Slasher Flicks vs. Monster Movies

So I'm not a huge horror fan, particularly not a fan of what horror has become lately, these aggressively masculine torture flicks like Hostel. I don't mind blood and gore--I count Kill Bill among my favorites--but I do dislike the premise of and what feels like the message behind these movies. They're the missing-white-girl story on steroids, and forgive me for writing about movies I haven't seen, but the villains/killers/people with power are mostly white men.

I do like monster movies, though. Zombies, vampires, comic book supervillains, anything strange and uncanny.

Slasher flicks seem to me to be the reassertion of patriarchal-white-male power while monster movies are about the return of all things repressed by that power. Monsters disrupt the boundaries of the social order, while slashers reassert them--don't travel, don't have sex, don't you dare be a loudmouthed girl. Remember the Scream rules? The virgin survives, the sexy girl gets killed.

Zombies lately have been the most popular genre (though did anyone see Cloverfield?) and they inspire heated debate among zombie fans--Natalia has some good stuff here. There's the whole not-quite-zombies theme, too, like the infected from 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, who can be seen as the literal return of the repressed in humans: voracious appetites. And even when the monsters are defeated they return.

Zombies themselves are not human but not corpses. That's why they horrify. But if you squint you can see in them the people Western mainstream society has painted as subhuman. It's not our fear of invasion that they evoke, it's our fear that the other, the objectified, will not remain an object (a corpse) and will come back and fight for what they've lost.

Of course each movie needs to be analyzed separately, and I'm not gonna do it because then I'd have to sit through Hostel and Saw and all the rest of them. I'm just kind of thinking on the computer here.