horror genre representation essay

Laure Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist. Her theory was called male gaze. The concept of male gaze is one that deals with how an audience views the people presented on their screens. For feminists it can be thought of in three ways-
·         how men look at women
·         how women look at themselves
·         how women look at other women

Laura Mulvey coined the term Male Gaze in 1975. She believes that in film audiences have to view characters from the prospective of a heterosexual male. The features of the male gaze include, the camera and how it lingers on the curves of the female body, and events which occur to women are presented largely in the context of a mans reaction.  It also relegates women to the status of objects. The female viewer must experience the narrative secondarily, by identification with the male.
A perfect example for this theory is House of wax and the death of Paris Hiltons character. In this scene we see Paris Hiltons character and her boyfriend in a sexual situation as she is in her under ware, we see her boyfriend get killed for about 5 seconds where as we get to see Paris Hilton run around in her under ware for about 5 minutes and then get to see her brutal death.

Carol Clover is an American professor of film studies. Her theory was called the final girl theory. The final girl is a figure of speech in thriller and horror films, particularly slasher films that specifically refers to the last woman or girl alive to confront the killer, ostensibly the one left to tell the story. The final girl has been observed in dozens of films.  Carol J. Clover in her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Clover suggests that in these films, the viewer begins by sharing the perspective of the killer, but experiences a shift in identification to the final girl partway through the film. The final girl theory is a common plot line in many horror films, particularly prior to the 1990s. In which a series of victims is killed one by one by a killer amid increasing terror, culminating in a climax in which the last surviving member of the group, a girl or woman, either vanquishes the killer or gets away. According to Clover, the final girl in many of these works shares common characteristics: she is typically sexually unavailable or virginal, avoiding the vices of the victims, sex, illegal drug use, alcohol. She sometimes has a unisex name (e.g., Teddy, Billie, Georgie, Sidney). Occasionally the final girl will have a shared history with the killer. The final girl is the "investigating consciousness" of the film, moving the narrative forward and as such, she exhibits intelligence, curiosity, and vigilance.

A perfect example for this theory is Nightmare on Elm Street.  The main hero in this film was a girl called Nancy who was on Freddy’s to kill list as she attended this preschool. She was the final girl of this movie as she figured out how to kill him and that it was something to with sleep. She also figured out that it was something to do with their past and tried to worn her fellow peers.

Claude Levi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist. Levi-Strauss looked at the narrative structure of media texts. An example would be good and evil- we understand the concept of good as being opposite of evil. Levi-Strauss was not interested in looking at the order in which events were arranged in the plot. He looked instead for deeper arrangements of themes, for example if we look at science fiction films we can identify a series of binary oppositions which are created by the narrative...

·         earth/ space
·         good/ evil
·         humans/ aliens
·         past/ present
·         normal/ strange
·         known/ unknown

A perfect example for this theory is Alien, 1979. Which follow the conventions of the science fiction genre which is shown above.

Propp & Todorov
·         Propp- is a Russian critic who examined 100s of examples of folk tales to see if they shared any narrative structures. He then wrote a book on his discoveries- “Morphology of the folk tale” this was first published in 1928. When looking at 100s of folk tales he identified 8 different characters and 31 different narrative functions.
1.       The villain
2.       The hero
3.       The donor- who provides an object with a magic property
4.       The helper who aids the hero
5.       The princess/ damsel in distress- reward for hero and object for villain’s schemes.
6.       Her father- who rewards the hero
7.       The dispatcher- who sends the hero on his way
8.       The false hero
The character roles and the functions identified by Propp can be applied to all kinds of narrative.

 ·         Todorov – is Bulgarian structuralist linguist and published a lot of influential work on narrative from the 1960’s onwards. Todorov suggests that stories begin with an equilibrium or status quo where any potential opposing forces are in balance. This is disrupted by some event, setting in chain a series of events. Problems are solved so that order can be restored to the world of the fiction. An equilibrium is set up which is then disrupted, causing disequilibrium, which is resolved into a new equilibrium by the end of the tale.