After a long week of watching Halloween movies, it's good to grab some friends, get cozy in your pajamas, munch on a pizza, sip some beer, smoke some weed and settle into a slumber party. If you're lucky, it might even be a slumber party MASSACRE!
1982's THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE, directed by Amy Holden Jones, is one of my all-time favorites: a clever satire on slasher flicks through the female gaze.
When a slumber party hosted by a group of teen girls is crashed by a drill-wielding maniac on the loose, they've got to band together to stay alive and fend this fucker off, assisted by two sisters from across the street.
Perspective is the name of the game here, as Jones' lens eschews most of the slasher subgenre's conventions. FRIDAY THE 13TH blew the doors wide open in 1980. The next year, its gang of imitators hacked on through, giving audiences a crash course in the cinematic language of masked men, their gruesome kills and POV shots. Jones grounds her killer, often using these conventions as red herrings, to contrast the blunt and rather matter-of-fact approach of the killer. Women constantly need to keep their head on a swivel because, as Jones reminds us throughout the film, the difference between life and death can last only seconds, occur in broad daylight and be perpetrated by your everyday Joe.
It doesn't take much for you to become the pizza boy lying face-up in someone's living room with drill holes where your eyes used to be.
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