Representation Of Women In Psycho And Halloween

The natural being of monsters is supposed to instill fear in humans. Their original purpose of creation was to scare children into doing what they were told and to scare people away from places. They instill fear because they possess supernatural powers. Each society that has monsters worked into their culture, reflects that society’s values. In the majority of societies across the globe, men are seen as the stronger, more dominant gender. So, when monsters have more power than men, and that monster happens to be female, men feel vulnerable to allure and emasculated to their domination.

Where once she was a female, now she is both girl and boy, though most often and most conspicuously girl” (Clover 135). The main analysis with the victim is that the victim is going to be killed whether it’s male or female, beautiful or not, and sexually active or not. Postcoital death is the most common of slasher films and is usually a pivotal point of the climax. According to Clover’s piece, “the death of a male is nearly always swift; even if the victim grasps what is happening to him, he has no time to react or register terror” (136). With that being said, I think it is worth noting that there’s a reason female deaths are filmed at closer range and in more detail. I feel that it’s easier for viewers to watch a female be stripped and abused and killed, because of what the audience is seeing; her naked body and her being taken advantage of. The director of the film highlights two important aspects of the situation: tits and the screams. If mostly males are watching these types of films, they aren’t going to want to see naked men and how they are getting groped or abused because that is not appealing to the male

Correspondingly, Barbra’s character shrieks the stereotype of a hysterical housewife, a helpless, naïve blonde woman. She is weak and reliant on the others, incompetent and oblivious to the concerns at hand. Her lack of prowess when the ghouls infiltrated the farmhouse consequently led to her death. While others were pitching in to devise a plan to combat the slew of ghouls drawing near the farmhouse, Barbra was in a state of bewilderment due to Johnny’s death and was unmindful of the plan to defeat the ghouls; therefore, she became a hindrance to the others. Robert Hass’s film criticism of Carol J. Clover’s work in Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, declares, “Women are usually helpless victims in the horror genre” (Haas 67). This essentially summarized Barbra’s character in such a manner that the viewer would infer that Barbra enacts the stereotypical female role of a horror film.

The classic femme fatale in forced to resort to murder to free herself from an unbearable relationship with a man who would try to possess and control her, as if she were a piece of property or a pet. According to Sylvia Harvey, author of Women's place: The absent family, the women of film noir are "presented as prizes, desirable objects" for the leading men of these films. The femme fatale's unique power is her brazen willingness and ability to express herself in sexual terms. By this the femme fatale threatens the status quo, and the hero, because she controls her own sexuality outside of marriage. She uses sex for pleasure and as a weapon or a tool to control men, not merely in the culturally acceptable capacity of procreation within marriage. Her sexual emancipation commands the gaze of the hero, the audience, and the camera in a way that cannot be erased by her final punishment. Attempts to neutralise the power and blatant sexuality of the femme fatale by destroying her at the end are usually unsuccessful, because her power extends beyond death. Noir films immediately convey the intense sexual presence of the femme fatale by introducing her as a fully established object of the hero's obsession. Since the camera often represents the hero's subjective memory, revealed

The Siskel and Ebert Halloween Review from 1978 shows how they like how the movie shows how the female character is seen as intelligent, brave and smart. The way the two men spoke about how they felt about the film gave a feminist critic. They were able to put them self in her shoes and think about how they might of felt in that scenario. They see the film as up and positive and see the movie for the film qualities other than the depressing killing. The film focused on film qualities, where the mood, lighting, music and camera angle all played roll in creating the feeling where one can feel that the female actor out smart the bad masked man.

Many horror films provide their audiences with scares and screams.  Not many viewers follow what kind of model the films follow to appease their viewers.  However, after reading film theorist Carol Clover’s essay, watching one of the films she associates in the novel “Halloween”, and also watching the movie “Nightmare on Elm Street” I say almost every “slasher” or horror film follows a model similar to Clover’s.  The model that is a female is featured as a primary character and that the female tends to always overcome a situation at some point throughout the film to become victorious.

I’m using this source as it relates to my research question regarding history, myths, and exploitation of women in horror films. In Part 2 of the book “Audiences, Fans, and Consumption’, the article ‘Trashing the Academy’ by Jefferey Scone offers a detailed analysis of emerging politics in the genre of horror

In the novel Frankenstein women are viewed as passive, pure and innocent. Frankenstein also focuses in the importance of beauty throughout the story and this is often relayed to the readers through describing the women in the story. Women in Frankenstein are also expected to tend to typical gender roles and aren’t seen as equal to men. Going along with the

It has been the age-old belief that it is a man’s job to protect women from all harm. The final girl defeats this standard by showing a smart, independent woman capable of fighting back the aggressor. I cannot dispute the sub-categories of horror movies that portray women in misogynistic manner such as borderline pornos like Zombie Strippers, but these movies rarely get any theatrical releases and almost no recognition, for a good

Upon further probing, there is perhaps a deeper terror rooted in Frankenstein, which subtly appears to stem his hesitancy at creating not just another monster, but specifically a female monster. Because Victor Frankenstein fears the existence of a female free of restrictions that he cannot impose, he destroys her, thus eliminating the female’s options of becoming either completely feminine through becoming a mother and mate, or totally unfeminine by opting to leave her partner and face the world alone.

Breaking down meaning by disrupting the distinction between the subject and the object. (Childers & Hentzi 1978:308). Kristeva theorises that because the abject is situated outside of symbolic order, our confrontation with it becomes an innately traumatic experience akin with the disgust we experience when confronted with an object which has been violently cast out of the cultural world, having formerly been a subject (Kirsteva 1982:65). In Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine, Barbara Creed refers to horror as a “crossing of borders”. The abject therefore can be seen as referring to horror itself. That is to say, horror defies the lines of decency, morality and accepted social practice in ways that threaten to jeopardize the stability of order. Creed discusses the representation of the woman as the monster rather than as the victim to a male monster. She associates the monstrous feminine in patriarchal society to sexual difference and castration. The term monstrous feminine emphasizes the signifigance of gender in the formation of her monstrosity. She disputes the notion of the male monster and Freud’s theory of the castrated woman who is established as a victim by nature. The monstrous feminine addresses more regarding male fears than female subjectivity. The woman is more accurately feared as the castrator than the

Even as the decades pass on and society is deemed by the public as becoming more progressive in it’s understanding of the Other, violence related to sexuality is a topic that continues to permeate horror films. The subject of the horror/slasher genre begins to shift by the late eighties and early nineties on the image of the serial killer. This shift changed the monster of the horror movie from a masked killer wielding a phallic weapon to a representation of, as Mark Seltzer describes it, “the monster among us.” It is through this shift that the Final Girl character is evolved as well, especially in terms of Jonathan Demme’s film The Silence of the Lambs. Clarice Starling in Silence can be classified as a Final Girl due to her survival at the

She is our final girl and in a departure from the previous films, she has no help from Steve at the end of this film. He even tries to help her and Kristy literally pushes him away and saves the day herself. This movie has a deeper meaning when you consider the slang term for box is another way of describing female genitalia. In order to release the cenobites, one must play with this box, moving in until it clicks and upon opening it, you release “pleasure”. There are close ups on the box with characters slowly grazing their fingers along its edges, trying to find the button that will open it up. In the end you are left with the idea that it is your sexual desires that will consume you and that sexual women are bad. This message can come across as problematic given films ability to influence the masses. The target audience for slasher films ranges from pre-teen to young adults, all of whom are still discovering themselves and their own ways of thinking about sexuality and society. Slasher films tend to reinforce this idea that female sexuality can be problematic, that sexually promiscuous women are “whores” and men are

The issue of female persecution throughout many of Hitchcock’s films has been fiercely contested, none more so than the controversial issue of assault and the attempted rape of a woman. Views that Hitchcock represents the archetypal misogynist are supported, Modelski suggesting that his films invite “his audience to indulge their most sadistic fantasies against the female” (18). Through both the manipulation of sound and the use of language, none more so than in Blackmail and Frenzy, the idea of rape and violence does effectively silence and subdue not only the women in the films, but the also the women watching them (18).

To my knowledge, I have never read or seen that many horror comics that involve women taking the lead over the typical male. Just like in Vampirella, it had some horror in it, but was more focused on being sexual and outlandish. One particular comic book series I was quite fond of was The Sandman by award-winning writer Neil Gaiman. What really got my attention was the character Death; the sister of the main protagonist Sandman. Death is both the lord and personification of all death and life, but she is the complete opposite of what people see her image as, an image of a skeleton with scythe and a scary black robe. We do not know the true image of death, but why depict a woman? Why not just a figure of a skeleton? Is it too complicated to show Death as a skeleton figure or a mere shadow, like in the film The Frighteners? It is not scary and I find it sexist to have an image of a dark and strange figure be a woman. This is similar to the Infinity Gauntlet storyline published by Marvel where Thanos, the main antagonist, is on a quest to please Death herself in order to win over her heart and cause destruction all over the galaxy. Again, another personification of death is portrayed as a female, seeming to signify that women are far more ferocious and scary than men are. I always had an image of a woman when I think of death when I was little. How woman are seen in horror comics, they are shown either as being the damsel in distress, or being death itself, but not