‘It’s that fucking TV!’: Dangerous media in the Danish teen slasher

This article investigates representations of media in the Danish slasher films Sidste time ( Final Hour ) () and Mørkeleg ( Backstabbed ) (), arguing that such representations function as focal points of a self-reflexive exploration of slasher cinema and its potential cultural work. Utilizing two interrelated media historical contexts as interpretive frameworks, it first reads Final Hour as concerned with the commercialization of Danish film and television culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s, arguing that the film establishes television as a medial and ideological Other in order to explore its own relationship to the dominant system of capitalist commodification. It then reads Backstabbed as engaged with concurrent anxieties concerning filmic representations of violence, specifically the Scandinavian media panics revolving around home video technology. It concludes that Final Hour ’s ideological ambivalence allows it to retain a degree of critical distance, while Backstabbed reinforces the cultural logic it ostensibly opposes.