Psychopathic Dismemberment and Psychic Slaughter: Spectatorship, Affect, and Gender in the Slasher Cycle
Arts
Film 195 - Senior Thesis
My project consists of an intensive examination of the psychic, historical and aesthetic development of the “Slasher film” in an effort to illuminate broader conceptions of cinematic spectatorship and its relationship to notions of affect, somatic response, and processes of gender identification. The Slasher cycle, which has taken on a character of relative obscurity in recent years, foregrounds issues of spectatorship, bodily destruction and filmic violence in ways that were, and continue to be, unprecedented in their execution. The chief goal of this project was to differentiate these discrete elements of the cycle from the conventional lenses of gender through which the Slasher has historically been viewed. Furthermore, the selection of films referenced in the work broadens the temporal and geographic parameters associated with the cycle beyond the limitations prescribed to it by the pre existing scholarship on the subject. Drawing on the work of theorists like Carol Clover, Laura Mulvey, Barbara Creed, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and others, I aim to recenter and reframe academic debate on the cycle through rigorous formal analysis of film bodies: viewer, killer, and cadaver alike.
