Sex and Sexuality in Teen Horror Movies

At the end of the 1970’s the open attitude towards sexuality ended and premarital sex was once again frowned upon. The horror movie genre picked up on this and sent teens a message: abandon sexual promiscuity or face punishment. Two typical horror movie characters were born. First, there is the virginal female. Her clothes are more conservative than the other females, she often has a boyish name, she makes no sexual advances and she resists the advances of the male characters. She is the heroine and will more than likely end u

In Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, made in 1984 and distributed by New Line Cinema, Tina and her boyfriend Rod are having sex in her parent’s bedroom. Downstairs, Glen expresses a wish that he and his girlfriend Nancy were doing the same, but Nancy tells him she’s not ready and wants to wait. Naturally, Nancy is the only survivor. She defeats the killer and saves the day for the rest of the town. These morally opposing characters are a constant trend throughout almost any horror movie made in the 1980’s.

1996’s Scream directed by Wes Craven and distributed by Miramax Film was one of the first to take the typical horror movie’s rule book and throw it out of the window. True, it’s heroine, Sydney, is a virgin who maintains the ‘underwear rule’ with her boyfriend, but she doesn’t stay that way for long. Halfway through the movie, she decides that she loves her boyfriend enough to sleep with him and yet she is still living at the end of the movie. However, Scream did not depart entirely from the punishing message of 80’s horror movies. Tatum, a sexually promiscuous and aggressive teen, is brutally murdered. The adapted message that the movie is trying to get across is that sex is okay as long as you really love your partner.

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