Mindless Consumption or Hopeful Anarchy?

1980s Slasher Cinema Goes to the Mall

Abstract

This article investigates the formal and thematic significance of the mall in two 1980s slasher films: Chopping Mall (1986) and Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge (1989). It first reads Chopping Mall’s story of young adults stalked and killed by security robots inside a mall as centering on a coalescence between “law and order” conservatism, corporate capitalism, and military power in the Reagan era. Although it is critical of this particular coalescence, however, the film does not reject capitalism, but presents the mall as embodying a potentially emancipatory synthesis of youth culture and consumerist capitalism. Phantom of the Mall conversely presents an image of the mall as a place of manipulation and control, embodying a corrupt collusion between political power and capital. While the film suggests that this collusion is particularly dangerous to youth, however, its reliance on a highly gendered damsel-in-distress narrative entails that its critical impulses are tempered by a reassertion of cultural conservatism.