imdb synopsis: College juniors Cassidy, Jessica, Claire, Ellie, and Megan are sorority sisters sworn to trust, secrecy and solidarity, no matter what. But their loyalty is tested when a prank at a raucous house party goes terribly wrong and Megan ends up brutally murdered. Rather than confess to the crime and risk destroying their bright futures, the girls agree to hide the bloody corpse and keep their secret forever.
And then they all get stalked by some mysterious killer in a hood (Scream) who knows their secret and sends them videos and pictures of their secret (I Know What You Did Last Summer and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and … is there another one)?
What the hell? I realize this is a remake of the 1983 film The House on Sorority Row, but does every misogynistic horror film from 1983 really need a remake? Here’s what I’m betting on: gratuitous nudity, possibly in hot tubs, girl-on-girl hate, or, you know, murder. I’ll just stop there.
Look, let me be the first to admit that I don’t exactly have a high opinion of most sororities in general, especially given many of their well-known hazing techniques (body-shaming one another by circling “problem areas” in marker, etc). But this film will most certainly take on a they-all-deserve-to-die theme, with the audience identifying exclusively with the killer, as the killer picks off the girls in one hilarious bloodbath after another.
While a film like Mean Girls tries to take a decidedly feminist slant in the end, at least in the way it addresses the issue of female competition for men, female slut-shaming, and the subsequent abandonment of sisterhood (I have some problems with this film, but that’s for another post), a film like Sorority Row promises to use the idea of sisterhood as some kind of commentary on … what? Female incompetence?
Face it, when women get together man, I mean, watch the fuck out! You might, like, die!
Of course, we can’t ignore Carol J. Clover’s “Final Girl” theory. She argues in her book Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, that slasher films are obsessed with feminism in that they force male viewers to identify with the Final Girl, the one lone girl who doesn’t die, who gets her shit together, who kills the killer.
And all the men in the audience cheer!
I get that. And I like her theory. But I don’t have high hopes for this particular film to live up to her theory. As I said above, when these girls do a stupid, shitty thing, and one of their sorority sisters dies as a result, I suspect that a major element of you-deserve-what-you-get-haha-bitches will overtake any potential empowering “Final Girl” resolution. I hope I’m wrong.
I’ll never see this film, but I suspect your analysis is right on. I despise the slasher genre–begun with sexploitation films in the 60s and later mainstreamed by franchises like Halloween and Friday the 13th–because by featuring scantily clad women as victims of carnage and murder, they conflate sexual arousal with dismemberment and death, and with violence against women in particular. This is old news, I know, but it still apparently needs to be said.
Certainly, the pairing of beautiful women and danger goes back to the medieval romance (if not further), but that era’s misogyny at least allowed the damsel to be rescued by the hero, rather than tortured and killed for the reader/hearer’s “entertainment.” Still, there are some instances of “evil” sorceresses meeting their rewards, of which the killing of the evil sorority girl is perhaps an extension– the feminine principle of power is purged from the social order.
The so-called “torture porn” genre (Hostel) has yet more to answer for, perhaps, as it strips away even the bogus pretense of insanity or revenge to focus lovingly on the torture itself, divorced from any contexts other than decadence and enjoyment. “Here,” these films seem to say, “is what YOU could do if you only had the requisite wealth and power!” To be fabulously rich is to be 1) bored by mere “normal” entertainments, and 2) virtually untouchable. (Is this one of the carrots dangling from global capitalism’s string?) Technology provides glittering simulations of murder, but will they always, in the end, fail to “satisfy?” It is noteworthy that these thoroughly American films “blame” the extreme violence they purvey as eye-candy on the ruthless, old world decadence of Europeans. In the one I skimmed (Hostel 2, I think), an American character lacks the stomach to be true to his desire and torture/kill the young woman offered to him. Was this some back-handed way of claiming that Americans are incapable of such brutality, while simultaneously giving these same Americans an excuse to be titillated by torture? The mind reels.
Some European countries used to reserve the “X” rating for extreme violence, thus barring some of their more impressionable viewers from reveling in murder. But in these United States, where even the word “fuck” is routinely deemed more obscene than murder, we like our titillation and violence served together. The world seems largely to have followed suit, and while such things as movie and game violence may not directly cause actual violence, they inarguably contribute to an atmosphere of desensitization and often promote a mindset of reveling in carnage for its own sake. These developments surely both reflect and abet the violence of contemporary culture.
In terms of smart filmmaking, we have sadly come to prefer mere horror and spectacle over finely wrought suspense. We have forgotten the wise words attributed to Hitchcock, a man with his own “woman issues,” but an inarguably great director: “A bomb explodes under a table– that’s excitement. A bomb DOESN’T explode under a table– that’s suspense.” Sir Albert, where are you when we need you?
Thanks for a thoughtful and necessary site.
BB