Make Room for
Step-Daddy
by June Pulliam
The Stepfather. Dir. Jerry Rubin. 1987.
Jerry Rubin's 1987 film The Stepfather is probably one of the best slasher films you've never heard of (and you'll have a hard time finding it as well, since no one has seen fit to reissue it on DVD, and VHS copies of the film are fast disappearing). True, it is a B film, and there are holes in the plot large enough to pilot a Hummer through. Nevertheless, The Stepfather touches on issues central to the consciousness of denizens of the late 20th century who have often had their ideas of the recent past shaped by television, rather than historical fact.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Bush the Elder extolled the virtues of the traditional family, the one who existed in that kinder, gentler time, the 1950s, where everyone knew his place and was perfectly content to play his role. Of course, this pre-lapsarian age of the nuclear family never really existed outside of a television studio. Even in the 1950s, father didn't know best, mother was popping Phenobarbital to cope with the mind numbing, spirit crushing role her culture had foisted upon her, and the kids were just waiting to evolve into very pissed off young adults who weren't thrilled about going off to die in Vietnam. The Stepfather offers a critique of the idea that everyone can ultimately find fulfillment by playing his or her part in the nuclear family.
Jerry Blake, the stepfather, marries into existing families where the wife is a fairly traditional woman who is newly widowed. Jerry then attempts to set himself up as the new family patriarch. This may sit well with the women, who are often a product of a more traditional time and feel reassured by a strong (or overbearing) male presence, but their children are less accepting. Jerry doesn't feel that it is possible to have a family without children, but as any parent can tell you, raising kids is hard work, even under the best of circumstances. Eventually Jerry becomes disenchanted when the family members disappoint him through their failure to unquestioningly accept his authority and emulate the orderly existence of the Cleavers or the Andersons. This disappointment leads him to murder his wife and children, assume a new identity, and begin the cycle anew.
Jerry is presented as a villain from the very beginning of the film. When we first meet him, he is washing the blood from his hands as he changes his appearance before our eyes, leaving behind his present residence, which is now littered with the bloody corpses of his wife and child. The film flashes forward to a year later, where we see Susan and Stephanie, a happy mother and adolescent daughter playing while doing yard work. But this scene is soon disrupted by Jerry's arrival. It's made painfully clear that Susan has remarried, and Stephanie is none too happy about this pushy stranger that her mother has brought into their home. Susan has unknowingly put herself and her daughter in danger because she has unquestioningly accepted what her culture has told her it is to be a woman. She is obviously uncomfortable living alone and fears that as a woman, she isn't competent to run her household on her own, that her life is meaningless without a partner.
The Stepfather, extremes of gendered behavior cause great unhappiness and even put characters in danger. It is Susan's insecurity that causes her to wed Jerry a scant year after her husband's death, and Jerry's unhappiness (and psychosis) is rooted in his rigid sense of gender identity. He identifies too closely with the paterfamilias of 1950s television sitcoms, and thus, he is doomed to be disappointed: He slowly realizes that major problems can't be solved in a day or two, teenagers are rebellious, and worse still, they want to grow up and become independent adults.
While an extremely masculine or feminine gender identity causes unhappiness, typically feminine behavior is represented as more conducive to survival than typical masculine behavior. Throughout the film, Jerry is being hunted by Tim Olgivie, brother of t he woman he murdered a year earlier. When Tim finally locates Jerry, he does the stupidest thing possible---he confronts a man who has no problem savagely killing other people. Tim is practically unarmed for the confrontation. All he has is a pitiful snub nosed revolver and his masculine bravado. But Tim is no match for Jerry, and he's managed to barge in on him as he's in the middle of doing away with Stephanie and Susan. Instead of saving the day, Tim becomes a pitiful victim, stabbed by Jerry before he can even get off a shot. On the other hand, when Stephanie sees a rampaging Jerry coming at her with the butcher knife, she does what any sensible person would do---run like hell.
At first, viewers might mistake the path of her escape as feminine incompetence: she first locks herself in the bathroom, and then, when Jerry manages to break down the door, fights him off long enough to escape into the attic rather than out the front door. But Stephanie's detour through the attic is important as it buys her time to save Susan, who has already been badly beaten by Jerry. Eventually the chase positions Jerry in between Stephanie and Susan on the stair case, where together they finish him off with his knife and Tim's gun. Because Stephanie was not taught to hold her ground "like a man" against all odds, she and her mother survive at the end of the film. As her therapist told Stephanie earlier when she wanted to escape the toxic family situation by going to boarding school, "sometimes running away is a good thing."
I'll be the first to admit this is not the most finely crafted film ever made, but that isn't enough to prevent me from seeing it as a classic of both the horror genre, and of the slasher film genre. The subject matter alone---a critique of the traditional nuclear family that is still marketed to us by conservative elements in our culture as the only place where one can find happiness---is sufficient to make it something worth viewing.
Of course, people who know little about horror often vilify the slasher film as reactionary and disrespectful to women. They argue that the sexually active woman is punished by the slasher while her virginal sisters live to scream another day. I won't attempt to explain or defend the entire genre in this humble little essay. Suffice it to say that The Stepfather is not one of these reactionary films, for it contains elements that make it a unique contribution to the slasher film.. The women who are punished for their sexuality aren't teens having premarital sex, but middle aged women doing what our culture all too often tells them they must do, marry a man who will take care of them. The film's adolescent lead, Stephanie, is a virgin, but it's clear that she won't stay that way for long. While she's not promiscuous, she is at that age where she is ready to begin experimenting with sex, even if it's just with the boy next door that she's known all of her life.
The film's ending is sort of the antithesis of Psycho. At the end of Psycho, a psychiatrist who has just met Norman Bates declares his schizophrenia is the result of the pseudo-incestuous relationship he enjoyed with his mother after his father passed away, leaving them alone together, indicating that there is something inherently toxic about an unmitigated mother-child bond. The Stepfather ends with Susan and Stephanie reunited after dispatching Jerry. But their mother-child bond is represented as healthy and natural in comparison to the family unit that Jerry attempted to impose.