Essay on how woman are represented in the horror genre

Carol Clover In men, woman and chainsaws, argues that many horror films are interesting in their representation of gender because they provide a point of identification for a male core target audience. To what extent do you think horror represents gender progressively?

Carol Clover talks about the representation of gender in different ways. She talks about the final girl who is also known as the final protagonist. One of the Stephen King novels she has looked into is carrie. She talks about what her role is in the story, she is shown as a shy, social outsider who becomes the class joke who gets bullied, for such reasons as starting her period. She also mentions that the story is very feminist. She also argues that the processes of identification/objectification going on in many horror texts are much more complicated than the typical 'male gaze'.

Also in different media, woman are represented in other ways. We looked at the classical theoretical view of woman and how they're represented in the media. In the media males and females are usually presented in terms of stereotypes, males are shown to be dominant, strong, active, and independant. But on the other hand females are shown as submissive, passive, sexuality and emotionally. And they're often defined through there relationship with men. Jeremy Tunstall looked into gender representation in the media. He argues that woman in the media are represented as being domestic, sexual, consumer and famuliar. In most films they're shown as being housewives, contented mothers, eager consumers and sex object. In later research they found out that males and females are approximately equal in prime time TV, but males were more likely to be shown having an occupation and they're also shown outdoors more, also males are more likely to be depicted as authorities and females as consumers.

In calss we looked at 3 different horror films to help us understand the different representations of woman. The films we loooked at were Halloween (1978), The Shining (1980) and Eden Lake (2008) The first one we looked at was Halloween where we looked at the female characters and their representation. In Halloween there are

more females than males, the females each have roles in the film. Linda, Annie and Judith Myers are all represented as being sex objects and laurie, baby sitting girl and the nurse are shown as being domestic. We agreed that the roles are very sexist. We also looked into the male gaze. From the roles of each character we can see that the three females who are sex objects are in the male gaze. Laurie isn't part of that gaze because she is shown to be the protagonist who arn't usually sexual, more domestic and maybe a consumer. Again, we see that it's being conservative to the female characters in Halloween. Looking at the narrative we see that more woman die more than men. The percentage would be around 60%:40%, Female:Male. From looking at the figures we decided that it was concervative because more woman die in Halloween due to the fact they are represented as being sex objects.

The second film we looked at was The Shining (1980). In this film

we see that there are more men to woman, 2:1. Wendy has different roles such as being familiar, domestic and a consumer. The reason for her not being a sex object is because she is the final protagonist. The other characters such as bathtub woman are shown as being a sex object because of her being naked in the film and she tries to seduce jake in the room. Again, we see in this film that it's also conservative because the roles are very sexist. The gaze is only presented on the bathtub woman. but it's complicated because she turns into a a corpse which is very confusing. The narrative for this film is that the deaths are equal so this woman seem to be punished for transgression.

The last film we looked at was Eden Lake (2008). The visibility of this film is that men outnumber woman 11-6, which again is conservative.

From some of the female chracters there a different roles. Jenny is familiar and is a teacher so she would be classed as being domestic, and she is the final protagonist. The waitress in the cafe is post related to domestic also, and paige could be classed as being the passive role in the gang. From analysising these roles we can say that the roles are progressive. The only bit of male gaze we see is where jenny is objectified by the gang.. But then we cut to a close up of her and are not identifying with the boys. Also paige refers to objectification as a way of insulting steve. So the gaze in this film is progressive. The narrative of this film is that Jenny is the final protagonist, and woman are not punished for transgretion any more than men, we found this out by doing a death count of both male and female. From analysising the film more we agreed that the narative is progressive because men are treated the same as woman.