Throughout media women are presented to be beautiful and much more emotional compared to men who are stereotypically seen as being much more tough and less emotional. They can be represented as part of a group such as a group of friends or a family, they tend to work and think of part of a team, they take the role of a helper they are generally never a leader.
Men are usually the heroes in typical media forms, they tend to take on the active roles whereas women tend to take on the passive roles, and there is a definite lack of female role models compared to the amount of male role models. We know what types of relationships men have with the characters, as their roles are made out to be a lot more active, we focus on their actions a lot more.
About 20 years ago the visibility of men to women in media was men outnumbering women. Proving males are much more dominant within the media. Women can be seen as sexual objects, in media we are often presented with women in the nude or wearing revealing clothes whereas we never really see men in the nude, showing the difference between male and female presentation.
The presentation of female visibility in horror films is different compared to other media forms. The main female protagonists can turn into the final girl and are therefore present until the end of the film.
Horror, unlike many other forms of media, shows gender in a much more ‘respected’ way, women can be portrayed as being more active than passive, and their passive roles are normally conveyed in other forms of media. In certain horrors they can even be seen as the heroes, or the characters that save the day.
The final girl normally lasts to the end of the film, by either defeating the monster or actually turning into the monster. This type of female strength and anger is not usually presented in other forms of media. The males are mainly the aggressive types, stereotypically. However, in horror films you do normally have a male protagonist, they generally get defeated and the female takes over.
Horror films tend to follow the rule that the male killer kills the group one by one until he himself is killed by the ‘last girl’. This is featured in the book by Carol Clover: ‘Men, Women and Chainsaws’. This suggests that the female is usually the survivor or one who kills the killer therefore giving females in horror power over males, which is feminist ideology. However now with the influence of feminism and modern ideologies women are more successful and therefore the representation of women has changed in horror films to intelligent women who try to figure out who the killer is and stop them rather than be overwhelmed with fear and get killed stereotypically as they were before.For example, the female characters in the movie Scream. They take the role of a male hero and take charge of the movie, trying to find the killer and either capture or kill him.
Carol Clover, the writer of the book: ‘Men, Women and Chainsaws’ has many points of feminism in horror, one of them is the audience identification. She questioned who the audience identifies with in the film. It was previously assumed that the males of the audience identified with the male killer. Clover argued the audience rather identifies with the ‘final girl’. This means that the audience identifies with the fear of being attacked as opposed to the satisfaction of the killer as he kills people or sneaks up on them.
There tends to be three groups for male and females in films; the useless character, the hero and the monster, gender can be represented through any of these categories.
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