Gender Representation in Horror.

Carol Clover in ‘Men, Women and Chainsaws’ argues that Horrors representation of gender is very interesting because it frequently offers its core target audience of young males identification with female characters, unlike any other mainstream genre. To what extent do you think Horror’s representation of gender challenges dominant representation?


The common representation of women in most mainstream genre films is that they are less dominant, with Jeremy Tunstall finding the roles were wither domestic, sex objects, consumers or martial. Media focuses on there roles and contrasts with men being dominant, independent and strong whilst women are almost always passive, with a focus on the physical beauty. Clover in her book ‘Men, Women and Chainsaws’ argues that the “sadistic objectification” of women which occurs in mainstream genres is different in horrors because they often allow the audience to identify with the female or “final-girl”. 

Laura Mulvey, in her famous essay ‘Visual pleasure and Narrative cinema’ suggests that the camera presents women as objects rather than someone we can identify with. Often referred to as the ‘male gaze’ because the camera works to allow the audience to see the woman as an object through the males eyes. Common ways of doing this is through point-of-view shots, long shots of the woman and reaction shots of the male. Horror always brings this objectification into something negative, and example of ‘male gaze’ in horrors is in ‘The Shining’ when we see a point of view shot of Jack admiring the naked woman coming out of the bathtub in a long shot, following all mainstream examples of the ‘male gaze’ until the gaze is undermined by the woman transforming into an old woman, almost making the audience feel badly about objectifying the woman in the first place. 


However, sometimes in horrors the ‘male gaze’ is used to show why the victims should be punished for sexual actions, for example, in ‘Halloween’, there are point of view shots of Annie taking off her clothes and a long shot of Linda showing off her boobs. But the protagonist Laurie is never objectified, which suggests that the ‘male gaze’ was a punishment for sexually active females. In ‘Eden Lake’, the male gaze is different than expected because we identify with the female rather than Brett, who is watching her in her bikini. 


Horror; often has a female protagonist, which the target audience of young males have to identify with, this is extremely contrasted from other mainstream genres where a male would usually be the protagonist if the core audience were males. ‘Carrie’ is about a girl who is bullied then transforms her victim character function into heroism as she becomes monstrous, getting revenge on all her bullies, Stephen King, the writer of the book claims that any boy who has ‘had his shorts pulled down in phys ed or his glasses thumb-rubbed’ would be able to identify with Carrie. This allows us to see how victimisation can happen with males too, so horror breaks the assumption that females are the only victims. There is arguably the possibility that males will identify with the female characters because since the 1970’s the new ‘tough girl’ image has given boys something new they can identify with.


 The number of deaths in horror films is usually about ‘punishment’ of females having any independence and for transgressing those typical four representations of women, a film that proves this is in ‘Halloween’, where the majority killed are sexually-active females whose boyfriends are simply in the way. However in some horrors the death is not about punishment but simply to fulfil the expectation of horrific deaths to occur, like in ‘The Shining’, where there are an equal amount of female and male deaths. In ‘Eden Lake’ there are much more male deaths, this gives an alternative representation that women needn’t be punished for independence. The more modern the film, the more sexism is fading away, creating strong female roles that are identifiable. 


http://youtu.be/Xr9QsFnd2Os

The whole ‘final girl’ aspect of horror films is when a female who is weak has been made to become strong and sometimes, monstrous. The ‘final girl’ is often the main protagonist who we follow through the entire narrative but in ‘The shining’ we do not identify with Wendy until she has become Jacks victim, the shifts from a male perspective to a woman’s. The ‘final girl’ is represented as unsexualised, boyish, innocent and smart, this fights against the normal female figures in other genres because horrors represent sexual objects as negative, so as a genre sexism is fought against. 


When we look at the roles that women are often categorised under, some of the horrors do still follow those representations. For example in ‘Halloween’, Laurie is shown to have a domestic role as she is caring for the children as she is babysitting and Annie and Linda are portrayed as sex objects but horror allows this negative objectification to be seen as something that is punished with death. In ‘The Shining’ Wendy is family defined, as mother of Danny and wife of Jack, she is a passive character even though she is of importance as the hero/victim in the film. She is also showing the stereo-type of domestic representation of cooking, completing chores and caring for Danny, something that was the typical woman’s roles in 1982 (when the film came out). In ‘Eden Lake’ the representation of woman is still very sexist despite the film being modern (2008), with the only female gang member being perhaps passive, as when all the males stab Steve she just films it. Jenny is also defined by martial status as she is Steve’s fiancée and also domesticated by her teaching career, showing she has a caring nature. Horror manipulates this caring women into a monstrous nature with her killing two of the teenagers that are involved with the killing of Steve.


There was research in 1992 providing the evidence that in films there is a lot more male characters than females, with statistics showing for every two men there is one woman. This is also shown in horror, even if there are sometimes equal amounts like in ‘Halloween’, most horrors contain more male roles. This may be to continue to show that women are passive and they have also limited roles outside the ‘final girl’ character.


To conclude, I think that Horror generally offers a progressive representation of gender because of males having a identification with the female protagonist. Horror challenges the normal sexist roles of females and provides females more equality.