The representation of women in horror films

In this essay I am going to be writing about how woman are represented in horror films.  To help me come to my own conclusion, I will first look at theorists such as Carol Clover and Laura Mulvey and relate their theories to a range of horror films old and new.  After that I will then compare these critics theories to each other using evidence to back up either side.  Finally, after I have finished with all of that, I will give my own personal opinion on the matter and try to decide who I believe to be more accurate.

I am going to relate Clover's 'Final Girl Theory' to a number of films.  The first film I am going to relate is Halloween which was released in 1978.  Halloween is a prime example that works with Clover's theory.  The final girl, Laurie Strode, is the only adolescent girl to survive being stuck in a pre-pubescent state.  She is the one who doesn't take drugs, doesn't have sex and is the most sensible unlike her friends who are the first to be murdered.  She fights back when the killer is trying to murder her and ends up surviving for it.  The second movie I will be relating to Clover's theory is the modern version of The Crazies.  Originally made in 1973 this remake of the film was made in 2010.  The final girl in this film was Judy, this was the only female resident of the tow we know of that escaped.  We see throughout the film that Judy does have some masculine traits.  She fights back to save her friend Becca by distracting the "crazy man" long enough to be rescued.  She also saves her husband David a couple of time, swapping gender roles with him on occasions.  The third movie I will be relating to Clover's theory is Sinister which was released 5th October 2012.  This film is hard to relate to Carol's theory because the film ends with everyone dying ad there aren't any strong female characters in the film.  Ellison's wife Tracy tries to stop him for carrying on with Scream which was released in 1996.  Clover's theory can somewhat be related to the opening scene with Drew Barrymore.  Casey is the first victim of ghost face; when Casey is outside on the ground, she is fighting for her life, she does have some masculinity in her as she resists and manages to fight back to a certain extent.  She is, however, eventually overwhelmed and does not survive but survived much longer then a defenceless damsel in distress although could not come to using the knife she picked up.
his investigation however the stronger masculinity of Ellison ignore Tracy's much weaker assertion.  The final film that I will relate to the theories is

I am now going to relate Mulvey's theory on the 'Male Gaze' to the some films.  The first film I am going to relate is Psycho

History of horror class powerpoints

Tyler and I worked on the PowerPoint which focused on classic literature

Questionnaire

Questionnaire

1.      Are you male or female?                               

Male                                  |  |                                       

Female                              |  |

2.      What category of age are you in?             

12 to 20 years                  |  |              

21 to 30 years                  |  |            

31 to 40 years                  |  |      

41 to 50 years                  |  |       

51 to 60 years                  |  |       

Over 60 years                   |  |

3.      How many movies (any genre) per month do you watch at the cinema, at home and around a friends home?

Cinema                ____

Home                   ____

Friends’ home     ____

4.      What are the top 3 factors that persuade you to watch a movie?

1. ___________________________________________________________________

2. ___________________________________________________________________

3. ___________________________________________________________________

5.      Have you been persuaded to watch a movie because of the director, stars or production company?

Yes                    |  |

No                     |  |

6.      How much do you enjoy horror movies?

I hate Horror movies                                                   |  |

I dislike horror movies                                                |  |

I don’t like or dislike horror movies                         |  |

I like horror movies                                                     |  |

I love horror movies                                                    |  |

7.      What is your favourite horror movie?

_____________________________________________________________________

8.      Do you prefer to watch horror movies alone, with family or with friends (including partners)?

Alone                    |  | 

Family                   |  |

Friends                 |  |

 

9.      What would you expect to see when watching a horror film (give 1 or more answers)?

1. ___________________________________________________________________

2. ___________________________________________________________________

3. ___________________________________________________________________

4. ___________________________________________________________________

5. ___________________________________________________________________

10.  If you like horror movies, why do you like them?

1. ___________________________________________________________________

2. ___________________________________________________________________

3. ___________________________________________________________________

11.  Do you think you are influenced by the marketing of a movie?

Yes          |  |

No           |  |

12.  Has a trailer for a movie persuaded you to watch a movie?

Yes          |  |

No           |  |

The questions I asked aimed to relate peoples age and gender, to their movie watching habits such as how often they watch movies, where they watch movies and how much they enjoy watching horror movies.  I also wanted to find out on another subject what makes different ages and genders persuaded to watch certain movies to learn more about marketing them.

Film distribution and marketing

Film distribution is a term used to describe the distribution of films.  This means that film distribution is the process of making a film available to watch for an audience by a film distributor.  This could be through the cinemas or through a home release on DVD, Blu-Ray etc or both.

A film distributor is a company that has responsibility for marketing a film.  A distributor can set the release date of a film and the method for which the film is made available for viewing.  Again these choices are cinema or home release.  Friday the 13th was distributed in the USA by Paramount Pictures who were also the producers.  However Warner Bros. were the company that distributed Friday the 13th in the UK.  A film will normally have more than 1 distributor  if it has been released in a number of countries for various reasons.

A film can only be successful if it is distributed well.  Poor distribution will result in a poor reach.  Reach is the number of people that are exposed to a media at least once.  This means that the person has to see something about the media at some point atleast once.  The person does not have to take in this media or watch the film, television series etc due to this, they only have to be exposed to it once.

A marketing plan is a written document that details the necessary actions to achieve one or more marketing objectives.  The marketing plan may be laid out for an individual product or for the entire company and all its products.

Distribution resource planning is a method used in business administration for planning orders within a supply chain.  Distribution resource planning enables the user to set certain inventory control parameters (like a safety stock) and calculate the time-phased inventory requirements.

Advertising is the process or profession of producing advertisements for products/services whereas publicity is public exposure for something.  Promotion is increasing the public awareness of a product, organization, or venture so as to increase sales or just public awareness in general.  Advertising is considered a type of promotion that the company will pay for in term to increase public awareness and gain more publicity.

The Crazies

The Crazies was released in 26 countries and was distributed in the USA by one of the producers of the film, 'Overture Films'.  However for every other country, there are different distributors and sometimes 2 for the DVD distribution as well.  In the USA, The Crazies was released in 2,476 theatres on it's opening weekend.

Final film trailer analysis

The final film trailer i am going to analyse is for 'The Mist'.  The Mist is a movie I have watched and enjoyed very much.  For this horror trailer I will be looking out for the horror conventions using the handy word DISTINCT to remember these conventions.  These being setting, technical codes, iconography, narrative, characters and finally themes.

I will start with setting.  At the start of the trailer we see David and his wife happy with their child Billy outside of their medium size peaceful looking house.  We also see when the car is driving past that the setting must generally be a village or small town due to the luscious number of trees and grassy areas.  The trailer then cuts to the supermarket where the majority of the trailer takes place.  This setting then changes from a casual supermarket to a isolated safe haven from the creatures of the mist.  The mist consumes the supermarket and we assume that Brent's attempt to go outside got him killed.  For the rest of the trailer we only see action take place in the supermarket and rightfully so as it is where the majority of the film takes place.

Next up is technical codes.  These technical codes are camera, mise en scène, sound and editing.  I will note an example in the trailer for each of these and explain how it relates to the horror genre.  At 1:34 in the trailer we get an over the shoulder shot of the man taping up the windows.  From the angle we get the full impact when the bug flies right onto the window in front of him.  It makes for a jump moment which is common within the horror genre.  From 1:34 onwards we also see that night time comes and it is also dark within the store with no electricity, this is also where the action and conflict starts to escalate being conventional to the horror film tradition of the night time being less safe.  Throughout the trailer music is playing, this quiets down a certain points to hear the characters however it is still there and changes throughout the trailer.  At the start of the trailer, the music is nice, high tone and cheery.  A siren then leads to some suspense music at 0:34 which quietens down and stops for a bit so we concentrate on the particular scene.  At 1:25 a different piece of music comes back that continues with a tension building atmosphere and then unleashes when the monsters start attacking and everything becomes out of control.  Finally for editing.  Similar to how the sound is throughout the trailer we see at the start that there are lots of long shots which give us an indication that it is peaceful and fine.  As the tension starts to build up the shots get smaller and cut to the next shots more rapidly.  This keeps the audience attention on the trailer and near the end where the tension is high they are very rapid cuts and screen flashes.  These have been added during the editing process and add to the impact of the trailer.

The iconography for the trailer is a small peaceful town that is consumed by to which we assume is a supernatural force.  For the rest of the trailer we see that everyone is trapped in the store.  The iconography of a store in a small town turns into everyone's only safe-haven.  The mist houses the unknown and is dangerous to go out in to.

In The Mist,  the narrative is explained pretty well in the trailer without spoiling the end for obvious reasons.  The trailer goes through the narrative of the movie without allowing the audience to piece too much of the story together.  We know the movie starts all nice and happy, the mist comes over and disrupts the equilibrium.  To not spoil the movie we do not see the resolution and if the equilibrium is restored or not.

The main character we can assume is David Drayton due to him getting the most screen time compared to any other character throughout the trailer.  At the start of the trailer we following him to the supermarket,  the trailer clearly wants us to pay attention to him.  We also see that the religious lady Mrs. Carmody causes much of the conflict in the trailer where she gets slapped and tries to take David's son as a sacrifice.  Being in charge of two of the major scenes in the trailer we can assume that she is an important character.

There are many themes that we can see throughout the trailer, some being more obvious then others.  There is the more obvious themes like danger, supernatural forces and fear.   There is also some more obscure ones that the trailer doesn't obviously show like religion, willpower and sacrifice.  There are more then these 6 themes but they are obvious to find.

'The Crazies (2010)' in relation to the 4 narrative theories

I have already explained the four narrative theories when relating them to 'Halloween' so I will only be relating these theories to The Crazies and giving a conclusion on how these theories relate to it.

Tzvetan Todorov
The story in The Crazies follows this theory better than in Halloween as we find out during the film more about how this equilibrium was disrupted.  However it still isn't set out in the traditional Hollywood style narrative.  We see at the start that there is an equilibrium and the equilibrium is disrupted.  This escalates until eventually the army is there, testing everyone and then going to blow the town up.  We get a clue rather close to the start that the plane in the river is somehow poisoning the water however we are not confirmed on this until near the end where the Intelligence Officer tells them that it was a biological weapon.  Being typical of the horror genre the movie also ends without a happy ending where the satellite that scans them as contaminated with the virus as thy enter into the new city restoring and not restoring the equilibrium at the same time.  They survive but they're going to become crazy and possibly contaminate another town/city.

Vladimir Propp
I will relate the characters from The Crazies as best as I can to the 8 character roles that Propp summarizes based off his the folk tales he has heard.  The hero in The Crazies would arguably be David and his wife Judy,  they are both the survivors at the end and are strong willed saving each other throughout the film.  The villain would be the government and the crazies.  We see in the barn scene that the army is just following orders and is trying to prevent and more people from being harmed.  However the government are the ones that caused the people to turn into the crazies basically killing them.  The crazies themselves are villains due to the fact that they will murder anyone that isn't crazy on sight, they have lost all reasoning and will kill.  The donor would be David as the gun is what gives him the edge over the crazies.  The helper is Deputy Russell who saves Davids life on a number of occasions and sacrifices himself when he knows he's gone to save David and Judy, the heroes.  The princess is Judy as she is the lady that David is determined to save, he goes out of his way risking himself to save her.  The princesses father is David as he gives himself the reward of going back to a normal life with his wife to live in peace.  The dispatcher again is David, with the whole town becoming crazy he decides himself to go on the quest to escape the town.  There is not really any false hero throughout the story and even though Russell has a moment where he almost kills the heroes, he realities he's not healthy and sacrifices himself before becoming a false hero.

Claude Levi-Strauss
I will note a few binary oppositions and note them.  Being a horror film many of these generally relate to horror movies or sub-genres of horror movies.

• Sanity vs Insanity
• Good vs Evil
• Night vs Day
• Healthy vs Unhealthy
• Safety vs Danger
• Love vs Hate

The Crazies doesn't seem to have as much similar binary oppositions compared to more conventional horror movies like Halloween and it is harder to find these binary oppositions because of this.

Bordwell and Thompson 
During the movie of The Crazies we see the plot, however there is also a story behind this plot that we figure out for ourselves as the story progresses on.  We piece this puzzle together as we go through the movie and think outside the plot to other things like character lives.  When we see Peggy Hamill telling David about how Rory was a drunk we then picture Rory's life and connect to it more and learn more about the characters.  That scene then leads on the David thinking on the moment when he shot Rory and think on to about David as a character and his morals, we see that a bit of guilt was inside of him because maybe Rory wasn't going to shoot.  Did David have a past memory where a similar situation occurred?  We will never know because that is not in the plot.  Within the plot we also get an idea of some of the story, we find out that the plane was carrying a biological weapon and then we can look at the events that led up to that event in space and time.

Conclusion
In conclusion The Crazies has a similar narrative to horror films in general and relates to the narrative theories to a limited extent.  However due to the sub-genre of the horror film, there are some differances present for example some of the binary opposites.

Analysis of a horror trailer

I am going to be analysing a trailer for the horror movie 'Possession'.  This trailer is recent and the movie was only released less then 2 months ago.

I have not watched the movie my self however the trailer does make it clear what the movie is going to be about without spoiling the plot.

This movie is not exactly distinct in any way as the idea of possession has been done many times before.  One of the most well known examples of this is 'The Exorcist'.  Also as is very common for possession movies, is that a little girl is the target as it invokes more emotion with the little girl being the most innocent.  The trailer show with superimposed text that the movie is based off a true story however it is doubtful that these events occurred in the real world on such a large scale but those more religious or weak willed will be more afraid because of this.

 The horror trailer seems to follow the general codes and conventions for a horror movie, particularly to the possession style sub-genre.  There is a supernatural force that slowly takes over it's host and becomes more apparent the longer they are possessed.  A religious figure or man who researches deity's will identify the demon who has possessed the target.  Eventually the demon starts to become uncontrollable and as is with a trailer it ends so that you'll have to watch to movie to see the conclusion.

It is hard to relate narrative theory to a trailer as it is not the whole package however some analysing can be done.  Todorov's theory can be applied to this trailer to a limited extent.  At the start of the trailer which we assume is also the start of the movie, the father and his daughter are fooling around, having a fun time.  The equilibrium is then disrupted when we hear that the box was not intended to be opened and the little girl opens it.  We can also see this when the girl says herself that she feels funny.  We do not know whether this equilibrium is restored or not and would need to watch the movie to find out, it is not certain as is normally the case with horror movies.

Propp's theory can also be related to this to identify certain character roles.  The villain and the dispatcher is probably the demon.  The demon is the one controlling the girl and is the reason the father is trying to help her.  This leads to the hero and princesses father, the father of the possessed girl who must identify the villain and stop it from killing the princess, the little girl.  The man in the university and the Jewish people seems to be the helpers providing knowledge on the situation to help the hero defeat the villain by knowing more about him.  There doesn't seems to be a false hero at least from what the trailer shows and the donor may be the Jewish people who may have gave the man the book to perform an exorcism or it could also be the hospital to look at the girls medical condition.

Levi-Strauss' theory is about binary oppositions and some of these are presented in the trailer, particularly those in conventional horror films.  A few examples would be.

• Religious vs Anti religious
• Natural vs Supernatural
• Good vs Evil
• Science vs Magic
• Control vs No control

Bordwell and Thompson's theory relates to the trailer as the trailer gives a clear series of events that occurred to get to the next shot.  Our questions are answered throughout the trailer through the use of editing techniques to show us a series of events that occur in a small space of time.  We see that the girl wants to buy the box, we see the father agrees, we then see that the box wasn't intended to be opened, after that the girl opens it which results in her feeling weird the next day. This is continuity editing and is vital for viewer to understand what is going on in the movie.  We know the girl has been possessed by the title of the movie and by seeing the series of events in time and space that led upto where the girl became possessed.  We see that it was the box because we get a clue in the shot before she opens it and after she opens it she says that she feels funny indicating to us, the audience that something is wrong after she opened the box.

'Halloween' in relation to the 4 narrative theories

Tzvetan Todorov
Todorov's theory explain how a story will begin with a state of equilibrium between two opposing forces.  This equilibrium is then disrupted by some event that then sparks a series of events to restore the problems and restore order to the world of fiction.  This theory is the base of the classic Hollywood structure.

In relation to Halloween it doesn't explain the narrative structure of the story too well as it does not really explain how this equilibrium has been disrupted.  It mainly just says how the story has a beginning where everyone is alive and happy.  The equilibrium being disrupted by the bogey man escaping sparking a chain of events eventually resulting in the ending where the equilibrium wasn't fully restored as the bogey man was still alive.

Vladimir Propp
Propp's theory was based off the 100's of folk tales he read resulting in him identifying 8 character roles and 31 narrative functions.  The 8 character roles he identified were the villain, the hero, the donor, the helper, the princess, the princesses father, the dispatcher and the false hero.

Being based of folk tales, it is hard to define these roles to Halloween or any more obscure genre like horror.  This is genrally because horror doesn't like to stick to the general codes and conventions that a more conventional genre like action does.  Obviously the hero is the girl that lives at the end and the villan is the bogey man.  The doctor is a helper as he is trying to find and stop the villan throughout the movie, the also saves the girl at the end.  Even with this information though it still only tells us that there are these roles that the characters play.  It is not in depth still.

Claude Levi-Strauss
Levi-Strauss looks a bit more deep into the narrative structure by looking at a narrative in terms of binary oppositions.  Instead of 1's and 0's we look at oppsites such as good and evil or light and dark.  These binary oppositions can genrally be associated to particular genres or multiple where good and evil can be applied to many genres but more obscure ones like natural and supernatural genrally stick to sci-fi and horror.

This theory better explains the story of haloween and can easily be tied to its horror genre through the binary oppositions that occur.  A couple of examples for this would be natural vs supernatural as we see at the end, the boogie man was not human.  Light vs dark because we only saw the murders happen at night where evil is genrally at it's strongest.  Looking at all these binary oppositions we can easily piece together a good idea of what the story is about.

Bordwell and Thompson
This technically isn't a narrative theory but does put together some interesting ideas.  In their book "Film Art: An Introduction" they defined narrative as "a chain of events in a cause-effect relationship, occuring in time and space".  In a way, this is similar to Todorov's theory but on a much more open and deeper level.  The theory defines where the event took place, when the event took place and what span of time the event took place over.  It explains how narrative will manipulate our awareness of time and place though techniques such as flashbacks or jumps between place and time.

This theory also can explain the narrative of halloween on a much deeper level and breaks down the plot of the story.  Right from the start of the story when we see the vision of the boy walking up the stairs, we see he is holding a knife, we immediatly know he is going to murder the occupents of the house and come to a shock when the mask is taken off and we see the kind standing there with the knife.  We know that something is wrong.  The movie then makes it clear that time has passed and that the man who escaped the asylum was the same boy who murdered his family.

Conclusion
Halloween being a horror movie means that a deeper analysis is required when looking into the narrative for the story.  This is why explaining the story's equilabrium or assigning character roles is not enough to analyse a more obscure genre like horror.  A deeper look is required which is why the last 2 theories are better suited to explain halloween.

My favourite horror trailer

This is one of my favourite horror movie trailers.  The reasoning for this is that the special effects look really well done especially for the time it was made (1984).  It keeps the viewer alert throughout the trailer with lots of cuts keeping their attention and making them want to watch the movie. It also uses continuity editing showing the audience small previews of how the story line unfolds except the conclusion.  The shots where the teenagers were getting murdered in their sleep looked awry and mysterious.  People wanted to know how this was happening which meant they had to watch the movie.  The special effects are pulled off well to, like the girl who was levitating on the ceiling.  It was hard to tell if there was anything suspending her at least at first glance which is what really matters.