Search Results

This chapter discusses how David Robert Mitchell repeatedly listed John Carpenter as one of his main influences. It describes the opening scenes of Mitchell's It Follows on a tree-lined suburban street outside Detroit at dusk, which is considered a sister city of Haddonfield from the film Halloween (1978). It also explains the horror prologue as an essential component to the genre that serves as a mini trailer and provides a justification of the monster or as a way of keeping the audience tense or aware that they are watching a horror film and not a drama. The chapter assesses the striking opening vignette of It Follows, which is more than a typical horror film opening that features the killer attacking. It mentions Mitchell's first movie The Myth of the American Sleepover in 2011, which played a role in creating the world of It Follows.

This chapter answers the question of how to understand the openness among Dutch parents to minors spending the night together by examining three powerful frames parents use to understand adolescent sexuality and their own parental responsibility, namely, normal sexuality, relationship-based sexuality, and self-regulated sexuality. In the process of illuminating those frames, insight into the workings of normalization as an active cultural process is gained, which involves conceptualizing, controlling, and constituting both teenagers and parents. It will be seen here that the three cultural frames construct adolescent sexuality as a nonproblematic, non-emotionally disruptive, and decidedly relationship-based phenomenon, helping parents describe and interpret teenage sexuality. Finally, the sleepover serves as a means to constitute teenagers and parents as people who rationally discuss a potentially disruptive topic and jointly integrate it into the household.

This chapter shows that in spite of parent-teenager tensions, sexuality becomes a vehicle through which young people are encouraged to develop a psychology of incorporation rather than separation. Boys are encouraged to make their sexuality gezellig—to value the integration of sexual and domestic pleasures and to choose partners who can be treated as temporary family members. Girls are encouraged to make their sexuality normal—to avoid causing unnecessary disturbances by springing a sexual relationship, let alone a pregnancy, on their parents prematurely or out of the blue, and to be able to discuss emotional issues without letting discomfort get the better of them. While it is striking how similarly Dutch boys and girls are treated, it is also notable that negotiations around the sleepover are more prolonged and tension-ridden for girls than for boys.