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Fantasies of Transgression: Troubled Identity and Idealism in Postwar U.S. Horror Films.
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Westerman, Jonah G.
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Spring 2025
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2025
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9902_Gene_Eckhardt.pdf
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In studying these films, I'll be looking at how they comprise a sample of the postwar horror landscape- specifically, the slasher era of the late 70s and early 80s. In analyzing the elements at play in each film, I'll be discussing how the tension between an earlier advertised ideal and transgression from that ideal shape the themes within all of these films. Crucially, the tension in relation to these ideals is on a spectrum from a place of repression to transgression. In the final breakdown of this continuum, these films reveal something about the terrifying, but also freeing, state that arises from being faced with a possible self on the other side of transgression.
The discussion of these films are separated into three sections, as they operate in different registers of ideals and norms. The first section covers the films The Thing, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, Night of the Living Dead, and Dawn of the Dead, in terms of how they operate within and against larger-scale norms of scientific thought, hierarchies of power, and mass communication. The second section, covering the films Carrie, the first two A Nightmare on Elm Street films, and Sleepaway Camp, and how they operate in terms of smaller-scale norms of the family unit, suburbia, and adolescent expectations of a gendered identity. Finally, in the third section, I'll be discussing Halloween, the first four Friday the 13th films, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In this concluding section, these films continue to operate under the norms of the previous register, but they are whittled down to a duology of characters- that of the killer and the final girl. In this confrontation, the tensions between a repressive expectation of identity and a transgressive possibility uncover a pure escapist terror in the clash between the self and the other.
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