Representation of Women in Horror

The male gaze is a concept that refers to how visual culture is designed to please a male viewer by sexually objectifying women. It was first coined by Laura Mulvey, a British feminist film critic, in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). She argues that Hollywood films use women as “erotic objects” in order to provide pleasurable experience for heterosexual male audiences. According to her, the male gaze can be seen as active and passive roles that satisfy the spectator, who in our culture is a man, which means a woman is the spectacle. “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure

The role of the female throughout the horror genre has generally reflected the roles of women in society within the social context of the movie. In the early days of movie, women were no more than the weak and defenceless victim. They are ‘the object of the creature’s desire’ , a beautiful yet two-dimensional character who is there for no other reason than to become the victim. As feminism and the role of women in society has developed, so too has the role of the female in the horror genre. This is recognisable in both Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978).

There has been a large variety of horror films produced throughout the last fifty years. People are always going to be frightened and scared by different types of horror films. But, what type of horror film scares more people, and were men or women more frightened by these horror films? Each one of the horror films had its own agenda to frighten its audience using several different methods of horror. Some of these methods were more so directed at the female audience than the male audience. Most horror movies show the female as being vulnerable, because in real life females are defenseless against monsters.

Any discussion about gender and cinema must begin (though not end) with a thorough understanding of the male gaze. As one of the most pervasive talking points throughout the history of the cinema and film theory, an understanding of the male gaze from classical Hollywood cinema until today is

Having discussed Victorian ideas of sex and gender, this paper will now focus on the monstrous feminine in Dracula. The term monstrous-feminine itself derives from Barbara Creed's "Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection." In her text, Creed claims that every human culture has its version of the monstrous-feminine, "of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject" ("Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine" 44). Creed applies this concept onto horror movies such as Psycho ("Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine" 70) or Alien ("Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine" 68). She also links this concept to Medusa in Geek mythology who turns men into stone by simply looking at them (Creed, "Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine" 44). Creed proposes that the monstrous-feminine is a man-made villain representing a male fear of female domination in a society when that was unthinkable and

Laura Mulvey is best known for her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” written in 1973 and published in 1975. Her article was one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards psychoanalytic framework. Mulvey was concerned with the feminist attitudes throughout film, she intended to make a ‘political use’ of Freud and Lacan’s studies, using their concepts to argue that the spectator was in a masculine subject position, using the figure of the women as an object of desire. Linking this theory to

After watching “Meshes of the afternoon” and “Vertigo” a few times for my video essay project it was clear to me that Laura Mulvey’s theory is implemented in almost every film. When I first read Mulvey’s reading, at first I thought that Mulvey’ theory was only evident in ‘old’ movies. However, after I completed the reading, when I was watching movies for my own pleasure I started to notice the idea of the male gaze and scopophilia in almost every movie I watched. From the film by Deren, I learned that “Meshes of the afternoon” could be a feminist film but it still does include the famous male gaze in the ending of the film. Also, Deren’s “creative use of reality” can be confusing at times, but after watching the film several times it is clear

In many horror films, women are presented as ‘the abject’ – as theorised by Julia Kristeva. This is described as the taboo, and is said to be rooted historically and subjectively in the reproductive female function. In Carrie, this representation of the abject is in direct conjunction with menstrual blood. In the shower scene, Carrie gets her first period at school, and is unaware of what is happening to her body. At the beginning of the scene, the camera tracks Carrie into the shower, cutting to close ups of her concerned face.

The framework breaks down my literature review to explain female performances in science fiction horror films in a visual aspect. It focused on the two research questions stated below:

Women in horror fiction tend to be portrayed in a similar light. They are either victims or survivors, but rarely aggressors. Or are they capable of being all these? And if they are, for what purpose do they serve? Dan Simmons’s horror novel, Song of Kali (SK) portrayal of the mother and the villainesses/monster, emphasises females’ struggles for survival of their own through sexual selection, protection of their offspring and aggression towards rivals. Amrita is the maternal embodiment in contrast to Kali and Kamakhya as monsters. Furthermore the recurrent adaptive problems of surviving in a hostile and unknown place, with the added factor of the supernatural, dark and evil forces, make SK is a good premise to test for the biocultural paradigm.

Laura Mulvey created "the male gaze" theory in one of her essay's she wrote in 1975. The theory suggests that the media such as movies and advertisements were made to grab heterosexual male's attention and pleasure their perspective of women. She says that women are objectified and that their bodies are often centered as the attention grabber. The use of slow motion, certain camera cuts and angels are done in order to make a women's body more admirable as seen from a man’s perspective. From the slideshow source given, it is suggested that "male gazing" causes hegemonic, visual pleasure, enforced gender roles, scopophilia, and female objectification.

Many people insist that a function of mass media is to entertain the audience; it does not play a significant role in shaping an individual’s attitude towards women and gender stereotypes. The primary purpose of using the sexualized images of women is just to attract the audience’s attention because they are visually pleasure. Media consumers do not really imply those pictures to something else. Other people might assert that the media does shape individual's perspectives and promote the negative gender stereotypes. Even so, those stereotypes embed by the media would only psychologically harm females in reality. The threats would not induce any form of physical violence against women. The illustrations of women do not have enough power to control over the human morality and

I agree that feminism is used in the movie Halloween. I would like to share my different opinion. I feel that psychoanalytic might be best fit this movie.

The theory coined by Mulvey claims that a womens identity is taken away and that women are praised for their appearance resulting in objectification. They have become an object. The male gaze is only applicable for example if a shot is slow and revealing the womans body. This allows the audience visual pleasure.

Although women are predominately the focus within sexual stories in the tabloids, the female gaze becomes more and more apparent within the 21st Century. The female gaze is the opposite in theory to the Male Gaze, a concept put forward by Mulvey (1975). It hypothesizes that gender power is constructed for the pleasure of the male viewer, which is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideologies and discourses. In contrast, a Female Gaze has been put forward, which is a product of feminist campaigning and societal pressure on men to look good as well as women, for example gym culture with males in magazines like GQ. Pollock (1988) supports this, by arguing that the female gaze can often be visually negated, showing how men can be pressured by the media