Graduation Day (

1981

)

Graduation Day is not a great film, hell it’s not even very good. At best you could say it makes for an amusing diversion for 90 odd minutes. However, it does have an opening that is unusually skillful for the genre and strata of filmmaking it belongs to. For one thing, it is actually relevant to the plot, in an age where many slasher movies opened with a complete non-sequitur that served only to show how dangerous the principal antagonist is. Moreover, this opening starts off feeling like it belongs to a different sort of movie altogether. For a minute or so, it feels like we’re watching a high school sports drama as we’re bombarded with a rapid succession of scenes that serve to establish the various members of the track team, their relationships, and the events they specialize in. Then in the middle of the big race the team’s star runner, Laura Ramstead, sprints to victory and collapsed dead. The sudden death puts an end to the cheerful atmosphere of the film’s opening and informs us that yes, it’s a horror movie that we’re watching after all. Obviously, this is far from original. Carrie (1976), for instance, did the same thing but better (and with more gratuitous female nudity). However, it is still a nice little intro that suckers the viewer into a false sense of security and then jolts the rug out from under them. What can I say, I’m a sucker for a game that plays with its genre a bit. The only issue is that dying from an undiagnosed heart condition, while undoubtedly tragic, is not really horror movie material. We’re here to see ghosts and masked killers, not to be remained of our frail mortality.

From there the film jumps ahead two months to the end of the school year and what would have been Laura’s graduation. However, just how far away the graduation ceremony is not something the film feels overly concerned about establishing. In one of the first scenes of the film, the surviving members of the track team are posing for their yearbook photo which would imply that they are still months away (those things take time to print you know) from the end of the year. But then in the next scene, the kids have gotten their yearbooks and are passing them around to collect signatures. Yet despite that, day after the day the kids keep going to school. They even have the senior prom and then go back to school the next day! All this winds up feeling very contrived and confusing. A better move would have been for the filmmakers to double down on their Carrie (1976) plagiarism and build the whole film around a big event (either the graduation ceremony itself or the prom or the last big track meet). That would give the events of the movie some urgency and add a ticking clock that built tension for the final climactic bloodbath. You could have a few murders before then, of course, but a big event that everything was leading towards would give us something to look forward to aside from the next death scene. Moreover, it would have made the school feel more believable, because as it stands now I have no idea if they have a day, a week, or a month left until the actual Graduation Day that the title promises.

This film also has no clue what sports are and aren’t included under the umbrella of track and field. To be fair, the term can be used as something of a catch-all but I doubt there is a school district anywhere in the United States that has as flexible a definition as the one in Graduation Day! Seriously, in this film Track and field includes such disparate sports as fencing, gymnastics, and freaking football! Gymnastics and fencing are odd fits for Track and Field, as neither of them is done on either a track or a field, though at least they are individual sports and unpopular enough that I could see them being lumped in with Track and Field out of convivence. Seeing one of the murder victims clad in full football regalia though is just too much for my belief suspenders to handle though. Sure, some football players might run track in the offseason to stay in shape but in what high school in America would lump the football team in with the sprinters and hurdlers? This seems to be in the film only so we can see one character get killed with a spear attached to a football but why would this even be necessary? After all, it’s not like spear throwing isn’t a well-known track and field event. Just toss a javelin at him. Come to think of it, Graduation Day missed the chance to show someone being bludgeoned to death with a shot-put.

Like many early slashers, Graduation Day’s chief appeal to people watching in the present day (aside from some bare tits and a few inventive kills anyway) is a chance to observe the slasher genre crystalizing. Again, I’m astounded at how slow the process was, as many studies on the genre seem to depict it like Halloween (1978) came onto the scene and then the rules that governed the genre remained ironclad until they were lampooned in the mid-90s! This film, like many others from this period, has more than a touch of Giallo mixed in with the slasher premise, especially with its heavy focus on the mystery of the killer’s identity. We won’t know the killer’s true identity or motives until the movie is almost over (though once you realize that the film is a mystery guessing the ending is not exactly difficult, at least if you have the slightest degree of intuition). Indeed, the Giallo influence is so strong that in a move that could have been ripped directly from The Bird with a Crystal Plumage (1970), we get a POV shot from the killer and see that they are wearing black leather gloves.

You can’t have a Giallo mystery without a red herring though, and Graduation Day gives you not one but two. Coach Michaels is the obvious one. After all, it was he who pushed Laura to race until her heart exploded and he seems like a real slimeball generally. The scene where he forces Sally to run through her gymnastics routine for the newspaper reporter, all while staring at her lasciviously tells us everything we need to know. He’s a creep that is way too interested in watching high school girls give 110% effort at track and field events. He’s way too obvious a suspect so there’s no way he’s actually the killer. Then there is Anne, who having lost a sister, has every reason in the world to be pissed off at her former teammates. Sure, she’s ostensibly our final girl but filmgoers in 1981 hadn’t yet started to think in those terms yet. Moreover, the film introduces her while she’s hitchhiking and shows her nearly throttle the driver that picks her up after he makes a pass at her (incidentally, the driver is wearing a ratty-looking ascot, seemingly only to give Anne something to choke him with after he puts his hand on her thigh). She’s also suspiciously close to Paula, the first victim, right before she gets taken out.

 The film’s shortage of extras even adds in a third red herring, though unlike the other two I doubt it was intentional on the part of the filmmakers. It seems like whenever there is a murder, two students, Joanne and Doris, are never far behind (fun fact, Doris is played by a young Vanna White of Wheel of Fortune fame). They turn up in the locker room before Sally is killed, and in the park, they speak to Ralph before he is impaled. In a better film, the filmmakers would have realized that these two superfluous characters were showing up with suspicious frequency and done something with them. As it stands, it’s just another loose end in Graduation Day’s script.

I’ve watched a lot of slasher movies at this point, and I’m beginning to wonder if the stereotype of the final girl always being a virgin is based on any objective reality. Here, as was the case in Friday the 13th (1980) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), it’s never explicitly stated if the final girl is a virgin or not but it seems doubtful. For one thing, Anne is way too old for it to be believable that she’s still a virgin unless she was a nun. Her exact age is not stated, but we do know that she has graduated school and enlisted in the Navy since she is a commissioned officer it’s safe to assume that she’s gone to college as well. Plus, there’s the fact that the actress playing her was nearly forty at the time of filming. As a result, I find it rather difficult to believe she's never had sex. This of course makes me wonder, when did virginity become a requirement for a slasher’s sole survivor? Some early slasher film heroines were maidens, but with the notable exception of Laurie from Halloween (1978), I’m struggling to come up with even one example of a heroine that is either explicitly or implicitly a virgin. I suspect that the trope crystalized a bit later in the 1980s around the time of the endless sequels, but I’ll have to dive a bit more into the later entries of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th before I can say for sure. However, I’m beginning to suspect that the universal purity of the final girl has been greatly exaggerated by later scholars of the genre, possibly just to give them a handy psycho-sexual lens with which to view the films.