Certainly any vets who went to see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre the year of their homecoming received a very different image of American history than their 1950s history textbooks had offered. The setting of Hooper’s film on the Texas frontier evoked the violence of the American past and situated it in the troubled present. The name of the family conjures both cutting (the saw) while playing with the notion of American innocence on the frontier (Tom Sawyer). When asked what Chainsaw was really about, Tobe Hooper, whose only previous feature had been an antiwar drama, laughingly responded in a 2000 interview that “it’s about America, man.”48
It is about America. The Sawyer family represents all that the Puritans feared about the howling wilderness, the alleged savagery of the Native Americans who lived in the dark woods beyond the settlement. And yet, the Sawyers are not the American other, the enemy of the nation. They are deeply American, intricately tied to national myths of the frontier hunter-hero. This is the implicit message when the Sawyer homestead is shown as a kind of frontier cabin full of hunting trophies, both human and animal. Leatherface himself obviously references James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking, the hunter who becomes part of the natural landscape.49
The 1986 sequel to Chainsaw underscores similar themes. The patriarch of the family (known simply as “the Cook”) is now presented as a 1980s entrepreneur who rides the wave of Reagan’s free-market cowboy capitalism by becoming Dallas’ favorite barbeque purveyor. At the beginning of the film, he appears in front of an adoring crowd dressed like a car salesman, proudly taking his award for winning a chili cook-off with his special recipe. “I love this town,” he cries. “This town loves meat.” The Sawyer clan’s less public face has relocated from their homestead to a bizarre, blood-drenched chamber of horrors beneath a Frontierland-style theme park. Giant, creepy statues of Davy Crockett are joined by images of forts and wagons. Meanwhile, Dennis Hopper plays a former Texas Ranger (“the Lone Ranger”) on the trail of the Sawyers. Hopper used his signature style to portray this typical American hero as almost as deranged as Leatherface himself.50
Chainsaw sliced and diced the American dream of the past. Increasingly, the slasher genre mocked the American dream of the present. Wes Craven’s 1972 The Last House on the Left prepared the way for a new kind of horror film that combined extraordinary violence with a countercultural critique of American institutions and their violent origins and trajectory. Craven’s film showed the brutal rape, degradation, and murder of two teenage girls by a “family” of murderers that mirror the dark family of Charles Manson. The killers’ car breaks down and they find themselves the houseguests of the parents of one of the brutalized girls. The middle-class parents discover the crime and that they are playing host to the perpetrators. Rather than calling the authorities or running for their lives, the bourgeois couple themselves become maniacal killers, vengefully slaughtering the murderers in ways that actually cause some shift in audience sympathies and raise questions about primal violence beneath the veneer of middle-class America.51
Craven has described the film as growing out of his desire to take the American public’s thirst for violence to its logical conclusions. Craven believed this would expose the foundations of violence at the heart of Nixon’s silent majority. He purposefully sought to give Last House a photographic intensity resembling the raw footage coming from Vietnam by using high-speed, documentary-style film. The original script called for the murderers to be Vietnam veterans, while one of the slaughtered girls would die giving the “V” sign, with all its metonymic evocations of the peace movement.52
Hooper and Craven’s challenges to the dreams of America’s past and the hopes for its future were soon joined in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). Carpenter took urban legends about babysitters in danger and turned them into a critique of the American suburb. The film portrays the Halloween night return of Michael Myers, a mental patient who fifteen years earlier had brutally slashed and killed his older sister, to the small, quiet town of Haddonfield, Illinois. Pursued by psychiatrist Sam Loomis, Michael invades the quiet streets and four-bedroom ranch homes of Haddonfield, brutally slaying teenagers the same age as his sister. He meets his match in Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, the daughter of Psycho’s Janet Leigh) who manages to best Michael by turning everything from coat hangers to knitting needles into weapons. Curtis’ portrayal made Strode into what horror scholar Carol Clover has described as the archetypal “final girl” of slasher convention, a gender-bending figure who slays, or at least holds at bay, the monster.53
Jamie Lee Curtis—On the Set of Halloween
Michael Meyers came home to a world that was supposed to be safe. Suburban life since the 1950s had increasingly become the image of middle-class success. In the master narrative of domestic life, hard work and frugality allowed an American family to purchase a suburban home that offered refuge from the world of commerce. At the same time, the home became a place to display the rewards of financial success, a showcase for the latest model of refrigerator, self-cleaning oven, and color television set.54
The civil rights struggle had given another meaning to the suburban home. The phenomenon of “white flight” from urban centers created the perception of the suburb as an escape from social change. New school districts blossomed around the nation as the educational system integrated in the early 1970s, and new schools often became the epicenter for developing communities. The desire to flee the consequences of the freedom struggle generated the enormous and violent anger over busing, as white families who thought they had escaped their black neighbors watched their children’s court-ordered rides back to what was increasingly called “the ghetto” rather than the neighborhood.55
Michael Myers’ assault on Haddonfield tapped into white middle-class anxieties that the secure world they had created could easily become a literal shambles. Carpenter pictures Haddonfield as in every way idyllic, except that one of its perfect families in one of its perfect homes produced a maniacal and unstoppable killer. In 1984, Wes Craven would build on this theme with his A Nightmare on Elm Street. As the title suggests, a safe suburban street could easily become a slaughterhouse where, to paraphrase Malcolm X, the fulfillment of the American dream becomes a nightmare.
The legacy of the 1960s lived on in other aspects of the new American monster film. The critique of the alleged safety of the suburb is joined in the slasher film by a strong antiauthoritarian strain. The role of teenagers in these films has led many commentators to see them as parables of adolescent hormones run wild. In fact, the motif of teenagers in danger has been less an opportunity to explore adolescent sexuality than a chance to satire various kinds of established, institutionalized authority. Young people are generally left to themselves in these films, forced to cope with the monster alone. Parents, police, camp counselors, and ministers are frequently held up for ridicule as either ineffectual or participants in the mayhem.
Chainsaw is paradigmatic in this respect, portraying countercultural teens as victimized by a family in a domestic setting—the American home turned slaughterhouse. In Friday the 13th, the killer turns out to be a middle-aged mom who despises the young for their treatment of her son Jason. In Halloween, Laurie Strode’s father (whom we see only briefly, in one scene) puts her in harm’s way by sending her to “the old Myers’ place” on an errand. In A Nightmare on Elm Street, the parents of an entire town endanger their children by keeping secret a horrible act of violence, the lynching of an alleged serial killer. The older generation’s acts of violence, and the secrecy that surrounds it, unleashes Freddy Krueger into the nightmares of their children.56
Craven’s 1984 Nightmare represents the crest of the slasher film’s creativity as a form. Independent auteurs such as Hooper, Carpenter, and Craven increasingly moved on to big-budget studio projects and left the indie slashers to lesser talents eager to cash in on the maniac with a knife craze. By the late 1980s, Reagan-era conservatism seemed to influence many of the films being made in the genre. Sequel a
fter sequel drew less and less from their seminal sources of bloody inspiration and degenerated into simplistic morality tales of besieged communities seeking to destroy a monster, a reimagining of the themes of 1930s horror with less creativity and lots more blood and skin.57
By the late 1980s the Reagan Revolution came to fruition in the rise of the yuppie mentality, a vision of youthful experience in which brutally ambitious MBAs fought their way to the top of corporate America. From Michael J. Fox’s Alex in television’s Family Ties to Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, the yuppie worldview saw American life as a wild frontier and men in Brooks Brothers suits as the new Davy Crocketts.58
The serial killer remained the icon of this era though revisions of his image left behind some of the themes found in the slasher films. Increasingly, the monster wore the mask of success, American style.
Mainstreaming Murder
Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 American Psycho transformed Norman Bates into a 1980s American yuppie turned (maybe) into a serial killer. Ellis’ novel tells the story of Patrick Bateman, a corporate-ladder- climbing monster whose obsession with the accumulation of status commodities and utter hatred of women leads him to commit a series of bizarre and brutal murders. While Ellis leaves unresolved the question of whether or not these murders actually occurred or only took place in Bateman’s mind, his graphic descriptions seem more than real to the reader.59
Ellis’ title makes clear that Bateman represents a peculiarly “American” psycho. Bateman works for “Pierce and Pierce Mergers and Acquisitions,” a typical 1980s financial firm practicing slash-and-burn capitalism. His antifeminist obsessions and love of status symbols (a brilliant and unforgettable scene in the book and the film has Bateman wax poetic over the paper quality of his business cards) perfectly tied together the obsessions of the New Right, its freebooting entrepreneurialism, and reactionary response to the women’s movement.60
A cult classic today, American Psycho had a bumpy ride to press. Simon & Schuster originally picked up American Psycho for publication. The rumors of the novel’s alleged misogyny set off intense and heated prepublication criticism from NOW and other women’s organizations. Simon & Schuster dropped the book one month before its planned publication date, though it was quickly picked up by Vintage Books and became a controversial best seller.61
Ironically, during the period when Ellis’ book received a rough handling by censors at both ends of the political spectrum, images of serial murderers saturated American culture. Bateman’s deeply American psychosis mirrored a fascination with the serial killer that intertwined with the American culture of celebrity. This had been a facet of the serial killer’s appeal since Ted Bundy, whose crimes brought him enormous media attention while he waited for execution on Florida’s death row. Bundy became one of the first serial killers to create a romantic following. Women sent him flowers in prison and wrote him love letters. One admirer, Carol Anne Boone, moved from Washington state to Florida in order to be near him. They later married and had a child.62
The growth of serial killer fandom led to the phenomenon of murderabilia, the auctioning of personal items and artwork belonging to “celebrity murderers.” The Internet helped to fuel this phenomenon. The murderabilia site murderauction.com has offered a John Wayne Gacy collection with a starting bid of ten thousand dollars, as well as less expensive single items such as a Henry Lee Lucas drawing of a vampire with a starting bid of seven hundred dollars.63
Public obsession with serial murderers by the 1990s fed off new cultural realities. Historic changes in technology since the appearance of Psycho in 1960 facilitated the rise of a cult of celebrity. In the late 1960s satellite technology made possible the broadcast of multiple channels and the emergence of cable television. Entrepreneurs like Rupert Murdoch proved especially adept at transforming cable TV into one strand of a larger web of media outlets (including magazines and radio stations) that literally covered the globe. By the 1980s this media monster had become voracious for material to fill hundreds of channels playing twenty-four hours a day. The explosive growth of the Internet by the mid-1990s created an even greater need for fresh content. Serial murderers and their stories provided a simple narrative that did not ask audiences to confront larger social and political realities.
The cult of celebrity that centered on murderers invited satire. Oliver Stone’s 1994 Natural Born Killers used the serial killer as a symbol of media madness, posing questions about the nature of the monster in a world that simultaneously hates, fears, and glamorizes the monster. Stone’s psychedelic imagery perfectly captured the frenetic pace of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. The film used the device of a TV sitcom to tell the story of one of the killer’s dysfunctional family background, mixing the inanity of a laugh track with the severe sexual and psychological abuse that allegedly created the murdering maniac.64
The mid-1990s perhaps represent the apogee of the American fascination with serial murder. Talk shows, twenty-four-hour news outlets, true crime novels, a raft of movies, and innumerable television police procedurals dealt time and again with the knife, axe, and chainsaw-wielding maniac. This dark obsession in American culture did not disappear in the twenty-first century, although history would alter and complicate it.
Al Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 gave America a new set of monsters. Anger and a desire for revenge led politicians and the public to load the terrorists down with monstrous imagery. As if ideologically inspired terrorists with no respect for human life were not fearful enough, political leaders and commentators referred to the terrorist network as a “cult of evil” and made use of satanic imagery to describe the threat. The idea of the terrorist as the monster became a common media trope.65
Bomb-wielding terrorists did not completely replace the maniac with a knife. The 2006 Showtime hit Dexter recreated the serial killer for a post-9/11 world. The gruesome drama of the Emmy Award-winning series featured Dexter Morgan (played by Michael C. Hall) as a serial murderer that works by day for the Miami Police Department as a blood spatter expert. By night, he splatters quite a bit of blood on his own in the vigilante killings of “the guilty” who have slipped through the criminal justice system. Dexter represents both the best fiction ever produced about the serial murderer and a revisionist reading of America’s serial killer craze. Dexter, which has successfully run for four seasons at the time of this writing, asks the audience to identify with the serial murderer in a way that no other imaginative reconstruction of the genre has ever done before.66
Dexter’s creators provide a significant number of cues that audiences can recognize from the national mythology of the mass murderer. We learn, for example, that Dexter endured a significant childhood trauma. Moreover, he believes, and we are urged to believe, that Dexter is a monster on a basic level. He makes numerous references to his “Dark Passenger,” a need to kill born out of a traumatic event. We also learn that Harry, his homicide investigator stepfather, recognized the signs of this inner monster in Dexter’s early childhood. Knowing that the beast could be controlled but not destroyed, he taught Dexter “the Code,” a complex mix of injunctions against killing the innocent, combined with precautionary measures to keep from getting caught.
A desire to see vigilante justice in the messy post-9/11 world only explains part of Dexter’s appeal for audiences. Like Patrick Bateman, he is a very American psycho and a much more appealing one. When we first meet Dexter, he is successful in his work and lives in a small but stylish apartment that is the perfect domestic nest for the metrosexual male, outfitted with the latest technology and IKEA minimalism. The show’s creators also make it clear that he is no sex maniac. The first episode of season one forcefully underscores Dexter’s heterosexuality by introducing his beautiful girlfriend (Julie Benz), a sweet single mom with perfect children who lives in a comfortable suburban home.67
Dexter is the un-Norman Bates in numerous ways. He does not choose his victims in a psychosexual frenzy but rather on the basi
s of the Code. His issues are primarily paternal rather than maternal, an effort to come to terms with the demands, strictures, and, ultimately, the limitation of patriarchal authority. His fondness for his girlfriend and her children doesn’t humanize him so much as it Americanizes him, giving him a traditional family unit that makes his other, secret life seem both comprehensible and compartmentalized.
Dexter taps more into America’s dreams than its nightmares. Like numerous characters in successful franchises since the late 1990s, Dexter attempts to live a prosperous, fulfilled, materially rich family life grounded in dark, nighttime activities that, in some sense, make that life possible. Not unlike HBO’s The Sopranos, AMC’s Breaking Bad, or Showtime’s other hit Weeds, Dexter critiques white, middle-class dreams while affirming them. Dexter’s appeal is that he departs in one significant way from the prosperous, successful mainstream and yet he still desires to be a part of it, to live a life where his boat, his family, and by season four, his suburban home, form a web of personal fulfillment. He is the perfect suburban warrior, meting out justice from the minivan he acquires in season three.
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