Are Slasher Movies "Gay AF?" Gen Z Gays Says "Yes!" As I Smack My Forehead In Disbelief!

It's almost Halloween, the season of slasher movie pajama parties, or if we're to believe Gen Z gays, they're strictly gay slasher movie pajama parties. Why? Because "slasher movies are gay AF!" Which, I have to say, I find both adorable - oh, you cute li'l gays - and mildly annoying, if only because slashers have historically been openly misogynist and vaguely Republican with respect to sex, or rather, punishing anyone who was sexual, or had sex, particularly women, with deaths both gruesome and titillating. The prime example of this is arguably the first slasher, Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," the slashing death of Janet Leigh in the shower a tour de force of masterful savagery and peek-a-boo nudity, and, yes, there's a cross-dressing villain played by Anthony Perkins, a closeted gay actor. 

Low-budget mavens took Hitch's template and ran with it, creating a series of crude, slapped-together slashers which scant craftsmanship, much less any artistry. If anything, they seemed like quickie grindhouse excuses for straight male teens to get their rocks off via the female nudity, cheer their violent deaths, and cop a feel from their terrified dates. 

But a funny thing happened on the way from Brian De Palma's "Carrie" to Wes Craven's "Scream." In "Carrie," genuine pathos and Oscar-nominated performances were introduced into the genre, and while it's not technically a slasher, it introduced a template which slasher's would utilize relentlessly thereafter: the female outsider, in this case one who struck back at her high school foes in a prom sequence which had audiences torn between cheering her on and being horrified at her destructive powers.

Gen Z gays have now latched on to "Carrie," whom they say is a coded gay man, a laughable assertion when one considers De Palma's brilliantly leering camera as it slinks through a locker room with barely clad mean girls, or moves in for a sumptuous close-up of bad girl Nancy Allen licking her lips. De Palma would later tell us what was really at work in slasher movies in 1980's "Dressed to Kill," in which the slashing death of Angie Dickenson in an elevator was cross-cut with Nancy Allen, a savvy prostitute, discussing the increased riches to be earned in the stock market; the slashing death being "the movie," the stock market chatter a stand-in for the rising box office returns of a tawdry genre. 

Yet slashers, as tawdry, misogynist and poorly made as they generally were - see any "Friday the 13th" movie (come for me, fanboys) - were cracked wide open with the first "Scream," which offered the gory slasher goods aplenty, but also gleefully illuminated the genre's many tired cliches. Save for one. Like Carrie, the heroine Sydney is something of an outcast, her mother being "Ghostface's" first (offscreen) slasher victim, and a tough cookie to boot. Gen Z gays also claim Sydney as a coded gay hero, an assertion they say is buffeted by the fact that Kevin Williamson, the movie's screenwriter, is openly gay. 

I dearly want to slap these Gen Z gays upside the head, but also encourage them to keep looking and learn more. Roger Ebert, in an ambivalent review of the original "Scream," said that for all of the movie's amusing, self-referential tics, it was still a slasher, a genre he and Gene Siskel truly loathed, mostly because of their rank misogyny. But Gen Z gays will assert that slashers put forth "iconic" strong women, or "final girls" who triumph against all odds, which they further declare all gay men are attracted to since their very presence is "camp," the latter a claim so garbled, and with so little understanding of what "camp" is, that I once more want to slap them upside the head.

But really, the only thing Gen Z gays can accurately claim in their assertion that slasher movies are "gay AF" is their long standing as an "outsider," or ignored, genre of movies. But for Gen Z, they're now the tacky reborn as "relevant," the misogynist reframed as "empowering." I'm not buying it. And unless you're a true artist - a Hitchcock, a Craven, a De Palma, a John Carpenter (sometimes), or an Ari Aster - I probably won't watch it or take it seriously as anything more than the movie industry's easiest, most reliable cash grab. Slashers aren't "gay AF," but they are, like Nancy Allen's prostitute, capitalist AF. 

Art Credit: Caducadu