Imagining Murderous Mothers: Male Spectatorship and the American Slasher Film‪.‬

During the production of his independent slasher film, A Nightmare on Elm Street (US, 1984), director Wes Craven was forced to make alterations to his script when real-life events overlapped too much with his tale. A police investigation into accusations of child molestation by teachers at a preschool in South Bay, California, and the nationally publicized trial that followed corresponded too closely with Craven's script concerning a local janitor named Fred Krueger who lures children into his boiler room to molest and kill them. As Robert Englund, the actor who played Krueger in the film, explained, both Craven's film and the events in South Bay involved "child molesters [who] had descended on this unsupervised flotsam of seventies leftover Me-generation American children" (Robb 82). Concerned about possible accusations that his film was exploiting these tragic events, Craven changed Krueger from a child molester to a child murderer and as a result subsequent reviews after the film's release never mentioned or noticed any parallels between the on-screen events and the off-screen tragedy. But the odd coincidence between art and life that this episode vividly portrayed hints at the submerged nature of the slasher film in general, particularly those films made during the heyday of the genre in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Following the wake of such films as Halloween (US, 1978) and Friday the 13th (US, 1980), Craven's cult classic touched upon themes of child molestation, parental responsibility, and social justice that had captured national attention during the South Bay trial and that his film predecessors had explored as well. In fact, despite the genre's repetitive focus on monstrous killers (Michael Myers, Leatherface, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger) and sadistic acts of violence, slasher films all contain an underlying discourse concerning the proper nature of child rearing and family dynamics and the devastating consequences of alterations to these normative dimensions. In this essay, I explore the slasher genre's relation to the cultural politics of the nuclear family, focusing in particular on the negative images of mothers that abound in these films. Indeed, as we will see, the endless repetition of negative images of middle-class mothers within the slasher genre testifies to a profound ambivalence, if not downright hostility, in American culture towards the maternal role within the family dynamic.