Discreet Charms: The Last Slumber Party and the Order of Dreams

Art & Trash, episode 27
Discreet Charms: The Last Slumber Party and the Order of Dreams
Stephen Broomer, February 16, 2024

Made in suburban New Orleans in 1984, Stephen Tyler's The Last Slumber Party is an exceptional slasher: its characters occupy an oneiric space where dreams and other digressions challenge the asserted reality of plot, a messy extemporization of campfire storytelling. It is a surreal slasher, bowing to the intuition of dreams, the concealed truths of the subconscious, indicative of the collaborative dreamlife of adolescent friendships and of the strange fear that creeps in when dreams reveal themselves.

In this video essay, Stephen Broomer argues that Tyler's film develops, from its clichéd premise, into an imaginative film about dreams and omens.

SCRIPT:

A wild-eyed lunatic in a surgeon’s scrubs spies a girl through a window. He holds a bloody scalpel: with him, the mercy of modern medicine meets a destructive force of drooling lunacy. Doctor and patient, prisoner and jailor have switched places. A madman dressed as a doctor or nurse is, invariably, a metaphor for the cloak of sanity among the professional class, a citizen above suspicion armed with the physician’s authority and the fearsome instruments of the healer’s calling. It is later implied that the same man is a violent patient in a local hospital facing a lobotomy, who has secretly escaped. What follows from that revelation plays out in a curious riff on the stock commercial slasher movie, but even this culminates in a series of dreams and false endings. The Last Slumber Party, made in suburban New Orleans in 1984, is an amateur attempt at making a commercial film, distinguished for its curious plot-twists and bizarre dialogue. Slashers have often engaged backwards-facing stories of vengeance, of violence that echoes from the past, or that has been provoked by the reawakening of past traumas. In The Last Slumber Party, there is no past: this film looks forward, to omens, to the hidden warnings of dreams.

In a high school science class, teenagers court each other in silent shows of teasing and leering. The anti-social class geek, nicknamed Science, solitary in the corner, pokes at a model skeleton. Handsome jocks and pretty girls fill out the remainder of the central cast: loud, foul-mouthed Chrissy is the leader of the pack. She peppers her juvenile remarks with comically outlandish shows of homophobia. Tommy, Billy, and Scott are the sex-starved suitors of Chris, Tracy, and Linda. These six characters will converge at Linda’s house for a slumber party: Linda is the most virginal, hard-working, and mature of her trio of friends, a condition that would mark her as the de-facto protagonist in many other slashers; but once bodies start to pile up, it is vulgar, lustful Chris who will emerge as the film’s ‘last girl.’ The escaped lunatic and the slumber party cross as if by fate: Linda’s father, Dr. Sickler, is the killer’s doctor, and plans to lobotomize him the next morning. The mugging killer is played by the filmmaker himself, Stephen Tyler. He stalks and kills the characters one at a time, but he also witnesses, with what can only be interpreted as confusion, the brief appearance of a second killer, Science, also dressed in scrubs and armed with a scalpel, seemingly by coincidence. Tyler combines self-consciously funny and clever turns like this with curious, baroque variations on the form of the slasher, for instance, when the camera takes a menacing, voyeuristic tour of a bathroom where Chris is taking a shower, the room surveyed with a continuous three-minute shot: during this the camera-eye seems omniscient, in close-ups on Chris and in the shower with her; but at other times, it is identified subjectively with the killer, as when it retreats back into the bedroom where he is hiding. The durational nature of this shot is an extension of Tyler’s masterful control of staging elsewhere, as he constantly plays on foreground and background—distraction in the foreground that leads characters to be oblivious to the background—a means of controlling anticipation.

The Last Slumber Party departs from amateur craft and commercial aspiration at the mid-point, when it takes an unexpected detour. Chris wakes up to greet the morning: the slumber party is over, but is this a dream? She is summoned upstairs by Tommy, and the three boys attack her and push her down the stairs. The undead, bloodied bodies of Linda and Tracy reach out to her, asking her for help. Finally, Chris is killed—by Linda’s mother. She wakes again to find herself returned to the night before, still at the slumber party. The dream sequence serves several purposes: it establishes Chris as the central protagonist, whose perspective is now rattled by her nightmare; it serves her retribution for her sneaky behaviour (it is, after all, Linda’s mother who kills her—Linda’s mother whose house rules she has flaunted by inviting boys to the party); but above all, it turns The Last Slumber Party from a simple variation on a stock premise into an imaginative film about dreams and omens. Chris’s dream does not intuit violence that has happened—some of the boys, unbeknownst to her, are already dead—but it does anticipate oncoming violence. In another show of baroque, durational camerawork, the film will soon find Chris, seemingly awake, stalked in the house by the masked killer, experiencing something like her earlier dream, as some characters—Linda and her mother—appear not in distress but almost symbolically undead. After stabbing the killer, Chris collapses like a marionette with its strings cut.

Are we still in a dream? The structure of dreams begins to intrude on the plot: Dr. Sickler arrives home, not noticing the bodies, and the killer is moving around through the home, still alive. When Dr. Sickler is called back to the hospital, he manifests there almost immediately, murdered by his patient. As in a dream, the film has broken its spatial reality: Dr. Sickler’s body floats in the family swimming pool, and when Chris attempts to recover it, she is murdered by the masked killer. Chris is then woken up by a phone call from Tracy, to whom she recounts her bad dream, and, as if in a loop, they go to Linda’s house. When they arrive, Linda gets a phone call warning that the patient has escaped; when she goes to get her mother, the killer sneaks into the house behind her, later taking her hostage as the girls enter the house. It’s implied that their ordeal will play out again, slightly differently. The way in which The Last Slumber Party uses the conceit of the dream is following in a long line of horror films for which the faint threshold that separates dreams, fantasies and hallucinations from reality becomes the liminal space of terror. In the case of Tyler’s film, it is plainly indebted to the coda of Friday the 13th, in which last girl Alice dreams of the disfigured Jason Voorhees attacking her on the lake—the audience lets their guard down for the tranquility of sunlight, allowing the shock to hit like being jolted out of sleep.

The logic of the slasher movie is straightforward compared to forms that anticipate it, such as the old-dark-house mystery and the willfully convoluted giallo: slasher tropes become the stuff of easy adaptation. Because it most often deals with trauma and vengeance, the slasher movie can also host deep resonances, a formula that can open to creative and even personal variation. But its logic is seldom challenged on the level of form: subversion is typically reserved for the twists and surprises of story. The Last Slumber Party is exceptional in this sense: by allowing the characters to occupy an oneiric space where dreams and other digressions challenge the asserted reality of plot, it becomes like the messy extemporization of campfire storytelling, but also, surreal, bowing to the intuition of dreams, the concealed truths of the subconscious, indicative of the collaborative dreamlife of adolescent friendships and of the strange fear that creeps in when dreams reveal themselves. To this point, The Last Slumber Party is a strange bedfellow to Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise, in which a group of six characters attempt and fail, again and again, to have a dinner party, entering into strange dreams along the way that open onto entire histories, and that reveal the solipsistic, mannered behaviours of its protagonists. For Chris, Linda, Tracy, Tommy, Scott, and Billy, their lack of a mature front, their vulgar appetites and self-conscious posturing draw them even closer to the oneiric territories of Surrealism, albeit a vernacular surrealism that asserts itself somewhere between incompetence and passion. It may be no coincidence that Luis Bunuel’s son Rafael wrote a screenplay for an American slasher, Fatal Games: the clichés of commercial cinema are automatic, and thus invite other automatic processes that might yield to the subconscious. In The Last Slumber Party, the conflicts, archetypes and symbols already at play in Chris’s world are enhanced as she dreams them, and, as in a dream, the audience only learns to distrust what they are shown when it is too late.