Rant - Feminists on Horror Movies

[chironcentaur]

Renee was going to bed just as I was getting up, and she mentions to me that in her bored internet explorations last night she came upon an article that I might be interested in. Something about slasher movies, I emailed it to you.

Cool. right? So I get up, eat breakfast, come out here all excited that I have something interesting to look at on the

Comments

[moonvoice]

One of the main areas in film studies at the moment, or at least for the past ten years, has been the slasher film and gender - and I do actually think that the heroine in many cases is a masculinised woman, and not a feminised woman, for a variety of reasons. There are subversive slasher films that deliberately undermine this; I Spit On Your Grave, for example (which is an amazing b-movie and, unsurprisingly, banned in Australia), and of course Scream which set up the conventional rules of a slasher and then undermined many of them. And finally there was shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

But, that said, I don't like the condescending tone that appears to have come across in the person's article. No one is 'bad' for watching any genre of film. No woman is betraying 'womynkind' by watching slashers, and no guy is betraying 'womynkind' by watching them either. It's just a really strange judgement call to make, especially when the slasher genre was one of the first genres to consistently attempt to empower women, no matter how they

[chironcentaur]

Oh I don't deny that there is sex in slasher films, like you say some directors are very blatant that it is there, and hey a lot of serial killings have sexual elements to them. It would make sense to be there. Though I do think lines need to be drawn somewhere, cross this point and you're seeing things that aren't there (maybe symbolize knives since other weapons could be used, but where else are you going to torture people except some dark enclosed out of the way place, that's not symbolism that's logic

[moonvoice]

I really hate the idea of gendering intelligence as 'masculine,' that's just ridiculous and so so flawed. I can understand 'knife as phallic symbol' in many slasher films (not all), but 'woman is resourceful and smart, therefore she's enacting maleness' is just wrong.

As for torturing in a dark, enclosed space, I Spit On Your Grave is an example of a film where this doesn't happen for half of the murders I believe - one is drowned in the open, in the daylight from memory (it's pretty brutal though, a woman is gang-raped by a bunch of men, she recovers, and she kills them all in very brutal, exacting ways). There are others, but they are generally specifically subversive to the slasher formula.

I never got into slasher media analysis, it just wasn't my thing. I'm more of a TV analyst, and my areas have always been things like 'representations of mental illness in mainstream media,' and shit like that. But even when I was at uni, years ago, slasher analysis was huuuuuuuge. It was insanity.

[chironcentaur]

I have not seen I Spit On Your Grave yet (I know, bad horror fan, it is on my list though) but I'm familiar with it. That would make sense actually, people motivated by revenge against specific individuals isn't the same as a serial killer and would operate differently, wouldn't care as much about not getting caught than someone who wants to continue killing into eternity. :-)

I pay a lot more personal attention to conformity (themes like this is the way things are know your place) and how people who are different are treated. There is shit out there reinforcing that there is something wrong with weird kids and as such its perfectly okay to treat them like crap, and a frightening amount of that is actually being aimed at kids.