I just finished watching There’s Someone Inside Your House on Netflix. In some ways, the movie was comforting. It’s nice to know that 40 years after I was first exposed to this kind of junk, young people are still transfixed by slasher movies in which other young people get slashed.
On the other hand, watching the flick was dispiriting. Since the 1970s, movies like this nearly always featured nubile young starlets getting naked. This was done, presumably, to cater to the lust of males in the audience — not to mention the leering producers and crew on set.
No such luck in There’s Someone Inside Your House. The movie certainly has nubile young starlets, including final girl/star Sydney Park (pictured above). But no one shows skin. (As a consolation for horny males, Park does treat us to tits and ass in her Instagram posts. See below.)
But I miss the gratuitous skin in teen slasher flicks — or, for that matter, in sex comedies. Everyone involved back then seemed to understand that bare-naked actresses were not essential to the plot, but they got naked anyway. And if this was degrading to the actress, well, she wasn’t held at gunpoint. She got paid. Like starlet Karen Wood in this shamelessly gratuitous — some would say humiliating — scene from 1985’s Screwballs II (originally titled Loose Screws):
Karen Wood
“I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille.”
Not just bare-breasted, but groped as well.
In addition to the cluster of actors, there would also be an off-camera crew taking in the action.
The end of the gratuitous nude scene in mainstream movies — what caused this cultural calamity? Was it overzealous feminists? Harvey Weinstein? An Internet where the most disgusting and dehumanizing pornography is just one click away, and a cultural desire to compensate for that by sanitizing mainstream fare? All of the above?
Depending on how despondent we become thinking about the demise of the gratuitous nude scene, we might or might not make this an ongoing category at The Grouchy Editor. We have nostalgia for movies and starlets who knew that what they were doing was naughty — but did it anyway.
Karen makes a dash for the exit.
Sydney shows us the back door.
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