What Can You Do in Your Dreams? Slasher Cinema as Youth Empowerment

classic American slasher. Such films are alternately reviled as random, meaningless spectacle (Crane 147) or revered as cultural products of the exploitation of sexual difference. Psychoanalytic and feminist readers posit that we watch slashers because they act as signifiers of latent teenage sexual anxiety and desire (Mulvey 756). In the grand tradition of Halloween (1978), the Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) franchise is ‘‘characterized by the presence of a psychotic killer usually involved in a multiplicity of murders’’ (Dika 87). What sets these films apart from such canonical works as Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) is the intimate, formulaic relationship between Clover’s chaste, somewhat androgynous ‘‘Final Girl’’ (Clover 35) and her sexually aggressive assailant (Tracansky 65). The Final Girl’s ‘‘triumphant’’ survival is read by some critics as reflecting the conservative sexual politics of a nation then in the throes of an HIV/AIDS and teen pregnancy crisis (Derry 163). In critical analysis, however, this reactionary view tends to obfuscate the generally troubled relationship between parents and their rebellious offspring: in the Nightmare on Elm Street films, authority figures either dismiss teenage pleas for assistance or pose direct physical threats. The slasher, then, can be seen as underage society’s revenge-seeking doppelganger, its desire for rebellion made manifest in the murderous tendencies of powerful, sadistic Freddy. And though sexual exploration is a key feature of the slasher, in the Nightmare films, preservation of innocence and peer support constitute the most pressing crises and needs of the teenage unconscious. The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise offers us a particularly interesting case because its heroes rebel against abusive authority figures by