Wells, P (2000) states that
"Carol Clover's (992) feminist perspective maintains the idea of dominant gender paradigms, however, through her conception of the final girl' who takes on the (masculine) monster in the contemporary 'slasher movie. While some (female) viewers see this as an act of empowerment, Clover argues that these final women are only acting in the same ways that male protagonists would, and this "phallic" charge both undermines their feminine address, and their (often literal role as "castrators."
This helps to support the foundation for the purpose of my character, as I want to create a female character who can fulfill a horrifying and creepy role, to break out of the male stereotype. To achieve this without questioning whether she is successful as she uses male traits, or appears masculine, instead I want her to remain fragile looking, hunting for food as a mother would.
"The slasher movie effectively a narrative in which a machete-wielding monster causes seemingly indiscriminate havoc by brutally murdering a group of young people has often been seen as a metaphor for the punishment of young people involved in illicit and casual sexual practices. The sexual dimension of these films is further heightened by psychoanalytic readings which project the monster as masculine, playing out castration anxiety. Women, so the theory goes, must be eliminated in the horror text because they lack a phallus, and threaten men by projecting and potentially affecting the same lack upon them."
Interestingly, this links to Freuds idea of the uncanny, which is heavily linked with 'castration anxiety'. This puts the action of men in horror in a scarier more successfully violent place as they theemselves have fear of castration, which women do not. This may be why women are so commonly a victim, whom is ofter sexualised, simply becasue this brings interest from the viewers.
"Simply, and especially in the post-1960 period of the horror film, both monster and victim may be best understood by "the knot of their own highly distinctive and often unknown motivations and desires, rather than the social codings imposed upon them. Arguably, this is why in the post-Psycho era, the monster and its effects remain is only potentially rationalised on its own terms perpetually shocking. It rather than those which have been so obviously socially determined. using psychoanalysis to emphasise issues of mortality, and not issues o "lack' which have been played out on the feminine subject,"
From this extract, I gather that in the 1960's, horror was understood as the characters intentions were clear, with social issues included to make their motivations more understandable.
"While the horror film has always enacted fantastical and subversive scenarios which operate with high social relevance cannibalism, for example, used as a metaphor in 197os horror to expose the ways in which a capitalist economic order "feeds off the less powerful and socially mobile, or 198os AIDS anxieties in teen-vampire pictures like Near Dark 1987) and The Lost Boys (987 (see Taubin 1995) it has also become ngaged with the real and material conditions of existence. While film maker and novelist Clive Barker argues that "horror is till the last refuge."
"..of the surreal', theorist Jonathan Lake Crane suggests in irrevocably linking horror to the unconscious we dismiss all too hastily, the possibility that horror films have something to say about popular epistemology, about the status of contemporary community, or about the fearsome power of modern technology' 1994: 290. Lake Crane argues for a more socially-orientated set of readings which take into account the idea that the horror film is more closely related to the terrors of everyday life, and actually speaks to audiences in a highly direct fashion."
Both extracts above relate to the same idea, suggesting that what we see in horror is often influenced by political or world events. In this case it is discussed that cannibalism in horror film is influenced by the threat of AIDS from thhe 1980's. Without realising it, films may be looking at these issues in order to educate us and raise awareness of such things.
Wells, P. (2000) P 15, 18, 19, 20.
Family horrors Throughout the late 1960's and early 1970's, family' became an increasingly contested term. For the Women's Movement, it was the prime institution of patriarchal repression of women: "Patriarchy chief institution is the family. It is both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole For psychiatrists R. D. Laing and David Cooper, it enforced a more general repressiveness The bourgeois nuclear family unit (to use something like the language of its agents academic sociologists and political scientists) has become, in this century, the ultimately perfected form of non-meeting and therefore the ultimate denial of mourning, death, birth and the experiential realm that precedes birth and conception. For the various conservative moral movements of the time, however it was the beleaguered repository of religious and moral value that which bound modern society together and which had to be protected In the Christian view of society the family is one of the vital parts of the structure. Church, state and family are the three institutions divinely ordained for the preservation of society There must, a the centre of society, be a social unit where everyone can feel safe. Men and women are not given the emotional strength to live without the security which comes from love and trust. Horror films have often explored familial tensions. For example, there are some rather obvious parallels to be drawn between American and British horror productions in the 197os. Both use family dramas to address in a variety of ways and from a number of different positions a widespread sense of social fragmentation. But while American horror films of the 197os which included, to name but a few, The Exorcist, The Hills Have Eyes, It's Alive and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with their present-day settings and their relatively realistic depiction of violence, tended to explore the social dimensions of this situation (with in particular the monstrous family p166
The power of the mother Mother is ancient history The drama in these films turns on the threatened or actual collapse of an already weakened patriarchal order provoked by the emergence of a very powerful and threatening mother figure (with fathers either ineffectual or absent). The principal conditions of this figure's existence are, firstly, that the characters around her are rendered childlike in some way or other, and, secondly, that the realm of maternal power is associated with the past, both the past (i e infancy) of the individual and of society in general.p167-168
-The mother figure is described as very powerful, making people in her surrounding seem like her childrn, which we may see as womens only power, as the children she gives birth to owe her for giving them life.
Henry Fengriffen, Emmanuel Hildern and Baron Zorn, in their selfishly holding on to the women in their power, all exhibit characteristics of the primal father as identified by Freud in Totem and Taboo, his account of the founding of a patriarchal order. In Freud's version, the selfish father keeps all the women in the tribe to himself. This situation is finally overcome when the sons the primal horde kill and eat the father: "and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength'.16 However, these films conclude differently: in both The Creeping Flesh and Demons of the Mind the bad father is punished by another father figure.p179
- Here there is a battle of ame power, it is strange that an older male is eaten by younger ones, but in relation to nature this would happen if the elder had died before hand. The male figure is replaced by a larger power of two boys.
Anna uneasily replies "But I'm not a real lady yet.' In fact, much of her violence is directed against women who refer to her femininity or beauty or attempt to put her before a mirror: she actually kills Dolly the housemaid with a broken mirror. These killings enact a symbolic rape, with sharp objects a poker, hat pins piercing the female body, and are accompanied by the voice of the Ripper calling Anna's name in what can be read here as a psycho- logical interpellation, a calling of her to a particular male identity In this respect, Anna is contrasted within the film to Laura the "good' woman, who is blind, dependent on men for her vision. The latter knows her place, having already entered into a socially correct identification of femininity In the Victorian world of the film, where femininity is arranged and defined through the double standard, Anna's actions could be seen as a transgression of and challenge to patriarchal structures of oppression that has distinct feminist possibilities. Like the mother figures discussed above, she has a mobility that is not available to the constantly chaperoned Laura, moving as she does from domestic middle-class household to working-class street, from virgin to prostitute; she can see the undesirability of woman's place, unlike Laura who literally cannot see anything p181
-"But I'm not alady yet' instantly strikes me that she feels she has to be a certain way. Its interesting because in modern society young women are fighting stereotypes, sexualisation and expectations from society and males. The idea that being stabbed by a broken mirror shard signifies rape, is a very powerful metaphor, as this puts the women in what is usually a male sterotype. However in a sick way, she seems powerful as she is able to do this, she uses what may represent the phallus to penetrate her victim.
Hutchings, P. (1993)
Pp.166, 167, 168, 179, 181.
Images: Bell, J. and Frayling, C. (2013)
Women in Horror
Below are a collection of extracts taken from Hutchings, P. (1993)
Throught these passages, ideas such as family horror, horror in relation to society, sexualisation of women and finally the uncanny, referring to children.
The Wolf Man, (1941) & Dracula Prince of Darkness, (1966)
Both images are taken from horror films, showing the female characters in each. On the left, The Wolf Man, with what looks like a female victim who appears to be attractive and vulnerable. On the right, a female character in Dracula Prince of Darkness who also appears to be an attractive damsel in distress.
Here we see a female monster, who only appears monstrous due to her fangs which we associate with vampires or bats. So from face value, in my opinion she doen't appear scary at all, but perhaps she was for her time in the 70's.