Sorority Row is a horror film which conforms to the female stereotype. It follows the story of 4, 18 year old, attractive sexually active females who accidentally kill their equally attractive female friend. When their friend is killed, she is wearing white lingerie – white connoting innocence and purity, a stereotypical view of women in horror films. The girls are killed off one by one, unless they are saved by someone else. Then they’re killed anyway. They usually run around in skimpy clothes, screaming “help me”. Portraying the typical sexual, needy stereotype of a woman.
The Human Centipede is a graphic horror which contains two stereotypical female characters. The two girls get a flat tyre in the woods, which they cannot fix themselves, and they end up running around lost. It starts to rain, and the girls are in clothing suitable for a night out – fairly skimpy. So the girls are running around in the rain in short skirts, and thy end up at a man’s house, begging for help. They are shown as vulnerable as they drink some water which is drugged, and they do not wonder if the man is not all he seems, at first. The man tries to turn the girls into two parts of a three person human centipede, with another man. They try to survive, but the girls do this by attempting to run away and the man tries to fight back. This shows the girls as needy and unable to save themselves.
Piranha 3D is another horror film which conforms to the stereotype of females within the genre. The plot bases around a group of teenagers having fun in the lake in the summer. The film contains many girls in skimpy bikinis, getting drunk and acting stupid. Examples of this are when the sheriff tells them to get out of the water due to the danger, and the girls stay in there anyway. At one point a boy is filming a girl cliff diving naked, and she doesn’t seem to mind. The girls nearly always need to be saved by the boys when the piranhas attack, showing again the vulnerable stereotype of women in horror films.
The Unborn is a horror film which doesn’t particularly conform to the vulnerable female stereotype. The lead character is a female who goes in search of her past in a bid to stop the evil presence of her unborn twin making her life a living hell. She takes control of the situation, and does most of the research herself, even when her female friends tell her it’s “weird” and try to warn her away from it. When the time comes to call upon the spirit of her still born sibling, she takes it upon herself to be the person who takes the full force of the paranormal spirit. This shows she is strong willed and not afraid to take on fearful challenges. Also, the victim of the film is her boyfriend, who gets killed whilst she survives. In a sense, the stereotypes have been reversed.
The ring is a horror film which contains a female lead, and a female ‘monster’. Journalist Rachel Kellar investigates a video tape that has killed her niece, and makes it her responsibility to solve the mystery that surrounds it, thus putting herself at danger. She takes on the action of the film solely on her own, and at one point she swims into a deep well to save someone else, putting herself at risk. This also shows us she loses some of her femininity, as she is not concerned with material things such as how she looks. The ‘monster’ of the film is a young girl, which shows that children are not represented as innocent in this film. Also, the person who drove the young girl to destruction was her stepmother, who pushed her into a well to kill her. This shows us that this film does not conform to the female sterotype that the horror genre often contains.
No comments:
Post a Comment