Darlings and The Blue Lagoon,
which had been sold primarily on the presence of teenaged stars Tatum O'Neal, Kristy
McNichol, and Brooke Shields.^^ O'Neal, McNichol, and Shields were leading lights
among what Tímí journalist John Skow called "Hollywood's Whiz Kids," a cohort of
photogenic young actresses being nurtured into bankable A-listers by agents, publicity
departments, and marketers.'" The phenomenon of enabling prospecdve distributors to
capitalize cost-efTecdvely on the hits that had been headlined by the new starlets, and on
the nodon of the starlet itself, was therefore made possible by the teen slasher heroines.
The marketers of the teen slasher films of 1981 spodighted female-youth-oriented
content consistendy The first of the films to hit theaters was My Bloody Valentine, the TV
trauer for which, like its poster, spodighted romance. "In this town on Valendne's Day,"
proclaimed the narrator, "everyone loses their hearts." Aiy Bloody Valentine's lobby cards
communicated romance, as well as sisterhood and female valor, with images of the film's
heroine snubbing a male suitor, ushering a girlfriend to safety, warning others of imminent
danger, and preparing to save a male youth from the killer. By the Stimmer, Filmways'
poster for The Burning was invidng comparisons to the poster art, and by extension
89 The Blue Lagoon: $28.4m (llth/1980). Variety, "Big Rental Films of 1980," 29.
90 John Skow, "Hollywood's Whiz Kids," lime, August 13, 1979. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171
,948564,00.html.
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Cinema Journal 51 No. 1 Fall 2011
the content, of The Blue Lagoon by featuring a sepia-ünted image of young lovers about
to kiss in an idyllic setting, and the film's trailer opened with teenage lovers embracing.
Female protagonists were emphasized in the promotion of these and other teen slashers
as Compass International encouraged audiences to see "Linda Blair in Hell Night'
and Columbia warned that the disappearances of male students in Happy Birthday to Me
wotJd mean that there would be "no one left for Vii^nia's birthday party." The emphasis
that distributors placed on female-youth-oriented material may not have reached the
dizzy heights of Avco Embassy's promotion of Prom Night twelve months earlier, but it
remained a key tenet of the marketing campaigns of teen slasher films.
MPAA members eventually stopped offering pickup deals to the independent producers
of teen slasher films after market saturation generated weak ticket sales in 1981,
thus causing the production of new teen slashers to drop considerably. For a short time
between the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s, however, industry insiders reaped
significant financial rewards from having discovered a lucrative new type of date movie.
Conclusion: "What Makes the Perfect Date Movie?" Contrary to standard
thinking, ictnale youth was crucial to the American film industry's commercial objectives
vis-à-vis early teen slashers. From 1978 to 1981, independent filmmakers made
female-youth-friendly teen slashers to improve their chances of securing a lucrative
distribution deal from a reputable company, offering MPAA members material that
could be used in marketing campaigns to attract not just young males but also teenage
girls and young women, America's second-largest theatergoing demographic. By
releasing films that incorporated blade-wielding killers into hit date movies, and by tailoring
marketing campaigns to multiple segments of the youth audience, distributors
sought to maximize ticket sales. Time after time, independent female protagonists and
depictions of female bonding and heterosexual courtship were mobilized to achieve
these ends. The emphasis that was placed on these elements evolved as filmmakers and
distributors aimed to reflect the evolving content of youth-centered and horror hits,
which MPAA members had, from 1973 onward, geared consistently toward female as
well as male audiences.
The early teen slasher films demonstrated to the North American film industry the
commercial potential of inexpensive horror date movies, and with the establishment
of this new film type came the realization that a lucrative relationship existed between
horror, teen films, and female youth, a relationship that the industry could ignore only
at its peril. The approaches that were employed between 1978 and 1981 formed the
foundation on which the American film industry built its conduct with respect to teen
slashers for the next thirty years. The structure, conduct, and output of that industry
may have changed considerably since the first wave of teen slasher films broke, with,
among other factors, the advent of home video and other domestic delivery systems,
the rise of "major-independent" studios such as New Line Cinema and Miramax
Films, and the reorganization of multinational media conglomerates into various film
production and distribution divisions having altered the ways in which films are made,
marketed, and released, but one thing that these developments did not change was the
importance of female youth to the commercial objectives of the makers and marketers
of teen slasher films.
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While levels of producrion and distriburion have yet to match the explosion of acrivity
that took place between 1978 and 1981, new female-friendly teen slashers have been
made and released almost every year. In 1983, for example, the trailer to The House on
Sorority Row (Mark Rosman, 1983) opened to a female student applying lipsrick, and
combined shots of sorority sisters engaging in romance, parriciparing in girly high jinks,
and brandishing weapons. "A certain kind of girl joined Pi Theta sorority," explained
the narrator, "a girl who likes to party and likes to get close to her friends; a girl whose
extracurricular acriviries were more daring than most; a girl who could turn her fantasies
into reality." Securing young female theatergoers remained a key objecrive for the
companies behind the Friday the 13th (1984-1989) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984-
1991) franchises, which dotninated teen slasher ticket sales from the mid-1980s to the
early 1990s. "She's the only one who can stop it—if she fails, no one will survive," was
how New Line Cinema's trailer billed the principal protagonist of A Nightmare on Elm
Street (Wes Craven, 1984), a young woman who confronts dream stalker Freddy Krueger
as well as neglectful parents. The high-profile teen slashers of the late 1990s, as Wee has
demonstrated, were also angled toward female youth, reaching an apotheosis with Valentine
(Jamie Blanks, 2001), a film in which a group of wealthy young women contend
with male suitors, each other, and a cherub-masked killer. "Why is it that the one day of
the year that everyone's afraid to be alone is Valentine's Day?" asked its trailer's female
narrator. Because, according to Valentine's tagline, "Love hurts."
Similar approaches are still being used today, this rime to energize ticket sales for
"remakes" of the early teen slashers. Thus, Screen Gems, a subsidiary of Sony Pictures,
aimed its PG-13-rated "reenvisioning" of Prom Night (Nelson McCormick, 2008)
squarely at teenage girls, with its trailer's opening montage chronicling the "preparations,"
"celebrarions," and "anticiparions" of a "a night to die for" by referencing
countless earlier female-youth-centered films, including Pretty in Pink (John Hughes,
1986) and She's All That (Robert Iscove, 1999). Less than twelve months later, in 2009,
Valentine's Day weekend saw the release of Warner Bros.' new version of Eriday the
13th (Marcus Nispel, 2009). "This year, Saturday the 14th belongs to lovers," began
one of its TV spots. "But," it concluded, "Friday the 13th belongs to him," indicating
iconic maniac Jason Voorhees. The debut of Friday the 13tk on Valenrine's weekend
may have forced distributor Lionsgate to advance the opening of My Bloody Valentine
3D (Patrick Lussier, 2009), so as to avoid a potenriaUy devastating confrontation over
the box-office dollar, but it did not stop the company from targering the film—again
about young lovers and a maniacal miner—to female as well as male youth. Whereas
Paramount's promotion of the original My Bloody Valentine had, almost three decades
earlier, informed young people that "there is more than one way to lose your heart,"
Lionsgate's marketing of My Bloody Valentine 3D was even more direct. "What makes
the perfect date movie?" one of the film's TV spots knowingly inquired. "Nothing says
'date movie,'" advised its theatrical trailer, "like a 3-D ride to hell." •
Thantcs to Peter Krämer, Diane Negra, Otiver Grüner, and the anonymous Cinema Journal readersfor thár insigtitfut comments
and hetpjilt advice, and to CinemaJournal editor Heather Hendershotfor bang kind, courteous, and hetpfid. Partcutar
Itiank as ever tojindriska Btahova.
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