How Women are represented in Horror

Summary of how women are represented in horror films

Almost every single horror movie takes a stereotypical look on the women in their film, practically the sub-genre of horror: The Slasher. Typically, the men are portrayed as the killers and victimized women in all sorts of ways. Women in horror movies are constantly in need of being saved and barely if not rarely escape with their lives.

Many film directors talk about stereotypic women, Eli Roth for example talks about how horror portrays women as “marginal, pathetic figures” and not explored fully. Paranoia is often a characteristic inherited in women in horror films, questioning authority and always looking behind their shoulders. This “trait” sometimes allows the female to stay alive and survive but sometimes her paranoia can get her killed.

The audience of these films, mainly male audiences, want entertainment and pleasure from horror films; they want to see half-naked women running around dark, haunted houses being chased by a mad man with a chainsaw. Always in the end the murderer catches her and brutally has his way with her. This “classic” view of women in films keeps the male audience attention and allows suspense. They don’t really want to see females with short hair and “masculine” features since males are screen dominating.

Women in horror movies have to save themselves or be killed, because there shown to be as vulnerable, sexually defiant and not very intelligent. Driven mostly by male controlled environment society, since females in horror films are often described as “classic female victims, hopelessly naïve and passive”.

In short, representation of women in the 70s Slasher horror movies was stereotypical and shown as sexually active and silly, the same goes to the teen age group in those movies, who seem inly get killed by psychopathic killers and madmen. Now in 2000, this balance of stereotypical and “final girls” in horror films is somewhat tipping in favour of helpless girls because today’s male audiences still want the classic formula and to be entertainment by a girl with no clothes on.