Review: The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

Andree Honore, Debra De Liso, and Michele Michaels in The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

October 8, 2024

Amy Holden Jones’ Slumber Party Massacre (1982) is like a queer-coded haunted house, with jumpscares and gags around every corner. 

In many ways, this fast-paced 80s slasher doesn’t seem to deviate from the tropes and stereotypes prevalent in the genre at the time. Trish (Michele Michaels) and her group of friends throw a slumber party while her parents are out of town, but of course, a murderer is on the loose. Girls stay home alone for the first time, break their parent's rules, and get punished for their moral delinquencies by a blindly murderous man with a drill. However, once you consider that it was directed, produced and written by women (the screenwriter is queer feminist author Rita Mae Brown), you start to see the movie through a queer lens. Also, once you learn that it was originally written to be a parody but later changed to be a straight-up slasher, you can see the elements of comedy and self-awareness. The inclusion of subtle queer subtext subverts these overplayed tropes and adds a layer of camp over the film. Plus, it’s always fun to play ‘find the queer subtext’, sometimes even inserting a bit of your own. 

In the first 15 minutes of the movie, there's a locker room shower scene that is steeped in sapphic undertones, perhaps even overtones. The girls are fresh off the basketball court and naked, showering together after practice. Trish asks one of the girls if she likes watching basketball, and she says she does, for the ‘great big guys in their cute little shorts’. They both discuss how they’re attracted to athletes on TV, arguably in a sort of phony and performative way, sexualizing men in the same way men do to women. Then, it cuts to her teammate Valerie (Robin Stille) looking on wistfully and Trish and Valerie lock eyes, still showering. Trish walks over and compliments her basketball skills, then tries to convince her friends to let Valerie come to their party. Her friends don’t want her to come to the party because she ‘drinks too much milk’, and then they basically admit it’s because she plays basketball too well and is too pretty. I mean I don’t even know what to say. 

Then you have Coach Jana (Pamela Roylance), whose characterization is one of the most straightforwardly queer, from being a girls' basketball coach, to dressing in a somewhat masculine way (that Speedo baseball tee rocks), to coming home to a butch woman named Pat fixing her door. By the end of the movie, Coach Jana is the catalyst for the murderer’s downfall (spoiler alert), stabbing him with a fire poker until Trish and Valerie tag team him to death, Valerie even castrating his phallic power drill with a machete. Though much of this film plays into formulas shaped by the genre, the ending proves that this film is cut from a different cloth. Three queer-coded women work together to take down a rape-y dude and succeed through team effort. There is no final girl or male hero, in fact the men in this movie are pretty useless. It’s incredibly refreshing and invigorating to watch, it’s an ending that leaves you cheering at the screen like a sports fanatic.

On the other hand, I’m not going to try to sell you that this is an entirely progressive and explicitly queer film. The filmmakers often give us these queer moments and then backtrack to confirm the character's heterosexuality. I’m also not going to try to convince you that there’s something underlyingly feminist about gratuitous teen-girl nudity, either. The male gaze is still present even though it is a woman-made film. But, what can you do, it was 1982. 

Despite that, whether or not this film is gay or feminist or subversive is missing the main point. This film is so much fun. Sure it’s tropey and a bit predictable, but sometimes that’s the comfort of a slasher like this. Even though the characters aren’t exactly realistic, there’s a kinship among the girls that has authenticity. Valerie and her sister Courtney (Jennifer Meyers) have a particularly tender relationship, oscillating between teasing and caring for the other in true sisterly fashion. As an added bonus, this movie is extra fun for a queer audience member, it’s like a little gay Easter egg hunt for queer subtext, and there are plenty of eggs in the yard. Thinking this movie is too formulaic is like getting on a rollercoaster and rolling your eyes on the loop-de-loo just because you knew it was coming. Just throw your hands up, scream and have fun.

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Rating: 🦄🦄🦄🦄

Mickey Morrow is a film studies student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

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