MEN AND MASCULINITIES / April 2001

Rieser / MASCULINITY AND MONSTROSITY

Masculinity and Monstrosity

Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film

KLAUS RIESER
University of Graz, Austria

This article analyzes characterization (of the monster and the “Final Girl”) and identifi-
cation (of the male audience) in the slasher film. The author engages in a critical dia-
logue with key theories of gender in the horror film, particularly Carol Clover’s work,
arguing that these films, despite their formal deviance from Hollywood (gender) formu-
las—such as positioning a female figure at the center of the narrative—do not usually
depart from that cinema’s patriarchal signification. Indeed, most slasher films are vio-
lently misogynist and homophobic—punishing female sexuality, equating femininity
with victimhood, and portraying the killer/monster as a queer figure. It is also argued
that the male audience does not straightforwardly identify with the Final Girl. Instead,
slasher films rely on primary identification and offer empathy rather than identification.
Moreover, insofar as secondary identification with the female protagonist does occur, its
aggressive impulses are projected onto the monster.

Key words: horror film, slasher film, gender, masculinity, monster, feminist film theory,
identification, characterization, queer

We are trapped inside a killer monster that charges at women (and some men
along the way). Later, we identify with a woman, who is attacked by this very
same killer. The killer is a man. Or is he? He may be just a child, or even an ani-
mal. The victim not only fights back but also survives, even killing the monster.
The victim is a woman. Or is she? There are some doubts as to her gender
status.
Some say the monstrosity in horror films is the repressed of the male specta-
tor. Some that it is an alter ego of the woman on the screen. Some that it is the
maternal. Some that it is the woman’s body.

The relation of masculinity to horror film warrants treatment, because

horror is, as a recent anthology on the topic states, preoccupied “with issues
of sexual difference and gender” (Grant 1996, 1). Thus, it has become a popu-
lar ground for discussions of identification in film, particularly one on which
the prevailing paradigm of 1970s and 1980s feminist film criticism, Lacanian
psychoanalysis, has been challenged. After a brief presentation of some basic

Men and Masculinities, Vol. 3 No. 4, April 2001 370-392

© 2001 Sage Publications, Inc.
370
 Rieser / MASCULINITY AND MONSTROSITY 371

tenets of this paradigm, I will turn to three seminal counterarguments from

the field of horror and gender: the work of Linda Williams, Barbara Creed,
and Carol Clover. Engaging in a critical dialogue with these and other analy-
ses, I then develop my own hypotheses on characterization and male identifi-
cation in the slasher film, to account for the patriarchal recuperation that
always already counters the resistance presented by horror films’ breaking of
Hollywood conventions. I will concentrate throughout on 1970s and 1980s
slasher films (with some side-remarks on their 1990s mainstream deriva-
tives) because their narrative and audiovisual codes differ most sharply from
traditional Hollywood styles and they have therefore moved to the center of
critical attention.1 Furthermore, this study is mostly limited to identification
patterns offered the male segment of the audience.

PSYCHOANALYTICAL
FEMINIST FILM THEORY

Although feminist film theory has always been multileveled and has pur-
sued heterogeneous political, theoretical, and methodological strands, it is
nonetheless safe to say that during the late 1970s and early 1980s one
approach had gained paradigmatic status. This strand itself is more heteroge-
neous than its usual label “psychoanalytical feminist film theory” suggests,
having as its basis a confluence of semiotics, psychoanalysis, and Marxism
and comprising a whole array of feminist theories of subjectivity, identity, the
cinematic apparatus, filmic signification, and media ideology. Simplifying
even more (perhaps unduly), I here follow the practice of summing up its core
theses by reference to one of its foundational texts, Laura Mulvey’s “Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” ([1975] 1988b). In it, Mulvey uncovered an
ideological imbalance between male and female, which in the classic film
text is constructed visually as “gazing/to-be-looked-at-ness” and narratively
as “active/passive.” The spectator implied (or indeed constructed) by this
process is male, and his visual pleasures are divided between a fetishistic or
sadistic/voyeuristic gaze on the female and a narcissistic identification with
the male characters. Through techniques such as invisible editing and subjec-
tive camera, an essentially sadistic position vis-à-vis the story’s female char-
acter (either “rescuing” or punishing the woman for her desire) is carved out
for the male spectator.
Since the heyday of this strand of feminist film theory, a number of cri-
tiques have been voiced. It has, for example, been claimed that this theory
naturalizes heterosexuality (by disregarding a potential lesbian desire for the
heroine) and conflates male/female with masculine/feminine, but above all
that in its critique of the encompassing power of patriarchal signification (in-
herent in the film apparatus as well as in the visual coding, the narrative struc-
tures, and of course in characterization) it tends to reify the patriarchal system
372 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / April 2001

as monolithic and unassailable. This retotalizing and thus self-defeating ten-

dency is sometimes seen to be compounded by the ahistoricity of the tenets of
psychoanalytical theory and the fundamentalism in demanding nothing short
of a total destruction of narrative cinema.
It is little wonder, then, that a number of variations, revisions, and
countermodels have since been proposed, including a focus on women’s gen-
res (theorizing the spectatrix), audience analysis (e.g., to investigate the
transformative power of reception), and historical analysis (to determine the
influence of social changes on filmic narration). Two central tendencies in
these postparadigmatic theories have particular relevance for this article: on
one hand, a search for resistance (or at least divergence) outside the main-
stream texts of classical Hollywood, and on the other, an alternative theoriza-
tion of the male spectator (mostly as masochistic rather than sadistic).2 Both
of these tendencies came together in the feminist analyses of horror, focusing
as they do on gender characteristics and on the identification of the male
spectator. Three inspiring book chapters by Williams (1996), Creed (1996),
and Clover (1996) are usually seen as foundational in this regard.3

THREE SEMINAL APPROACHES

TO GENDER AND HORROR

Of the three theorists, Linda Williams remains closest to the Lacanian-

Althusserian nexus, drawing heavily on Laura Mulvey ([1981] 1988a, [1975]
1988b) and Steven Heath (another early theorist of the psychoanalytical par-
adigm) in her chapter “When the Woman Looks” (1996).4 However, she
interprets the female figure differently, as powerful rather than merely a sym-
bol for castration and “lack.” Indeed, one of her central arguments is that
woman and monster are close/similar, at least for the traumatized, “normal”
male, because they both exhibit a frightening potency where he would per-
ceive a lack. “It may very well be, then, that the power and potency of the
monster body in many classical horror films . . . should not be interpreted as
an eruption of the normally repressed animal sexuality of the civilized male
(the monster as double for the male viewer and characters in the film), but as
the feared power and potency of a different kind of sexuality (the monster as
double for the woman)” (Williams 1996, 20). Horror films have also been
subject to historical changes: while the classical horror at least granted some
power to both the monster and the woman through their differences to the
normal male, the post-Psycho, post–Peeping Tom films not only escalate the
doses of violence but—claims Williams—conflate the woman with the mon-
ster, often leaving the woman’s body as the only site of horror.
More than Williams, Barbara Creed presents a decisive departure from the
Mulvey/Heath model, leaving behind the Lacanian mold in her fascinating
chapter “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection”
 Rieser / MASCULINITY AND MONSTROSITY 373

(1996).5 Using Kristeva’s notion of the abject, Creed reads the maternal fig-
ure as one of the prime horrific elements in horror films as well as in Freudian
and Lacanian theories. The maternal figure (often, she points out, an illegiti-
mate conflation of the archaic, parthenogenetic mother with the dyadic
mother of the pre-Oedipal phase and/or the phallic mother) presents the dan-
ger of castration but goes way beyond that in her devouring threat of death
and annihilation. Despite her focus on the maternal, Creed also comments on
the male spectator, who in the duration of the film is drawn near to the annihi-
lation associated with the archaic mother and gains a reconstruction thereaf-
ter. In this process, the maternal figure is repudiated as stifling, the feminine
is repressed, and the social (patriarchal) order is restored. In short, horror
films bring their (male) audience in contact with the (fascinating as well as
threatening) abject, only to then eject it and redraw the boundaries. Creed
also differs significantly from Mulvey on the question of the gaze, when she
points out that horror, as opposed to mainstream, film does not constantly
suture the spectator into realist formalism and its ideology, instead challeng-
ing the spectator to look away. Turning the scopophilic pleasure (pleasure in
looking) at these moments into a decisive displeasure (the threat of disinte-
gration), it reclaims what Mulvey had only conceded to avant-garde cinema:
a breaking of voyeurism and its positioning of the spectator as male. How-
ever, in Creed’s analysis, horror films remain conservative in that after inves-
tigating the abject they ultimately reconstitute the male spectator’s self. The
combined power of plot, narrative, and imagery, one might add, is thus far
more threatening and realistic to the spectatrix.
A radical refutation of the Mulvey/Heath model also comes from Carol
Clover. In “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film” (1996) and Men,
Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992), both of
which have been exceedingly influential in film theory, she argues that the
slasher film—that post-Psycho form of horror with multiple killings by a
psychopathic monster—differs significantly from mainstream film and its
pertinent ideological projects. In her pioneering analysis, Clover points out a
number of formal departures that revolve around characterization (mostly the
construction of a Final Girl as survivor-hero figure) and related to that, audi-
ence identification (in particular, the male spectator’s identification with the
Final Girl).
Clover emphasizes that characterization in the slasher film (and, as she
points out in her book, in other subgenres such as the occult film and the
rape-revenge film) does not parallel male/female with masculine/feminine,
thereby breaking the patriarchal tendency of mainstream cinema to natural-
ize gender as biologically determined. “The fact that we have in the killer a
feminine male and in the main character a masculine female—parent and
Everyteen, respectively—would seem, especially in the latter case, to sug-
gest a loosening of the categories, or at least of the equation sex = gender”
(Clover 1996, 106). Indeed, the killer often has a nonnormative masculinity
374 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / April 2001

that the films see as deficient: he may be virginal or sexually inert (Halloween
as well as countless other films), a transvestite (Dressed to Kill), a transsex-
ual, or a schizophrenic with “a woman within” (Psycho). Conversely, the
Final Girl tends to exhibit a lack of traditional femininity and a surplus of
masculine attributes: an androgynous name, boyish interests, and above all,
“hero” qualities of active movement (tracking down the killer), active gaze,
and/or employment of phallic weaponry. This gender/sex split, especially
that of the Final Girl, is the cornerstone of Clover’s (1996) theorization of
gender in the slasher film, leading her to claim a certain progressiveness for
such films, unaccounted for in the film theories she reacts to: “What filmmak-
ers seem to know better than film critics is that gender is less a wall than a per-
meable membrane” (p. 91).
Later in her chapter, Clover anticipates opposition to her argument, which
would interpret the Final Girl to be well in service of the male viewer. Such an
interpretation might see the Final Girl as little more than a handy stand-in for
the male spectator in an otherwise thoroughly masculine discourse and focus
on her feminine characteristics (feminine garb, “tits and screams,” victim-
hood as femininity). In the face of such potentially oppositional interpreta-
tion, Clover (1996) refines her analysis, now seeing the Final Girl to be less a
masculine female than a fluid gender-bender, who exhibits masculine as well
as feminine attributes: “a physical female and a characterological androgyne:
like her name, not masculine, but either/or, both, ambiguous” (p. 106).
Related to such fluid and ambiguous characterization in the slasher film is
a similarly unhinged audience identification that is potentially even more dis-
ruptive of the gender order: Clover claims that contrary to Mulvey’s theoriza-
tion (of mainstream film), identification in the slasher is no longer clearly
split along sexual lines (male with male and female with female). Indeed, she
argues, it is closer to the Freudian theory of dreams in that it seems to allow
identification to be simultaneously with the attacker and the attacked. Most
important for Clover’s and our purposes is that the slasher invites a shifting
identification: the audience (predominantly male according to Clover) usu-
ally identifies at first with the killer, from whose point of view we witness the
multiple murders that are typical of the genre. Later, however, when the mon-
ster turns against the female protagonist, the audience shifts—along with a
change in camera point of view—its identification to the Final Girl. This pro-
cess demands of the male viewer not only to revise his identification midway
through the movie but also to shift it to a female figure, a fact unaccounted for
in most of the feminist film theory to that date.
The slasher indeed often seems to impose this identification either by pre-
senting no alternative masculine identification figures or by discarding them
dispassionately (especially if they attempt to rescue the Final Girl). Clover
(1996) concludes that the slasher film solves the femininity problem not by
obliterating the female and replacing her with representatives of the mascu-
line order—as “higher” forms of the horror genre do—but by regendering the
 Rieser / MASCULINITY AND MONSTROSITY 375

woman: “We are, as an audience, in the end ‘masculinized’ by and through

the very figure by and through whom we were earlier ‘feminized’ ” (p. 103).
The attraction for the male viewer in this situation may be—Clover (1996)
surmises—some sort of cinematic transvestism, allowing him to feel “like a
woman for a while” (p. 103).
These three seminal works shape the discussion of horror films to date and
have had enormous influence beyond that genre, in debates of gender, identi-
fication, and subject formation in film, making it impossible to do justice to
all the issues raised by them. Suffice it here to say that all three very convinc-
ingly argue that horror (particularly slasher) films’ characteristics warrant a
reevaluation of the basic premises of a psychoanalytically inspired feminist
film theory and criticism. However, as I intend to show in the following
pages, the slasher film nonetheless remains deeply implicated in patriarchal
ideology. I believe that particularly Clover and those who have followed her
argument (e.g., Knee 1996) overestimate the progressive effects of low hor-
ror’s formal divergence from the mainstream. Rather, it seems to me, these
films prove that cinematic sexism can simultaneously be very simplistic
(“torture the women” advised the much-revered Hitchcock) and consider-
ably more complex than traditional Hollywood boy-gets-girl formulas would
allow. In the main part of this article, I will therefore attempt to demonstrate
how the slashers’ gender disruption is folded back into the hegemonic mold,
how it serves to reinforce the heterosexist matrix, despite—or even by way
of—its break with mainstream gender forms.

FINAL GIRLS AND MONSTERS:

CHARACTERIZATION IN THE SLASHER FILM

In the following pages, I will delineate an interpretation of characteriza-

tion in the slasher mostly through a dialogical engagement with Clover’s the-
ses on the Final Girl phenomenon. While the following thus criticizes main
tenets of her analysis, I nonetheless believe that various, and even conflicting,
interpretations are possible. This is especially true of the slasher, since its typ-
ical low-genre messiness and unpredictable variations do allow for a wider
critical divergence than the more slick and systematic mainstream genres.
Moreover, as I have already stated, a longer study would have to take histori-
cal genre developments into account, such as the increasing marketing of
horror to women and teenage girls in particular. This being said, I also want to
stress, however, that my main aim is not to elicit the latent breadth of readings
but to analyze the most powerful ideological codes of horror, which continue
to show resilience beyond the corpus of this study, the 1970s and 1980s
slasher film.
There has been, for instance, some disagreement on the functioning of
“female sexuality” in horror films, sometimes claimed to be an aspect of the
376 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / April 2001

genre’s progressive nature, sometimes considered precisely a sign of its reac-

tionary ideology. A pro-horror view can point out that the representation of
female sexuality is more pronounced there than in mainstream genres and
that the patriarchal code of silence surrounding it is somewhat broken (cf.
Williams 1989). On the other hand—a critical perspective would say—this
same sexuality is traumatically punished in the horror film. In the slasher, for
example, sexually active girls—the Final Girl’s sidekicks—are typically
slaughtered like lambs in drawn-out voyeuristic scenes. Stephen Neale
(1980) has argued that “it could well be maintained that it is women’s sexual-
ity, . . . which constitutes the real problem that the horror cinema exists to
explore, and which constitutes also and ultimately that which is really mon-
strous” (p. 61). While I find the second position somewhat more convincing,
it is necessary to leave the binary opposition behind. Indeed, a closer look at
the reasons for the punishment of sexually active girls in slasher films reveals
both an even greater variety of possible interpretations and a very simple sex-
ism at work.
For example, the combination of a display of female sexuality and its sub-
sequent punishment can be read in terms of a double standard of that audience
segment that is arguably most challenged by an active female sexuality: ado-
lescent males.6 For them it is not so much the girls’ sexuality per se that is
“wrong” but the fact that they have sex with other boys. In filmic terms, these
girls are useful as titillation, as teasers, and are then, in a classical projective
manner, taken to task for it. Rather than—as is often suggested—repressing
sexuality tout-court, slasher films are very clear about punishing almost
exclusively the “promiscuity” and activity of these girls. Thereby they adhere
to Foucault’s interpretation of the production of sex in our culture, when he
states that “the politics of the body does not require the elision of sex or its
restriction solely to the reproductive function; it relies instead on a multiple
channeling into the controlled circuits of the economy—on what has been
called [by Marcuse] a hyper-repressive desublimation” (quoted in Benshoff
1997, 9). A psychoanalytic interpretation might read these same scenes dif-
ferently, for example, as transposed primal scenes (since they often take place
in a parental bedroom) or more generally as the parental bond in which the
father as the third term breaks the dyadic mother-child relationship (cf. Creed
1990, 1996). Finally, I would suggest, one can also read the girls’ sexual
interest as diverging from their textual role. By trying to attain sexual plea-
sure, they depart from the horror film’s single-minded preoccupation with
loss, separation, castration, expulsion, and terror. That is, they are punished
for “behaving out of genre,” enabling the film first to cross over into more
sexualized realms only to return “safely to violence” right away.
In the above, I dwelled on the sidekick women in the slasher film because,
as opposed to the protagonist, these women serve almost exclusively for voy-
euristic display as victims, a fact that in my opinion largely neutralizes the
 Rieser / MASCULINITY AND MONSTROSITY 377

“unconventional” characterization and identification processes around the

monster and the Final Girl, which I will turn to in the following pages.
The Final Girl is indeed an ambivalent and theoretically challenging phe-
nomenon that disrupts mainstream characterization practices. By placing her
in the very center of the narrative, by having her overcome various obstacles,
but above all by letting her rescue herself in the end, the slasher film and its
mainstream derivatives typically put a biological female in the position of the
traditionally male (victim) hero, making her the subject of the story rather
than the price (or prey) the hero wins at the end.
Although this remarkable positioning denotes a momentous departure
from traditional gender-signifying practices, I think one should not prema-
turely overestimate its potential to challenge the hegemonic discourse, which
is restrained and contradicted by other factors. First of all, the heroine’s “suc-
cess” is severely limited: she rarely wins anything, most of the time only
barely surviving her ordeals (Halloween), sometimes even losing her mind in
the process (Texas Chainsaw Massacre). In contrast to a typical male initia-
tion story, she does not gain valuable experience (unless we count the “knowl-
edge” of constant potential endangerment as such), she does not gain entrance
into the symbolic (access to language), and certainly, she does not get social
approval in the form of “getting” a boy. Furthermore, the self-sufficiency of
the Final Girl is severely undermined by the fact that woman is equated with
victimhood both in the instance of the Final Girl and in that of the sidekick
women. Above all, despite her hero status the female protagonist still exists
to support desire within the film. As Mulvey had claimed, it is usually the
screen male to whom the active role and the power to drive the story are
assigned, while the female functions primarily to support desire. That, I con-
tend, also holds true for the Final Girl. After all, we do not get to experience
her desire but only the desire of the monster for her.
In contrast to Clover, I would also claim that the Final Girl isn’t really all
that masculine. It is more precise to state that she is lacking in traditional fem-
ininity, mostly asexual (with an androgynous name), interstitial (between a
girl’s world and a heterosexual one), sometimes a tomboy. Even the modest
abilities that the films consider to be “out of character” for girls, such as
jump-starting a car, are rarely employed. Similarly, her usage of phallic
weaponry such as knives comes reluctantly, usually only after these weapons
have been thrust upon her by the monster (!), and is often better seen as a resi-
due of female castration threat than as a signifier of masculinity. Alterna-
tively, the phallic struggle between the monster and the girl may be seen to
signify that she has to accept sexuality on heterosexual and phallic terms and
her position within these sexual power relations—as feminine and subordi-
nated. After all, she does not turn these weapons against normative masculin-
ity but against a border-breaking monster that is threatening hegemonic gen-
der relations. In this interpretation, fighting the monster (to overcome
difference) is precisely what makes her ready for the dichotic and exclusive
378 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / April 2001

relations of heterosexuality rather than signifying a disruption of the gender

hierarchy. Most of all, the Final Girl lacks the ultimate signifier of masculin-
ity, by holding virtually no institutional or social power (the ultimate mean-
ing of the phallus in the Lacanian reading).
In this connection, it is instructive to take a second look at her centrality in
the story, that is, the curious absence of other leading figures. While in earlier
films of the genre the Final Girl might still have been helped or rescued by a
representative of patriarchal authority such as the psychiatrist in Halloween,
later films have chosen to do without such savior-figures. Clover—again
focusing only on the absence of male protagonists while disregarding the
dearth of female figures—applauds the Final Girl’s assumption of the roles
of survivor, helper, and rescuer. While I certainly agree on the (indeed
refreshing) progressiveness of the absence of male authority-type rescuers, I
think the absence of any figure able or willing to help her (e.g., no female
helpers either) reflects a very literal and tragic loneliness of the Final Girl
vis-à-vis the monster, whose power, moreover, is far more “realistic” than the
fantastic aspects of the slasher film leads us to believe. According to Lucy
Fischer (1996), horror functions as an “expressionistic ‘allegory of the
real,’ ” whose diegetic universe—tough fantastic—invokes a real social
order (p. 428).7 What the Final Girl’s “masculinity” therefore amounts to is
that she occupies the structural position of the victim-hero: actively gazing,
actively moving, possibly even tracking down the monster, fighting back,
surviving, succeeding. So she is indeed a woman-hero, a female figure in a
male mold rather than a heroine pursuing a feminine subjective trajectory.
Interestingly, despite her somewhat ambiguous gender status, the Final
Girl is sexually always denoted as female. Clover lists a number of possible
explanations for this sexual consistency across a spectrum of otherwise diver-
gent films: a filmic predilection to connect women and fear, women being
granted a wider emotional spectrum, and so forth. Perhaps most significantly,
this biological evidence of femaleness serves to delimit the Final Girl’s gen-
der fluidity, marking her as ultimately inescapably feminine. And “feminine”
she is, in many ways: flimsy dresses, skirts, and screams, “tits and ass” are
often quite literally stressed, alongside her tomboy character. She might thus
be a literalization of what Kaja Silverman has described as “the quintessen-
tial gesture of classical film: the displacement of masculine experiences of
loss and lack onto the female body, whose anatomical difference marks it
safely as Other” (quoted in Lindsey 1996, 292). Simply being so much in her
body (stumbling, wounded, crying, feeling) marks her feminine in diametri-
cal opposition to the (male) killer—who is visually coded as disembod-
ied—and the camera I/eye. Sometimes, it seems, she just cannot accept what
“at core” she already is: a good, reproductive woman, even the eternal
mother—a soccer mom perhaps—a characterization that does not contradict
her being a tough killer if she has to defend herself (or indeed her little ones)
like a lioness. In most films, however, she has not yet assented to her true
 Rieser / MASCULINITY AND MONSTROSITY 379

destination. She is in fact a Final Girl (not a Final Woman), who still has to
outgrow her intrauterine world: very often the Final Girl is pursued by the
killer in an intrauterine environment, be it the vaults in Texas Chainsaw Mas-
sacre or the parental residences in which the killer strikes in Halloween and
countless other slashers. The Final Girl’s task in each case is to get out of this
“motherly” body as much as to get away from the monster. Again, however,
she is only a stand-in, since this strict repudiation of the mother’s body has
been revealed by psychoanalysis as a peculiarly masculine trajectory. In
short, the fluidity assigned to her is often not so much one between masculine
and feminine as between girlhood and full-fledged motherhood. Halloween,
for example, portrays the protagonist as girlish in that she is presexual and
relates to the interests and mind-sets of the children she baby-sits. Corre-
spondingly, the little boy is the only other person to sense the foreboding of
danger and see the monster. Yet, from the start, she also exhibits “motherly
instincts”: contrary to her female sidekicks who get rid of the children
entrusted to them so that they can have sex with their boyfriends, she takes
over her responsibility. Moreover, when assailed by the monster she fights
back as much to protect the children as to save herself.
What are we then to make of this masculine/feminine/neutrum girl/
mother/hero? On one hand, the strong, resistant, self-rescuing woman first
incarnated as the slasher heroine (and later mainstreamed) repudiates the
chronic Hollywood formulas of the fragile female. On the other, this resis-
tance is not only countered in the surrounding discourse of the genre but is
also contained in the hegemonic struggle over meaning within the text. First
and foremost, the Final Girl poses no threat whatsoever (and least to the sym-
bolic order, Lancan’s Law of the Father); on the contrary, she is held in con-
stant endangerment, ensuring that she remains particularly reactive. As we
have seen, one way of resolving even the slight unease that her being a “mas-
culine woman” might produce is by couching her abilities in terms of an ani-
malistic motherly instinct: whereas bestiality is assigned to the monster, hers
is beastliness—a mammalian drive encompassing “naturally” wild defen-
siveness as well as nurturing qualities. More often, the Final Girl is a
watered-down version and patriarchal reconception of a liberal feminist
ideal, a modern woman who is masculine (read “strong”) enough to partici-
pate in the hierarchy of hegemony, maybe even tough enough to sock some
(bad) guys, yet far from rejecting this hegemony. Referring to the Alien, Ter-
minator, and Predator series, Christopher Sharrett (1996) remarks: “The
resistance these films propose is atomized and individualistic, usually in the
form of the fully masculinized female who internalizes the perspective and
means of the oppressor, while female sexuality itself is represented as gro-
tesque and malevolent” (p. 269). Far from seeing such a masculine female as
resistant, he indeed analyses her to be a “masculinized rejuvenator of the
patriarchal order” (p. 270). While I think this point of view strips her unnec-
essarily of any resistant or innovative aspects, I nonetheless can detect little
380 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / April 2001

more revolutionary in the Final Girl than a “sexually liberated” girl, one who
is ready to embrace premarital sex, but not prematurely, and thus manages to
keep an aura of chastity. In short, the Final Girl is modern but not too modern,
tough but not too tough, sexy but chaste. A post-1960s, post–women’s libera-
tion (but not feminist) version of girlhood and womanhood, she may be
enjoyable for women and in queer readings, but she is clearly kept in line with
the adolescent male’s level of acceptability.
In contrast to the Final Girl, the killer/monster is more diversified and
ambiguous: hardly to be seen, masked, hooded, hardly human; in fact, in
related subgenres the monster is often an animal (The Birds, Jaws) or even an
undefined threatening force (Pulse, The Entity). However, while Williams
(1996) may be right in her assertion that the monster is not simply a double
for the male spectator, signifying his repressed animal self, I do not agree
with her claim that the monster is a double for the woman. Instead, in the
slasher the killer/monster is predominantly male but nonetheless interstitial,
exhibiting a “categorical incompleteness” (Carroll 1990, 38). Indeed, where
the monstrous is not locum tenens of the maternal (these cases have been
superbly interpreted by Creed) it is almost invariably a male force outside the
bounds of hegemonic masculinity (cf. Connell 1995). And often these two
elements converge, with the killer incorporating his mother (Psycho), living
and moving through intrauterine spaces (Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre) or simply being “too close” to the maternal (Brain Dead). In any
case, his monstrosity is almost always defined in terms of gender deviance or
sexual deviance from a hegemonic masculine ideal. That is, he is a defective,
abnormal, perhaps nonmasculine man, a male queer figure, in short, but not a
woman.8 True, “his” deviance from the conventional catalog of masculine
etiquette is often coded (and more often read) as femininity, due to the binary
categorizing of the patriarchal gender system that always tries to pin down as
“feminine” whatever does not conform to its definition of masculine. But we
should not follow this hegemonic move of “othering” (to recode gender dif-
ference as gender inversion) analytically as well. When we equate the mon-
strous feminine man with womanhood, as Williams (1996) tends to do, we
collapse gender and sex, while I think it is both more accurate toward the
films and more apt politically to maintain this distinction. The difference
between the nonmasculine monster and the nonfeminine Final Girl (one bad,
the other good) also illuminates how patriarchy now under certain circum-
stances allows female figures a degree of masculinity, whereas femininity in
men is either funny or horrific. I will present a more detailed analysis of this
difference somewhat further on in this text.
To disentangle this ambiguous and somewhat contradictory structure, it is
helpful to refer to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (1995) notion of the reality of
gender as a two-dimensional field rather than the ideologically inflected
binary model we are used to. Based on research by Sandra Bem (1974), Sedg-
wick points out that the characteristics of femininity and masculinity are
 Rieser / MASCULINITY AND MONSTROSITY 381

Figure 1. The Traditional View of Masculinity and Femininity

actually widely spread among both sexes. Masculinity and femininity are
therefore not on a continuum such as that shown in Figure 1.
Rather, femininity and masculinity are independent variables, so that a
lack of femininity does not in and of itself signify a high degree of masculin-
ity and vice versa. This is graphically represented in Figure 2.
One conclusion to be drawn from Bem’s research is that some men and
women have many characteristics of masculinity and femininity, while oth-
ers (perhaps perceived to be asexual androgynes) have little of either. Even
more significant, perhaps, this model reveals a whole large, uncharted area of
gender diversity within the traditional values associated with masculinity and
femininity, which can elucidate the horrific in the slasher and its monster/
killer as well as the field of struggle between him, the Final Girl, and the spec-
tator. One can define this disavowed area (the central part of Figure 2) as rep-
resenting queerness, which, in Alexander Doty’s (1993) definition, is a “flex-
ible space for the expression of all aspects of non- (anti-, contra-) straight
cultural production and reception.”9
From this perspective, the threat posed by the queer monster is that it lurks
in the ideologically unaccounted for and repressed section (lacking mascu-
linity, exhibiting too much femininity, being neither/nor or both, perhaps
even roaming freely that whole territory), thereby challenging the neat sym-
metry of the binary gender system and the naturalization of gender as sex.
The Final Girl, too, occupies this interstitial realm to some extent. However,
as we have seen, she is usually forced to enter this realm of ambiguity (to
behave unfeminine) by the aggressive moves of the monster and is almost
invariably characterized as “deep down” feminine (biologically female, girl-
ish), while the monster is entirely beyond the realm of traditional masculin-
ity. In this regard, we should bear in mind again that the narrative function of
this masculine woman is foremost to escape and destroy the queer monster.
While she is ambiguous or shifting between two positions (bad enough), the
demasculinized male monster is—with regard to both sex and sexuality—
irrevocably outside the grasp of the binary gender system. Thus, although she
violates behavioral rules by covering sometimes both ends of the gender ide-
ology (being a woman but behaving “masculine”) and sometimes none
(being pre-/asexual), the monster rather than merely violating a rule
destabilizes categorization per se. Similarly, in his analysis of the confluence
382 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / April 2001

Figure 2. Masculinity and Femininity as Independent Variables

NOTE: “Real man” and “real woman” (corresponding to the poles of the line in Figure 1) refer to ideologically
proscribed positions, expecting women to score high on the femininity scale and low on the masculinity scale
and vice versa for men.

of horror film and network AIDS reporting, Andrew Parker (1993) concludes
that in both cases, “the plot revolves around an identical danger, the inability
to tell (until too late) who is Not One of Us. And in both instances, this danger
will be surmounted with the identification, isolation, and extermination of
the monster, as the founding binary order, at great though ‘necessary’ cost to
human life, is restored once more to its original integrity” (p. 218). Despite
these differences between the monster and the Final Girl, in the eyes of para-
noid hegemonic masculinity she nonetheless suffers from an uncanny close-
ness to the killer—to be evidenced in their nonverbal communication and
their irrational ability to “find each other,” a closeness that, for the “average
(male) spectator,” suggests she deserves the threats posed against her. But the
films tend to turn this around, presenting this shared inhabitance of the
ambiguous gender space as their mutual problem. It almost seems as though
they are competing for clarification, for an exit into the symbolic from the
polymorphous and confused underground of nonhegemonic gender spaces.
The difference as well as the similarity between these two figures is pow-
erful evidence of the achievements of the feminist movement as well as the
retaining power of patriarchal signification on the male adolescent audience.
After all, corresponding to the “masculine” behavior of the Final Girl, mod-
ern patriarchy is not a sex-apartheid system but rather a hegemonic gender
 Rieser / MASCULINITY AND MONSTROSITY 383

system that perpetually redefines masculine as universal and vice versa but
allows females to participate and compete (cf. Laclau and Mouffe 1985). The
filmic figuration of the Final Girl thus accommodates the real-world success
of women to break down walls of resistance and to gain access to positions
earlier strictly reserved for males. As outside the cinema, however, this par-
ticular construction simultaneously attempts to restrict women to a purely
reactive and perpetually disadvantaged position by defining any active
behavior as “masculine.” Less acceptable, according to slasher films (and
many other horror films), is the gender bending of gays, transvestites, trans-
sexuals, or possibly even just androgynous sissies (all recoded as aggressive
abnormal killers): characters who are made monstrous precisely because of
their closeness, rather than their distance from the (fears of the) implied spec-
tator. As Sedgwick (1990) puts it: “Because the paths of male entitlement . . .
required certain intense male bonds that were not readily distinguishable
from the most reprobated bonds, an endemic and ineradicable state of what I
am calling male homosexual panic became the normal condition of male het-
erosexual entitlement” (pp. 184-85). Alternatively, we might interpret the
success of the masculine female over the feminine male as an instance where
the “one-sex model” (women as lesser men) still shines through the other-
wise hegemonic “two-sex model” (women as the Other of men): a masculine
woman, then, is no contradiction, but an indeterminate monster is unaccept-
able. This deeply patriarchal and homophobic construction of the monster
even extends to a perverted accommodation of feminism in that it offers this
figure as a negative, despicable adversary/obstacle for the “progressive”
female protagonist and thus makes him (rather than the gender system or
“straight” men) carry the stigma of reactionary resistance to feminist
advances! But feminism interests the slasher film and its derivatives only up
to a certain point: since horror mostly toys with border disruption that in the
end is contained or refuted, queerness still constitutes the major monstrosity
in slasher and other horror films (cf. Benshoff 1997). What has changed is
that under exceptional circumstances, the somewhat masculine woman is no
longer declared as queer and therefore monstrous.

IDENTIFICATION, CONTROL, AND (CON)FUSION

To understand the workings of gender in film, identification is an even

more important analytical ground than characterization, because it involves
the construction of femininity and masculinity rather than their mere presen-
tation on the screen. Following this major insight, film theory in the 1970s
turned from a study of “images of women” (i.e., characterization) to an
analysis of the involvement and construction of social power relations in the
filmic text, most of all by tracing the psychosexual identification on the part
of the audience. This favoring of a semiotic/constructivist over a content/
384 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / April 2001

sociological approach has remained very popular, despite the growing disen-
chantment with the Lacanian variant of that paradigm. For Clover (1992,
1996), too, the figure of the Final Girl is most interesting not in itself but for
its implications on the identification of the audience, particularly of the (het-
erosexual) male adolescent. Clover (1996) concentrates on (heterosexual)
male viewers for two reasons: because she assumes them to make up the larg-
est part of the slasher audience (pp. 98, 104), but perhaps even more impor-
tant because for them, identifying with the Final Girl constitutes a crossing of
gender boundaries, which, Clover claims, throws them into a feminine and
passive position thereby subverting the patriarchal sex-gender equation.
Since I take issue with this analysis, I follow Clover in concentrating on the
male audience, without implying that it is necessarily the largest segment. It
is here that I depart most decidedly from her analysis, both in terms of the
tracing of the possible identification patterns and in the political impact of
these forms of identification. That is, I posit that the male spectator does nei-
ther straightforwardly nor entirely positively identify with the female victim-
hero and thus does not necessarily embrace an antipatriarchal and/or passive
position.
To a certain extent, horror (especially slasher) films are disruptive in that
they throw up inconsistencies and contradictions that they themselves cannot
resolve. Clover follows one of them when she claims the Final Girl to be active
but the spectator—by virtue of his identification with her—to become pas-
sive. Adam Knee (1996) takes this position to an extreme by claiming that the
male “identification with feminine figures in distress [requires of them a] con-
templation of one’s own passivity, humiliation, and penetration” (pp. 214-15).
The contrary is more true. Far from being disruptive, the ambivalence and
contradictions surrounding identification in these films serve a conservative
purpose: the male spectator is drawn toward a passive, penetrated position,
but not really into it, and is released at the end (cf. Creed). Therefore, the bur-
den of the confused state between active and passive always remains with the
active woman: the female hero, not the male spectator, is located in the dou-
ble bind of not being masculine enough in one way and not being feminine
enough in another. As Tania Modleski (1986) concludes: “The mastery that
these popular texts no longer permit through effecting closure or eliciting
narcissistic identification is often reasserted through projecting the experi-
ence of submission and defenselessness onto the female body. In this way the
texts enable the male spectator to distance himself somewhat from the terror.
And, as usual, it is the female spectator which is truly deprived of ‘solace and
pleasure’ ” (p. 163).
One might even propose that male spectators do not identify in a straight-
forward way with the female protagonist (in the sense of feeling to be her) but
rather empathize with her. Witness, for example, that the gaze of the camera is
only sometimes with her (and even more rarely through her eyes), while at
other times “her” point of view is subverted by shots that are looking down at
 Rieser / MASCULINITY AND MONSTROSITY 385

her, huddled and shivering in a corner (a camera angle of central importance,

it seems, since it is also reproduced numerous times on posters and video
jackets).10 Thus, the film lets a male spectator feel her terror, but it remains
nonetheless a female who serves as the site/sight of terror. In other words, the
fluidity and ambiguity surrounding the Final Girl’s character extend to the
narrative and audiovisual construction of identification, wavering between
feeling like her and merely feeling with her, who “is being beaten” instead of
the spectator. This corresponds to her being the body, the “meat” of the film,
while the killer remains mostly unseen, disembodied, just like the camera and
the spectator. Thus, the male spectator is invited to identify with her but is
also distanced by a dualism that defines feminine as body and masculine as
mind (cf. McLarty 1996, 247). I would like to stress again that I am here
delineating the patriarchal recuperation of the gender system following the
disruption of traditional cinematic codes through a more shifting and fluid
identification. This is not to say, however, that individual male audience
members might not be thrown into gender confusion or embrace passivity
beyond the distancing devices the text offers. Also, of course, the intermin-
gling of contradictory factors in the Final Girl—femininity, asexuality, activ-
ity, power, fear, and being pursued—and the ultimate release from that posi-
tion that I have pointed out might have very different thrills for a female
audience. Similarly, if my reading were less aiming at ideological recupera-
tion but instead deconstructively reading textual gaps and resistances, it
might be useful to focus on the power of the monster/killer, who (or should
we say which?) although “othered” and ultimately destroyed, nonetheless
drives the story and allows for a vicarious negative identification.
But let us return to the identification patterns offered to the male adoles-
cent viewers by the slasher film. Without stretching the texts too far, one
could claim that the Final Girl is served up less as a stand-in for the male
viewer than as an imaginary potential partner (“my girl”). And indeed the
Final Girl does not so much embody what a male adolescent would want to be
himself but how he would like his girl to be: not passive but not too active, and
above all, turning down (indeed against) that other man who desires her,
while at the same time fighting her way out of a somewhat too restrictive
(read: parental) definition of girlhood (now we don’t want her too chaste, do
we?). The resultant structure of empathy is not too innovative either, being
much practiced outside the film world and, one may note, entirely in accor-
dance with patriarchal power relations. Indeed, it corresponds perfectly to the
established masculinist practice of “protecting” women in the male’s sphere
of influence (wife, girlfriend, sister, daughter) from other men. Or, to prove
my point negatively: who but the spectator could be the partner of the Final
Girl? Whose romance but that of spectator and the Final Girl could possibly
be blocked by the monster—for this is a main function of the monster accord-
ing to Benshoff (1997, 4)? After all, there is a dearth of alternative male lead
figures to start with, and in the end it is only her and “us” who are left. It is this
386 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / April 2001

consciously arranged absence of male protagonists above all that holds out an
invitation to the spectator to fill the vacuum. Thus, instead of a male lead fig-
ure getting the girl on the spectator’s behalf, the spectator is directly involved.
Other male figures could only be rivals in such a set-up—and are either
immediately disposed of (male sidekicks) or refuted (the monster). In the lat-
ter case, this happens when he turns from punishing “bad” girls to desiring
the spectator’s girl: only then is the earlier audience identification with the
killer/monster disavowed and he is “named” and unmasked. In other words,
he is killed off, or at least disappears, not because he changes in any way (he
usually doesn’t) but because he now turns against the heterosexual matrix of
the “new,” more sensitive males, who feel they have some “femininity
inside” and can accept “their” women to have certain masculine aspects. It is
telling in this regard that the monster is now at the receiving end of phallic
weapons, lying down, bending over; he is un-masc-ed, and is, most of all,
often denounced as a border-crossing pervert that has to be abjected. It is even
more telling, however, that the monster—being (nearly) a man after all—is
not punished in equal “passionate” measure to the Final Girl or any of her
sidekicks. He, like his male victims, the boys and men, is disposed of quite
quickly, often “painlessly,” and above all, never ever has to endure or repre-
sent terror. This one is exclusively for the girls—and the vicarious enjoyment
of the audience.
To put my interpretation of the identification patterns in these films in
more cinematic terms: I posit that these films—at least after dissolving the
view through the eyes of the killer—favor primary identification (with the
narrative and camera) over secondary identification (with the characters).
While in mainstream films the latter serve as an anchoring point, especially
for the distribution of active/passive dichotomies on male/female, in slasher
films this secondary identification is indeed more fluid and broken (see Clo-
ver 1996). However, it is my contention that in the process primary identifica-
tion not only remains in place but may indeed be strengthened: this “body
genre” (Williams) in its attempt to get us frightened and/or disgusted simply
goes a more direct route both in its challenge to and its subsequent reassur-
ance of the male viewer.
Or, to put it differently again, these films play with a “hot spot” of mascu-
linity: the issue of control. In the realist, mainstream mode, primary identifi-
cation serves to create a phantasmatic belief in the viewer that he or she con-
trols the film’s advance, that it is “our” story—or at least conceals the passive
helplessness of the invisible and inaudible position of the voyeur. In horror
films, and in slasher films particularly, this tenet is often challenged: the male
viewer loses control, instead being subjected to moments of terror, surprise,
fear, passivity, and possibly even being thrown into masochistic identifica-
tion, through a story that for a certain time does not behave the way he wants.
Neither is he always spared to face his voyeuristic and “helpless” position
vis-à-vis the screen. But it is a relatively controlled loss of control, an invita-
 Rieser / MASCULINITY AND MONSTROSITY 387

tion to the spectator to play loss of control. After all, it abuses the woman as a
stand-in for this passive position, guides the spectator through an
“identificatory” progression from monster to woman, does not directly chal-
lenge his sex or sexuality, and offers him a story that may be more to his liking
than he admits. In fact, even this loss of control, the supposedly unpleasant
part of the horror trajectory, is usually done as pleasurably for the “average”
male as possible. With enough distance (unlike women, for example), the
thrill may be quite fun. Some theorists have even claimed that it is precisely
this masochistic positioning into passivity and inertia that is the pleasure of
cinema—in other genres, however more circumscribed or marginalized
because of its connotation of gayness and/or femininity. As Richard Dyer
(1993) and Kaja Silverman (1992), two leading scholars in this regard, point
out, such a masochistic positioning is not necessarily any more disruptive of
patriarchy than sadistic/voyeuristic patterns of identification. In the slasher
case, for example, the spectator’s being drawn into proximity of a woman’s
position (whether identification or empathy) should not automatically be per-
ceived as a promising signal. As Lianne McLarty (1996) points out: “Con-
temporary horror seems doubly dependent on images of the feminine for its
postmodern paranoia: it simultaneously associates the monstrous with the
feminine and communicates postmodern victimization through images of
feminization” (p. 234). However playful and “soft” they may be on this, ulti-
mately most horror films let the male viewer regain the phantasmatic belief in
control that they had denied him initially. Thus, the Final Girl finally obeys
the spectator’s (silently screamed) commands: on “Run!” she runs, on “Grab
the knife!” she grabs it. That way, across a fluid, broken, incomplete second-
ary identification, primary identification here addresses the viewer directly in
a narrative and audiovisual trajectory that challenges but ultimately rein-
forces the viewer’s subjectivity in a heteronormative and patriarchal system.
Moreover, insofar as secondary identification with the Final Girl does
indeed occur in the slasher, it is more in accordance with Freud’s conception
of this process in that it contains a significant aggressive aspect. According to
Freud, identification is not only a benign “wanting to be (like)” that other per-
son but also a partly destructive force. I would argue that the viewer’s identi-
fication with the Final Girl particularly exhibits “aggressive identification
based on a will to dominate and to humiliate sexually the object secretly cov-
eted” (Fuss 1993, 199). Following Freud’s arguments, such identification is
related to an oral cannibalistic form (originating in the identification with the
mother who fed us), and it is thus interesting to note that aggression in horror
films often takes a decidedly cannibalistic form. While it is often remarked
that monsters and their weapons are typically phallic, they are equally often
related to devouring. Horror films typically feature animals that see humans
as food (Jaws), vampires (Dracula movies), zombies munching on human
flesh (Romero’s Living Dead series), butchers that have turned to slaughter-
ing humans (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), cannibals (Silence of the
388 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / April 2001

Lambs), weapons such as knives or kitchen machines (Pulse, Gremlins), hor-

rific family dinners (Brain Dead), or more generally, humans as meat—the
knife that gives the slasher genre its name being a case in point. Whether or
not it is so clearly oral/cannibalistic, the identification with the female hero
always contains a strong aggressive streak, conveniently transposed onto the
monster. Thus, we can identify positively with the pure girl while the aggres-
sive aspect is associated with the sexually confused killer. This is one of the
functions of the initial positioning of the spectator in the monster: he can thus
serve all the better as the receptacle of our aggressive impulses that are later
disavowed. Even though the camera’s point of view may at the beginning of
the film be associated with the killer, identification with him is countered
from the start by distancing devices (heavy breathing or heartbeats, visual
codes such as obstructed views, narrative austerity with regard to his charac-
ter, etc.). The resulting significant lack of emotional identification with the
monster, I would argue, serves to make him first an empty vessel for our
access to the story, and later an empty slate for the above-mentioned projec-
tion of aggressive impulses.
This brings us to the fact that illegitimate (con)fusion is one of the prime
threats in the slasher (and most of the films inspired by it). The enveloping
maternal signifiers such as images of the vagina dentata, haunted houses or
underground chambers, the feminine men, the masculine women, the specta-
tor in a monster, the male spectator identifying with a woman—they are
prime examples of such improper fusions, who are defined as monstrous,
then punished and expelled. In other words, the slasher first fuses things, peo-
ple, and characters that “don’t belong together” and puts into motion what is
supposed to remain stable, thereby obliterating borderlines deemed impor-
tant for maintaining the social fabric. In the film’s duration, these confusing
proximities are progressively disentangled, whereby female subjectivity/
sexuality and nonhegemonic masculinity are rejected and the other “prob-
lems” are resolved: the monster is unmasked and subsequently killed or dis-
carded—that is, othered and disavowed. The Final Girl, after having been
frightened enough and having had to accept the patriarchal terms of sexuality,
is now ready for the heterosexual contract as a woman whose femininity is
not a powerful aspect in itself but a mirror to masculinity—or else she goes
catatonic (a perfidious symbol of frigidity) in which case she is left behind
like the monster. And the viewer, who had originally been drawn into the
monster’s position and then led to fight these very impulses during the
emphatic alignment with the Final Girl, is finally helped out, into a position
of (imaginary) control and ultimately, at the film’s end, released to resume
the normative (male) position. In other words, difference from hegemony
(queer- ness) is othered while heterosexuality and the sex/gender system it
maintains are reinstated.
Taking a cue from Foucault, we can say that the aim of these films is not at
all to repress sexual agency itself—as the literature often suggests—but
 Rieser / MASCULINITY AND MONSTROSITY 389

rather to affirm (phallic) sexuality and control deviations thereof. In terms of

the Sedgwick system, we can state that the Final Girl and the monster fight
over who gets to leave the impossible field of gender confusion and who per-
ishes there—leaving the spectator as the profiting third party. Thus, a binary
antagonism is established even in the depiction of broken binaries, since leav-
ing or perishing remain the only options for the Final Girl and the monster
alike. Most important, the audience, which has temporarily and thrillingly been
allowed into the field of ambiguity, is “reassured” that this gender-bending
sphere is uninhabitable.
Disavowing difference seems to be the foremost function of these films: it
is at first maliciously associated with active women and the threateningly
independent and powerful (male) monster but is subsequently anchored by
the Final Girl, whose awakening sexuality, being perceived as a threat, is con-
sequently controlled and contained. What is left is femininity defined as the
Other of phallic masculinity. That is, what gets really killed in the process of
the film is difference. Any remaining ambiguity (such as the Final Girl’s
nonfeminine, asexual conduct) is resolved when she successfully fights the
transgender monster, at which point femininity and masculinity are more
safely distributed: the former tied to her—and through the loss of control to
the passive film experience—and the latter to the audience, especially toward
the end, when it regains imaginary control and leaves both the monster and
the woman behind. In a corresponding movement, the monstrous (nonhege-
monic masculinity) is expulsed from the viewer onto the screen as the killer
becomes visible, entering the screen as an object and thereafter is expulsed from
there, too, killed or vanishing. While these films’ ambivalent structure and
their dialectical toying with difference and queerness (presenting-rejecting)
may accommodate female or queer pleasures or thrills, their tendency to pun-
ish nonhegemonic masculinity and to expulse femininity ultimately serves to
reinforce heterosexual and homophobic masculinity. Normative male iden-
tity can thus be placed in imaginary danger (confusion and border break-
down) and then rescued in a process of separation and border reinstitution,
without ever being scrutinized itself.
In summary, slasher films (and, I would argue, many of their derivatives)
dismally fail to take advantage of the field of possibilities opened up by their
formal departures from the Hollywood formulas. If we follow McLarty
(1996) in her assertion that “the issue . . . is not simply one of a tension among
discourses but a struggle over them” (p. 249), then the struggle over horror—
involving issues such as gender fluidity, queerness, female protagonists, and
hegemonic masculinity—is resolved in most cases in a reactionary manner.
On the whole, the slasher in my analysis remains quite rigorously hegemonic,
indeed often utterly (hetero)sexist, as can be witnessed in the standard pun-
ishment of sexually active women, the conflation of femininity with victim-
hood and fright, or the homophobic recoil from feminine men and other
forms of queerness. In fact, if these films do realize a progressive potential at
390 MEN AND MASCULINITIES / April 2001

all, it is more likely to be a critique of the stifling bourgeois family (Psycho

et al.), media seduction (some Cronenberg films), racism (Night of the Living
Dead), consumerism (Dawn of the Dead), or unethical corporations (Alien
series) but is highly unlikely to be a profeminist project. On the contrary, vio-
lently misogynist and homophobic images and narratives by and large char-
acterize the slasher.
Ultimately, the slashers’ “playful” intrusions into the gender field conve-
niently conceal that normative masculinity itself is the source of the mon-
strous. If we consider how readily the audience accepts narratives where fem-
ininity equals victimhood and masculinity equals rape and murder, we have
to conclude that this version of masculinity should have a government warn-
ing label: “Quitting being a normal male now greatly reduces danger to your-
self and others.” However, this is precisely what most horror films do not do.
On the contrary, they are actively engaged in projecting the violent impact of
hegemonic masculinity onto the (nonnormative) monster to then insidiously
exorcise it—for the moment, until the next film.

NOTES
1. Films in the mold of the 1970s and 1980s slasher continue to be made (often going
straight to video), but the most significant development has been a mainstreaming of its ele-
ments, for example, in the Scream series, in I Know What You Did Last Summer, in Silence of the
Lambs, and in the science fiction horror of the Alien series. Apart from the bigger-budget look,
these films manifest a couple of significant changes from the slasher, foremost (especially in the
Alien series) an even more active and powerful heroine. However, I would argue that a significant
number of the arguments I propose below for the 1970s and 1980s slasher (e.g., limited success,
an equation of femininity with victimhood, lack of social or institutional power, an “othering” of
nonnormative masculinity) also hold true for these later manifestations, particularly as far as the
monster/killer and identification processes are concerned. A conclusive testing of this hypothe-
sis, would, however, necessitate a separate study.
2. For an extended theorization of (male) masochistic identification, see Studlar (1988)
and—with a very different perspective—Silverman (1992). Neither of them, however, has fo-
cused on the horror film.
3. One should mention also two pioneers of psychoanalytical approaches to the genre:
Margaret Tarratt (1970) and particularly the prolific theorist Robin Wood (1986, 1989; Wood
and Lippe 1979).
4. Compare also her book on pornography, Hard Core (1989).
5. Compare also her 1996 chapter and her book The Monstrous-Feminine (1993).
6. It is a matter of dispute whether male viewers constitute a majority of the horror audi-
ence. Most would agree, however, that for the 1970s and 1980s slasher it is a sine qua non or core
group and that even in later cases it remains a main target group that producers would definitely
not want to alienate.
7. See also Clifford (1974, 11, 25).
8. For a useful introduction to the term queer and its political and academic uses, see
Smyth (1992) and the first chapter of Doty (1993).
9. Actually, ideological norms can be seen to be far more challenged: to adequately capture
gender “performativity” (Butler 1990) we would have to go beyond such static models figuring
in the dynamic aspect of lived existence.
 Rieser / MASCULINITY AND MONSTROSITY 391

10. I coined “empathic identification” to account for the empirical observation of a “bro-
ken” subjective camera. The concept is also in accordance with two points I raise below, namely,
the well-known distinction between primary and secondary identification and the Freudian con-
cept of identification as containing positive as well as aggressive components.

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Klaus Rieser is an assistant professor at the University of Graz, Austria, where he

teaches classes in American studies and media analysis. His major research areas com-
prise ethnicity and film, gender and film, and film theory. At present, he is concluding
work on a book with the working title Borderlines and Passages: Difference and Trans-
formation of Film Masculinities.