How Is Gender Represented In Horror MOVIES?

Gender in horror movies is mainly represented with a female protagonist who survives to the end. This counteracts the target audience as the main audience for the horror genre is teen males, normally in groups. The second most common is couples, going so they can cuddle up in the cinema and the man can protect the girl from the scary film. The main protagonist (which as I have said is normally female) tends to have an androgynous style, and isn’t portrait in a sexual manner, normally domestic and shown in conservative light. Horror films tend to stick with the format of if a teenage girl or boy does something wrong then they are punished for it; they don’t get punished if they don’t have sex, do drugs, or break any rules. They must lead a clean and tidy conservative life.

In the three films we watched (Halloween (1978) The Shining (1984) and Eden Lake(2008)) we expect to relate to a strong masculine hero but in each we tend to create more of a attachment to the female protagonist and we seem to empathise with her even though a male audience wouldn’t be expected to.

In Halloween we relate to Laurie as the main protagonist for the film, she is mainly seen from a domestic stand point, as during the film her friends are sexualised and because of this act of sex they die, as does one of the boyfriends, this is because they left the domesticated roles of familial life to become sexual, this change doesn’t follow a conservative view and they were ‘killed for their sins’. In the film we see a more modernised aspect as men and women are given the same amount of visibility, however, there is an issue with male gaze, all of the girl beside Laurie are sexualised and domesticated, so if they aren’t at home cleaning, they are being sexualised by men. The view of Laurie does rescue this slightly as she is seen as more masculine and balances out the ideas of women being objects.

Throughout the film women are domesticated and sexualised and men are there to protect and save, but at the end, where our female protagonist saves the day (with slight aid from Dr Loomis) and gets rid of the male monster.

Throughout the narrative of the film it is about equal with who dies and who survives in terms of gender but it can be argued that it would be outweighed due to the female deaths being more important and vital to the story.

In the Shining we have an unfair split of men and women as there is a roughly a 60:40 split in favour to men.  Maintaining the idea that horror films like a conservative view and men have power and women don’t. Women are mainly portrayed domestically in this film and as familial. As Wendy is shown doing chores around the hotel. And the secretary is doing a stereotypically female job when she brings in coffee.  On the familial side of it, we see Wendy only as the husband of Jack and the father of Danny. We also see the daughter of Grady; the Twins are seen as familial as they are known as the daughters of Grady. There is a sexual aspect to this film but it is only small, where in room 237 we are forced into an aspect of male gaze, we see jack enter the room and naked lady come out of the bath, this however, isn’t the standard sexualisation that we first think as when jack begins to become intimate with the mysterious naked lady she transforms into a repulsive rotting corpse, which, after we look at the naked women in a sexualised way we see that it was in fact wrong to do so because now we are staring at naked, rotting, old lady making this more of a lesson to the watcher, saying, don’t look at women for their appearance, as appearances are deceiving.

  The males in this movie are portrayed as people attempting to protect, Jack only takes the job to provide for the family, Dick Hanoran wants to save Danny from Jack and the police officer manning the radio wants to make sure there ok and that they keep in contact. All of these positions are there to protect the family from harm but in the end they all fail and it is down to Wendy to save Danny from Jack and escape the evil of the hotel with the snow cat.

In the film we see a number of deaths, which are 3 girls and 2 guys, but this in terms of the ratio to guys and girls means that whilst only a small percentage of men die all but one woman die, Wendy, who saves Danny and takes him to a safer place, we assume. Due to the way the film kills off most of the women, the men that are left seem to have a more powerful offset, even though the main protagonist and the one we seem to relate is Wendy. There is an argument that we relate to Danny more but in the end he has to be saved by his mother and if it wasn’t for Wendy pushing him out of the window he would have been captured by Jack and more than likely killed. Throughout the film we see Jack, Wendy and Danny as a family and this makes it all the harder when we see that Jack wants to kill Wendy and Danny, it is actually hard to imagine the way he would do it which makes it seem as if an  villain there is still ‘normal’ Jack in there somewhere.