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The Slumber Party Massacre franchise has amused and baffled horror fans for decades. Much has been written about it’s role as a piece of feminist cinema, thanks to it’s female driven writing and direction (Rita Mae Brown and Amy Holden Jones, respective writer and director of SPM 1; Deborah Brock writer and director of SPM 2 and 3). Canon tells of Roger Corman’s insistence on the boobs and the babes, but we certainly feel the impact of the female gaze and the smirk of irony behind the camera. Slumber Party Massacre is rife with schlock and splatter and absolute delightful nonsense. But, I’m not here to talk to you about Slumber Party Massacre.
I’m here to talk to you about the driller-killer musical packed with smoke, leather, pastels and corndogs, Slumber Party Massacre 2 (1987). Directed by Deborah Brock , SPM2 follows Courtney (Crystal Bernard), sister of Valerie, a survivor of the murderous events of the original film. In the first film, we see the character of Courtney portrayed as a salty and sexualized adolescent, perusing her sister’s Playgirl magazines and ‘beating off boys since the 5th grade.’ While the sequel does reference elements of the first film (mentions of Valerie, the return of drill as murder weapon, the dismembered hand of the original killer), it largely survives independently.
Courtney and the members of her girl band , Sheila (Juliette Cummins), Sally (Heidi Kizak Haddad), and Amy (Kimberly MacArthur) head away on a weekend to Sheila’s parents condo, where pastels and plush carpet abound, and a trash compactor is just as amazing as an in-ground swimming pool. The condo resides in an unfinished neighborhood where the eerie skeletons of empty abodes loom on the horizon. A crew of boys arrives (the nice one, the sleazy one and the dream boat. Their names don’t matter. Trust me.)
Corn dogs, champagne and inexplicable topless pillow fighting ensues, but the real focus of the film is Courtney’s overwhelming anxiety about penetrative sex which manifests as visions of leather clad disco demon Driller-Killer, who’s absurdly phallic weapon is a massive drill mounted on the end of an abrasive red electric guitar.
Courtney dreams of her sister Valerie, who is locked away in a mental health facility, presumably incapacitated by the trauma she faced in the original plot. Valerie warns Courtney not to ‘go all the way’. When Courtney is faced with moments of sexual arousal or intrigue, a lascivious music man appears, dressed in leather and fringe, and wreaks havoc upon her psyche. Courtney begins to experience events that feel more and more real to her, but that the other slumber party members can’t or don’t see.
A hand appears in her burger; an uncooked chicken lunges from the fridge to attack her; her bathtub runneth over with torrents of blood; a friend’s zit consumes her face and explodes. Courtney is terrified and confused. She is alone in her fear, none of the other guests are able to see or hear the goings on. One needn’t view more than the film’s poster art to be convinced that the true terror of the Slumber Party Massacre 2 isn’t the maniacal rock-n-roll goblin with a drill guitar (what?!) so much as it is sex. That’s been understood from moment one. As Jude Ellison Doyle writes in Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers (Melville House Publishing, 2019), “Slashers are the place where sex becomes death becomes sex, where a knife is never just a knife.” A rock-n-roll drill is never JUST a rock-n-roll drill.
But what on earth does a hand-burger have to do with intercourse?? Let’s dissect Courtney’s delusions leading up to the manifestation of the Driller Killer and his musical massacre.
Each of these events has a psychological tie to fears of hetero-normative penetrative sex. These hallucinations are reflective of long held anxieties about women, sex and the patriarchal structure.
Courtney enters the kitchen and opens the fridge. From behind the door, a raw roasting chicken accosts her. The pallid, squirming chicken resembles a mewling infant. It launches itself from the refrigerator and clings to her abdomen, calling to mind a growing womb. It spews forth a dark fluid, triggering Courtney to claw at the child-chicken and force the abjection fetus away from herself. Sex brings with it the threat of pregnancy and the threat of unwanted maternity. On motherhood and the changing of the pregnant body, Doyle writes, “The body of a pregnant woman- slimy, swollen, bleeding, leaking, teeming with other life- is the core repulsive image in patriarchal mythology.” Not only is pregnancy an abject concept in terms of the physical effects, but the act of motherhood, or mothering as a role is frightening in it’s removal of the self. Doyle states, “Women are taught not just that mothers are not really people, but that when they become mothers, they will not want to be people anymore. A good mother, a true mother, is someone who gives up all claim on her previous roles or interests, who lives entirely for and through her children, and who does so with a smile on her face.” For Courtney, this means no more road trips, no more topless pillow fights and most devestatingly, no more promising music career.
Courtney’s bloody bath seemed to suggest a horrific menstrual flow, as it spills out of tub and seems to chase Courtney, pouring out between her ankles at the bottom of the bathroom door. That being said, there is a connection to sexual bleeding. As Doyle writes in Dead Blondes in regards to Reagan Macneil in The Exorcist, the blood flow ‘could be menstrual but it could be another equally portentous blood flow: a broken hymen.” In Slumber Party Massacre 2, the thought of penetrative sex is tied to a literal destructive phallic weapon for Courtney, but the idea of pain at the “loss of virginity ” is a commonly spoken of concept. Courtney fears that “going all the way” will wound her, unleashing a tidal wave of pain and gore.
Not only does this fear of sex tie into a physical anxiety, but the concept of loss of virginity as a moral failing is rampant throughout history. On virginity in the slasher, Doyle writes, “losing your virginity is equivalent to losing your life…because penetration is seen as a means of conquering and humiliating the penetrated, to open your body to another person is to bleed, suffer, and die.” Courtney fears the vulnerability of opening herself to another, for the act leaves her open to literal slaughter.
Immediately following this bath incident, Courtney calls her friend Sally to investigate. Sally brushes it off, but as she talks with Courtney about her acne, we see a pimple on her face begin to inflate and grow more and more grotesque, inflaming her face, neck and shoulder until her head eventually explodes. Sally’s pimple explosion calls to mind disease and decay, suggesting a fear of sexually transmitted infections, another abject concept that Courtney cannot face, even as it bubbles to the surface. She fears the ravages of disease that come with horror stories of sex and the promotion of abstinence. Following this, Courtney begins to fear that Sally, who has seemed to disappear from the house, is being crushed in the trash compacter. This highlights a fear that a sexual partner will become abandoned, trashed, even destroyed by the other partner, or by the act itself. ‘Going all the way,’ becomes an event that eradicates the worth of the female self in a patriarchal society, which, make no mistake, is the world of Slumber Party Massacre 2.
The hand-burger may be a consumption fear, and I think there’s a vagina-dentata angle. Courtney may not consciously view her own genitals as violent and dangerous, but its undeniable that the mouth-vagina connection exists in psychoanalysis as it pertains to castration and dismemberment. Barbara Creed, in her book The Monstrous Feminine (Routeledge, 1993) states, ” Castration can refer to symbolic castration (loss of the mother’s body, breast, loss of identity) which is experienced by both female and male, or it can refer to genital castration.” Freud speaks of the castrated mother and the vagina-dentata. It’s reasonable to connect this sexual mouth with the idea of cannibalism, a monstrous impulse to consume another. Perhaps Courtney’s cannibalism in consuming the hand-burger symbolizes her fear of emotional or identity castration. She, as the source of the dangerous ‘trap’ threatens dismemberment of the male appendage, but it’s her own autonomy and identity at risk of castration through the act of sex.
A link exists between cannibalism and motherhood as well. Creed refers to the archetype of the ‘oral sadistic mother’ stating, “This is the mother feared by both female and male infants who imagine that, just as they derive pleasure from feeding/eating at the breast, the mother might in turn desire to feed on them.” In this scenario, Courtney again becomes the mother. She is the monstrous matriarch, ingesting the product of her sexual act.
Before long, Driller Killer tears through the hymen (ahem, excuse me, FABRIC) of Courtney’s dreams and manifests in reality. He’s on the loose and wielding his musical phallus as he takes the crew out in efficient fashion, leaving none alive but Courtney. The pre-realization of the Driller Killer is a lot more gripping than the odd music video of slashing that follows. One might find oneself feeling that it goes on forever (insert ((ha!)) sex joke here.).
We are then privy to a handful of ‘it was just a dream’ scenarios, ultimately ending with Courtney awakening in the same institution where her sister Valerie is seen. As Courtney screams wildly in her inexplicably triangular room, a massive drill pierces through the floor, effectively eviscerating yet another symbol of female genitalia, this mysterious, narrow wedge of a room, and with it, the fragile fragment of self that Courtney still retained.
*I’d just like to acknowledge that this writing reflects on hetero-normative and cis-gender ideas of virginity, sex, pregnancy and maternity. Not all women have a womb, and not all people with wombs are women.
The Dark and Stormy Night 