SLASHERS – Slumber Party Massacre

Published on: 17th September, 2009

SLASHERS - Slumber Party Massacre  | read this item

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The earliest offerings of the slasher cycle were predominantly by males and for young male audiences, and so the more low budget efforts would be filled with dubious acting and unnecessary T&A. And so, when Slumber Party Massacre was released in 1982, directed by a woman and written by a noted feminist, both fans and critics expected something a little different, perhaps a critique on the formula and clichés of the teen horror movie. What would surprise audiences, however, was just how much Slumber Party Massacre would rely on gratuitous nudity and close-ups of female bodies in all states of undress. Whereas the likes of Halloween and even Friday the 13th had been relatively restrained in this respect (both featured breasts but for no more than a few seconds), Slumber Party Massacre revelled in its sleazy exploitation roots.

The director responsible for Slumber Party Massacre was Amy Holden Jones. Born on September 17 1953, Jones had studied art history at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and had attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After winning a student award from the American Film Institute for her short film A Weekend Home, Jones managed to attract the attention of renowned filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who offered her an assistant role on his latest feature Taxi Driver. Through Scorsese, Jones would meet the man who would help launch her career, b-movie king Roger Corman. She was initially hired as an editor, working for Joe Dante (making his directorial debut) and Alan Arkush on their feature Hollywood Boulevard, before performing the same duties on Hal Ashby’s Second Hand Hearts, where she learnt the craft of saving movies in the editing room.

Corman was interested in jumping on the slasher bandwagon, which had taken over the horror genre during the early eighties and could be produced on a relatively small budget. Surprisingly, the script that they would decide to shoot would come from the most unlikely of sources. Rita Mae Brown was extremely intelligent and educated, an acclaimed writer and feminist and had fought for civil liberties. Her first work to be published was The Hand That Cradles the Rock in 1971, a collection of short poems, although it would be her novel Rubyfruit Jungle that would launch her writing career. With slasher movies constantly criticised for its use of female nudity and violence towards women, Brown was hired to write a script, injecting her own spin on the genre. The result was Don’t Open the Door, a title that would echo various other low budget efforts of the era (such as Don’t Go in the Woods, Don’t Go Near the Park, Don’t Go in the House and Don’t Answer the Phone!).

Whilst the script had the essentials of what was needed for a slasher, Corman felt that it wasn’t quite what they needed, and so Jones was allowed to perform extensive re-writes, adding elements of humour and fleshing out the main protagonists. There were various sexual subtexts already present in the original draft, however, most notably the killer’s choice of weapon – a drill. This phallic device that he used to penetrate his scantily clad victims was a symbol of man’s power, which would result in a metaphoric castration during the climax, when one of the girls successfully breaks the end of his ‘weapon.’ One aspect of the script that Jones did work on in great detail were the kill scenes, realising that these would be a major selling point with its young target audience and so they should be as exciting and unique as possible.

In order to prove to Corman that she was more than capable of directing, Jones decided to shoot a prologue for the movie with her husband Michael Chapman, a respected cinematography who had previously shot the likes of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull for Scorcese and Philip Kaufman’s take on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The sequence would help establish the villain, Russ Thorn, and would revolve around a group of young hippies performing a tarot reading, promptly followed by several brutal murders. These special effects were homemade, with Jones taking a Styrofoam head and attaching a wig, then driving a knife through to create the illusion that the victim had been stabbed in the head. Corman was impressed by the eight-minute teaser, but sadly the footage was unusable due to the actors being students and not members of the Screen Actors Guild.

Corman had built a reputation for himself over the years for being a resourceful producer, able to shoot movies with little funds and on an extremely tight schedule. Avoiding unnecessary costs, such as still photographers (for promotional material like magazine articles and lobby cards), Corman was able to provide Jones with an adequate budget of just $200,000. With Chapman preoccupied with Carl Reiner’s film noir spoof Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, the cinematography would instead be handled by Steve Posey, who had previously shot second unit on Dante’s werewolf flick The Howling. Posey would later lens such cult films as Savage Streets and Friday the 13th: A New Beginning for Danny Steinmann, before launching his own career as a director with the likes of Xena: Warrior Princess and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

The crew for what would be re-titled Sleepless Nights during production consisted of various names that would later enjoy minor success within the genre. Associate producer and ssistant director Mark Allan would later become a production manager on the harrowing drama Patty Hearst, vampire flick Near Dark and, more recently, the action thriller The Bourne Identity. Co-producer Aaron Lipstadt would direct episodes of various TV shows like The Equalizer, Miami Vice and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, whilst the editing would be performed by Wendy Greene Bricmont (who had previously worked on Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and would later cut Kindergarten Cop and My Super Ex-Girlfriend) and Sean Foley (Survivor and The Apprentice). The director’s brother, Ralph Jones, would compose the score, using a cheap Casio synthesizer.

For the role of ‘final girl’ Valerie, Corman and Jones decided to cast twenty-year old Robin Stille who, despite her good nature and professional attitude, would be criticised later in her career for her drinking habit, particularly in the set of the 1988 flick Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama. Tragically, she would commit suicide on February 9 1996 at the age of thirty-four, with 1991’s American Ninja 4: The Annihilation being her last notable appearance. Co-star Michael Villela also had no prior experience when he was cast as antagonist Russ Thorn, although his future credits would include Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, Wild Orchild and its 1991 sequel Wild Orchild 2: Two Shades of Blue. Michele Michaels, who would portray the second heroine Trish Devereaux, would go onto appear in Death Wish 4: The Crackdown and several straight-to-video and TV movies.

The supporting cast would include Debra Deliso (Iced), David Millbern (Gods and Monsters), Jim Boyce (Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment) and Pamela Roylance (Days of Our Lives). Brinke Stevens had originally been lined up to play one of the lead girls (at that time she was married to Dave Stevens, a comic artist for The Rocketeer), but modelling commitment in Lake Tahoe forced her to take a smaller role. She would later appear in This is Spinal Tap, as well as issues of Penthouse and Playboy. The special effects, meanwhile, were handled by Rick Lazzarini, whose subsequent work would include A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge, Ghostbusters II and A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child.

Principal photography took place in Venice, Los Angeles, over a period of twenty days. At the insistence of Corman, Jones would fill her movie with copious amounts of nudity, most notably during a shower scene early on in the film. The running time would be greatly reduced to a mere seventy-six minutes, whilst the climax would be re-shot to make it more intense. Jones herself would design the infamous poster which would show several young women (none of whom are featured in the movie itself) with the killer standing over them, ‘weapon’ in hand. Due to none of the actresses being available on the day, Jones would use stand-ins. Corman had left Jones alone after the first day of shooting and was impressed with the result, although he would change the name of the movie from Sleepless Nights to Slumber Party Massacre for its release.

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