Item 2: Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Catalogue
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…
(2007)
A road trip takes a deadly turn in this terrifying thriller about a young couple tormented by a psychotic hitchhiker. I believe this film to be a good point for discussion, as the lead female’s role appears to change throughout the duration of the film.
Item 4: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
A group of suburban teenagers share one common bond: Freddy Krueger, a horribly disfigured killer who hunts them in their dreams, is stalking them all. A good example for key scenes as main character Nancy learns to defend herself from the killer and attack back.
Books:
Item 5: Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in Modern Horror Film. By Carol Clover.
My most useful resource, Carol Clover discusses both fact and her own opinion about the use of different genders in horror films and how it has changed over the years. She uses a number of different films as examples, both old and new, and relates her arguments to numerous critics, philosophers and filmmakers themselves.
Item 6: The Heroine's Journey. By Maureen Murdock.
A book about a women’s journey, their reasons for choices and how it affects them. Can be related to films easily and clearly and has helped my research into women in horror films.
Websites:
Item 7: http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art48141.asp
An online article written by Steven Casey Murray, the horror movies editor for BellaOnline. Gives a lot of facts about women in horror and uses A Nightmare on Elm Street as an example, picking out numerous key scenes which I will find helpful, as this is one of my focus films.
Item 8: http://www.cinemademerde.com/Essay-Final_Girl.shtml
An essay on the different types of women in horror, rather than how their representation and roles have changed. The writer of this online essay relates her arguments to one of the books in my resources, ‘Men, Women and Chainsaws’. Useful as all aspects of horrors are discussed here.
Other:
Item 9: Horror Films...And the Women Who Love Them! – Entertainment Weekly Article.
Discusses women as an audience to horror films as apposed to discussing the cast. Why women would or would not want to watch a female cast. Also discusses how women may be empowered in these films.
Presentation Script
Run Audio:
10 Second Clip from Black Christmas, scene where first girl is murdered, girls are screaming.
Presenter:
For this presentation I have chosen to research and discuss how the roles and representation of women in horror and slasher films has developed since the 1960’s. Horror films are movies that try to provoke the emotions of fear, horror and terror from their viewers.
Projector:
Show clips of women from 3 films.
(5 second clip of women facing their killer in each of my focus films. Black Christmas, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hitcher.)
Presenter:
In horror films created before the 1980’s, there is a lack of strong female characters, any females that appeared on our screens were seen as weak and quite often ended up being murdered long before the end of the film. When looking for a horror film from this time with a female lead, the only films I managed to find were 70’s films ‘A Nightmare In Elm Street’, ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ and ‘Black Christmas’. In the book ‘Men, Women and Chainsaws’, Carol Clover argues that this lack of lead females is because the majority audience of horror films has always been male, and having a male lead as the hero and/or killer in a film, will allow the males of the audience to relate to these characters.
Projector:
Show 5-second clip of male audience of horror film.
Presenter:
As I mentioned, there weren’t many female lead roles, therefore nearly all of the women that were cast in a horror before the 80’s were usually the ones to die. They are often seen as weak and helpless women and are usually a friend of the lead character, more than often they weren’t good for much more than running, screaming, falling down, and dying.
Projector:
Run 10 second clip sequence of scenes from Black Christmas. Four different clips of the female cast in little clothing, then looking scared, defending themselves and finally dying.
Presenter:
These women are often linked with sex. As everyone who has ever watched a horror film will have noticed, if you have sex in a horror film, you almost always die shortly after.
Projector:
Runs through sequence of photographic images from Black Christmas that are evidence to what is being said by the presenter in the next section of speech.
Presenter:
Which is why these women who are seen to be the weak ones are often wearing little to no clothing, are easy to bed, and at some point attempt to fight off the killer/monster which inevitably leads to their death.
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
three.
Projector:
Rolls scene from Texas Chainsaw Massacre – The blonde female friend is killed.
Presenter:
As horror films developed through the 1980’s onwards, another kind of female role evolved. Lead roles were being cast with women, and these roles were characters who survived until the end of the film, giving them the name of ‘the final girl’.
Projector:
Short clip of women achieving and celebrating the Women’s Liberation Movement.
Presenter:
I sometimes wonder if it is coincidence that these films came out and became popular in the 1980's, during the time the Women's Liberation Movement was starting to change the way America viewed women's rights and roles. Maybe this movement gave women the chance to appear more often as lead characters in all genres of films, not just horrors.
Projector:
Shows 3-second clip of main character from Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), seen to be quite masculine looking compared to other females cast.
Presenter:
The final girl is usually the complete opposite to the roles I have already talked about, she is usually shown to be smarter, stronger and more conscientious than the other women, and of course, they avoid sex. The very presence of these “women” tells a viewer that part of the point of view of the movie is that not all women are whores, and if not all women are whores, this knowledge makes possible the enjoyment of watching the torture and murder of those who are.
Refer to handout. – Section from page 39 of Men, Women and Chainsaws.
“The Final Girl is boyish, in a word. Just as the killer is not fully masculine, she is not fully feminine - not, in any case, feminine in the way of her friends. Her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from the other girls and ally her, ironically, with the very boys she fears or rejects, not to speak of the killer himself.”
Presenter:
Over the course of any horror film with one of these women, the final girl tends to become more and more masculine; she becomes more active and aggressive. She grows quickly from a girl who hides and cowers from the killer to a strong woman who fights back, or in some cases, she even hunts down the killer to find out who the it is and why they are killing. She quite often has a male-sounding name too, like Billie, Max or Alex and most of the time will have, other male-like characteristics. But how do these final girls earn the men’s respect? It would seem that they have to be more like men.
Projector:
Clip of scene where Nancy is figuring out how to attack Freddy in A Nightmare On Elm Street.
Presenter:
In A Nightmare on Elm Street, main character Nancy learns how to build booby traps and she sets them as she turns to attack Freddy, making her the stronger and smarter character, and the attack makes her more masculine and male like than the girls in previous films. This assumption of male-like qualities helps to make the Final Girl an “Okay chick.” As well as this, the courage they have to defend themselves and attack the killer in this way means that a guy will feel he can relate to her, as he respects that she’s not afraid to kick some ass when she needs to.
Once the women have been split into these two roles in the male audience member’s mind (the whores and the final girls), he is free to enjoy getting off on watching the “whores” be killed, because the presence of the smart, active Final Girl who is also a woman tells him that not all women are like that, and the final girl slaying the killer at the end restores justice, meaning that all of the horrible thoughts the male audience member had all along were okay.
There are many reasons for using a ‘final girl’ in horror films, but what comes to mind as the most important reason for this is that the audience will often feel more fear for a woman in peril than they would for a man playing the same role.
Projector:
Shows 2 clips of female lead, Grace, in the 2007 film ‘The Hitcher’. The first clip is of Grace in the back seat of the car, looking terrified, fitting the damsel in distress stereotype. The second clip is from the end of the film, where Grace stands gun in hand, looking relieved, strong, and definitely more masculine.
Presenter:
Carol Clover, the writer of ‘Men, Women and Chainsaws’, says that, although surprising, the males in the audience will identify across gender with the Final Girl. She says that the focus of their excitement will lie with the killer in the first half of the film, but switch sides to the Final Girl by the end, because the young men in the audience enjoy a somewhat pleasurable masochistic experience as they watch the killer be bested by the female hero. Clover makes a point of believing that the males see themselves as the Final Girl in the last sections of the film, and cheer her on as they would the male hero of an action film.
Projector:
5 Second clip from Texas Chainsaw Massacre of Erin running through a number of white sheets hung up on a washing line, and continuing to run through a field.
Presenter:
One great example of a final girl would be Erin from the remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As our main character she manages to fight off the killer a number of times whilst trying to save her friends, and eventually escapes, the only female to be alive at the end of the film. Another great example is that of Grace from The Hitcher (2007), who quite obviously begins the film as a young, dependent girl, but throughout the film becomes dependent on only herself, and as she becomes stronger and braver, she also becomes more masculine and ready to take on anything, eventually managing to defend herself and kill the villain. Carol Clover has argued that these, and a lot of other horror films with such final girls are potentially empowering for women. Another important part of having a final girl is that it means justice is restored at the end of the film, and justice is perhaps the most important part of any horror film, so that nobody in the audience feels guilty about watching such violent, cruel behaviour with all the killings. The males feel okay about watching the other girls being tortured and killed because it is a girl who survives and defeats the killer in the end, without this, the audience will not allow itself to enjoy all of the violence and murder that has come before. If the woman is able to get away with the murder, because the men in the audience are relating to her, it makes them feel more powerful and good about themselves for defeating a killer.
In summary, what I have learnt about how roles for women in horror films have developed is that, and most likely due to the Women's Liberation Movement, more lead roles have become available between the years of the 80’s and 00’s. As the audience for horror films grows and more female directors are creating films, lead roles for women have become a popular trend, most of which are classed as a ‘final girl’. These roles have really started to empower women, which I believe will only increase the number of people watching horrors, because women are also more likely to watch if they know that it will be a female who is shown to be the stronger character, eventually murdering the original killer. This will make both a male and female audience feel better about watching a scary and violent film.
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…
(2007)
A road trip takes a deadly turn in this terrifying thriller about a young couple tormented by a psychotic hitchhiker. I believe this film to be a good point for discussion, as the lead female’s role appears to change throughout the duration of the film.
Item 4: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
A group of suburban teenagers share one common bond: Freddy Krueger, a horribly disfigured killer who hunts them in their dreams, is stalking them all. A good example for key scenes as main character Nancy learns to defend herself from the killer and attack back.
Books:
Item 5: Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in Modern Horror Film. By Carol Clover.
My most useful resource, Carol Clover discusses both fact and her own opinion about the use of different genders in horror films and how it has changed over the years. She uses a number of different films as examples, both old and new, and relates her arguments to numerous critics, philosophers and filmmakers themselves.
Item 6: The Heroine's Journey. By Maureen Murdock.
A book about a women’s journey, their reasons for choices and how it affects them. Can be related to films easily and clearly and has helped my research into women in horror films.
Websites:
Item 7: http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art48141.asp
An online article written by Steven Casey Murray, the horror movies editor for BellaOnline. Gives a lot of facts about women in horror and uses A Nightmare on Elm Street as an example, picking out numerous key scenes which I will find helpful, as this is one of my focus films.
Item 8: http://www.cinemademerde.com/Essay-Final_Girl.shtml
An essay on the different types of women in horror, rather than how their representation and roles have changed. The writer of this online essay relates her arguments to one of the books in my resources, ‘Men, Women and Chainsaws’. Useful as all aspects of horrors are discussed here.
Other:
Item 9: Horror Films...And the Women Who Love Them! – Entertainment Weekly Article.
Discusses women as an audience to horror films as apposed to discussing the cast. Why women would or would not want to watch a female cast. Also discusses how women may be empowered in these films.
Presentation Script
Run Audio:
10 Second Clip from Black Christmas, scene where first girl is murdered, girls are screaming.
Presenter:
For this presentation I have chosen to research and discuss how the roles and representation of women in horror and slasher films has developed since the 1960’s. Horror films are movies that try to provoke the emotions of fear, horror and terror from their viewers.
Projector:
Show clips of women from 3 films.
(5 second clip of women facing their killer in each of my focus films. Black Christmas, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hitcher.)
Presenter:
In horror films created before the 1980’s, there is a lack of strong female characters, any females that appeared on our screens were seen as weak and quite often ended up being murdered long before the end of the film. When looking for a horror film from this time with a female lead, the only films I managed to find were 70’s films ‘A Nightmare In Elm Street’, ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ and ‘Black Christmas’. In the book ‘Men, Women and Chainsaws’, Carol Clover argues that this lack of lead females is because the majority audience of horror films has always been male, and having a male lead as the hero and/or killer in a film, will allow the males of the audience to relate to these characters.
Projector:
Show 5-second clip of male audience of horror film.
Presenter:
As I mentioned, there weren’t many female lead roles, therefore nearly all of the women that were cast in a horror before the 80’s were usually the ones to die. They are often seen as weak and helpless women and are usually a friend of the lead character, more than often they weren’t good for much more than running, screaming, falling down, and dying.
Projector:
Run 10 second clip sequence of scenes from Black Christmas. Four different clips of the female cast in little clothing, then looking scared, defending themselves and finally dying.
Presenter:
These women are often linked with sex. As everyone who has ever watched a horror film will have noticed, if you have sex in a horror film, you almost always die shortly after.
Projector:
Runs through sequence of photographic images from Black Christmas that are evidence to what is being said by the presenter in the next section of speech.
Presenter:
Which is why these women who are seen to be the weak ones are often wearing little to no clothing, are easy to bed, and at some point attempt to fight off the killer/monster which inevitably leads to their death.
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
three.
Projector:
Rolls scene from Texas Chainsaw Massacre – The blonde female friend is killed.
Presenter:
As horror films developed through the 1980’s onwards, another kind of female role evolved. Lead roles were being cast with women, and these roles were characters who survived until the end of the film, giving them the name of ‘the final girl’.
Projector:
Short clip of women achieving and celebrating the Women’s Liberation Movement.
Presenter:
I sometimes wonder if it is coincidence that these films came out and became popular in the 1980's, during the time the Women's Liberation Movement was starting to change the way America viewed women's rights and roles. Maybe this movement gave women the chance to appear more often as lead characters in all genres of films, not just horrors.
Projector:
Shows 3-second clip of main character from Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), seen to be quite masculine looking compared to other females cast.
Presenter:
The final girl is usually the complete opposite to the roles I have already talked about, she is usually shown to be smarter, stronger and more conscientious than the other women, and of course, they avoid sex. The very presence of these “women” tells a viewer that part of the point of view of the movie is that not all women are whores, and if not all women are whores, this knowledge makes possible the enjoyment of watching the torture and murder of those who are.
Refer to handout. – Section from page 39 of Men, Women and Chainsaws.
“The Final Girl is boyish, in a word. Just as the killer is not fully masculine, she is not fully feminine - not, in any case, feminine in the way of her friends. Her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from the other girls and ally her, ironically, with the very boys she fears or rejects, not to speak of the killer himself.”
Presenter:
Over the course of any horror film with one of these women, the final girl tends to become more and more masculine; she becomes more active and aggressive. She grows quickly from a girl who hides and cowers from the killer to a strong woman who fights back, or in some cases, she even hunts down the killer to find out who the it is and why they are killing. She quite often has a male-sounding name too, like Billie, Max or Alex and most of the time will have, other male-like characteristics. But how do these final girls earn the men’s respect? It would seem that they have to be more like men.
Projector:
Clip of scene where Nancy is figuring out how to attack Freddy in A Nightmare On Elm Street.
Presenter:
In A Nightmare on Elm Street, main character Nancy learns how to build booby traps and she sets them as she turns to attack Freddy, making her the stronger and smarter character, and the attack makes her more masculine and male like than the girls in previous films. This assumption of male-like qualities helps to make the Final Girl an “Okay chick.” As well as this, the courage they have to defend themselves and attack the killer in this way means that a guy will feel he can relate to her, as he respects that she’s not afraid to kick some ass when she needs to.
Once the women have been split into these two roles in the male audience member’s mind (the whores and the final girls), he is free to enjoy getting off on watching the “whores” be killed, because the presence of the smart, active Final Girl who is also a woman tells him that not all women are like that, and the final girl slaying the killer at the end restores justice, meaning that all of the horrible thoughts the male audience member had all along were okay.
There are many reasons for using a ‘final girl’ in horror films, but what comes to mind as the most important reason for this is that the audience will often feel more fear for a woman in peril than they would for a man playing the same role.
Projector:
Shows 2 clips of female lead, Grace, in the 2007 film ‘The Hitcher’. The first clip is of Grace in the back seat of the car, looking terrified, fitting the damsel in distress stereotype. The second clip is from the end of the film, where Grace stands gun in hand, looking relieved, strong, and definitely more masculine.
Presenter:
Carol Clover, the writer of ‘Men, Women and Chainsaws’, says that, although surprising, the males in the audience will identify across gender with the Final Girl. She says that the focus of their excitement will lie with the killer in the first half of the film, but switch sides to the Final Girl by the end, because the young men in the audience enjoy a somewhat pleasurable masochistic experience as they watch the killer be bested by the female hero. Clover makes a point of believing that the males see themselves as the Final Girl in the last sections of the film, and cheer her on as they would the male hero of an action film.
Projector:
5 Second clip from Texas Chainsaw Massacre of Erin running through a number of white sheets hung up on a washing line, and continuing to run through a field.
Presenter:
One great example of a final girl would be Erin from the remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As our main character she manages to fight off the killer a number of times whilst trying to save her friends, and eventually escapes, the only female to be alive at the end of the film. Another great example is that of Grace from The Hitcher (2007), who quite obviously begins the film as a young, dependent girl, but throughout the film becomes dependent on only herself, and as she becomes stronger and braver, she also becomes more masculine and ready to take on anything, eventually managing to defend herself and kill the villain. Carol Clover has argued that these, and a lot of other horror films with such final girls are potentially empowering for women. Another important part of having a final girl is that it means justice is restored at the end of the film, and justice is perhaps the most important part of any horror film, so that nobody in the audience feels guilty about watching such violent, cruel behaviour with all the killings. The males feel okay about watching the other girls being tortured and killed because it is a girl who survives and defeats the killer in the end, without this, the audience will not allow itself to enjoy all of the violence and murder that has come before. If the woman is able to get away with the murder, because the men in the audience are relating to her, it makes them feel more powerful and good about themselves for defeating a killer.
In summary, what I have learnt about how roles for women in horror films have developed is that, and most likely due to the Women's Liberation Movement, more lead roles have become available between the years of the 80’s and 00’s. As the audience for horror films grows and more female directors are creating films, lead roles for women have become a popular trend, most of which are classed as a ‘final girl’. These roles have really started to empower women, which I believe will only increase the number of people watching horrors, because women are also more likely to watch if they know that it will be a female who is shown to be the stronger character, eventually murdering the original killer. This will make both a male and female audience feel better about watching a scary and violent film.