Gender Influence Of Gender In Modern Horror Films

A researcher named Carol Clover demonstrates a unique research method in her book “Men Women and Chainsaws.” Clover relates gender research into various films, especially “slasher” films. Often times in “slasher” or scarier films females have a primary role. In many of those cinemas females are being tormented and faced with a challenge often by a male tormenter. Clover applies the new theory and selects a specific female character from various “slasher” films. She then digs deeper into the film with an eye on the challenge the female is facing and how she overcomes it. Clover came up with a few claims with a major one being that “slasher” films aren’t trying to insert male dominance but instead focus the viewer how powerful the female(s)

He adopts an ambivalent tone in order to examine the conflicting views of high school genre films. Denby’s purpose in writing this essay is to show how the overuse of these stereotypes results in few original teen films. Original movies expose their viewers to a diverse range of people and ways of thinking. Adolescents often mirror or find inspiration in the characters they see in media, so it is important to depict a variety of people in media targeted towards them. People of various sexual orientations should be represented more prominently and truthfully in media targeted towards children in order to promote acceptance and provide role models for those exploring their identity.

Men and women have played gender specific roles, from the earliest sign of civilization to modern society. In the cult classic “Night of the Living Dead”, stereotypical gender role were on display. George A. Romero’s film hinted at subtle references to the responsibilities of men and women and depicted the stereotypes America held during the 1960s. Men played the protectors and enforcers, while the women represented the submissive homemakers and caretakers. Romero’s film portrays the sexes, men and women, in their respective stereotypical behaviors. Stereotypes that sets the undertone for the duration of the film.

Insidious easily fits the film conventions of the horror genre and themes. Insidious incorporates classic horror elements like haunted houses, ghosts, children being possessed, and outside experts of the spiritual world. A family with three children start to witness things out of the ordinary and are unable to understand what they are seeing. The mother, for instance, knew she was seeing strange deities, but her husband refused to believe it and thought she was just out of it. The classic element of denying there is anything out of the ordinary going on is a classic horror element. Typically the people who deny the reality that there might be something supernatural happening, are the first people to be killed or affected in some manner.

When one hears the terms “violence” and “horror,” one typically imagines horrible crimes and serial killers; rarely would one think of everyday suburban life. However, this is the exact landscape of violence depicted in Charles Burns’ Black Hole. In Black Hole Burns draws attention to the implicit assumptions about “normal” and “other” made in everyday life by exposing the objectification of women and through the male gaze. The male gaze is a phrase used in film and gender studies to describe the lens through which audiences view popular culture from a heterosexual male perspective. According to Laura Mulvey, the film theorist who coined the term, the male gaze is so ubiquitous that it often goes unrecognized and is considered the norm.

This shows how the film industries use sexuality to gain audience, since it is fairly common in our society nowadays. For this paper, I will be focusing on how gender,

Through exposure, the role of women as a visible visual icon, such as cinematic mechanisms fetishism serves to convince the position of the male audience as an absolute subject.

This critique then develops into a standpoint with the emergence of the Final Girl trope, where a female character is shown to take characteristics which are typically masculine and makes them her own, becoming then a figure of empowerment. Just as society at large attempts to repress individuals into, as Wood explains it, “predetermined roles within that culture,” the horror film uses the killer to repress the final girl into a victimized, annihilated state. In Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it was with the subversion of classical family values with the male-dominated, cannibalistic household who tried to objectify Sally. In Carpenter’s Halloween, repression of sexuality and bisexual characteristics in Laurie Strode by Michael Myers led her to become the Final Girl as the film world knows today. Finally in Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling takes a step further into the role of the Final Girl by facing head on the “wound culture” state while inhabiting the male-dominated world of law enforcement. With the role of the final girl as the self-empowered figure of the hero who pushes back against her oppressors and by the film’s end, defeats her oppressors, the horror film takes on a more feminist

Horror movies throughout history have been known to have their cheesy storylines or continuous bad acting. Especially horror movies. People nowadays could easily spot the flaws in a film and judge them drastically in reviews. Yet, little do people notice the ongoing discrimination between genders. Horror films tend to portray males and females substantially differently because of stereotypical views. There seems to be a pattern in which each gender takes a certain role in a movie continuously. Females are shown to be “objects” such as sex and emotional symbols, while males are shown as strong or powerful and moreover as the main bad guy. Although some of the newer edition films of the horror genre are displaying each gender more and more equal throughout the ongoing years, the gender discrimination dilemma still exists and can be seen by the statistics in the movie industry in general.

A girl runs frantically through the woods trying to escape an axe wielding villain. The defenseless victim suddenly trips and collapses to the ground. The villain laughs wickedly as he lifts the axe above his head. The girl releases a final scream as the weapon quickly ends her life, causing the audience to go silent as they watch the villain drag away the lifeless body. Death, blood, guts, suspense, screaming, and terror are all just a few things to expect when watching a modern day horror film. What is horror? Horror can be defined as an intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust. (Wilson) The description of horror is not very pleasant, but for some reason horror films are extremely popular. Why is this so? People are addicted to the

In the early 1990s Laura Mulvey’s thesis concerning the patriarchal structure of an active male gaze has influenced feminist film critiques and Hollywood. Mulvey’s project is to use psychoanalysis to uncover the power of patriarchy in Hollywood cinema. Patriarchal influence upon cinema is found primarily in pleasure (pleasure in looking) or as Freud’s has put it, scopophilia. Mulvey suggests that it may be possible to create a new for of cinema due to the fact that patriarchy power to control cinematic pleasure has revealed.

Since the inventions of television and film, media influences have become extremely important in modern society with people constantly being inundated by images and messages that come from film, television, magazines, internet and advertising. Researchers and theorists such as Carol J. Clover and Jean Kilborne believe that the fact that people are going to be affected by the media is absolutely unavoidable. Films can act as guides to how people, particularly women, should act and look. Women in horror are typically shown as the ‘damsel in distress’ and are usually attacked by the killer after committing a sinful act like having sex or misusing drugs or alcohol. The females are

Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, psychoanalyst and feminist writer. Her work on abjection gives an engaging insight into human culture in terms of it’s relationship to larger overarching power structures. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva argues that the oppression of woman in patriarchal societies is constructed through fear of the abject. “The tremendous forcing that consists in subordinating maternal power (whether historical of phantasmic, natural or reproductive.)” (Kristeva, 1982, p.91) The abject refers to the human reaction of revulsion to the threat of breakdown between the subject and object, the self and other. The border which separates nature and culture, between human and non human. “The abject confronts us, on one

British film theorist Laura Mulvey’s 1973 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, published in 1975 to the British film theory journal ‘Screen’, tackles the themes of objectification of women in mainstream 1970’s Hollywood cinema through run by a patriotic society. Through the analysis of actress’s roles in famous Hollywood cinema and psychology theories from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud, Mulvey implies this is due to the heterosexual ‘male gaze’ which views women as a fear biologically but simultaneously sexualises them to reject this notion. Through the years evidence showing that women are being sexualised in the texts supports this theory such as the subtle sexualisation of women in the 2017 Baywatch trailer. However it can be argued that although parts of Mulvey’s argument is true, both genders have been sexualised throughout history before cinema existed through propaganda, ideology and romantic fiction created through our desire to engage in intercourse. This is shown throughout Labyrinth (1999) (which first came out in 1986) as it still shows objectification of men and women.

These screen narratives are dire in positioning the Antony-icon as a paradigm of gender anxiety. The eight texts analyzed in this study each follow a series of narrative tropes that in some way relate to gender performance. Kelly catechizes the notion that Antony-as-icon is used to perform and purge the spectre of masculinity gone awry.