Women’s Roles In the Horror Genre

Those lines, spoken by Neve Campbell in Wes Craven's blockbuster Scream, can sum up a great deal about the horror genre as a whole. Campbell plays Sidney Prescott, an average high school girl who is stalked by a killer after they committed a series of murders involving her friends. She speaks the truth on the phone. Women in horror movies are tended to be victimized more than their gender warrants. They are constantly stalked, hacked-up, and tossed behind without a second glance, while their more-common-than-not antagonist male counterpart keeps coming back for more. Why do the majority of horror films depict most women as helpless targets for insane madmen?

Typically the ideal scene most people picture when thinking of a horror movie is a chase scene. Within that scene, there is some girl being chased through woods, or a house, or some dark alley by a male somehow costumed or covered so his identity cannot be discovered. She is screaming while he is

Hitchcock’s women are constantly “tortured and punished”, according to Molly Haskell’s essay “From Reverence to Rape”, while the men are more “implicated in the deed” (351). Meaning that the women are constantly being thrown into situations that men might be more suited to handle in general terms. The women are then put to consequences because of this.

Gale is the one part of a duo in the films; Dewey Riley, played by David Arquette, completes the other half. In the plots of most of these films we see an on-again-off-again relationship between the two. Gale is the more gutsy, daring, and tough of the two, while Dewey is more passive, clumsy, and goofy. However in the end it usually ends up Dewey saving the two. He is obviously the more feminine of the two, but as the male of the couple he also has to serve as the stereotypical protector of Gale- even though it seems as if Gale should be the one protecting Dewey due to his constant screw-ups and clumsiness.

A majority of the killers in the horror films are male. The position as the female as the antagonist also seems to be a rarity in the genre. Yet in the few cases that this has actually occurred, after the shock of finding out the killer’s gender was not male rubs off, it becomes harder for an audience to keep fearing her in the same way.

Some topics in this essay:
Michael Myers, Sidney Prescott, Linda Blair, Ellen Ripley, Gale- Gale, Origins Women, Gale Weathers, Quint Hooper, Narrative Cinema”, Janet Leigh, horror films, female character, horror movies, women constantly, horror genre, michael myers, easier believe, male character, fifteen minutes, neve campbell,