Representation of women in horror

Representation of women in horror

In this essay I am going to talk about the representation of women in horror movies. I’m going to discuss women characters in films such as House of Wax, Halloween and Scream and two main theories, these two main theories are Carol Clover’s final girl theory and Laura Mulvey’s male gaze theory. The first theory I am going to talk about is male gaze.

Laura Mulvey first wrote about male gaze theory in her famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1975. Male gaze is the idea that women are put into media texts to be looked at as objects of desire. This is the idea that "much commerical cinema puts the spectator into the position of an 'appraising heterosexual male' by adopting technical camera techniques which present women as objects to be looked at." The audience is literally put into the eyes of the male ‐ usually the protagonist ‐ who then looks voyeuristically at an objectified female.” Mulvey first got this idea from looking at posters from the 50s and 60s. The Attack of the Crab Monsters

posterfeatures a skinny blonde girl in her bathing suit, baring cleavage, purposely put to attract a heterosexual male target audience. Day the World Ended is the same, a skinny girl in her underwear, bearing cleavage, appeals to a male audience. One Million Years B.C. does the same job as the two above it and film posters still use underdressed attractive females to this day.

Examples of male gaze theory in horror films include Paris Hilton’s role in House of Wax (2005), Paris plays slutty teenager Paige Edwards.

Horror movies tend to have a reactionary sexual agenda in the sense that characters that drink, do drugs or have sex all meet the same outcome – death, this applies to Paris Hilton in House of Wax and also Judith and Lynda from Halloween (1978), all three characters die immediately after having sex. Jeremy Turnstall (The Media in Britain 1983) looked at a wide range of the existing research that had been carried out on gender representation in the media and mentioned four roles: domestic, sexual, consumer and marital. Following these four roles, male gaze theory is sexual, the women are portrayed as sexual objects. Paris Hilton’s on‐screen boyfriend Blake gets murdered after sex but the film doesn’t make too

much of a fuss over it, his death is pre‐dominantly off‐screen and what is shown of his murder is over in seconds. Whereas Paris Hilton’s death takes four minutes and seventeen

seconds of her running about in her underwear before she gets a big phallic symbol through her forehead.

In 1992, Carol Clover wrote about Final girl theory in her book “Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film”. Final girl theory refers to the last woman alive to confront the killer, ostensibly the one left to tell the story. She listed three key traits of the final girl theory:   

She is virginal (purity and innocence) She is androgynous (in her name, appearance and clothing) She fights back (refuses to give in, may actually escape the villain, or physically fights back)

In terms of Jeremy Turnstall’s observations, final girl theory falls under all four roles. Traditionally the final girl is a hard‐working, well educated, and from a middle class background. These are all domestic and consumer roles which make up a perfect marital woman (marital role). Laurie from Halloween (left image) has all three of these traits and she ultimately survives, making her a perfect example of final girl theory. However, final girls such as Lara Croft from Tomb Raider (2001) (middle image) challenge this and fit in to the sexual role. Although Tomb Raider is not a horror, Lara Croft is still a final girl in the sense that she survives and she fights back, but she is sexualised, she is an example of both male gaze and final girl. Scream (1996) also challenges the conventions of the final girl, Casey Becker, played by Drew Barrymore (right image), is a middle class horror film consumer, going by just this she would be an archetypal final girl, however, she dies right at the start of the film.