The art of par­ty­ing, as depict­ed by teen movies

A24’s lat­est blood­fest Bod­ies Bod­ies Bod­ies is a sar­don­ic riff on The House Par­ty – the only trope in Hol­ly­wood that has its own smell. Fol­low­ing the tang of teen spir­it to an upstate New York man­sion to ride out a hur­ri­cane, Sophie (Amand­la Sten­berg) reas­sures her new girl­friend Bee (Maria Bakalo­va) that the friends they are about to meet are ​“not as nihilis­tic as they look online”. Spoil­er alert: they are. 

The teen movies I grew up on taught me not to give a fuck – Bod­ies Bod­ies Bod­ies makes it clear that Gen Z doesn’t need any coach­ing. A hur­ri­cane would’ve seemed cat­a­clysmic cut­ting through Gurinder Chadha’s Angus, Thongs and Per­fect Snog­ging; here, it’s bare­ly pathet­ic fal­la­cy. After the tit­u­lar card game goes awry, Eupho­ria meets Agatha Christie and the vicious ensem­ble of par­ty­go­ers make the Girls of Lena Dunham’s Girls seem self-aware. Bay­ing for the body count, it’s the best satir­i­cal (and lit­er­al) skew­er­ing of Gen Z to date.

Nonethe­less, part of me will always be a Sti­fler – I mean stick­ler – for the ear­ly noughties house par­ty. The Sum 41-fuelled MTV-of-it-all in 2001’s Amer­i­can Pie 2, or Jake Gyllenhaal’s weird time-trail goopy moment in Don­nie Darko of the same year, one that also gave us the genre send-up Not Anoth­er Teen Movie. For bet­ter or (almost def­i­nite­ly) for worse, these films shaped my con­cept of house par­ties dur­ing those for­ma­tive, form­less years when my hor­mones were hay­wire and week­ends involved per­suad­ing a kind­ly stranger out­side the local Tesco Metro to buy us some Fos­ters. We would’ve tak­en Superbad’s fake McLovin ID over my mate’s brother’s out-of-date dri­ving license any day of the week. 

This was the era of The Girl Next Door (2004), The Hot Chick (2002) – cin­e­ma as a per­vy set of binoc­u­lars for the Male Gaze. Still this was an improve­ment on the teen movies of the 80s. Weird Sci­ence (1985) skips the pick-up artistry alto­geth­er and instead sees a rag­tag group of nerds Franken­stein them­selves up the ​‘per­fect’ (read: busty) woman. A mutant bik­er gang invades their house par­ty lat­er in the film and sends the boys run­ning, but they’re not near­ly as bru­talised as a 2020s audi­ence might like them to be. Bare­ly even maimed, in fact. 

Instead, the worst down­fall a straight man-boy can expect in an ​‘80s teen movie is a spot of shame. The awk­ward­ness in 1985’s Teen Wolf comes cour­tesy of a game of Sev­en Min­utes in Heav­en and a full moon. Teenage­hood is, after all, a unique – and unique­ly ter­ri­fy­ing – time of new social codes and bod­i­ly trans­for­ma­tion, be it under­arm hair or full werewolf. 

With the emo­tion­al bar set at were­wolves, kegs, and motor­boat­ing, praise be to debut writer and direc­tor Paul Bruck­man, whose slick teen sex com­e­dy Risky Busi­ness (1983) has more nuance than the rest of the era’s offer­ings com­bined. Tom Cruise, in his break­out role, plays a spoiled yup­pie who trans­forms his house into an actu­al broth­el for the night while inter­view­ing for an Ivy League – but you don’t even hate him. Rather, Bruck­man bor­rows lyri­cal sleights of hand from Euro­pean art­house cin­e­ma, knows when to leave things unsaid and relies on Cruise’s sheer charis­ma to keep the char­ac­ter on the right side of loathsome.

From lived expe­ri­ence, an amped-up dude does tend to be the scari­est thing that can befall a decent par­ty. For that rea­son, Delta Psi’s ​‘Robert De Niro’ themed social in Bad Neigh­bours (2014) is more night­mar­ish than any­thing super­nat­ur­al. Still, I’d rather be ignor­ing fifty frat bros mum­bling ​‘You talkin’ to me?’ than in a cramped kitchen with two drunk­en men beat­ing the shit out of a chair, as in Har­mo­ny Korine’s exper­i­men­tal dra­ma Gum­mo (1997). 

Gummo’s raw and ropey ener­gy is some­thing that Nima Nourizadeh’s Project X (2012) strove for but couldn’t reach. Pro­duced by Todd Phillips – of The Hang­over Tril­o­gy and Jok­er fame – the found-footage teen is a dis­as­ter teen par­ty com­e­dy with­out a sense of humour. Its Blair Witch-inspired attempt at ​‘authen­tic­i­ty’ through found-footage tech­niques bare­ly con­ceals its grim, tire­some, Hunter Moore-ish pur­suit of sex.

Time to grow up, then. Trey Shultz’s Waves (2019) is the most acute­ly observed recent depic­tion of unbri­dled testos­terone. Arriv­ing the same year as Sam Levinson’s teen dra­ma Eupho­ria, and shar­ing a star in Alexa Demie, the after­shocks of that scene in Waves rip­ple across the rest of its run­time and are emblem­at­ic of a shift in how par­ties are depict­ed on our screens.

Waves is all about the bur­den of liv­ing up to an unreach­able soci­etal stan­dard, for which house par­ties play the role of a Large Hadron Col­lid­er. This has been drama­tised before, of course, and Mean Girls (2004) is prime: tell me you don’t wake up in a cold sweat some nights remem­ber­ing Cady (Lind­say Lohan) turn­ing up to that Hal­loween Par­ty in a bridal gown and buck teeth only to dis­cov­er her fren­e­mies, the Plas­tics, have dressed sexy. 

But cinephiles! Good news is there are so many more ways – more nuanced, dis­tress­ing, dis­turb­ing ways – that you can fall short of the expec­ta­tions of your peers beyond wear­ing the wrong cos­tume, and there­fore an abun­dance of par­ty dis­as­ters still to be writ­ten. You could be arro­gant. Needy. Greedy. Aggres­sive. Pas­sive-aggres­sive. Obses­sive. What’s more, social media is only rais­ing our per­ceived ideals so fail­ure is all but guar­an­teed – plus you must seek peer approval at an even ear­li­er age. Four­teen-year-old Kayla’s (Elsie Fish­er) long, timid walk from the guest bath­room to the pool par­ty in Eighth Grade (2018) is one of the most sus­pense­ful in all of cin­e­ma for the weight of all that imag­ined, silent judge­ment beam­ing her way.

While social media proves a tem­po­rary solace for Kay­la, we all know the cure is also poi­son. Bod­ies Bod­ies Bod­ies gets this so right. The first gen­er­a­tion to be exposed to the inter­net from ear­li­est youth, the film calls out Gen Z for their warped way of see­ing the world. While our desire for approval shifts from our par­ents to our peers dur­ing puber­ty, it doesn’t sim­ply stop at nine­teen, and social media giants know how to manip­u­late it. 

So be warned non-Gen-Z-ers who feel like stick­ing the knife in too – doing so would just prove that social media is the most hor­ri­fy­ing thing to ever hap­pen to house par­ties: it colours our every thought and action, every cut­ting Tweet, every Tik­Tok-ready take­down. As Bod­ies Bod­ies Bod­ies proves, it has made key­board slash­ers of us all.