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Laura Mulvey

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Finals Week: 'The Final Girl: A few thoughts on Feminism and Horror'

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)...

12/21/09

Finals Week: 'Bisexual Horror: Gaze and Desire in David DeCoteau’s The Sisterhood'

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!...

12/15/09

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