My paper...

[trinityvixen]

yogi_schuldich requested I post this for some reason. It's a paper I wrote for horror that, FOR NO REASON I CAN FATHOM, got a plus, when the paper I actually researched a lot more only got a check. I guess Prof. McKenna was just more lenient than his TA in grading.Dude, that goalie was pissed about something:
New Sympathies for Old Slashers


Outwit, outplay, outlast.
-motto of the television show Survivor

Imagine a medium whose proponents are vilified in the mainstream media. The majority are men and are considered to be sadomasochists who enjoy murder and mayhem who also welcome violence upon themselves. Connections between this medium and real-life violence are drawn by visible government figures. Today, this medium is the electronic game, on console, computer, or in the arcade. Twenty years ago, it was the slasher, “the most disreputable form of horror film” (Pinedo 71). Criticism of slashers once attributed their popularity on a strict sadomasochistic axis. “Either you wish you had the power to carve up a score of unsuspecting victims or you envy the dead” (Crane 3-4), so you’re either a Freddy Krueger in human clothing or you believe you deserve the same fate as the butchered. The gaming generation, whose children spend almost an hour a day playing games and who spend more money on games than on films (Katz 2000), has stimulated debates, similar to those held regarding the slasher, about the causal relationship between violent games and violent behavior. Consequently, there appears to be a connection between this new game-oriented audience and the popular resurgence of the slasher. Freddy Vs. Jason’s (Yu 2003) success is an example of reborn regard held for the fictional unkillable killers. The sympathy of the audience with the titular duo in Freddy Vs. Jason is not born of mutual sadism but of shrewd respect. In a world where gamers rank their elites “based on how many people [they] kill” (Keegan 1999), the slasher villain is the penultimate player, the one likely to kill the most, last the longest, and, most importantly for gamers, be able to revive from a temporary death setback. The slasher film revival is not due to its capacity to use death to scare but rather due to its ability to engender camaraderie with the killer through the spirit of competition that is the hallmark of the gaming generation.
Slasher films, when they were first released, frightened audiences through the exploitation of the everyday terror. Violence occurs in slashers because characters “occup[ied] the wrong space at the wrong time,” (Crane 147); they scared the audience by reminding them that danger and death are unpredictable and inescapable occurrences. That notwithstanding, slasher films managed to provide a cathartic release upon confrontation with mortality, as it is the characters who die, not the viewers, a better-them-than-me reassurance (Crane 140, Pinedo 86). Slasher films, like the cycles of horror that preceded them, “whet[ted] the appetites of their...audiences for more” (Pinedo 61) and could be seen as the precursors to the gaming generation as well as to future horror cycles. The slasher has an atypical narrative structure, despite all the conventions associated with and expected of it (Pinedo 44), as are parodied by films such Scream (Craven 1996). Their narratives offer nothing “redemptive, revelatory, logical, or climatic (it does not resolve conflicts)” (Crane 4). Similarly, video games “are designed for repeated playing, and as such necessarily resist narrative closure” (Finn 2000). Some, especially the action-horror games such as Resident Evil (Capcom 1996) and Silent Hill (Konami 1999), complicate the component of what little narrative they have by presenting multiple characters, branching story lines, alternate endings, and numerous sequels. They are often set up with an introduction and a conclusion, but the duration is indeterminate, dependent on the player, and often events occur that do not contribute at all to the overriding story arc. The villains usually persist past the end of the game, necessitating the sequels. Like the slasher, the zombie hordes of Resident Evil do not go away and seem never to permanently die–the threat still lives on, even after many individual monsters are dispatched.
However, it is the glory of the body count in video games that generates much of the respect for the slasher. As slashers do for their fans, video games permit their players “to enjoy seeing totally soulless, characterless, faceless, inhuman “things” being blown away in the goriest possible manner” (Horsley 228). The legions of enemies blur together in video games because they lack personality, history, or any other form of interactivity with the player. Slasher films and video games have this much in common; the nominally individuated characters presented to the audience are “fodder” whose deaths are expected and highly anticipated, making that the characters’ sole entertaining contribution to the film (Crane 140). Disinterest in the lives of the victims stems from their inability to be more than speed bumps on the road to the end of the film (Pinedo 74-75). Instead, the focus shifts to the method of death. Accordingly, Freddy Vs. Jason’s DVD release (New Line Home Entertainment Inc. 2004) has a special feature titled “Jump to a Death,” with a “Kill All” loop that allows the loose narrative to be skipped entirely, creating a new twenty-minute piece of film consisting only of the murders committed by Freddy and Jason. The “Jump to a Death” cut of Freddy Vs. Jason thus plays out exactly as a video game; the viewer moves to one arena where an obstruction, the victim, must be eliminated in order to advance to the next area and the next obstacle. The cycle repeats, while the number of kills escalates, drawing nearer to some arbitrary end along the sequence, defined only by the lack of new things, inhuman or human fodder, to kill.
It is important to note that only the most successful killers will advance to the harder levels; in the slasher, the harder levels translate as those characters who are increasingly aware of the danger they are in and plan accordingly. The video game player kills monsters who usually then disappear, leaving behind blood or rewards (Pargman 2000) that usually serve either to further the narrative or to improve the player’s ability to kill. Some games elevate the necessity for kills above a merely a determination of status or prowess; kills are used to ensure survival. Aliens Vs. Predator (Fox Interactive 1999), based on the popular horror-science fiction films, turns the human fodder into victims who are themselves the reward for killing. As an alien, the player replenishes health by eating humans and predators; in the sequel, Aliens Vs. Predator 2 (Fox Interactive 2001), the progression from fragile face-hugger to adult alien requires the parasitic invasion of a host. As a predator, the player collects alien and human skulls as trophies, and a battle against the queen alien is fought without weapons to prove the honor of the predator as hunter. Death, in the Aliens Vs. Predator games, is not only about slaughter of the stale, characterless humans. It is about honor and survival as the species face-off against each other, which is particularly fierce when players do so through online multi-player competitions. Not surprisingly, the film Aliens Vs. Predator’s (Anderson 2004) slogan emphasizes this motif of survival requiring death, expressly that of the less advanced or adapted humans: “No matter who wins, we lose” (www.avp-movie.com).
As with the aliens, Freddy reveals that he, too, must kill in order to exist. Over a montage of his previous victims’ deaths, who are practically indistinguishable from one to the next, Freddy exclaims, “Being dead wasn’t a problem, but being forgotten? Now that’s a bitch! I can’t come back if nobody remembers me!” Jason is not as bound to memory and “can never die,” according to his mother; his first victim in Freddy vs. Jason morphs into previous victims, all of whom say they earned their deaths for getting in his way. From the outset, Jason and Freddy are set up as ideal player avatars, as both have powers that enable them to overcome their antagonists–ironically, the film’s supposed protagonists–and each has prodigious means of recovery, akin to a continue or a reset after dying in a video game. Contrasted with the barrage of minor characters who have fallen to the two killers, the viewer/player can see the permanent dominance of the killers over the other victims who might have, occasionally, and only ever temporarily defeated them. Before the credits have rolled, both Freddy and Jason are established as the elite, the long-reigning champions, “confirm[ing] for the audience that the multi-murderer[s] on view [are the] most talented specialist[s] worthy of our undivided attention” (Crane 166). As the situation among the fodder gets more desperate, even they recognize that they are not the center of the story. They are the interchangeable, the replaceable, and the respawnable. The only way to win is to throw in behind one or the other, Freddy or Jason; “the protagonist must, to survive, become more violent, more savage than the ostensible monster” (Crane 12), and none of the new teenagers can cut it. The humans are reduced to observation, like the crowds of people who watch proficient dancers master complex moves and beats in games such as Dance Dance Revolution (Wilson 2000). Jason and Freddy attack each other for the honor of being the best, their respective abilities to survive now unassailable.
As stalkers, both Freddy and Jason have been playing their games for a long time (Crane 167), their motives being only to keep playing; only now, the audience also plays along. The slasher, always popular, is now more so, is adored for being the slasher as the best player in the death game. The kick to the slasher genre required streamlining the narrative to reflect gamer expectations and knowledge in order to thrive. It needed players for whom “the impossible is easy” and opposing forces for whom “logic is practically impossible” (Crane 137); Freddy vs. Jason offers a choice of two players, and a host of ignorant characters that the pair can sneak around and pick off without suffering any significant damage. One might argue that the revival of slasher icons is attributable to the same factors that inspired slashers in the first place, the response to the fear of the everyday erupting into a cavalcade of the gruesome. It is arguable that terrorist attacks such as the 9/11 bombings of the World Trade Center and Pentagon are responsible for reawakening the paranoia about the terrible rising to disrupt the mundane. Such paranoia serves horror protagonists well, allows them the resourcefulness to survive, and the film acts as a reassurance that “as bad as things are in reality, they could be infinitely worse” (Pinedo 66, 76). This explanation cannot address the failure of Jason X (Isaac 2001), a straight forward slasher and Friday the 13th sequel, to revive the genre in a post-9/11 world. But, perhaps most tellingly, it is the slasher itself that contradicts the slasher-as-frightening explanation for the slasher film’s revival. In Freddy Vs. Jason, one character stands up to Freddy and lets him know, point-blank: “I mean, come on. Get real. You’re not even scary.”



















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Now, don't you feel enlightened? You didn't read it, did you? Good, I wouldn't have...

Back to pretending I have an idea for my personal essay...