Gender steroetypes

Introduction
Movies have been around for many decades. There are various types of genres including action, drama, romance, and comedy. The focus of this paper will be on films in the horror genre. Typically, men are portrayed as the killers and victimize women in all sorts of ways. Women are put into a specific mold within the horror flicks and seen in that light constantly. An example of such a character would be Laurie from the Halloween franchise. She is constantly in need of being saved and barely escapes the hands of Michael Myers during each sequel. This study will deal with the ways that the film industry portrays females in horror movies.

At this point in time, very little research exists pertaining to stereotyping in movies, with respect to the horror genre. Roth (2005) talks about how films portray women as “marinal, pathetic figures” as they aged (p. 189). Helford (2006) writes that “mainstream filmgoers witnessed anti-feminist backlash and/or a more politically/psychoanalytically ambiguous contemplation of the figure of woman” in 1990’s films (p. 145). These are just two examples of how women are stereotyped and put into gender roles. Both Helford (2006) and Roth (2005) concentrated on the genre of drama, rather than horror as I have proposed. The way that females are being portrayed in horror movies is rarely explored. Many researchers take a broad look at the film genres and hardly touch the surface of the underlying reality. Females are stereotyped in a particular way across many genres and it needs to be explored, especially within the genre of horror.
Another reason that this study would be beneficial is that it could help the public understand why women are stereotyped in films. A good majority of the horror movies that have been made have half naked women running around dark houses hoping to not be killed. The murderer, for the most part, always catches her and brutally murders the victim who he lusts for. Film goers want to see the female character running for her life and half naked. It keeps the attention of the audience and allows for suspense. Many viewers know how the chase will end, but like the cat and mouse roles that the victim and the killer fall into. Also, victims are very often engaging in sexual activities either during or before the slicing takes place. A study conducted by Sapolsky, Molitor, and Luque (2003) concludes that “exposure to scenes of explicit violence juxtaposed with sexual images is believe to blunt males’ emotion reactions to film violence and lead males to be less disturbed by scenes of extreme violence and degradation directed at women” (p. 28). Men tend to watch horror films in order to see women objectified and lacking intelligence in order to stay alive. The constant nudity and/or peek-a-boo of privates also entices males to buy a ticket or rent the movie. Movie viewers are often left with the images of females, after the movie has ended, that tends to be far from truth. The female characters are portrayed as stereotypical needy women. These women cannot save their own lives, rather, they need to be saved by others or die. Filmgoers need to understand that this negative perception is not true in reality and horror movies are mere entertainment only.

Literature Review
Scholars have looked at slasher films, a sub-genre of horror, to make conclusions about theories that they chosen to explore. Horror movie franchises portray females as paranoid, sexually defiant, having “abject terror personified,” and very often victimized (Trencansky 2001). I want to look at how the horror genre of the film industry sheds light on the female persona. There have been numerous studies conducted on the topic of females in horror movies, with the concentration on the term “Final Girls,” which was coined by Carol Clover in her book, “Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film” (Markovitz 2000). Females are shown as vulnerable, highly sexualized, and not intelligent. When, on the rare occasion, there are females playing the role of a murderer, it is because a male drove them to that point. Mainly, this paper will analyze the negative and positive roles (as rare as they are) that females occupy within the genre of horror movies.
There is a commonplace generalization about women and how they are portrayed in movies within various genres. Women are objectified and controlled by the male driven society. Elyce Rae Helford (2006) points out that women are an “erotic spectacle and she [women as a group] holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire” (p. 148). The male gaze keeps the females as secondary to men. The men hold the power in many situations and women are often forced to do as they are told or risk losing their lives. These women are objects to the males and when they become empowered to act out, in the film The Stepford Wives for example, men take back power by destroying them (p. 147). Mary Blewett (1974) reveals that the “classic female victim is hopelessly naïve and passive” and in need of saving by a male. Even the Final Girls need to be saved towards the end of movie, like in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, when the passerby picks up the female who escapes the mass murderer.
Paranoia is a characteristic of the women in horror. She is the one who is looking behind her back while walking down a darkened alley, questioning authority, and labeled an outcast. Most, if not all, of the heroines that are present in sequels survive because of questioning authority. Paranoia entails constantly being cautious of surroundings, checking behind, and never trusting anyone. This trait can be used as a survival skill and enables her to escape death, for some time at least (Markovitz 2000). Being afraid is the key to living. Sarah Trencansky (2001) writes that the girl needs to “recognize the horror surrounding her and [eventually] fights back against her attacker” (p. 2). When the female distances herself from the villain, due to the paranoia, she can save her own life in the end, or until the sequel (Gill 2002). Valerie Wee (2006) agrees with the idea that survival is reliant upon the watchfulness of the female, to the point of becoming paranoid (p. 58).
Females are portrayed in a negative way in many horror movies. Another characteristic of women in horror is that her sexual indulgences and the nature of being a female can be harmful, or deadly. A girl who prefers sex to other obligations can be a means to her demise, without her being aware of the future aggression of the attacker (Gill 2002). Blewett (1974) touches on the point that if Hollywood portrays a sexually aggressive woman without her being punished, it would be dangerous (p. 14). Blewett’s (1974) study shows that society’s stereotypes of women are present in movies since the beginning of the film industry. Aviva Briefel (2005) looks at the female monsters in horror movies. Carrie is a good example used in the article because after pleasing herself sexually, she begins to menstruate. This is a sign of her sexuality coming of age and sexual desires are likely to follow. The horror genre “presents female sexuality as monstrous” (Briefel 2005). Natural female desires displayed by females can lead to the female character’s downfall. Helford (2006) asserts that women are emotional and taught to be private, which is quite the opposite of how males are shown (p. 150). A masculine view of sexual intimacy and exploration for a woman tends to lead towards her death in horror (Connelly 2007). Women who are engaged in sexual acts or are partially nude are susceptible to violence (Weaver III 1991; Gill 2002).
Another characteristic of females in the horror genre of films is terror. The terror that the female feels after discovering the villain and the fact that she is ultimately going to be a victim is exposed in horror movies. Kelly Connelly’s (2007) study found that in order to defeat the monster, the female heroine must take on the concept of violence through the male perspective and become masculine (p. 20). The women must actively seek out the killer, although she is terrified by him (Markovitz 2000). Sarah Trencansky (2001) argues that the “Final Girl survives by her “ability to adapt to the new: to negotiate change” (p. 3). The female can only live if she recognizes her terror and accepts it, while overcoming fear and possible victimization. The gender identity of the female characters is typecast as needing to accept the way things are and working around the circumstances. The females do not have a choice and must act out in order to save their life.

Method
This study explores the various ways that women are portrayed in specific female stereotypical roles in horror movies. There have been previous studies conducted that looked at sex and violence in horror movies, with emphasis on how males and females are shown during these scenes. Although these studies do show that there is some difference in how male and female characters are portrayed, they do not get into detail about females as a single group alone. A quantitative method, such as a content analysis approach to gathering data for this study is appropriate because there isn’t a vast amount of studies that have been conducted on the portrayal of females in horror movies without comparing it to males. Others who have explored a similar topic to this study have chosen to look at a compilation of films in the horror genre.
Following the analysis of 1990s slasher films by Sapolsky, Molitor, and Luque (2003), this study selects fifteen movies, rather than the ten selected in the previously mentioned study, in the horror genre and critically views them, with the help of coders. Three coders were given a reliability test in the Sapolsky, Molitor, and Luque (2003) study which helped to determine the homogeneity of the data once the ten films were viewed. The results of the study concluded that “females were shown in fear significantly longer than were males” (Sapolsky, Molitor, and Luque 2003).
Another content analysis method was conducted to determine if slasher films are sexually violent. Weaver III (1991) selected ten slasher films from “Variety’s annual compilation of movies” and they “were identified by a panel of 12 judges.” This study, unlike Weaver III’s, takes into consideration sequels of films, which he chooses to exclude. The results of Weaver III’s (1991) study proved that “all depictions of full nudity [in the selected horror movies] presented female characters exclusively” and that “there was no significant difference in the number of male and female characters suffering violent victimization that the circumstances of these deaths did not differ as a function of gender.”
A final study that was looked at was conducted by Linz and Donnerstein (1994) and it looked at “30 slasher films released in 1980, 1985, and 1989.” The findings indicated that “slasher films present violence in a sexual context that uniquely targets women” (Linz and Donnerstein 1994). Of all the previously mentioned studies, none of them primarily focus on the portrayal of the female character herself in horror movies. The researchers do not go into details about how the character is constructed, how she associates with others, and how her survival or death is determined. This study focuses on those ideas and looks into the female in horror films.