The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

(In French, On TV, May 2020) While The Slumber Party Massacre remains notable in the 1980s slasher film canon for being one of the few written and directed by women, you would be hard-pressed to identify how this has led to a different kind of film. Coming in at a time when the slasher was firmly established and on its way of crashing, this film mechanically executes the characteristics of the genre, with meaningless gory murders every 5–10 minutes and as many opportunities it gets to show naked girls dressing after sleep, taking showers or putting pyjamas during their titular slumber party. Despite its female writer and director, the film is as guilty of lecherous male gaze (sometimes ridiculously so, as per the slow pan during the shower scene) as anyone else—director Amy Jones was playing the game like everyone else, even if she did have a penetrating insight on the genre by giving the psycho killer a big throbbing drill as signature weapon. It’s not even playing the whodunit card—an escaped murderer is mentioned early in the film and the rest is played straight. While the film occasionally has doses of dark humour (the film opens with misleading screaming, features a character watching a horror film while someone else is getting killed, etc.), this is really not the comedy that some people pretend. In most ways, this is exactly what people talk about when they talk about early-1980s slashers: At this point in the craze, everyone knew exactly what to do to give the audience what it wanted. At least, The Slumber Party Massacre is mercifully short at 77 minutes—and executed well by the standards of the genre.