So now I want to talk about the other three horror movies we saw this weekend all together, because they’re not worth talking about in detail (I wouldn’t recommend any of these unless you already know you want to watch them), but I do think they get at something.

The first was on Joe Bob’s Drive-In (a series on Shudder, where this old Texan horror expert guy hosts horror movies, and kinda talks about the behind-the-scenes and larger context of them at periodic breakpoints in the movie — it’s the kind of thing that’s almost a little weird without commercials to force the breaks, but they make it work). It’s a movie from 1983 called Angel about a high school student that works as a prostitute, and the serial killer who starts killing prostitutes, and whom she then hunts down in a final showdown.

The second and third movies were Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood and Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. (I had mentioned incredulously some stuff that Jamelle Bouie had tweeted about these movies, and my wife was like “Okay, now I’m going to make you watch the Weird Jasons.”)

New Blood is basically taking the “horny teens go to the lake” slasher structure and throwing in a twist where one of the teens is basically Carrie and can use her telekinetic powers to face off with Jason. It feels very classical slasher, with exceptions that I’ll talk about below.

Jason Takes Manhattan is a really weird movie where 90% of it takes place on a local(?) cruise ship that sails from Crystal Lake to NYC(?), and only near the very end (literally 1:04:39 into the movie) does Jason set foot in Manhattan. This last part feels less like a Jason movie and more like one of those late-80s/early-90s “decaying cities” movies, that are all about how America’s cities are crime-ridden sewers. Tons of hard drug use (cocaine! crack! heroin!), lots of trash-strewn alleys, barrels of burning garbage, and most notably green toxic sludge treated as a major feature of the landscape. It’s really part of the same cinematic universe as RoboCop and TMNT. (It’s also a terrible movie, like by far the worst of the four we watched this weekend.)

But anyway, what I want to talk about is the way that watching these movies from different time periods really illustrates kind of the larger social context around the movies.

So Jess had recently watched this documentary about horror films of the ’70s and early ‘80s, and one of the things often repeated about those films is “they couldn’t do that today, of course,” and it’s super true: They couldn’t, and wouldn’t.

Like, in Angel there are multiple shower scenes with full nudity of what are supposed to be teenage girls; I’m not even sure that would be legal today (even keeping in mind that this is the era when they cast people in their late 20s as teenagers), but it’s definitely not a thing that you would expect to see, either way. But movies of that era are just wildly full of exploitation of all kinds, with essentially no thought given to any variety of ethics or responsibility or anything. They’re just pure anarchic rebellious raw-id energy.

(Angel is actually not the best exemplar of this, because it’s actually fairly “decent” — its trans character is treated respectfully, it’s generally positive about sex workers, and it shies away from stuff that ’70s movies would not — but also it’s ‘83, so you can kind of see that ethos disappearing.)

But by the time you get to those late-80s Jason movies, you can really see the Religious Right censoriousness having an impact: They cut away from kills before the gore, and while it’s full of horny teens, there is very little nudity — like at one point, there’s this whole elaborate setpiece where a girl strips down and is waiting for her boyfriend (since Jason-killed) to return, and then Jason comes back instead and kills her, and even though they made a whole big point of how she was stripping and naked, she remains fully covered and decent for the whole scene. There is absolutely zero way that someone filming that scene a decade earlier would have filmed it that prudishly.

And then when you watch the 2018 Halloween movie, you can see a more modern mindset at work: Nobody in modernity cares at all about gore anymore (videogames are dripping in blood, and nobody even blinks at it), and so the kills are lovingly detailed. But meanwhile, there’s virtually no nudity whatsoever.

And so as a modern person, I think it’s probably on the whole good for movies to not place gratuitous demands on their actors, to not just be casual about sexual violence, and to approach topics sensitively and respectfully.

But at the same time, there is something about those ’70s-era “straight from the director’s id” horror movies that is weird and strange and durably compelling as art, in a way that I think is hard to extricate from their more regrettable yikes elements. I don’t want movies to exploit the actors who help make them, and I don’t want movies to unthinkingly be hurtful to viewers, but at the same time, I do want there to be a space for movies that aren’t blandly focus-grouped and filtered through layers of corporate sensibilities. To some extent, it’s like “that’s what indie movies are for,” but even there you’ll see this kind of critique that, say, Nomadland wasn’t tough enough on Amazon, so idk. I feel like I should tie this up with something more definitive, but that’s about all I’ve got, really.