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5 Slashers That Will Have You Yelling, “GOOD FOR HER!”

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Horror is often misinterpreted as a male-dominated genre devoid of women characters with nuance. But horror is a genre that relishes in subversion, and here women are rightfully capable of anything, including murder.

In the real world, women are often punished for not being likable enough, or for not subscribing to any patriarchal notions of femininity. Horror levels the playing field for women in a way that I really admire: within horror, a woman can be unpleasant, monstrous, and human, and still have people wishing for her success.

I’m always fighting for women’s rights and women’s wrongs. Sometimes in horror, women’s wrongs are justified! Here are 5 slasHERs that you make you think, “good for her!”

Red, US

Jordan Peele’s sophomore hit Us is a pointed class analysis disguised as a slasher film and pits protagonist Adelaide “Addy” (Lupita Nyong’o) Wilson against her doppelganger Red in a fight for survival. As a clone “tethered” to Addy, Red has been forced to live underground and subsist on rabbits. Red eventually organizes the other clones (#unionpower) to escape and take their rightful place above ground.

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And Red had a point! Why was she confined to darkness while Addy lived her life in comfort? Red’s remarkable organizing power, undervalued empathy and natural leadership had me rooting for her to swap places with Addy the entire time.

 Pearl, Pearl, and X

It’s been a year since we were first introduced to Pearl, and it already feels like she has reached icon status. But it comes as no surprise since Pearl, played by a delightfully unhinged Mia Goth, is an offbeat horny woman isolated with her strict parents during a global pandemic. Is it any surprise she became a murderer?

Pearl dreams of the day she can escape life on the farm and become somebody. Pearl’s ambitions are not uncommon: youth, notoriety, sex. The youthful Pearl exemplifies a woman that will stop at nothing to get what she wants, and God help those who stand in her way.

The elderly Pearl we meet in X is resentful of the perky and horny youths renting her guest house to shoot a porno, and the guests dismiss Pearl as old and creepy. They don’t give much thought to how much she was like them when she was their age, and how they may end up like her with time. But Pearl quickly reminds them what she is capable of by using weapons around the farm and her devoted pet alligator to dispose of them. Pearl is a star, indeed.

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 Nami Matsushima / Matsu the Scorpion, Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion

An epic revenge story like none other, the Female Prisoner #701 series pits Matsu the Scorpion [Meiko Kaji] against a laundry list of foes in her attempts to escape prison and enact vengeance on those responsible for imprisonment. In Scorpion, we are introduced to a young Matsu, who is used by her cop boyfriend in exchange for a bribe from the Yakuza. After a failed attempt at revenge, Matsu winds up in prison fighting against abusive guards and murderous inmates.

Matsu is an unforgettable character that serves looks and vengeance as she stalks her victims in a black trench coat and a floppy hat. She is a survivor who overcomes the worst abuse imaginable to right the wrongs committed against her, and as the petty woman that I am, her insatiable lust for Revenge is #relatable.

 Cecilia, Sissy

Sissy (Aisha Dee) prefers you call her Cecilia, thank you very much. Cecilia is a mental wellness influencer that pushes overpriced self-care items and prattles on about acceptance and safe spaces. She runs into her childhood best friend Emma, who invites her to her bachelorette party.

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Her childhood bully/Emma’s maid of honor Alex is also in attendance, and she quickly shows that she hasn’t changed at all. Cecilia soon spirals back into her prepubescent “Sissy the sissy” days, and the result is an outlandish bloodbath that makes you question who the real victims may actually be.

Cecilia tears through her bullies in increasingly deranged ways while she retreats further into her “safe space” (read: slips into madness). But Cecilia does manage to confront her “best friend” Emma for abandoning her all those years ago and comes to terms with her own eccentricities. Honestly, Cecilia did absolutely nothing wrong, although her methods for getting rid of her tormentors may be a little unorthodox.

 Amber, Scream V

Is Amber the Founding Mother of Requels? After a disappointing Stab 8, the cunning and ambitious Amber (Mikey Madison) decided to take matters into her own hands and bring Woodsboro the requel they deserved. She may represent a toxic faction of the horror fanbase, but it takes a brave soul to stand up and say we deserved better than Halloween Ends— I mean, say that sometimes a franchise needs to go back to its roots and remember what made it so special.

Amber also managed to get Sidney Fucking Prescott back for one last ride, uncover Sam’s lineage and her connection to the franchise’s past, and may or may not have inspired Sam to follow in her footsteps. That’s Mother!

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I’m declaring 2023 the Year of the SlasHER, and I hope to see more unhinged women on the silver screen. Let me know what other slasHERs should be on the list!

Jenika McCrayer (she/her) is a writer and horror enthusiast based in Brooklyn, NY. Her adoration for the sociopolitical aspects of the genre inform her writing on gender, politics, and education.

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Editorials

What’s in a Look? The Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy

The Jason Voorhees redesign sparked heated debate, but is the backlash overblown? Dive into Friday the 13th’s formula and fan expectations.

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If you’re a longtime reader of Horror Press, you may have noticed that I really really like the Friday the 13th franchise. Can’t get enough. And yet, I simply couldn’t muster a shred of enthusiasm for piling hate on the new Jason Voorhees redesign that Horror, Inc. recently shared with an unwitting public.

Why the Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy Feels Overblown

Hockey mask? Check. Machete? Check. Clothing? Yeah, he’s wearing it. I really didn’t see the problem, but very many people online pointed out all the places where I should. The intensity and specificity of the critiques shot me right back to 2008, reminding me distinctly of watching Project Runway with my friend’s mom while I waited for him to get home from baseball practice. What, just me?

But the horror community’s sudden transformation into fashion mavens got me thinking about other things, too: the character of the franchise as a whole, how Jason Voorhees fits into it, and why I feel like this reaction has been blown out of proportion. (A disproportionate reaction to a pop culture thing? On my Internet? Well I never.)

Baghead Jason

What Does A Jason Look Like, Anyway?

What confused me the most about this reaction was something I couldn’t quite get a bead on. What does Jason Voorhees look like? His look, both masked and unmasked (especially unmasked), changes wildly from film to film, even when he’s played by the same person (in three consecutive movies, Kane Hodder played a hulking zombie Jason, a shiny slime monster Jason, and a Jason who was mainly seen in mirrors and looked like his face was stung by a thousand bees). And then there’s the matter of him being both a zombie child and a bagheaded killer before receiving his iconic hockey mask.

However, if you synthesize the various forms of the character into the archetypical Jason Voorhees, the one that most people might visualize in their head when told to imagine him, the result doesn’t not look like this new redesign. Frankly, I even think “redesign” is too strong a word for what this is. This image shows a dude in outdoorsy clothes wearing a hockey mask. It looks enough like “Jason Voorhees” to me that my eyes just slide right off of it.

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What Do We Expect From Friday the 13th, And What Do We Need?

Ultimately, many people clearly disagree with my assessment of this redesign, which led me to ponder the franchise as a whole. If there’s something to complain about with this new look, that implies that there is a “right” way and a “wrong” way to be a Friday the 13th movie.

This I can agree with. While the franchise is wide-ranging and expansive to the point that it has included Jason going to space, fighting a dream demon, and taking a cruise ship from a New Jersey lake to the New York harbor, the movies do still follow a reasonably consistent formula.

Step 1: Generate a group of people in a place either on the shores of Crystal Lake or in Crystal Lake township (they can travel elsewhere, but this is where they must start).
Step 2: Plunk Jason down near them, give him a variety of edged weapons, and watch what happens. One girl survives the onslaught, and sometimes she brings along a friend or two as adjunct survivors. Bada bing, bada boom, you have yourself a Friday the 13th movie.

If you fuck with that formula, you’ve got a problem. But beyond that, there’s really not a hell of a lot that the movies have in common. Sometimes you have a telekinetic final girl, other times you have a child psychologist. Sometimes the dead meat characters are camp counselors, but other times they’re partiers or townies or students attending space college.

Hell, even the people killing them aren’t always the same. Look at Pamela Voorhees in the original movie or Roy in A New Beginning.

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So why this protectiveness around the minutiae of Jason’s look?

It’s Us, Hi, We’re The Problem, It’s Us

I don’t mean to discount everyone’s negative opinions about this Jason redesign. There are a multitude of aesthetic and personal reasons to dislike what’s going on here, and you don’t have to turn that yuck into a yum just because I said so. But I think we’ve had online fandoms around long enough to see how poisonous they can be to the creative process.

For instance, was The Rise of Skywalker a better movie because it went down the laundry list of fan complaints about The Last Jedi and basically had characters stare into the camera and announce the ways they were being fixed?

Look, I’m not immune to having preconceived disdain for certain projects. If I’m waiting for a new installment in a franchise and all that I’m hearing coming out of producers’ mouths is “prequel” and “television show,” those are fighting words.

However, the constant online pushback to projects that are in early development might be one reason it has taken us so long to actually get more Friday the 13th (I’m talking in addition to the long delays amid the lawsuit, of course). It’s been more than a decade and a half without a new Jason vehicle, and that time keeps on stretching longer and longer.

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Poll taken from Horror Press Instagram account

What Fans Really Want From a New Jason Voorhees Movie

Instead of just letting the creative tap flow and having a filmmaker put out the thing they want to make, then having somebody else take the wheel and do that same thing for the next installment, it seems like producers are terrified of making the wrong move and angering the fans, which has prevented them from actually pulling the trigger on much of anything.

Look, we survived A New Beginning. And Jason Takes Manhattan. Even Jason Goes to Hell. A controversial misstep can’t kill the immortal beast that is Friday the 13th. I say let’s just let them make one. Having something tangible to complain about is better than having nothing at all.

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Editorials

Monstrous Mothers: Unveiling the Horror in ‘Mommie Dearest’ and ‘Umma’

The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?

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I challenged myself to fill a gap in my cinema history this month and watched Mommie Dearest. I was very familiar with the movie due to how many drag queens reference it and because of Joan Crawford’s villainous reputation. However, I had never seen it in its entirety before, which is weird because I write about my own maternal baggage often. Without ever seeing the film, I knew this movie, categorized as a drama, belonged under my favorite genre label. Some sources even try to meet in the middle and classify it as a psychological drama, which is a phrase that does a lot of heavy lifting to remove itself from what it actually is. After all, what else should we call a film about being abused by the person who should love us most other than horror?

Does Mommie Dearest Belong in the Horror Genre?

The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?

Mommie Dearest recounts a version of Christina Crawford’s upbringing by Hollywood royalty Joan Crawford. It depicts her as an unstable, jealous, manipulative woman who only holds space for her beliefs. As with most abusive parents, she takes out her frustrations and feelings of inadequacy on those around her. Specifically, those who cannot fight back due to the power dynamics at play. This version of Joan is a vicious bully, which feels familiar for many people who grew up with an abusive parent. How many of us never knew what would set our parental monster off, so just learned to walk on eggshells? How many of us grew up believing we were the problem for way longer than we should have? How many of us normalized the abuse for so long that it carried over into adulthood, letting us believe being mistreated is just part of living?

Watch the trailer for Mommie Dearest

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The Lasting Impact of Abusive Parents in Horror Movies

While my mother wasn’t the active bully in our home, part of my struggle with her is her complicitness in the hell she helped create for all of us. Which is why, while I don’t think Mommie Dearest is a great film, I believe it’s a decent horror flick. It made me want to revisit a better movie, Umma, that also dealt with motherhood, mental illness, and trauma. Iris K. Shim’s 2022 PG-13 horror sees Sandra Oh playing a single mother who has not healed. After growing up with her own mother, who was especially cruel to her, she has built her world around that trauma and forced her daughter to live within its walls with her. As someone who was severely homeschooled by a woman who still really needs to find a therapist, Umma hits me in my feelings every time. 

Watch the trailer for Umma below

Maternal Monsters: A Common Thread in Psycho, Hereditary, and More

Before the film starts, Oh’s character, Amanda, has turned her back on her family and cultural heritage. She has built a life that she’s not really living as she hides in her home, afraid of electricity due to the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mom. So, when her uncle shows up with her mother’s ashes, she is triggered and haunted. All of the issues she hasn’t dealt with rush to the surface, manifesting in ways that begin turning her into her deceased mom. Amanda does eventually force herself to confront her past to avoid becoming her mother and hurting her daughter. So, while Umma is different from Mommie Dearest, it’s not hard to see they share some of the same DNA. Scary moms make the genre go round which is why movies like M.O.M. Mothers of Monsters, Serial Mom, Mother, May I?, and so many others will always pull an audience by naming the monster in the title.

I doubt I am the first person on Norma Bates’ internet to clock that some of horror’s most notorious villains are parents, specifically moms. I’m also sure I cannot be the first person to argue Mommie Dearest is a horror movie on many levels. After all, a large part of the rabid fanbase seems to be comprised of genre kids who grew up wondering why the film felt familiar. However, I hope I am the first to encourage you to watch these two movies if your momma trauma will allow you to hold space for a couple more monstrous mothers this month. Both have much to say about how we cope with the fallout of being harmed by the people who should keep us safe.

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