Female sexuality in horror film

The heart of cinematic horror lies a fear of female sexuality. The genre defines female sexuality as monstrous, disturbing and in the need of repression. (Jancovich, 1992)
Stephen Neale argues that horror film monsters predominantly defined as male, with women as primary victims. Women’s sexual renders them desirable but also life threatening to men which constitutes the real problem that horror cinema exists to explore.

Tenebrae by director Dario Argento
An American detective story visits Rome on a promotional tour and finds himself embroiled in a series of murders of young women.

Alfred Hitchcock has been branded the undisputed king of suspense thrillers. His uncanny ability to combine psychology, spirituality and intrigue into hair-raising, spine-chilling stories that tap into our deepest fears is astonishing.

To achieve real suspense you must give the audience information Alfred Hitchcock stated that "Information" is essential to create suspense; showing the audience what the characters don’t see.

For example the information given to the audience to cause tension in Alfred Hitchcocks
The Birds is shown when Melanie Daniels is waiting outside a school when hundreds of birds gather on the playground behind her.

The MacGuffin is a film terminology for the side effect of creating pure suspense. The MacGuffin in The Birds is 'what is causing the birds to attack?' The only reason for the MacGuffin is to serve a pivotal reason for the suspense to occur. (Schickel)

27/2/07
Peeping Tom Movie, 1960 Directed by Michael Powell

A story of a son that was tormented by his fathers obsession of fear and capturing fear using cameras and sound recordings for a scientific project. The son grew up to have the same fascination as his dad although he didn't just stop at taking photographs; he would kill his victims with the end of his camera tripod that was wielded into a spike.

When the victim's were filmed by the male protagonist the point of view was as if the audience were looking through the lens, one scene showed a cross that centred on the subject, as if about to target the victim and kill her, like a gun pointed at a victim.

Peeping Tom has been praised for its psychological complexity. On the surface, the film is about the Freudian relationship between the protagonist and his father and the protagonist and his victims. However, several critics argue that the film is as much about the voyeurism of the audience as they watch the protagonist's actions. For example, Roger Ebert, in his review of the film, states that "The movies make us into voyeurs. We sit in the dark, watching other people's lives. It is the bargain the cinema strikes with us, although most films are too well-behaved to mention it."

11/1/07
The Perverts Guide to Cinema:
Film critic Slavoj Zizek explores the psychological and symbolic meanings hidden within films created by Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Charlie Chaplin and other epic films such as the Matrix and Star Wars.

Zizek comments that Cinema explores the symbolic that bursts through realities and produces reassuring fantasies. "Cinema doesn’t give you what you desire; it tells you what to desire." Desire is a wound of reality. Our fantasies and dreams are projected on to the screen by characters in the story.

In Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho Marion is killed by Norman, the camera pans down to the plughole and then back to her eye; so in this scene she is returning the gaze to the viewer.

In the film Exorcist; the girl in this film becomes possessed by a voice. Sound gives the moving images depth and creates guilt within the viewer. Music can be used as a threat in a cinema environment. Music can be used to represent evil, but can also be redeemed and used with images of good and harmony.

"The paradox of belief in cinema and the story can be powerful and the viewer should take a step back and let themselves be emotionally effected by the moving images and sound."

Slovaj Zizek recreating the famous scene from Hitchcock's The Bird's (Still from The Perverts Guide to Cinema)

December 2006
Analysing and evaluating a piece of text from:
Cinema Cinema Contemporary Art and the Cinematic Experience Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven.
The piece of text that I have decided to analyse from this book is the introduction written by Jaap Guldemond and Marente Bloemheuuel. I have chosen to analyse and evaluate the introduction as it explains briefly the ideas, purpose and intention behind the Cinema Cinema exhibition and artworks created by 11 artists from Finland, France, Scotland, Denmark, England, Canada and the United States.
Cinema Cinema was an exhibition of contemporary artworks created by artists that incorporate the aspects of the cinema experience and are interested in combining various storytelling techniques. The artists work explores the tension between fiction and reality and studies the roles that cinema plays in the perception and reconstruction of both historical and current events.
The writers examine the various ways in which artists refer to famous films, make use of certain cinematic techniques and reflect on an already developed language.
The introduction describes a broad overview of work that has been created by 11 artists given the same brief: Cinema Cinema and the Cinema Experience. All artists have interpreted this open theme in very different styles and have incorporated a variety of famous films or cinematic techniques to express their own personal interest in cinema and the experience of cinema.
The exhibition is not concerned with the medium of film in the general sense, but focuses specifically on how artists make use of cinematic experience to formulate their ideas. The artists can distinguish two cinematic approaches: 1. Artists who make frequent use of existing material (films) by analysing the structure and dissecting the language in order to interpret this through artwork. 2. Artists that employ cinematographic techniques, such as casting, lighting, mise-en-scène, camera work, editing and narrative structures. They do not use these methods to make a film in the normal way, however, but instead apply them to other media such as photography and installations. They experiment with combinations of multiple projection screens, spatial objects, sound, slide shows, props and set-like performances.
I have found the critical writing on this exhibition within this book a useful source of inspiration because it explores the notions of the viewer as the spectator and the cinema experience as a personal possession to be taken away in the form of memories and nostalgia.
I have been influenced by many of the contemporary artists in the Cinema Cinema exhibition because of the way in which they analyse the cinema experience and the methodology and methods that are employed to create practical work that is both exciting and engaging to an audience. This text has enabled me to look more in depth at my reasoning for exploring popular horror films and how to communicate my own ideas and questions through moving image, therefore I feel I have validated and developed my practice and most importantly began to investigate further the successful role of engaging an audience.

One of the 11 artists that exhibited work in the Cinema Cinema and the Cinema Experience exhibition was video installation artist Douglas Gordon.Douglas Gordon 24 hour Psycho

December 2006
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
An essay by Laura Mulvey

Pleasure in looking/fascination with the human form

At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the undercover world of the surreptitious observation of unknowing and unwilling victim. What is seen on the screen is so manifestly shown. But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy. Moreover the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation. Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of regression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the performer.

In Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie the main female character performs for Mark Rutland’s gaze and masquerades as the perfect to-be-looked-at image. He, too, is on the side of the law until, drawn in by obsession with her guilt, her secret, he longs to see her in the act of committing a crime, make her confess and thus save her. So he, too, becomes complicit as he acts out the implications of his power. He controls money and words; he can have his cake and eat it.

8/12/06
My Little Eye, 2002
Directed by Marc Evans
Five young people apply to live in an isolated house together for six months whilst numerous cameras film their every move. Each has their reason for wanting to be there - fame, money, adventure. The prize - $1 million. The rules - if one person leaves, everyone loses. It becomes the ultimate morality test. When Danny's beloved grandfather dies, does his greed overcome his love? When the skittish Emma finds blood on her pillow why does she still stay behind? They all believe that there every movement is being recorded live and broadcast over the Internet; however they soon discover that this is all a hoax and that there is another reason why they have been brought here. One by one the housemates are killed by another house mate who has been hired by a rich organisation. The people that own the organisation receive pleasure from controlling the housemates by watching, tormenting and eventually killing them. There were some interesting moments in the film where the viewer and characters didn’t know what was happening and were unsure of the narrative. The use of cameras watching people in a house is well known to many of us that have watched Big Brother, a reality TV show. However, in this film the people were not being watched by millions on the Internet (as they thought), but by a handful of wealthy men that had given the contestants the promise of winning money. All the contestants performed to the cameras and ended up being brutally murdered in there own private snuff movie.

Interview by Ben Young, Sept 2002
For Jigsaw Lounge
http://www.jigsawlounge.co.uk/film/marcevans.html

A surprise critical and audience hit at this year’s Edinburgh Festival, My Little Eye is a claustrophobic Blair Witch twist on Big Brother, with five ‘white bread’ young Americans spending six months in a spooky mansion under the constant glare of hundreds of surveillance cameras beaming out a 24-hour webcast. Events take a sinister turn in the competition’s final week - are the organisers trying to scare the contestants into leaving the house and forfeiting their prize, or is there really a serial killer on the loose? The tension proved too much for one nervy Edinburgh patron, who had to be escorted from a late-night screening after suffering a panic attack during an especially fraught scene of bloodshed.

Relaxing in his hotel suite the next day, genial, fast-talking director Marc Evans takes this as a compliment: “I think it’s great in a way – I don’t really go out to upset people, but it’s quite nice to get some kind of effect,” admits the 41-year-old Welshman, who points out that his previous feature produced similar results. “I never had a screening of Resurrection Man where there wasn’t a walkout.” That movie’s controversial take on the Ulster’s murderous 70s ‘Shankhill Butchers’ gang provoked plenty of attention, but made little box-office impact. My Little Eye, however, is already being hyped as this year’s big horror hit.

BBC Films

Trauma is very uncomfortable to watch. Are you worried about the way audiences will receive it?
Well, that's the danger with this kind of film. You want to make it intriguing and odd and all that stuff, but you don't want to alienate the audience. I suppose, basically, you have to make sure that it doesn't put people off too much. But I think people will accept a weird film if they know it's going to be a weird film.
"This was a chance to do something very different, seeing the world through the eyes of someone who's falling apart mentally."- Marc Evans
Interviewed by Stella Papamichael
http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2004/08/11/marc_evans_trauma_interview.shtml

28/11/06
Between theory and post-theory by Slavoj Zizek: A journey through the work of Krzystof Kieslowski.
Zizek has had a huge influence upon film theory and academia generally. He is still best known for his use of the films of Hitchcock to explain Lacan. His basic method is to discuss scenes from films as illustrations of highly complex psychoanalytic or philosophical processes and thus to cast light not just on the way particular films achieve their effects but on the art of film itself.

A short film about killing, 1988
Directed by Krzystof Kieslowski
This film is about a young man that murders a Warsaw taxi driver in a particularly brutal way. There are no extenuating circumstances and the court condemns him to death.

Uncomfortable tension is created at the beginning of the film when the audience is shown a dead rat in dirty green water and a cat hanging from a rope. These images tell us that the film will contain brutal, gruesome scenes before we are shown them. This film plays on the fear and doubts that we all have, whether it is about our profession, the past or future prospects.
I felt guilty when I saw the brutal murder of a man I disliked earlier in the film because of his negative actions and miserable lifestyle. The film involves different people whose lives interlink and become a part of each other as the story develops. The story shows that any action (no matter how big or small) can affect the lives of more than one person. It is this cause and effect that can alter people's lives or perception of life that interests me.

The plot couldn't be simpler or its attack on capital punishment (and the act of killing in general) more direct - a senseless, violent, almost botched murder is followed by a cold, calculated, flawlessly performed execution (both killings shown in the most graphic detail imaginable), while the murderer's idealistic young defence lawyer ends up as an unwilling accessory to the judicial murder of his client.
Written by Michael Brooke {michael@everyman.demon.co.uk}http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095468/plotsummary

28/11/06
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1931
Directed by Rouben Mamoulian
Dr Jekyll faces horrible consequences when he lets his dark side run wild with a potion that changes him into the animalistic Mr. Hyde.
This film has inspired me to look further into the depths of good and evil and how one emotion can take over the other. I want to use myself as a vehicle to explore and express the two identities within myself (good and evil) to create practical work, which can then be explored by the viewer. By exploring films that expose two identities within one person or two people with conflicting personalities I can see how film directors have explored the idea of a split personality.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is both a technically and conceptually ambitious film. It attempts to find techniques to help communicate specific ideas and complicate easy moral positions. The use of subjective point of view shots is perhaps the most effective of these devices, but others compete for prominence elsewhere in the film.

4/11/06
Wolf Creek, 2005
Directed by Greg Mc Lean
This film was recommended to me by a professional cameraman, he was initially blown away by the way the film was shot and how some scenes resembled hauntingly beautiful photographs rather than a horror movie.
This film was a refreshing change to other traditional horror movies because while it still followed the conventional horror plot, it also had extra elements that were concurrent to a true- life response to danger. Obviously the situations are not an everyday factor in ones life, but the way in which the characters reacted to the villain and desperately struggled to get away using a car (instead of pointlessly hiding or running away) made the film even more convincing.

Greg McLean directed the horror movie and showed a sensible person (as a victim) trying to escape a mad man, it showed how the spectator would react (or how they think they would react), so instead of shouting at the on-screen victim and telling her or him not to be so stupid, the chase is far more compelling because the viewer really wants the victim to escape and continues to watch on the edge of their seat as each person tries desperately to escape and continuously fails throughout.

Interview: Wolf Creek Director Greg McLean
By Dave Dreher Nov 30, 2005, 20:04
From HouseofHorrors.com

Question: What were the true events that inspired you to write Wolf Creek?

Greg McLean: I wrote the original story five, six years ago and it was pretty much a standard horror thriller set in the Outback. Then over the years I heard about a couple of true cases that happened in Australia, one of them being the Ivan Milat case which is about a serial killer who would pick up hitchhikers on lonely highways and take them out into the woods and do horrific things to them. That case was influential in many ways because is had all of these elements that were so terrifying and scarier than anything I could possibly come up with.

Question: Explain to me your whole approach to on-camera violence, every director within the genre - from Argento to Craven - has one, and each is palpably divergent.

Greg McLean: My approach to the ugliness in Wolf Creek was the same way Mike Leigh would unflinchingly hold the camera on moments of incredibly intense human drama. I thought, what would it be like to do the same thing and hold the camera on someone who’s being tortured? What is it like to not look away? Part of the goal, for me anyway as a storyteller, is to not look away because what we do in our real life is not stare, it’s rude to look at a situation unfold. We tend to look away and go back into our own world. It’s more rare and more interesting to not look away from that darkness - keep the audience looking at it.

Question: That said, were there any scenes in Creek that were particularly difficult to get through?

Greg McLean: At one point while shooting that scene, because the shed was so small, the crew and me had to be outside for the wide shot. It was just Kestie and John in there. I was listening on the headset and watching on the screen the scene unfold and, at one point, I literally sat up from my seat and thought something had gone wrong. I thought John had gone crazy and Kestie really wants to stop. I was going to go running in there, it was really quite bizarre and at the end of the take I ran in there and they were both like, ‘What are you talking about? We’re doing what you asked us to do!’ It was so convincing and so believable I thought he was really hurting her. I reacted how the audience will react, which is: how do I make this stop?!

http://www.houseofhorrors.com/crypt/pages/interviews/printer_250.shtml

30/10/06
Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984
Directed by Wes Craven
I was surprised that this movie had the power to scare me in such a way that made my skin crawl. Freddie Kruger is a horrible, scar ridden child abuser that was captured by parents and burnt for his crimes. He now taunts the same parents children in their dreams, but it isn’t just a dream, the children wake up bleeding or with scars or even worse they don’t wake up at all.
I felt a different type of fear when watching this movie, it was the fear of Freddie capturing his victims and assaulting them rather than killing them. The scraping of his metal fingernails indicates that something bad is about to happen and the spectator feels both empathy and fear for the children involved. At the end of the film the spectator is comforted by the fact that Freddie has been banished and the children are now free to live their life and sleep in comfort. However, when the main victim enters a friend’s car she realises that Freddie is back and that he cannot be killed as she bangs on the car window and screams for help.

Written by Craven, a former English teacher, the film's premise is the question of where the line between dreams and reality lies. The villain, Freddy Krueger, thus exists in the "dream world" yet can kill in the "real world".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nightmare_on_Elm_Street

22/10/06
Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, 1986
Directed by Tobe Hooper
I had seen later version of Texas Chainsaw massacre and found it brutal and violent, with the victims running from the villian leather face, only to be captured and tortured and eaten. However, I found this version much more uncanny and sinister because of the eccentric family that live under a fairground and hunt for their food by capturing and torturing victims to feast on. Although this horror film was full of torturous scenes and a chain saw wielding maniac it was very humorous because the characters were so bizarre and disgusting that the spectator couldn’t compare them with a real life serial killer, even though this film and the other Texas Chainsaw Massacres are based on the true crimes of serial killer Ed Gein. This horror movie is far from the scariest movie I have seen, but compared with the other Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies it is the one that sticks in my mind.

The Austin Chronicle interview
online review: 11-02-98
http://www.filmvault.com/filmvault/austin/t/texaschainsawmass4.html

Austin Chronicle: So many people have their own favorite scenes in Chainsaw -- I'd like to know what you consider the best bits in there. What do you look back on and think, "Damn, I really nailed it with that one?"

Tobe Hooper: The meat hook scene and the build-up to it is certainly one of the scariest things in there. When the camera dollies under the swing as the girl (played by Teri McMinn) gets up and approaches the house...you see that her back is exposed all the way down -- that's one of my favorite scenes. I also like the dinner table scene a lot because it allowed me to work inside this bizarre, comedic sequence that had a ring of truth to it. And it was so damn weird and bizarre that it could go way out on the edge and turn into comedy. However, I think that scene, coming late in the film, it did take a long time for some people to see the comedy in it. It was outrageous, and certainly that's also one of my favorite scenes.

19/10/06
Analysis and evaluation from gender in horror books:
The Monstrous – Feminine, film, feminism, psychoanalysis by Barbara Creed

I have noticed that women are often portrayed as the passive and tearful victim rather than the heroine of a horror film. If a woman plays a monster she is referred to by her sexuality, and is said to seduce her victims with her femininity and sexual charms. A female monster is more likely to destroy and kill its victim out of revenge and spite and often malice and jealously. Whereas a male monster will kill due to a number of reasons: insanity, rape, jealously etc.
The male role within popular horror films stereotypically portrays the man as the villain; dominant and powerful whose job is to either murder the female victim or rescue her. I do not agree that male directors are trying to offload some anger or jealousy on to the female role by killing her off, as stated in some gender in horror books. I believe that this formulae for woman as victim and man as hero or monster works better because of the way in which society view male and female roles. It is much scarier to watch and put yourself in the shoes of a female victim, than a big strong man, who would stand a good chance at defending himself against the villain/monster. The suspense and tension added when a woman plays the victim is greater because her chance of survival is smaller. Therefore, in my opinion the greater amount of tension and suspense the better the horror movie.