Critical research - are women represented as sexual objects in Slasher films PT.2

Critical research; Arguement and conclusion Q.2

The topic I chose to research into was women in film. However to narrow down my argument as this is a very broad topic I decided to focus on the representation on women in the Slasher genre of film, More specifically; to find if women represented as sexual objects in Slasher films.
Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) is sometimes described as the mother of all slasher films. The three films most igniting the slasher film "craze" of the 1980s were John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th (1980) and Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), all of which created numerous sequels and imitators. By the end of the 1980s audiences were tiring of "unstoppable" masked killers and predictable plots. The slasher genre resurfaced into the mainstream in the mid 1990s in the form of Wes Craven's Scream (1996). The film was both a box office and commercial success which attracted a new generation to the genre.
Scream kicked off a new slasher cycle that still followed the basic conventions of the 1980s films, but managed to draw in a more demographically varied audience with increased production values, reduced gore, increased of humour, more character development, and better-known actors and actresses (often from television shows). This style continued for the duration of the 1990s with competing series such as I Know What You Did Last Summer.
From the mid 70’s women evolved in slasher films, all women victims and the last girl in slasher films are sexually desireable. All of the origional slasher films include women as a form of sex symbol, when leatherface in TCM2 discovers sex he no longer wished to kill, the shower scene in psycho when the women is naked and norman bates holds a knife which is a phallic symbol and in halloween Micheal Myers walks in on his sister naked and stabs her repeatedly, again a very phallic symbol. The killers are very rarely women, and when they are (such as the jasons mother) it is nothing to do with sex.
Donald Spoto suggests in his ‘The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures’ (1976) on hitchcock that women are women usually the victims in horror/slasher films and are the scenes of the womens death so prolonged and sexualised the violence againtst women in hitchcocks Psycho, and other films may be due to the directors resentment towards the leading ladies. From the book “stay out of the shower 1985 (william scholl) it states that women are the victims not because of there beauty or sexual inuendoes but it origionates from the late 50’s, where elderly women were the victims and this was not becsaue of there sexuality but because they were less capable of fighting off a crazed killer then a 6ft male football player so made it easier for the killer, and as the evolution of film continued directors used the beautiful women to play on the male viewers so they would attract more viewers. This would lead me to belive that women are meant to be seen as sexual symbols to male viewers due to the reliable source that the quote came from.

An article I found on Laura Mulvey from Media Magazine was a great help to me, it told me about Laura Mulvey, a critique on feminist film theory, she is also a professor of media at birbeck university of london. She says how women are film are purely objects for “the Gaze”. The Gaze is a term that laura mulvey suggests that women in film are represented as objects instead of people, images with visual and erotic impact. A famous quote from mulvey sums up her beliefs and views of women in film : “the paradox of phallocentrism in all of its manifest is that it depends on the image of the castrated women to give order and meaning to its world” simplified it means “ isnt it funny that a culture obsessed with masculinity needs images of women, and their absence of masculine chareceristics, to give it meaning?” this quote basically explains that laura mulvey feels that women are only in films for men to see women as sexual symbols and for them to have no other meaning or point in the film.
The Final girl is term brought in by Carol Clover in the book ‘Men, Women and chainsaws’ the final girl is usually the virgin type of girl who is ‘pure of heart’ and has an outstanding beauty. This girl will never smoke, do drugs or drink during the course of the movie, with exeptions when they do get peer pressured into doing so the spit out or choke on the substance and show a certain amount of displeasure. From previous research I have seen that the ‘final girl’s’ seem to have masculine names, such as Joey, Laurie and terry. During the final girl’s battle with the killer, C.Clover argues suggests that she becomes masculinised through "phallic appropriation" by having objects such as a knife or chainsaw, against the killer. oppositionally, C.Clover points out that the villain of slasher films is often a male whose masculinity is in crisis. Giving a masculine feel o the women and implying that even the final girl needs male charecteristics to survive and ultimately fend of the killer.
Both Kaplan and Kaja Silverman who are both film critiques argued that the gaze could be adopted by both male and female subjects: the male is not always the controlling subject and in turn the female is not always the passive ‘object’. So this would not necessarily say that women are seen as sexual items but men are just as much seen as sexualised objects as women are. Which says to me that it is not women that are seen as sexual symbols, becusae men are also seen like this that it is just a aprt of the conventions of a slasher.
My argument againsts Laura Mulvey would be the following; At the beginning of the slasher films there was Psycho and more recently was Scream. Origionally people who would of gone to see films would have been men going to the cinema to watch the horror film as they liked to be scared, this was before the conventions of the slasher film were ever coined so they could not of known there would be women seen to be sexual objects. However in the more present it has been shown that girls from the ages 18-25 go to watch them, I find it ironic that according to Mulvey, women are only in films to be seen as sexual objects when women also see these films and see the woemn get killed in a sexually attractive manner. And also the fact that gay males able to enjoy the films aswell, even though they have no attraction to the female form. Granted that men may go to see the movie to look at model actresses getting half naked, however I do not feel this is the only reason men go to watch the slasher genre. Many other film theorists have also objected to mulveys theory of ‘the gaze’

All in all I feel that women are to an extent used as a sexual presence to sell there films. Granted women in the slasher genre are usually beautiful and heve perfect figures and also get killed in sexual ways by a phallic object, however there are many other factors that the ‘Gaze’ does not take into account such as the final girl. So I would say that women have evolved into sexual objects to a certain extent in the slasher genre but not totally.