the bastard son of a hundred maniacs
Sleep. Those little slices of death. How I loathe them. — Edgar Allan Poe So begins A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors . Gotta remember this quotation from Edgar Allan Poe, too: The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world... The slasher film, of course, shows us the deaths of numerous beautiful women, but really it’s all about that final girl, the one who will get away. The homicidal pursuit works as a surrogate for a sexual one. We want the girl, but we settle for wanting her dead. Thing is, we get neither of these things. The slasher film is inevitably a disappointment for the males in the audience, but also something quite the opposite. It’s like a gift to the id in us all—but especially the supposedly heteronormative males—twisting our lust and our longing to kill into one primal urge. The obvious question then: why do females like the slasher film? Karanovic (2012) suggests, “For the women, it may not be sexual, but m...