Films:
Item 1: Black Christmas (1974)
A sorority house is terrorized by a stranger who makes frightening phone calls and then murders the sorority sisters during Christmas break. A great example for weaker roles for women as every member of the female cast is killed off. I intend to pick out key scenes to use as examples in discussion.
Item 2: Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
A group of friends passing through are stalked and hunted down by a deformed killer with a chainsaw in order to sustain his poor family who can only afford to eat what they kill. This made a great film for discussion as the female lead role survives the entire film and she is different from many other female roles in horror films.
Item 3: The Hitcher …show more content…
A great example of these weak female roles would be those of the girls in the 1974 film ‘Black Christmas’. The film is packed with good looking young women, often in skimpy clothing or, at times, nothing at all. This is perhaps for the viewers, as I mentioned before, that the majority of horror film lovers are male, therefore loving the naked chicks on their screens. The girls in this film are killed off one at a time until just one (the main character) is alive. At the very end of the film though, this girl also dies, perhaps giving the impression that women are the weaker sex, and of course, the killer turns out to be male. Not one of the women who had a part in this film survived and was still living when the film had finished. But, if the male audience enjoy watching these women in their skimpy clothing, why would they want to watch them be killed? Clover argues that the women who are murdered in these films are the one’s who, if they existed in real life, would be unattainable to the ‘normal’ men in the audience. They are usually highly attractive, obnoxious, self-centered girls who think they are greater than everyone else. Either this, or they are simply seen as whores, giving the audience little reason to feel anything for them except hatred. So there is a drive there to see these types of women “get what they deserve” by being tortured, raped or murdered, or all