The Slasher Film and the Torment of the European Body

Among the seemingly innumerable masterpieces crafted by our European ancestors is Lorenzo Bernini’s 17th century sculpture, Apollo and Daphne.

Currently held in the Galleria Borghese in the Eternal City of Rome, Bernini’s sculpture is the quintessential Renaissance piece.

Drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the principal source for classical mythology throughout most of Western history, Apollo and Daphne the sun god’s failed attempt to capture the chaste nymph whose father turned her into a laurel tree as a perpetual symbol of her nobility and purity.

Like Bernini’s lesser known great work, The Rape of Persephone, Apollo and Daphne is a (perhaps all too erotic) showcase of the beauty of the human body—specifically the beauty of the European body in both its male and female form.

The bodies of these divine figures are intensely charged with eroticism, beauty, and nobility—so much so that one might be tempted to agree with more severe Christians who wanted such creations preserved in private and shown to a select and mature visitors.

But that is a discussion for another time and another forum.

Like the majority of great Italian art—both sacred and profane—Bernini’s sculptures depict the ideal human form as that of the Italian or Greek hybrid of both Indo-European and Mediterranean or Early European Farmer genetics, a combination of large bodies, aquiline noses, and alternating round and “square” faces.  

To say that these beautiful European bodies are not well received or appreciated by other ethnic groups—or rather one characteristically resentful ethnic group in particular—would be an understatement.

On the other hand, to be fair (TRIGGER WARNING), there are some very beautiful men and women of that particular ethnicity, and, there is, of course, no shortage of ugly and resentful people among our own Western people.

Nonetheless, while Bernini’s works are, in fact, typical of the Western art, which has, generally speaking, celebrated the beauty and nobility of the human (usually European) body as well as the soul.

However, as is commonly known, for much of the past 150 years, the human body in general and the European body in particular has been subject to horrific disfiguration and torment within works of postmodern and now postmillennial art.

There are, of course, the hideous depictions of mutated and tortured bodies in the grotesque and diabolical paintings of Picasso and the 20th century Irish painter Francis Bacon.

However, no art form has subjected the European body to more torment and humiliation than the slasher genre.

From mid twentieth century masterpieces like Psycho to contemporary gorefests like the Saw and Hostel series, slasher films have featured the common formula beautiful and young European males and females being torn into bloody pieces for the amusement (and humiliation) of, until recently, audience of young European males and females.

Moreover, the monster, serial killer, and/or mutant who inflicts the carnage upon the Chads and Kelseys who tragically found their way to the Bates Motel, Camp Crystal Lake, or Elm Street him (or her)self usually follows a set formula.

The slasher is almost always a physically grotesque outsider, who, neglected by the quasi-aristocratic community of football players and cheerleaders, takes out his perverse resentment on the “cool kids” in an exceptionally brutal and, one must admit, weird manner.

Jason Voorhees from the Friday 13th saga was a weird nerd who drowned while the camp counselors were distracted.

A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy was, in the original script, a literal pedophile, who preyed upon young middle Americans.

While Freddy, Jason, and Halloween’s Michael Myers rightly have been read as avenging angels of God’s justice who enact divine punishment on drunk and drugged out degenerates who “could not wait until marriage,” the secondary underlying message of these films is undeniably clear: the people who control Hollywood do not like us and fantasize about tearing us limb for limb—in fact, they even have induced us to pay them to watch their fantasies played out.

They do not simply hate our Christian faith or our heroic ideals and virtues.

They hate our bodies.

They hate our blonde, red, and brunette hair.

They hate our blue, green, and auburn eyes.

They hate our very existence as people, for our beauty is a reflection of the Divine Beauty that they reject in their rejection of Christ, the Divine Logos.

One of the most reactionary acts we can do in this degenerate age is be as beautiful as we are strong.

-By Norman Burgundy and originally published at The Anatomically Correct Banana