Finals Week

By Amanda Reyes

In this newfound grey area of defined roles, or lack thereof, The Innocents delves into an exploration on dualism, showcasing both possible endings in one, because the reality of the ghosts and Miss Giddens’ apparent insanity do not have to be mutually exclusive.

The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror By Donato Totaro

One of the more important, if not groundbreaking, accounts/recuperations of the horror film from a feminist perspective is the 1993 Carol Clover's "Men, Women, and Chainsaws". One of the book's major points concerns the structural positioning of what she calls the Final Girl in relation to spectatorship. While most theorists label the horror film as a male-driven/male-centered genre, Clover points out that in most horror films, especially the slasher film, the audience, male and female, is structurally 'forced' to identify with the resourceful young female (the Final Girl) who survives the serial attacker and usually ends the threat (until the sequel anyway.) So while the narratively dominant killer's subjective point of view may be male within the narrative,the male viewer is still rooting for the Final Girl to overcome the killer. We can see this operating archetypically in Halloween (Jamie Lee Curtis, 1978), Friday the 13th (Betsy Palmer, 1980), Eyes of a Stranger (Jennifer Jason Leigh, 1981), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (Heather Langenkamp, 1984)...

Lips of Blood: Female sexuality and desire in the modern vampire film By Brigid Cherry

The vampire in film has always been associated with elements of sexuality and morality. This association between vampirism and sexuality is related to the violation of taboos, but more importantly allows the identification of the other which is then repressed. Erotic and sexual characteristics are equated with vampirism, which for the female character - who is herself other and therefore subject to repression - means that to embrace the vampire is to embrace sexuality. For that, a forbidden act for the woman who is constrained by patriarchy to suppress her sexuality, she is punished - she is or becomes the vampire and dies, frequently staked through the heart. She is contrasted strongly and starkly with the heroine, the victim who remains coded as virginal, who is therefore pure and can be returned to normality at the climax of the film...

Bisexual Horror: Gaze and Desire in David DeCoteau’s The Sisterhood by Heidi Martinuzzi

Traditionally, horror films have been made for a straight, white, male audience. Most film studios release their horror movies with young males, aged 14-22, in mind and tend to create storylines to accommodate their perceived tastes; gratuitous amounts of blood and sexualized female nudity. While mainstream cinema has included gay storylines and filmmakers in increasing numbers in recent years, horror movies have invariably catered to a static audience and excluded gay characters (except as villains and comic relief.) This reluctance to sell and make queer horror movies has relegated those films to low-budget releasing and production budgets through select studios like Here!...