The Cat's Meow: Women in the Horror Genre

The Cat’s Meow:
The Evolution of the Woman in the Horror Film

The female role is an ever changing archetype in the horror genre. The early days of the horror film portrayed women as merely in the victim’s role succumbing to the wills of the monster/villain. The female victim did not put up much of a struggle against the male villain. Females usually were usually portrayed with a certain sex appeal as the male lurked in the dark with a voyeuristic and sadistic mindset. Over the years, the female’s role in the horror film would evolve from the victim into the hero. This evolution would also be a result from the changes in attitude toward women over the years.
Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) would be an early film to depict the female as the victim. Dracula is the story of Count Dracula, played by Bela Lugosi, and his obsession over the virginal Mina Harker, played by Helen Chandler, in his attempt at transforming her into a vampire allowing having a companion for all eternity. The film would soon be followed by other horror
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films that portrayed the damsel in distress where the female is viewed as a more subservient character to the male villain.
A more modern film would also incorporate the female victim. In 2000, Mary Harron released, American Psycho, a film set in the world of the Wall Street Yuppie, misogyny, and the culture of excess of the eighties. The women portrayed in the film come across with a kind of naivety and are viewed as sexual objects. The main character in the film: Patrick Bateman, portrayed by Christian Bale, fantasizes about and murders women. The women in his eyes are just objects to him along with everything else in his life. The Bateman character is a good example of the misogynist. He displays a hostile sexist viewpoint of women which is, “dominance-oriented paternalism, derogatory beliefs about women, and heterosexual hostility.” (Lips 18) A perfect scene to reinforce this notion is when Bateman lures two women back to his apartment to engage in a ménage a trois. During the threesome, Bateman does not pay any attention to the women instead looks directly into a mirror beside the bed and flexes his muscles in a clear display of male dominance. He soon gets underneath the covers, not for any tenderness, but starts to kill the women. One woman escapes, briefly, reinforcing the woman victim running from the male killer. Bateman, like in so many horror films before, eventually catches up to her by dropping a running chainsaw on top of her. The scene teased the idea of the female getting away from the misogynist signaling that the era of the male dominated world would soon be coming to an end.

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The role of the woman victim into hero actually started to change back in the seventies and eighties with the advent of the “final girl” or the “last girl alive to confront the killer.” (Clover 260) These girls were usually the characters that did not partake in any of the sex, drugs, and are viewed as the virginal girl. The final girl is present in such iconic horror films as: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. She is usually the one that’s left to tell the tale. The final girl, in a social economic context, is the female rising up against the male furthering the feminist movement.
The situation that the final girl finds herself in toward the end of each respective film reinforces that, “many of the women’s and men’s habits of thought and behavior act to perpetuate the power difference between them.” (Lips 486) In Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the character Nancy, played by Heather Langenkamp, gets the idea of outsmarting Freddy Krueger, played by Robert Englund, by pulling him out from the nightmare world he created to the world that Nancy lives in. Nancy is the last of her friends to survive and she knows that she must face Freddy in his world and defeat him in hers much like the mindset of the modern woman: going into the male arena only to defeat him on her terms. Freddy’s behavior enhances his power over all of the kids, especially the girls, in the film. One of the earliest scenes in the film shows Tina, portrayed by Amanda Wyss, being slowly stalked by Freddy only to wake up before he can get to her. A good deal of time is spent in the beginning of the film focused on Tina demonstrating the power difference between the male killer’s dominance over his female victim.
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Clive Barker offered a different viewpoint for how, “women’s and men’s habits of thought and behavior act to perpetuate the power difference between them” (Lips 486) with 1987’s Hellraiser which told the story of a mysterious box that took anyone who opened it into a world of pain and suffering at the hands of the Pinhead, his Cenobites, and their sado-masochistic world. Barker’s viewpoint was that women could use their sexuality in an evil way and use the sexual behavior of men against them. The story centers on a not so typical family: Larry and Kirsty along with Kirsty’s step mom Julia. Julia, in the midst of moving into their new home, accidentally cuts herself on a nail. The blood drips down through the floorboards onto the skeletal remains of Frank, a former lover of Julia, and who was running away from Pinhead and the Cenobites. Julia finds out that Frank needs more blood to fully regenerate into his former self and the only way that it could happen is that Julia lures strange men to their death.
Hellraiser could be construed as an extension of the kind of sexual liberation of the sixties and seventies along with the sexual freedom that was happening in the eighties. The Cenobites lead by Pinhead also represent a sort of alternative lifestyle that was starting to pick up in the eighties in the form of sado-masochism (sado referring to the Marquis de Sade who used to inflict pain upon his women claiming his dominance of the submissive women in a pseudo-sexual release). The character Kirsty, played by Ashley Laurance, stumbles upon Julia played by Clare Higgins, and Frank’s, played by Dean Chapman, plan. Kirsty not only has to deal with Julia and Frank, but with the leader of the Cenobites: Pinhead, played by Doug Bradley, who is dressed in leather, equates pain and suffering with pleasure. Pinhead is the
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modern Marquis de Sade. Kirsty also becomes the hero in the film by stopping, not only Frank and Julia, but Pinhead and the Cenobites. She continues to be the hero in some of the subsequent sequels that are released in the next several years.
A controversial issue in the U.S. is whether or not females should be able to fight alongside males in the military. The arguments ranged from females not being strong enough to they would be a distraction sexually. Paul W. S. Anderson’s Resident Evil (2002) brought into light those questions. The film was not only a film about the evils of conglomerates, but also delved into females in high position in the military. The film centered on the Umbrella Corporation and Alice, played by Mia Jovovich, a paramilitary guard of the corporation. We are introduced to Alice after some sort of biological attack on the corporation ends with the killing of all the employees by the company’s defense mechanism. Alice is also caught up and is gassed by the defense mechanism. After waking up, Alice comes in contact with a rescue team which is sent to take restart the defense mechanism, but soon is battling the undead employees. Alice soon regains memory of who she really is and what her station within the company. We then learn that Alice was working with a mole within the company to bring into light the evils of the corporation.
Beside the military aspect of the film has to do with one of the other plot points which have to do with the character: Spence played by James Purefoy. Spence and Alice are the main guards of the Umbrella Corporation. They are also in a sham marriage to cover their true role in the corporation. This plot point conveys a level of change within society that saw a shift in
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the conventional wisdom within the construct of marriage and the notion that whether or not marriage is still the institution that it was once viewed as. It also comes into question whether or not that the modern woman views marriage in the same light as women forty or fifty years ago. Both characters suffer amnesia from being attacked by the corporation’s defense mechanism and as the film moved forward they started having flashbacks with one being the day of their marriage. The blurred image shows the “happy” couple, but the irony of the scene is that the audience knows that this is a sham marriage.
As the film goes on, Alice becomes aware of who she really is and becomes the hero. Alice turns back into the paramilitary soldier leading the survivors on an escape from the hell they are living. She is seen as an equal in the eyes of her military brethren when the leader of the rescue team asks her, “I need your report soldier.”
Another small aspect of Resident Evil is in the collective of some of the minor characters in the film that shows a pro-woman aspect. In the beginning of the film, an array of positions are filled by women. One of the executives, a leader of the science division, and a couple of the military personnel are played by women. They are viewed as strong independent women with the example of the female scientist. She is being asked out on a date by one of her male co-workers, but tells him she is busy rejecting the female stereotype in the horror film that would suggest she would accept the male’s advances.
The female hero would take an interesting turn showing ambivalence in whether or not a female could be considered a hero by also being the killer. Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth
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(2007) took on a new subject in the horror genre by portraying a virtuous teen as both heroine and killer. Teeth tells the story of Dawn O’Keefe, played by Jess Wexler, as a teen as the head of an abstinence movement at her high school and the surrounding area where she lives. She preaches purity. She is a role model to all the young girls who idolize her. She also meets a boy: Tobey played by Hale Appleman who falls in love with Dawn. She considers Tobey as her soul mate and views him as her prince coming in on his white horse. Her views soon change as they are at a secluded area when Tobey forces himself onto Dawn when Tobey is killed by an unlikely killer: Dawn’s vagina. Dawn turns out, to have a condition known as Vagina Dentata or vagina with teeth. Teeth is essentially a rape-survival film. All the victims in the film view Dawn as just a sexual object and are killed by because of their sexual pressure on Dawn. She learns that the only way she can control the “teeth” is if she feels that it’s the right time and believe that the boy truly loves her.
“Because stereotypic views of females and males are dynamic and depend on social context, sex stereotypes, and ideals of femininity and masculinity vary somewhat across social/cultural groups and historical periods.” (Lips 5) These stereotypes are on display here because Dawn is portrayed as a virtuous woman and the males are portrayed as sex hungry. There are a few scenes in the film that displays Dawn’s needing to know the truth about her “condition.” One scene involves her holding her sex-ed book underwater to remove a sticker covering a picture of the vagina starting to bring down the wall of her naivety when it comes to sex. She then starts to do some research into her vagina dentata and learns that she is not the
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first person that has the “condition.” She learns that her vaginal dentate is a cultural phenomena and that the stories about her “condition” have been passed down generation by generation by different cultures.
The scene with the gynecologist portrays a laissez faire take on rape. The dialogue toward the end of the scene reflect the mindset of the rapist. The gynecologist who is now using his hand to rape Dawn is calmly saying, “Relax” to Dawn. Rapists were known for telling their rape victims to relax. Again, Dawn uses her “condition” to attack the gynecologist.
Dawn’s vagina dentata could be viewed as the chaste women. The last scene in the film shows Dawn being picked up by a much older man. There are two different looks on both of their faces. The older man has a look of the typical dirty old man knowing what he wants to do with her, but Dawn looks back at him with a look signaling what she is going to do to him. This scene portrays the kind of new woman defeating the old male way of thinking.
The evolution of the female role in the horror films has grown over the last 70 years. Women aren’t viewed as the “damsel in distress” anymore and the female is now viewed as equal as the male in the hero role. The formula in the horror film portrays the dominance of the killer over the submissive female victim, but as women struggled and achieved equality this formula changed also. The horror film no longer could continue using women only as victims for the killer’s sadism. The “final girl” has changed over the years also. She is not just the “final girl” as the byproduct of a thinned out cast anymore. The “final girl” ends up being the strongest character of the horror film.