User:Kassidydn/Gender in horror films

The horror film genre is a movie genre containing multiple subgenres. A goal of this genre includes invoking responses of trepidation and panic from the audience. Critics and researchers claim that these films depict graphically detailed violence, contain erotically or sexually charged situations which verge on becoming pornographic, and focus more on injuring or killing female as opposed to non-female characters. Many also see recurring themes of misfortune for male characters who perform overt masculinity or sexuality. Audience reception is suggested by researchers to be affected by the respective gender representation depicted in these movies.

Female Roles in horror films

The virgin

Female virgins are standard tropes of horror films. The genre frequently plays on the idea that threats can arise metaphysically or from inside the body, and virginity fits into this framework being an alleged, intangible construct within a person. Scholars like McDonald argue that virginity is used as a "bridge" between ambiguity and reality to make sense of mysticism through ordinary means. Virgins are commonly depicted as "plucky heroines and sacrificial offerings, repressed psychos and misunderstood monsters" as McDonald says.

Audience

Male

Scholars such as Mulvey, Clover, and Creed have argued that we live in patriarchal society, where men dictate the rules and women have to abide by them. Clover looks at the notion that men might "elect to betray their sex and identify with screen females." In slasher films, male characters are often killed quickly and easily leaving the audience to resonate with the strong female character left to kill the monster. Clover seeks to suggest that masochistic impulses is seen within the male spectator who finds a "vicarious stake in" the "fear and pain" the final girl endures by the monster's torturous actions. Additionally, Clover claims that the central figure of horror movies, even those promoted as female-centric, is typically "a man in crisis" in actuality. Researchers like Nolan and Ryan have reported that male audiences largely remember scenes that involve empty fields and unknown strangers or what they have ascribed as "rural terror." Male gaze

The "male gaze," a term coined by Laura Mulvey in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", describes the depiction of female characters in a sexualized, de-humanizing manner. Mulvey states that, because the media depict women as they are observed through the male gaze, women tend to take on this male perspective. According to this theory, women largely appear on screen for men's erotic pleasure. At significantly higher rates, female characters are at least to some degree physically exposed and it is in these scenes that they are simultaneously more likely to being assaulted.

Female

Linda Williams suggests it is supposedly honorable for males to gaze upon the terror shown on a movie screen while females hide, avoiding these screen images. She also suggests women have the right to feel as if they do not belong since they are shown as powerless "in the face of rape, mutilation and murder". As Mulvey argues, the female character "exists only to be looked at." When female audiences gaze upon the screen and when the women on the screen are involved in the gaze, they see "a distorted reflection of" their own image. "The monster is thus a particularly insidious form of the many mirrors patriarchal structure of seeing hold up to the woman." Linda William believes that the woman's gaze is "so threatening to male power, it is violently punished." Researchers like Nolan and Ryan have were informed that women more-likely remember scenes revolving around being stalked, possessed, or betrayed.