Fecund Horror: Slashers, Rape/Revenge, Women in Prison, Zombies and Other Exploitation Dreck
Self-Published in 2016, 158 pages.
By Noah Berlatsky

This was a tough one. I had a feeling that this might fit into one of my Psycho-Babble categories, and boy, was I right. Granted, when you have the word “dreck” in your title, after naming a few sub-genres, it kind of gives you the feeling that these are not spoken with any fondness. Which is even stranger because it does seem like Berlatsky likes a lot of the films he’s writing about.

As with many of these types of books, the authors are very smart, educated, and like to quote a lot of different material, giving credibility to their speculations and theories. But once again, I feel a lot of what is read into these films is just pure Freudian fiddle-faddle, trying to point out anything that could remotely be taken for or looked at in a sexual manner. Therefore, anything that is long and hard is always going to be taken as phallic symbolism. I’m sure it might be in there in some cases, but for the most part… I still call bullshit.

Usually it takes a few pages for me to discover that it is Psycho-Babble, but this one started in the very first paragraph. He starts off covering John Carpenter’s Halloween, about the very first murder, with Michael killing his sister. He writes, “As in Psycho too, the nudity and thrusting knife are blatantly sexual; intercourse presented as blood-soaked violence, and vice versa. You (yes, you, and you also) are the murderer in the act of murdering, and the rapist in the act of raping. The pleasure is in the visceral voyeuristic embodiment of the monster.”

So where again is the raping in Psycho and Halloween? Or because both the victims are being stabbed with a knife, that is supposed to be taken as a penis, and that the thrusting of it “are blatantly sexual”? Even when it is being done by a 6-year old boy? And as for Psycho, do we really think that Hitchcock use Marion Crane’s murder to be played out as sort of titillation, sexual or otherwise? Or was it simply used to shock the hell out of the audience?

He goes on to write that “To watch Halloween, then, is to be transformed into a misogynist sex predator.” Uh… right. Let’s remember that virginal as they always like to point out Laurie is, besides Michael’s sister in the opening, Lynda and her boyfriend Bob, is the only ones to have had sex and be killed. So where does this whole “misogynist sex predator” come into play? Oh yeah… the knife. I forgot.

Staying on Carpenter’s films, he discusses his version of The Thing. Oh my… where to start.

He quotes an interview with screenwriter Bill Lancaster, as to why there are no women in this new version, where he says, “In reality there aren’t any women in these kinds of situations. Women have taken on a different role in 1982 than they did in 1951 (when the original film version came out), so perhaps we should have put in one or two, but they would have seemed gratuitous to me.”

I think that really explains it to a T, at least for that time. People that worked in secluded areas, like in Carpenter’s version, where not the most social people, which is why they were there. But the author argues that since this film is “basically a slasher film” that the director “knew well”, which is defined by “the chasing down and mangling of female bodies. Women were central to this kind of story – not gratuitous at all.” So all the times in slasher films, when critics complained about the gratuitous nudity and violence towards women, this author is saying it’s not because that is the central part of slasher films? And I won’t even go into the argument that The Thing is a slasher film. Let’s get back to the Psycho-Babble.

Berlatsky gives us many examples where there are many homosexual implications throughout the film. For example, when Bennings is attacked. Right when he is starting to make room for the thought-dead alien creature and Windows leaves Bennings alone with it, “Slowly its body starts to ooze ichor, while, in the background, Bennings bends over, his butt suggestively towards the frame. A short while later we see Bennings, stripped, covered in latex-like slime, and wrapped in slithery, phallic, bondage tentacles.”

Yes, he actually wrote “his butt suggestively towards the frame”!?!?! How can you actually watch any film when you are constantly looking for ANY shot that could somehow be twisted into some sort of sexual connotation? A guy has his backside turned to the camera (because his character is trying to make room for this burnt corpse) and that is “suggestively”?

When Windows coming back to see Bennings being attacked, the author states that “Bennings in the throws of his passion/transformation.” The author uses “throws” not “throes”, so I’m not misquoting. Microsoft Word even caught that mistake. He goes on to say that when Windows is later confronted by the newly transformed Palmer-Thing, when he freezes up looking at it, he is “transfixed, his face blank with an expression which could be fear but could also, I think, be interpreted as desire. And so he is raped and turned into a Thing.”

Uh… seeing your co-worker mutate into something you’ve never seen before, blood and goo oozing all over the place, gives you the feelings of desire? And having your head snapped inside a giant Venus Fly-Trap is now considered being raped? So… if I follow this correctly, he’s saying that Windows was desiring to be raped? So he was asking for it?

Later on, the author starts to cover the Friday the 13th series, discussing when the guy is attacked in the outhouse, in part 5. He writes, “As Jason plunges a sharpened phallic pole through the walls, the victim weeps and blubbers. Besides him, on the wall, half-visible graffiti declares “Be a Man!” Of course, he isn’t… and neither, by homophobic patriarchal standards, is his assailant, who is, after all, substituting a pole for a penis, and who, is moreover, engaged in a decidedly homoerotic assault.”

Why must everything that is long and/or hard must mean it is a dick? Because Jason has a pole it is supposed to be his dick? And because he is trying to stab the guy through the wall, it means he’s trying to rape him? Give me a freaking break.

I honestly had a hard time getting through the rest of this book because of this kind of silly theories, which is pretty sad when the book is only 158 pages! Yes, they are just his opinions, as well as this review is mine. And he quotes plenty of scholars throughout the book to aid in his points. The sad part is that he may have some valid points if it wasn’t so ridiculously fattened up by these ludicrous assumptions. And using quotes from other Psycho-Babble, in my view, doesn’t prove anything, other than you’re not really watching these films, but watching for parts you can use to prove a point you already have developed.

Proceed at your own risk on this one, my friends.