Slasher, rites of passage and adolescence: the liminar Queer subject in Fear Street (Netix, 2021)Slasher, rito de paso y adolescencia: el sujeto liminar Queer en La calle del terror (Netix, 2021) doxa.comunicación | nº 35, pp. 165-191 | 165July-December of 2022ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978How to cite this article: Diez-Puertas, E. (2022). Slasher, rites of passage and adolescence: the liminar Queer subject in Fear Street (Netix, 2021). Doxa Comunicación, 35, pp. 165-191.https://doi.org/10.31921/doxacom.n35a1583Emeterio Diez Puertas is a Senior Lecturer and has had two six-year periods of research. He has given courses and seminars at universities in Argentina, Colombia, and Ecuador. He has carried out academic research in the elds of Audio-visual Narratives, Media History and Gender Studies. He is the author of ten books and over sixty articles. Among his books are: Cine y Comunicación política en Iberoamérica (2018), El sueño de un cine hispano (2017), Golpe a la Transición. El secuestro de “El crimen de Cuenca”, (2012), Historia social del cine en España (2003) and Historia del movimiento obrero en la industria española del cine (1931-1999) (2001). He is a member of AsHisCom (Association of Communication Historians).Camilo José Cela University, Spain[email protected]ORCID: 0000-0002-2206-0480Abstract: Slashers are a subgenre of horror lms, full of violence and sex, born in the United States in the 1970s. ey star teenagers and triumph, especially, among teenagers. Despite moments of crisis and serious controversy, they are still part of audio-visual ction today, as illustrated by Fear Street (2021). is paper studies the narrative of this Netix production to interpret the profound sense of a type of lmmaking often accused of inciting femicide and of being exploitative. at is, of using the forbidden, the lurid and the scandalous to, for a low budget, make a killing at the box oce through commercial formulas such as sequels and using dubious aesthetic pretensions. Specically, slashers are related to the sexual awakening and narrations of the rite of passage to heteronormativity, which, in the case of Fear Street, is questioned from a Queer perspective.Keywords: Adolescence; Slasher; horror movies; narratology; rite of passage; heteronormativity; Queer.Resumen:El slasher es un subgénero del cine de terror lleno de violencia y sexo que nace en Estados Unidos en los años setenta del siglo pasado. Está prota-gonizado por adolescentes y triunfa, especialmente, entre los adolescen-tes. Pese a momentos de crisis y graves polémicas, hoy sigue formando parte de la cción audiovisual, como demuestra el caso de La calle del terror (Fear Street, 2021). El artículo estudia la narrativa de esta pro-ducción de Netix para interpretar el sentido profundo de un tipo de relato que ha sido acusado de incitar al feminicidio y ser cine de explo-tación, es decir, de servirse de lo prohibido, lo escabroso y lo escandaloso para, con bajo presupuesto, fórmulas comerciales como las secuelas y dudosas pretensiones estéticas, amasar una fortuna en la taquilla. En concreto, se relaciona el slasher con el despertar sexual y las narraciones del rito de paso a la heteronormatividad, la cual, en el caso de La calle del terror, se cuestiona desde una perspectiva Queer.Palabras clave:Adolescencia; Slasher; cine de terror; narratología; rito de paso; hetero-normatividad; Queer.Received: 21/12/2021 - Accepted: 23/02/2022 - Early access: 11/03/2022 - Published: 01/07/2022Aceptado: 21/12/2021 - Recibido: 23/02/2022 - En edición: 11/03/2022 - Published: 01/07/2022

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166 | nº 35, pp. 165-191 | July-December of 2022Slasher, rites of passage and adolescence: the liminar queer subject in Fear Street (Netix, 2021)ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978doxa.comunicación1. IntroductionSlasher lms came into being in the late 1970s with two foundational lms, Halloween, (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980). ey are a variant of the horror genre, a genre forming part of the tradition of gothic literature (MacAndrew, 1979), which has been, since the 1950s and perhaps because it stars adolescent actors, taken as theirs by teenagers, becoming, along with live music, jeans and comics, a characteristic element of youth culture (García Grego, 2015). e sub-genre itself, following dozens of lm and TV productions, seemed to have run out of steam (Rocko, 2002), however, in recent years, and as a part of post-September-11 cinema, it has made a comeback with even remakes of those foundational classics being lmed. e narrative outline of a slasher is very simple. e protagonists are high school students of 15-18 years of age. e sexual urge, that is, the initiation to sex as a step in their maturity, marks their character. e teens are a group who are little by little picked o by a masked killer until only the most demure and level-headed girl remains. She, after killing the murderer in the third act, is revealed as the heroine, having overcome all obstacles without the help of an adult. She has done this through her courage, intelligence, prudence and, then yes, by being as violent as the killer. Figure 1. Jamie Lee Curtis plays 17-year-old Laurie Strode, in Halloween (1978)Source: Universal PicturesSlashers have drawn academic attention from the very beginning, there being numerous studies from just after the subgenre’s birth, from a great variety of perspectives (Brottman, 1997; Carrol, 2006; Kerswell, 2010; Zinoman, 2011). In the Spanish context,
doxa.comunicación | nº 35, pp. 165-191 | July-December of 2022Emeterio Diez-PuertasISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978167the contributions of Guillot & Valencia (1996), Berruzo (2001), Delgado Matón (2016) and, especially, Higueras (2011) and Pérez Ochando (2015 & 2016) deserve particular mention. Rubén Higueras denes the subgenre from certain narratological characteristics: a female protagonist, a context far from adult or paternal gures, pre-matrimonial sex, a masked gure, his being a voyeur, a bladed weapon with a phallic connotation, a succession of systematic killings, graphically shown, the use of a subjective point of view as well as clear transtextuality. Luis Pérez Ochando relates slashers to their socio-political context: the movies from the 80s are an expression of that decade’s neo-liberalism; the self-reference and parody of 90s slashers derives from globalisation and the extension of mass media culture; early XXI century slashers are related to post-9/11 paranoia and the 2008 economic crisis; and, nally, recent slashers are understood by the hardening of neoliberal, imperialist, androcentric politics, as the endless deaths of the youths in these lms is no more than a warning of what awaits them in a competitive capitalist world that in its way massacres people. One of the most recent slasher productions is the Fear Street trilogy (2021), broadcast on the Netix platform. It is made up of three lms Fear Street (part 1): 1994, Fear Street (part 2): 1978, and Fear Street (part 3): 1666. All three are based on the books written by Robert Lawrence Stine, author of terror stories for children and young adults, such as the Nightmare Room series. is paper proposes an analysis of this trilogy to reveal its narrative devices and understand its meaning. 2. eorical framework & methodology Our approach to the object of study comes from four dierent academic traditions: on-screen content, teenage consumption, gender studies and the mythopoetic focus. Within the eld of communication, studies of television ction were established in the eighties and were the heirs of traditional lm studies. e TV was no longer the “idiot box” and since then, quality TV series have been studied (Feuer, 1985; Cobo Durán, 2013; Iglesias, 2014; Weiner, 2015; Carrión Domínguez, 2019). Digital convergence means that today studies are turning to programs on paid digital TV platforms. Netix, Amazon Prime, HBO, Filmin and others are the emerging windows as opposed to cinemas and conventional TV channels. is new form of à la carte consumption and exhibition is what explains Fear Street’s peculiar format, three lms, each of 100-120 minutes, available for binge-viewing.
168 | nº 35, pp. 165-191 | July-December of 2022Slasher, rites of passage and adolescence: the liminar queer subject in Fear Street (Netix, 2021)ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978doxa.comunicaciónFigure 2. e Fear Street trilogySource: Netix Secondly, this paper belongs among those that cover teenagers’ consumption of TV series, whether they be studies focused on early adolescence (10-14 years-of-age) or later (15-19), be they from a theoretic perspective or another (educational, social, gender, psychological…), looking at one or other risk factor (drug addiction, isolation, dropping out, pregnancy, suicide, etc.) (Abad & Fernández, 2016; Bandrés Goldáraz, 2019; Belmonte Borrego, 2016; Chicharro Merayo, 2012; Donstrup, 2019; Forteza Martínez, De Casas Moreno, & Vizcaíno Verdú, 2021; Mateos-Pérez, 2021; Ramírez Alvarado, Gutiérrez Lozano & Ruiz del Olmo, 2020; Trujillo Fernández, 2015). It is true that slashers are “adult” lms. e authorities rate these lms for the over-18s, and even, in some cases, make cuts or ban them. However, with the growth of domestic video and cable TV plus greater tolerance, teenagers have been able to access this “taboo”. In fact, Halloween was classied in 1978 for over 18s (over 16s in France) but other countries have recently lowered the rated age to 12-13. Moreover, there is a “rite” among adolescents to see the most “mythical” horror lms, and especially slashers, on Halloween night. e market has created yet another consumption rite. It should not be forgotten that cinema-going and TV-watching are practices that have been compared to religious rites. Georey Hill arms that the cinema theatre is a temple; the lmgoer, a communicant; the ticket, an oering to the gods; and what we watch on the screen, the myth (1992: 4). Marc Augé states that the television is a domestic altar for small gods (1997: 138-139).
doxa.comunicación | nº 35, pp. 165-191 | July-December of 2022Emeterio Diez-PuertasISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978169Figure 3. Slasher (2016-). A Canadian series created by Aaron Martin. Now in its fourth seasonSource: Chiller Films, Super Channel, Shaftesbury Filmsirdly, we set out from a gender perspective, a source of abundant academic output in the case of slashers. From an early stage, it was spoken of as exploitation cinema and as a subgenre based on a patriarchal and heteronormative regime which reproduced female stereotypes and exercised victimising violence and objectication towards women (Clover, 1987 & 1992; Dika, 1990; Creed, 1993; Pinedo, 1997; Karlyn, 2003; Leal, 2020). In this sense, slashers are taken to be a demonstration that gender is a regulated social construction (Butler, 2007). eir images are a cultural representation of what each gender role is allowed to do or prohibited from doing in society. In the case of Fear Street, we enter into what Fonseca Hernández and Quintero Soto call peripheral sexualities: “those which cross the border of socially accepted sexuality […] are based on the resistance to traditional values, and on assuming the transgression many times the price to be paid is that of social rejection, discrimination and stigma” (2009: 44).As regards the mythopoetic, the relation between tale and rite/myth, between ctional and sacred text, is now a commonplace (Campell, 2014; Durand, 1993 & 2005; Frazer, 2011; Frye, 1963; Jung, 2002; Lévi-Strauss, 2000 & 2006; or Propp 2008 & 2020). As pointed out by Chillón, media culture is largely narrative, and is built on transtextuality, that is, on an intense dialectic relation with the preceding cultural tradition and adheres to the mythopoetic character of human imagination and the collective imaginary world, in the sense that its tales are constructed by mythemes and archetypes inscribed in the anthropological limits and possibilities of the species. Consequently, “the imaginary gures generated by media culture are indebted to representations that have been crystalised and sedimented by the cultural tradition considered sensu lato.” (2000: 138) erefore, audio-visual ction is full of tales about rites of passage such as e Emerald Forest (1985), based on a true story, or such ction has a narrative derived from the rite
170 | nº 35, pp. 165-191 | July-December of 2022Slasher, rites of passage and adolescence: the liminar queer subject in Fear Street (Netix, 2021)ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978doxa.comunicaciónof passage, as in those lms that follow the narrative outline of the monomyth or the Hero’s Journey. People’s social lives, for Arnold van Gennep, are marked by these rites of passage, by transitions from one state to another: from youth to maturity, from single life to matrimony, from child to parent, from peace to war, from life to death, etc. Some of these transitions are so important that society controls and ritualises them. It controls them because there is danger that certain individuals may not pass such a step. It ritualises them through a ceremony with a series of community and symbolic activities.Uniting these four perspectives allows us to formulate our hypothesis in the following way: the Netix trilogy (digital screens) shows the teenagers (the target audience) a rite of passage and a myth (mythopoetic) related to their sexual identity (gender assimilation). e slasher was born as a myth that explained to adolescents the rite of passage to full sexuality, or rather, it explained to them why they should accept the heteronorm. However, our hypothesis is that Fear Street ghts against this discourse, as the actantial subject is a Queer liminar subject.Illustration 4. e credits show the story’s geography: the wealthy town of Sunnyvale and the poor town of Shadyside on the land occupied in 1666 by Union, the pioneer settlement, built by those Queers who had arrived in the New World eeing from religious and political persecution in EuropeSource: NetixTo demonstrate this hypothesis, we are going to perform, in the results section, a narratological analysis of the trilogy starting from Greimas’s proposal (1973, 1982, 1983, 1991). e methodology consists of taking the actantial model and studying the semiotics of the action in Fear Street as regards: 1) space-time; 2) the actantial structure, 3) the subject’s competence; and 4) the narrative outline of the tests. Below, in the discussion section, we consider the relation between semiotic modes of existence, peripheral sexualities and certain elements of the rite of passage of initiation, what its phases are, the liminal personae, the communitas, mysteries and terror. Finally, we nish with a synopsis of conclusions.
doxa.comunicación | nº 35, pp. 165-191 | July-December of 2022Emeterio Diez-PuertasISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-39781713. Semiotic analysis of Fear Street3.1. Paradigmatic organisation: the articulation of space-time Concerning the paradigmatic blueprint, we focus on the chronotope. Furthermore, this articulation is decisive in how the trilogy is told. e title Fear Street