Film Studies - the aim of my presentation today is to establish how women are represented in slasher films by studying A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween and Psycho.

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Katie Rattigan

Small Scale Research Project

Representations of women in the ‘slasher’ movie

Presenter: Welcome, the aim of my presentation today is to establish how women are represented in ‘slasher’ films by studying A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween and Psycho. Firstly, we must recognize the definition of a ‘slasher’ movie.

A slasher film is a subgenre of horror film, and at times thriller, typically involving a mysterious psychopathic killer stalking and killing a sequence of victims usually in a graphically violent manner, often with a cutting tool such as a knife or axe. – Item 1

Presenter: Typically in ‘slasher’ films, women are often the victims, and are stereotyped as subordinate and often fearful. This stereotyping of women in ‘slasher’ films has ensured that audiences now expect women to be helpless and vulnerable, and of course the victims. This has been criticised by feminists and although most women are portrayed as the victims, in terms of Propp’s character types, women can sometimes be displayed as the hero.

“Girls and female adolescents [in horror films] who are witnessed displaying fearfulness and protective need in the face of terror on the screen are more favorably evaluated by male and female peers and non-peers than their counterparts who are witnessed displaying no distress” – page 87 Item 2

Play “A Nightmare on Elm Street” clip Item 3 – Sheila’s death

Presenter: This idea of a helpless female victim is a typical convention of the ‘slasher’ film. Women are constantly degraded, as a killing often occurs after sexual activity. The victims are often young, attractive and typically blonde females.  Some theorists argue that women in ‘slasher’ films are punished for engaging in pre-marital sex, suggesting that sexual activity would constitute in death. In the ‘slasher’ film, the final girl who survives will always be a virgin – whereas the girls who engage in sexual activity will die a gruesome death in the hands of the killer.

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Play “Friday the 13th” clip item 4 – sex in a tent

 

The Final Girl is usually the last woman standing. A woman who is resourceful, intelligent and feisty. She has witnessed her peers (male and female) being killed and she will be in the final confrontation with the killer. But rarely sexual and rarely sexually active. The Final Girl also brings into view the virgin/whore dichotomy. The sexually active women die and die, on camera, in the most violently gratuitous fashion possible. – item 5

Presenter: Feminism in the 1970s and 80s had ...

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