Representations Of Femininity In Horror Film

Do you watch horror film? What type of horror film do you watch? Horror films always possess dominant cultural insights and provide a public discourse about femininity in every different period of time. Within the horror film genre, a possession film is a type of film which showcases a “display of aberrant feminine behavior which is depicted as depraved, monstrous, and perversely appealing” (Creed 31). This genre is populated by female monsters, including many types of monsters such as witches like in Carrie (1976), castrating mothers like in Psycho (1960), and possessed bodies like in The Exorcist (1973). Although a great deal of these horror films is highly talked about, very little of these films succeed to have a great representations and ratings. However, The Exorcist (1973) is unlike other less
In slasher films, mother-child relationship will also cause massacres where a lot of people die due to a revenging mother. Therefore, we also consider it as another extension of the “final girl” category. Greven, in his book Representations of Femininity in American Genre Cinema: The Woman’s Film, Film Noir, and Modern Horror, used a female epic “Demeter and Persephone” in order to illustrate the female transformation where women decide to take action in the face of enemy threat, arm themselves and save themselves (Greven 80). However, Short, whose argument centered around the movie Carrie, explains the power of women and the failure of the patriarchal model, and offers her own assumptions on the relationship between patriarchal model and female maturity. What’s more, she also examines the maternal hero, also known as the mothers in horror films, specifically and argues that “vengeful mothers tend to be castigated” (Short