The Slumber Party Massacre

In Venice, Trish Deveraux, an 18-year-old high school senior, decides to throw a slumber party while her parents are away. Their neighbor, Mr. David Contant, is given the job of checking on the girls. She awakes and gets dressed shortly before going to school. Meanwhile, Russ Thorn, an escaped serial killer, kills a telephone repairwoman and steals her van. Trish meets up with her friends Kim, Jackie, and Diane. She invites the new girl, Valerie, to the party, but Valerie declines. After school, one of their classmates, Linda, goes back into the school to retrieve a book but gets locked inside. She is attacked and presumably killed by Russ, armed with a power drill. As the party begins that night, the girls use marijuana and alcohol, while Valerie babysits her younger sister, Courtney, across the street. Two boys from school, Jeff and Neil, arrive and spy on the girls while they change clothes. Russ kills Mr. Contant outside with his power drill. Diane asks Trish permission to go with her boyfriend, and goes to his car to find him decapitated. She is then murdered as well. The girls order pizza and, while on the phone with their coach, Rachel Jana, the girls answer the door and find the pizza delivery man with his eyes drilled out. The teens arm themselves with knives as Jeff and Neil run for help, but both boys are killed. Russ gains entry to the house and murders Jackie. Trish and Kim barricade themselves in Trish's bedroom, but Russ enters through a window and kills Kim as Trish flees. Valerie and Courtney enter the house to find Kim dead and hide from Russ. Coach Jana, having become concerned after the earlier phone call, arrives and is confronted by Russ, who disembowels her with the drill. Valerie chases Russ with a machete, eventually severing his hand before slicing his stomach. Russ falls into a swimming pool and sinks beneath the water, only to emerge moments later and attack them again, but Valerie finally kills him with the machete. Valerie and Trish break down in tears as Courtney looks on in shock. ==Cast==

Conception Author and feminist activist Rita Mae Brown wrote the original screenplay, titled Sleepless Nights, as a parody of the slasher film. Producers repurposed Brown's script to make a "serious" slasher film against her wishes. Amy Holden Jones, a film editor, and they shot the scenes at their house over a weekend for $1,000. She showed the result to Roger Corman, who agreed to finance the film. Jones had to turn down a job editing Steven Spielberg's E.T. (1982) as a result. The soundtrack was composed on a Casio MT-40. Filming Filming began in the summer of 1981. The film was shot on location in Los Angeles, California, mainly in Venice. ==Release==

Box office Distributed by New World Pictures, the film premiered in Los Angeles on September 10, 1982, and was given a limited release in New York City on November 12. Time Out gave the film a middling review, noting: "Despite the unlikely script credit for Rita Mae Brown, Jones's debut feature is little more than a Halloween clone, reliant on buckets of blood and sudden surprise rather than suspense." David Hinckley of the New York Daily News awarded the film 1.5 stars out of 4, noting that the performances are "uneven" and "the special effects are not special". Varietys published review, however, praised the film: "Besides its obviously catchy title, Slumber Party Massacre is an entertaining terror thriller, with the switch that distaff filmmakers handle the 'young women in jeopardy' format." Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader also gave the film a positive review, noting its even pacing and direction by Jones. Leonard Klady of the Los Angeles Times also noted the film's pacing, writing in a retrospective that the film boasted a "darkly humorous vision and a breathtaking pace". Dale Schneck of The Morning Call deemed the film a "rousing thriller" that "delivers as many vicarious thrills as one could want from this sort of cinematic mayhem". Despite the critical reception, the film has a large cult following among slasher fans. Home media It was released on VHS and Betamax by Embassy Home Entertainment in 1983. The film has been released on DVD three times in North America. The first release came from New Concorde Home Entertainment in September 2000. The company subsequently re-released the film on a double feature DVD alongside Slumber Party Massacre II in July 2003. Both these versions are out of print. Shout! Factory released all three films in the series on a two-disc special edition DVD set in October 2010. It contained the full-length documentary Sleepless Nights: Revisiting the Slumber Party Massacres, reuniting cast and crew of the original trilogy and directed by Jason Paul Collum. Shout! Factory, under their subsidiary label Scream Factory, released The Slumber Party Massacre on Blu-ray on March 18, 2014. The company later re-released the film on Blu-ray in a limited edition steelbook with new extras in January 2020, followed by a double-feature set on 4K UHD Blu-ray alongside Slumber Party Massacre II on February 21, 2023. In the United Kingdom, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) re-titled the film The Slumber Party Murders, as the word "massacre" was felt to be too suggestive. In the U.K., it has had two releases on DVD, with both editions containing no special features. ==Sequels==

There have been two sequels to the film, Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) and Slumber Party Massacre III (1990). Jason Paul Collum directed the documentary Sleepless Nights: Revisiting the Slumber Party Massacres (2010). Other films in the Massacre film series includes a second trilogy: Sorority House Massacre (1986), Sorority House Massacre II: Nighty Nightmare (1990), and Sorority House Massacre III: Hard to Die (1990), and a third series: Cheerleader Massacre (2003) and Cheerleader Massacre 2 (2011), the former filmed as Slumber Party Massacre 4 before being renamed during post-production. Re-imagining Shout! Studios produced a stand-alone sequel/re-imagining of the film, with director Danishka Esterhazy and written by Suzanne Keilly. The film premiered on Syfy on October 16, 2021. ==See also==