The Slumber Party Massacre Double Bill

Part of Dundead Horror Film Festival 2024. Priority booking for members starts at 10:00 on Wed 3 April. Passes and individual tickets will go on sale from 10:00 on Fri 5 April. More information on Festival Passes can be found below.

Vintage horror films directed by women are (sadly) rare. As a result, the horror genre has a complicated relationship with women, often casting them as screaming victims or misogynistically-framed sex objects. Then there’s 1982’s The Slumber Party Massacre and 1987’s Slumber Party Massacre II. 

Don’t be fooled by the generic advertising which played to genre standards of exploitation – these two films are self-reflexive slasher parodies (14 years before Scream would do it) which are both written and directed by women. Rita Mae Brown and Amy Holden Jones in the case of the first film, and Deborah Brock in the case of the sequel. As such, the films’ foregrounding of their female casts still feels fresh today. The characters are genuinely funny and we’re really rooting for them to survive. 

The first film takes a lean (both films are only 77 minutes) and mean approach – amidst the bitingly funny skewering of slasher tropes there is a real sense of threat and danger to its pneumatical-drill-armed killer. 

The second film meanwhile unleashes the weird, featuring musical numbers, deliberately campy acting and a surprisingly empathetic portrayal of trauma. It also contains one of the slasher genre’s greatest killers of all time – a scenery-devouring supernatural rockabilly greaseball whose obnoxious electric guitar’s fretboard has a drill on the end. Yes, he gets his own musical number, and yes, it is glorious. 

Sadly overlooked, these two films are extremely fun, completely ahead of their time, and are two of the slasher genre’s very best entries.