Horror Studies - 1980s Horror Film Culture, Oct 2022

Halloween III: Season of the Witch is the stand-out sequel in the Halloween franchise because it deviates so wildly from the pattern set in the original film, and then followed so poorly in subsequent editions. Instead, the John Carpenter and Debra Hill-produced Halloween III takes the form of a ‘pod movie’, in which a toymaker plots to use a television signal to murder viewers on Halloween night. Much of the creative team were regular members of the Carpenter–Hill stable, which is clear in the film’s look, feel and sound. On the occasion of the release of Halloween Kills, and Halloween III’s 40th birthday, this article proposes a critical re-evaluation of the work, highlighting the lost potential in the idea of an anthology series, the lack of serious engagement in the film and the crucial point of the villain having an Irish heritage. The film is also analysed as a ‘TV Text’: films, novels, plays and non-fiction works that are concerned with the effects and mechanisms of television. These were becoming increasingly prominent in the 1980s and beyond, with examples ranging from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) to the late work of Gore Vidal and Arthur Miller.

Focusing on The Believers (1987) and Angel Heart (1987), this article examines how occult crime is framed through the central male protagonists’ fragmented subjectivity in the respective investigation narratives. Through close analysis of the films’ shared cinematic languages of horror and neo-noir, I present how these texts are in direct dialogue with the ‘Satanic Panic’, the contemporary phenomenon of religious hysteria propagated by Reaganite conservatism and the New Christian Right. I argue that post-Vietnam masculine identity anxieties are intimately tied, and interrogated in these films, as part of a traumatic national history of white, patriarchal Satanic scapegoating and theocratic hegemony in the United States.

Critiquing representations of women, their bodies and their sexuality is an established tradition in horror studies. Indeed, the 1980s is a particularly important era for analysing the (mis)representation of women in horror. Such critiques are primarily based on analyses of the woman-on-screen as seen through the gaze of characters, creators and imagined audiences. This article takes an altogether different perspective, focusing instead on discursive representations of women, their bodies and sexuality in the words of actors, creators, critics, fans and journalists in Fangoria magazine throughout the 1980s. This retrospective insight highlights the legacy of women’s place in horror and its implications for the relationship between popular culture(s) and contemporary political economies of gender in/equality.

Jackie Kong released four feature films between 1981 and 1987, including the horror films The Being (1981) and Blood Diner (1987). She directed all four films, while also working variously as screenwriter, producer and editor on individual productions. In this essay, I use Kong’s experiences of making horror films in the 1980s as a way of critically revisiting our histories of 1980s horror film culture. I offer a feminist model of doing horror film history: not only uncovering and illuminating the unknown or little-known work of women in horror film, but also critically thinking about the way we write our histories, and what this might say about our representation of personal, cultural and national identities. Ultimately, this essay is guided by the following question: what might a feminist historiography of horror cinema look like?

In the 1970s rape became a central focus of second-wave feminist activism, and also, as censorship waned, a frequent narrative event in New Hollywood cinema, often, as a number of critics noted, in strikingly misogynistic forms. A few films, however, reflect and engage with second-wave feminism’s new perspectives on sexual assault. Sidney Furie’s The Entity (1982) uses its horror premise, a woman repeatedly raped by an invisible, aethereal attacker, as a powerful metaphor for what feminists termed ‘rape culture’. The film enlists our identification with, and sympathy for, its protagonist in her struggle against both the invisible rapist and against a medical establishment that denies the truth of her experience. Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To will be briefly considered as a film that reimagines the story of Jesus’s conception in feminist terms as sexual violation and Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 will be discussed as a representation of women’s experience of rape culture.