Retro Slashers

While movie critics took to the airwaves to decry the slasher films flooding theaters in the early 1980s, hardcore feminists groups like N.O.W. took to the streets to protest the films, theaters showing slashers, and the dirty degenerates who attended the showings. If the popular feminists propaganda is to be believed, slasher films were designed to teach the lowest level of pervert how to stalk, rape, and murder women. The entire women’s lib movement could crumble into ruins if films like Maniac and Friday the 13th were allowed to be shown in movie houses. Armed with placards and banshee shrieks, these stormtroopers in high-heels marched in front of any theater showing a slasher on the Siskel and Ebert hit list.

While these feminist group claimed to be protecting the female race from dangerous movies, the simple truth is these ladies found an easy way to get on television. All of their rage and fury was nothing more than cheap publicity for their organizations. I suspect some of the protests were actually organized by the producers and distributors for films like Maniac and I Spit on Your Grave. The media attention increased ticket sales for the very films the fems wanted banned.

If the feminists weren’t so intellectually dishonest when it came to arguing against slasher films, then they would’ve seen that no other genre features as many strong female characters as the slasher. Let’s take Jamie Lee Curtis for a quick example. Curtis plays a woman who defeats evil through inner strength and intelligence in Halloween, Halloween II, Terror Train, Prom Night, The Fog, and Roadgames. She wasn’t exploited until she made a mainstream picture, Trading Places, and was reduced to playing a hooker who strips for the camera shortly after walking on screen. Almost every slasher has a warrior woman archetype, an image the fems should’ve praised rather than protested.

When the slasher film stopped being a big money maker at the box-office, the fems moved their protests over to rock and heavy metal music. After metal died a slow death, the fems took up arms against evil video games like Grand Theft Auto. One would think feminist organizations would’ve come to the aid of Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin when Big Media started ripping them to pieces during the last election cycle. Odd, isn’t it, that N.O.W. and those other groups stayed silent when MSNBC accused Clinton of “pimping out” her daughter. They were also silent when media wise-men claimed Palin couldn’t be a politician because she had too many children. Maybe N.O.W. should change its name to the National Organization of Women . . .Just Not All Women.