The Stepfather; Latent Female Sexuality and Why It Isn't the Feminist Film It's Preached to Be

My presentation about the 1987 classic, The Stepfather centered around a couple ideas. I wanted to get into the weird and interesting history of the film (John List and all of that). I think horror movies get this added element when they are based on true stories. 

I also wanted to discuss in my presentation how this film really is different for it's time. While problematic, the film should be given a certain degree of credit for going against slasher norms. 

As I said in my presentation, the movie does break this 80's horror paradigm by making the villain a conservative patriarchal head and the hero a sexually active teenage girl. 

Another element of the film that is pretty great is the nuance of Stephanie's character. As far as final girls go she's a pretty good one.

These are elements that make the Stepfather pretty great, as well as a couple more details. Things like showing how people invalidate the fears and rationalities of young women is a big one, as well as showing a mutilated male body as a spectacle is pretty different than traditional slashers coming out in 1987.

There is also the fact that female rage and sexuality are made real and the fact that a young woman is shown grieving in real and human ways is also pretty different. Now that we dove into the good parts, let's talk about the bad parts. 

In feminist academic circles, there's a lot of literature about how Stephanie is a great final girl and how the film should be applauded in the genre, leaving out a lot of glaring problematic gaps.

I went on to compare another final girl that is often applauded for being written well, Kirsty from Hellraiser and how she also.... in short.... sucks. 

Both women are sexualized in weird ways that the writers pretend like didn't happen. At the end of the day, there are a lot of fetish-like sexual references in these films using these young girls in opposition to a male authority figure as pawns.

I believe that these sexual- incest undertones are to "sex up" these films and bring in male viewership, which is something that I haven't seen a lot of if any, discussion about.

I go on to talk about some research I conducted through IMDB about why these trends are happening in big and little budget films. I went to the cast and crew list and found the answer pretty much immediately.

Hellraiser's crazy large production team included no women writing, directing, producing, editing or even doing makeup.... what a shocker.

The Stepfather in my opinion ended up being a more feminist film because of the one single woman on the writing team, but so many aspects of what makes the film gross I believe is largely due to the fact that there were no women directors, or producers, editors, etc. The correlation is blatant. I also made a little zine discussing the topic more.