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The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror

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The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror

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https://offscreen.com/view/feminism_and_horror

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One of the more important, if not groundbreaking, accounts/recuperations of the horror film from a feminist perspective is Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chainsaw. One of the book's major points concerns the structural positioning of what she calls the Final Girl in relation to spectatorship. While most theorists label the horror film as a male-driven/male-centered genre, Clover points out that in most horror films, especially the slasher film, the audience, male and female, is structurally 'forced' to identify with the resourceful young female (the Final Girl) who survives the serial attacker and usually ends the threat (until the sequel anyway). So while the narratively dominant killer's subjective point of view may be male within the narrative, the male viewer is still rooting for the Final Girl to overcome the killer. We can see this operating archetypically in Halloween (Jamie Lee Curtis, 1978), Friday the 13th (Betsy Palmer, 1980), Eyes of a Stranger (Jennifer Jason Leigh, 1981), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (Heather Langenkamp, 1984).

One of the book's central strengths is the direct simplicity of its central premise: taking the classic Laura Mulvey male-centered identification process of sadistic-voyeur and flipping it around to a masochistic-voyeur (by having the identification process shift to the usually female victim/Final Girl). Vis-à-vis the Mulvian argument against male-driven cinematic pleasure, Clover does for the horror film what Gaylyn Studlar did for the Sternberg-Dietrich films: swapping the Post-Oedipal, male voyeuristic-sadistic impulse for a more feminine, Pre-Oedipal masochistic impulse. In psychoanalytical terms, sadism is post-Oedipal, meaning that it takes shape when identification shifts from the mother to the father. Masochism, deriving pleasure from one's own pain or submission, is pre-Oedipal and takes place when the mother is all powerful and is the source of the child's identification (from the womb to the breast). In the pre-Oedipal stage the child takes pleasure in this pure submission to the mother. (Fellini once said a similar thing about why his films are populated with large, motherly women and 'motherly' prostitutes: because of middle aged men not wanting to let go of that pleasure of unadorned submission.) In relating this to the Sternberg/Dietrich films, the implication is that one can also identify with the submissive male or female character one finds in each of the films. When turning this over to the horror film, as in the traditional slasher film, the spectator assumes a submissive position whenever they identify with the female victim, and more importantly, the female heroine (the Final Girl).

Final Girls: Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween and Jason Jennifer Leigh in Eyes of a Stranger

Hence weakness or victimization, which may be seen as a form of disempowerment, becomes a pleasurable submission to the mothering body. In Barbara Creed's feminist psychoanalytical account of the horror film, this mothering body takes the form of the "The Monstrous Feminine": the female as castrated male becomes the female as castrator, period. Although psychoanalysis never really gives full justice to the social, political and artistic subtleties of any film, it does seem best served by the horror film. Even staunch anti-psychoanalysis theorist Noel Carroll admits to its value where horror is concerned. What is also commendable about Clover's approach is that she has at least seen a lot of horror films and supports her arguments with textual analysis. But there are other precedents to her main argument, most clearly Linda Williams' "When the Woman Looks" (which Clover acknowledges but discounts as still being dependent on the sadistic-voyeuristic model).

The Linda Williams essay serves as a bridge from Laura Mulvey to Clover by positioning the woman not only or just a victim, but as a symbiotic double for the monster (monster/woman as 'different,' 'freak,' object-to-be-looked-at, victimized, etc.). Which harks back to the early horror film classics where the monsters were sympathetic figures (wolfman, Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, King Kong, the Mummy, etc), unlike the demonized and psychologically disturbed human monsters of the modern era. The "otherness" of so many classic horror movie monsters could be seen as metaphoric explorations of different forms of 'difference.' For example, racial ( King Kong (1933, Merian Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack), sexual (homosexuality and lesbianism in Nosferatu (F.W Murnau, 1922), Dracula's Daughter) (Lambert Hillyer, 1936), ethnic-cultural ( The Mummy) (Karl Freund, 1932), and parental ( Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), The Bride of Frankenstein) (James Whale, 1935). Another essay that makes a similar argument is the French piece by Gérard Lenne called "Monster and Victim: Women in the Horror Film" (listed in Clover's bibliography). Lenne sees woman as a dual being, beginning with the Maria doubles from Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) and following through on many European models as well (lacking from the Clover book, which concentrates exclusively on American films).

Ellen Confronts Nosferatu: Sacrificial Passion or Taboo Sexual Desire?

For example, the wonderful female doppelganger of Barbara Steele as the benign countess (dressed in black) and her evil look-alike descendent witch in Mario Bava's amazing La Maschera del demonio/ Mask of Satan (AKA Black Sunday, 1960). Or the angelic looking but murderous blond haired ghost girl in Bava's Operazione paura/ Kill, Baby, Kill, 1966, who literally represents the town's (returning) repressed dark secret (which influenced the angelic-demonic girl in Fellini's Toby Dammit, 1969).

The Bavaesque Angelic Demon From Toby Dammit

Another key touchstone essay for Clover is the famous 1981 Roger Ebert diatribe against the subjective point-of-view killing mechanism of the slasher film which, he argued, placed viewers in the position of 'seeing as' and 'identifying with' the maniacal killers. Ebert then turns this into an anti-feminist backlash movement (although Ebert did give Halloween its due respect). But even Hitchcock disproved this simplistic association of subjective point of view shooting with audience identification by believing in point-of-view cutting as a stronger way of achieving audience identification with a character (i.e. cutting from a shot of the character, to a shot of what they are seeing, and back again). Clover turns the Ebert argument on its head by making horror films much more victim-identified (masochistic rather than sadistic).

In any case, Clover and other feminists deprive themselves of great potential material with their near exclusive dependence on American horror. American horror, like its popular culture in general, is generally prudish and too deeply entrenched in a Puritan past to really engage in sexuality, which is so important to the horror film. For example, Isabel Cristina Pinedo's fine book Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (1997) cites over 120 films in her book, but only 3 are non-English language films! As a professor of "Media and Cultural Studies,' this points to a general inherent drawback with any "Cultural Studies" approach: the culture in question is usually the one the writer is born into, in this case of course American. But it is in the European horror film where sex and violence really cook. Typified by the title of the excellent book by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs: Immoral Tales: European Sex and Horror Movies 1956-1984 (1994). In the American horror film women are murdered for their sexuality and desire, from Cat People (1942), to The Birds (1963), and onward, and expressed archetypically in Psycho (1960), where Marion Crane arouses Norman's repressed (homo/Oedipal) sexuality and is subsequently murdered by his jealous 'mother'. An exception is the Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg with Rabid (1975), where ex-porn star Marilyn Chambers stars as a victim of science gone wrong who sprouts a nasty, phallic-like lesion that makes her crave blood. And Shivers (1974), featuring Bava/Italian horror icon Barbara Steele as the lesbian seductress/vamp, which champions pure, unadulterated sex-drive in the form of a parasite.

Barbara Steele: The Archetypical Euro Scream Queen

Much auto-feminist criticism points to the fact that there is no pleasurable room for female spectatorship, or more directly, does not address how the horror film may speak to female empowerment. Most feminist recuperations of the horror genre entail shifting the emphasis from, as noted above, a male/Oedipal sadistic position to a female/Pre-Oedipal masochistic position. But when this happens, as in Barbara Creed's the monstrous-feminine, the 'vagina-dentata,' is still only an externalized reflection of male anxiety and fear of the female ( Alien (R. Scott, 1979), The Brood (D. Cronenberg, 1979), The Exorcist (W. Friedkin, 1973), Carrie (B. De Palma, 1976), and I Spit on Your Grave) (Meir Zarchi, 1979). And I do not know of too many women who would take great pleasure in such an identification, as either a masochist or castrator. The deeper problem resides in the built-in patriarchy of depending on a Freudian psychoanalytical model, where an active or powerful woman is nothing but a 'masculinized' woman (or a closet lesbian). Isabel Cristina Pinedo acknowledges this problem and writes, "If a woman can not be aggressive and still be a woman, then female agency is a pipe dream. But if the surviving female can be aggressive and be really a woman, then she subverts this binary notion of gender that buttresses male dominance." [1] This is exactly what occurs in the Italian sex-horror film Femina Ridens ( Frightened Woman, 1969), by director Piero Schivazappa, who plays his cards up front by displaying a huge vagina dentata in his set design (more than a decade before all these feminist accounts), and has a twisted, millionaire playboy character literally walk in and out of it!

Vagina Dentata, literally!

In this film the male character, Dotto (Philipe Roy), invites a young female employee, Mary (Dagmar Lassander), to his modish house for a weekend of S&M. Dotto is James Bond and Austin Powers rolled into one, but the tables slowly turn to the point where Mary becomes the willing master (similar to the dynamic power shift in Losey's The Servant, 1963). In fact, by the end of the film we discover that Mary was never a victim, but had actually planned the event. In this latter case, the female spectator is given ample space within the narrative to identify with the woman's sexual (and not necessarily violent) empowerment. [2]

In the American horror film, women are usually murdered because of their having had sex, or desiring sex. In the Euro horror film women murder because of their carnality! A classic in this regard is the Spanish shocker Vampyres (1974, José Laranz), a Carmilla-inspired lesbian vampire story about two female vampires who detour men into their castle-lair, drug them, and then keep them as imprisoned blood supplies. In Vampyres vampiric carnality is the erotic. Another film which wears its female carnality on its sleeve is the sleeper French horror film Baby Blood (1990, Alain Robak). In this darkly humorous film a circus-bound tentacle incubating in a lion escapes into the womb of a pregnant woman (played by Emmanuelle Escourrou). The alien womb turns the woman into a ravenous, voracious male killer (reminiscent of the Marilyn Chambers character in Rabid). In the infamous German underground film Nekromantik 2 (Jörg Buttgereit, 1988), female sexual desire manifests itself in the perverse arena of necrophilia. It may not always be pretty, but female sexuality is often celebrated in the Euro horror film. Subsequently, within the relativized moral rules and aesthetic merits of the horror world, the approach found in the Euro horror bears a far richer and healthier terrain for feminist analysis.

Female Carnal Desire in Vampyres

The suppression of female sexuality is the critical subtext of the British exploitation horror film The House of Whipcord (Peter Walker, 1974). In the film a woman and husband, banished from their positions in the British court house because of corruption, run their own secret court-prison for women of "lax moral conduct." They rid the world of sexual liberation by sending out their attractive son to swinging London as bait to return with young, sexually active women, who are then detained as prisoners. Punishment for not abiding by their ridiculously strict prison rules escalates from solitary confinement (1st offence), flogging (second offense), to death by hanging (third offense). The film was made as an unabashed exploitation film, complete with sadomasochism, incest, and (slight) female nudity, but below the exploitation is a social critique of what director Walker saw in the late 1960's, early 1970's as an increasingly sexually and politically repressive British society.

Repressing Female Sexuality in The House of Whipchord

Where the 'final girl' is concerned, there is a wonderfully strange coincidence that exists between Texas Chainsaw Massacre (T. Hooper, 1974) and The House of Whipcord (made in the same year). Chainsaw ends with the Final Girl escaping her torturers out onto a nearby highway, where she is saved by a passing truck driver. Whipcord BEGINS with a physically distraught and semi-comatose woman escaping from some horrendous situation out onto the street, stopping and being picked up by a truck driver! The film then switches to flashback to tell her story (the Final Girl in reverse!).

Final Girl "In Reverse"

Returning to Carol Clover, her central argument does not work as consistently well in the European horror film, simply because the killers/murderers in Euro horror are often female! Hence the gender dynamic is rarely the same as in the American model. Mainly because in the European horror film there are many instances where (a) the victims are exclusively or mainly male, and (b) the male victim/hero is sexually attracted to the female killer, not repulsed, as with the monstrous-feminine, and hence there can be no disavowal of her femininity. Consequently, there are less instances where, vis-a-vis Clover, the male viewer is able to simultaneously experience these forbidden desires and disavow them on account of the victim being female. However, if you stick with the American model, as Clover and other feminists usually do, there are still the interesting exceptions and films that can be read 'against the grain' (as Clover and others such as Vera Dika, Cynthia Freeman have done with the slasher film, and which has been brought out into the popular mainstream with the -overrated- Scream). But there are far more interesting gender politics to be found in such European horror films as: the sensual lesbian vampire films Daughters of Darkness (1974, Belgium, Harvey Kumel); Blood and Roses (Roger Vadim, 1961), Vampire Lovers (Roy Ward Baker, 1970), Immoral Tales (Walerian Borowczyk, 1974), and Lust for a Vampire (Jimmy Sangster, 1971); the female revenge film The Blood Spattered Bride (Vicente Aranda, Spain 1972) (in contrast to such as American versions as Carrie, Ms. 45, (1980, Abel Ferrera) I Spit on Your Grave, etc); the British Alien rip-off Inseminoid (Norman Warren, 1981), which features Judy Geeson impregnated by an alien and killing the crew (the 'monstrous-feminine'); the aforementioned Baby Blood; and pretty much the whole oeuvre of the French director Jean Rollin, who made close to a dozen films in the 1960's/70's which feature female vampire predators in a dreamy, surreal pop art world, usually with very little dialogue ( Le viol du vampire, 1968, Le frisson des vampires, 1970, Requiem pour un vampire 1972, La rose de fer, 1973, Fascination, 1980). While there are some questionable and extremely misogynist European horror films (as is par for the course), there are also far more of the sexually liberated variety. In general, the gender-political range is broader in the European horror film, and these films should be mined by feminist writers and theorists, rather than merely attempting 'against the grain' readings of familiar, over-analyzed American models.
Notes
1. Isabel Cristina Pinedo. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997, 83.

2.The frame stills from The Frightened Woman are taken from the DVD release, courtesy of First Run Features.
Bibliography of Important Feminist Horror Film Literature
Berenstein, Rhona J. Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in the Classic Horror Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996

Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.

Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine. London: Routledge, 1993.

Dika, Vera. Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Genre. Rutherford, NY: Fairleigh Dickinson, UP, 1990.

Freeland, Cynthia. The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror. Colorado: Westview Press, 2000.

Ebert, Roger. "Why Movie Audiences Aren't Safe Anymore." American Film (March 1981): 54-56.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia, UP, 1982.

Modleski, Tania. "The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and

Postmodern Theory." In Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture. Ed. Tania Modleski. Bloomington: Indian, UP, 1986, 155-66.

Lenne, Gerard. "Monster and Victim: Women in the Horror Film." In Sexual Stratagems, ed. Patricia Erens.

Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

Williams, Linda. "When a Woman Looks." In Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Criticism. Ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams. Frederick, MD: American Film Institute, 1984, 83-99.

Wood, Robin. "Return of the repressed." Film Comment 14.4 (July-August, 1978): 25-32.

Donato Totaro has been the editor of the online film journal Offscreen since its inception in 1997. Totaro received his PhD in Film & Television from the University of Warwick (UK), is a part-time professor in Film Studies at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) and a longstanding member of AQCC (Association québécoise des critiques de cinéma).

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The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror

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Should feminist scholarship be looking beyond American horror for a more varied representation of female desire and sexuality?

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In a year when the scariest movie is the news, Halloween calls for more than gross-outs, ghouls, and goblins. Instead, give us movies that get at the truly terrifying stuff - like being married, getting pregnant, or walking home alone at night. Turns out for some of us, that's spooky enough.

Each of these psycho thrillers explores the kind of daily, earthly frights that actually make us howl at the moon and scream into pillows. And by "us," I mean anyone who sees themselves in these terrified female protagonists. You know who you are, and you may also recognize the monster in the closet, which is so often nothing less than the powers that be, those who refuse to listen, the regime, the water we all drink. This Halloween, the call is very much coming from inside the house, and by "the house," I mean the patriarchy.

No better place to start than with the source of "gaslighting." Ingrid Bergman stars as a swooning, glassy-eyed bride whose new husband (Charles Boyer) tries to convince her she's going mad in order to get her family jewels. Let the cruel, manipulative shenanigans begin; he does things like give her an heirloom brooch, steal it back, then watch in an "all according to plan" kind of way as she hysterically looks for it. The crime here is not about the brooch, of course (not even about the murder he's also clearly guilty of); it's about making a woman distrust her own eyes, ears, mind, and memory - and it's one of the oldest, cruelest tricks in the book. What makes Gaslight such a touchstone is that it's so straightforward: to make her doubt herself, he quite literally rearranges the world around her, and you know it's him the whole time. What makes Gaslight a classic is that Bergman is such a revelation to watch.

The thing about Alfred Hitchcock is there's always a little part of you that doesn't really know "if he did it." Instead, the Master of Suspense leaves you with much scarier, realer questions like, But would he really betray me? and Who can I trust, if not him? So it is with the aptly named Shadow of a Doubt, in which the villainous Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) not only terrorizes his teenage niece and namesake (Teresa Wright) but also has a virulent, murderous disgust toward old ladies. I mean this guy really hates women! But our young female protagonist, like the rest of her family, positively adores her uncle. Perhaps the scariest, most pertinent question of this underappreciated classic is: How could someone I love so much, who means so much to all of us, commit this violence?

The fact that young Charlie keeps her uncle's secret is also complicated and prescient, as is Uncle Charlie's malicious inquiry: "You think you're the clever little girl who knows something, but you don't know anything ... What would you tell? Who would believe you?" (For another fun tale about a rampant misogynist who kills widows while terrorizing children along the way, please see 1955's Night of the Hunter.)

It's hard to avoid being labeled nuts when you uncover incriminating info that may undermine order - especially when that info is brimming with salty, salacious details that question hetero-dominant norms. That's what happens in Suddenly, Last Summer when Violet Venable (Katharine Hepburn) tries to get Catherine Holly (Elizabeth Taylor) lobotomized so she'll finally shut up about Venable's son Sebastian, his evident homosexuality, and his (problematic) death at the hands of a pack of lustful vacationers down by "the baths." Manymovies featureladies "turning psychotic" at the moment a powerful institution or malicious individual realizes they have a lot to lose, but in Suddenly, Last Summer, Hepburn, Taylor, and Tennessee Williams's script carry out this plot device with thrilling fervor and histrionics. Exhibit A: Hepburn's piercing delivery of "Doctor! See how she destroys us with her tongue for a hatchet? You've got to cut this hideous story out of her brain!"

Don't let anyone tell you this psycho horror is a story about a satanic cult. That's like saying The Wizard of Oz is about tornado safety and Citizen Kane is about a sled. The real crimes against Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) are much more earthly and terrifying than devil worship. She's a woman made palpably anxious by her pursuit of upper-class domestic bliss and by her narcissist husband (literally named Guy and played by John Cassavetes). And that's before she's drugged, wakes up with scratches all over her body, and hears Guy saying, "I didn't want to miss out." Her rape results in a pregnancy, during which she becomes increasingly ill, but Guy, her neighbors, and one doctor after another disavow her experience of her own body. The prevailing feeling is that THEY'RE ALL IN ON IT, and it's an all-too-familiar one.

Perhaps worst of all (worse even than Guy continually dissing her new pixie haircut), Rosemary is berated by hubby and docs alike for reading books to learn more about her condition and for talking to her gal pals about pregnancy ("Pain like that is a warning that something isn't right," they say. "You can't go on suffering like that!"). As in real life, books and friendship prove to be Rosemary's best weapons in this maddening world, though here they aren't quite enough to avoid a harrowing diabolical birth scene. The fact that a movie about such distinctly feminine horrors comes from Roman Polanski is conflicting, to say the least, even haunting. That in and of itself is worthy of late-night discussion with your favorite feminists.

Brian De Palma and menstruation - truly a match made in hell that's well worth another watch this Halloween. Sissy Spacek's Carrie is, yes, a teen outcast with telekinetic powers, bad social skills, and a religious yahoo for a mother, but she's also relatable, likable even. She's just pissed that nobody ever told her about her period. You know the old adage, Tell a girl the truth and maybe she won't freak out and bleed all over the locker room. Signs that Carrie is just like us: She sets up a healthy boundary with her mom; she mounts an appropriate defense when she's suspiciously asked to prom by a total stud; she quite satisfyingly knocks a little monster off his bike for teasing her; and when confronted with the phrase dirty pillows, she replies, "No, Mother, they're called breasts." Honestly, I don't care what the other girls say, Carrie puts on a master class in learning how to own your shit. And against all odds, she finds her way to an ethereal prom night, all blush pink and glitter, with a gentle blond boy showing her how to dance. When she's crowned onstage, it's not so much that she's "made it," as much as she's finally just been given a chance to breathe.

Which, of course, makes it all the more heartbreaking when the pig's blood comes pouring down, and with it, all the old narratives, parental lies, and peers' cruelties - the very expectations of womanhood - all come back, syrupy and suffocating, to reclaim her. The worst part is the famous climax when Carrie vengefully sets all around her ablaze. This isn't actually the final scene; instead, for all her teen-girl triumphs, Carrie is punished relentlessly. And that, more than the bloody havoc she wreaks, should haunt us still.

If Rosemary's Baby is all about bodily autonomy, then The Shining is all about marriage. What caused the Overlook Hotel's previous off-season caretaker to murder his family with an axe? "Well," the hotel manager explains, "it's what the old-timers might call 'cabin fever' - a kind of claustrophobic reaction which can occur when people are shut in together for prolonged periods of time." Does anyone else hear wedding bells?

The central horror at the heart of this classic really just boils down to Jack Torrance (the maniacal Jack Nicholson) being a colossal dick to his wife, Wendy (the saucer-eyed Shelley Duvall). For signs of the almost commonplace marriage plot here, look no further than the famous staircase scene: Wendy has just found that for all her husband's self-serious proclamations about his writing, he is in fact a fraud, "a dull boy." She backs her way up the stairs, swinging a bat in self-defense as he stalks up after her. He yells about whether or not they should take their son to the doctor, then pivots to full-throttle self-pity. "Has it ever occurred to you what would happen to my future if I would fail to live up to my responsibilities?" he screams. He's a husband turned monster, driven psychotic by his professional shortcomings and that time he drunkenly broke his son's shoulder, among other failures of masculinity. Jack would almost be a cliché of a deadbeat alcoholic husband and father if Nicholson's performance weren't so totally unhinged. He mocks his wife's whimpering and, finally nearing the top of the stairs, proclaims in syrupy faux sweetness, "Wendy, darling, light of my life, I'm not going to hurt you ... I'm just going to bash your brains in." Love you too, honey.

When you close your eyes and think of The Silence of the Lambs - as you often do - do you see Hannibal Lecter's sniveling grin, his chin tilted downward, hair slicked back, pupils staring straight into you, calculating your every move and likely also the taste of your skin? Me too. But just as scary as a maniacal cannibal: workplace harassment! Stay with me.

One of seemingly two women in her training program, FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is summoned by the boss. He has an "interesting errand" for her - to interview Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), the serial killer they most need to talk to but who refuses to cooperate. Why send a student to do what nobody else in the bureau can do? The head of the insane asylum has a theory: "Clever, using you, ... a pretty young woman, to turn him on," he says as he walks Starling to Lecter's cell. Thus begins her uphill battle to do an impossible job while fending off sexual harassment at every turn. For Lecter's part, he immediately tells Clarice he can smell her "cunt," and when an inmate does something even more obscene, he uses Starling's vulnerability as entreé to her psyche. It's a no good, very bad workday, and it doesn't stop there. She is belittled and hit on by every man who has the information or access she needs: the skeevy asylum director, the police, her boss, her fellow FBI agents, and even the nerdy entomologist boys (focus on the moths, guys!). She is constantly put into situations as sexual bait rather than for her skills, then has to prove her right to be there, often endangering herself in the process. And this is just the backdrop to her actual job: searching for Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine), whose favorite pastime is skinning women. On every level, Starling's gender is rendered a liability rather than a nonfactor or an asset to her work. That The Silence of the Lambs barely reckons with this sexism says at least as much about the '90s as the freaky queer politics and transphobia informing the portrayal of Bill's criminality.

Also see ...

For a simmering workplace thriller that may hit closer to home these days, see Kitty Green's The Assistant (2019), which - amid a grim Weinstein-esque backdrop - features an HR-complaint scene between Julia Garner and Matthew Macfadyen that will make any woman's skin crawl.

"What do you miss most about New York?" a reporter asks Joanna (Katharine Ross) in the original 1975 Stepford Wives. Joanna has just relocated to a Connecticut suburb with her husband and children. "The noise," she says. "I miss the noise." Based on the novel of the same name, this cult classic details a woman's realization that the "perfection" around her isn't just boring; it's the result of the local Men's Association's nefarious technocratic plot to turn all the women into automatons! So the value of "noise" here isn't just honking horns and the hubbub of Manhattan; it's also "the noise to the signal" in a technological sense. It's messiness, unpredictability, and humanness versus the control, the prototype, and the inflexibility of ideology, gender, and robots. According to the Men's Association, strict 1950s-style, white, upper-class, domestic femininity is perfection, and anything outside of that is a bug, not a feature. That the women tend to short-circuit inside this system is just a glitch to be worked out. But Joanna and her new BFF, Bobby (Paula Prentiss), are real women. They drink, ask questions, make art, and trade cutting quips. They sweat, fight, and when they're cut, they bleed. Walter, on the other hand, "hates noise," says Joanna of her husband (Peter Masterson), who comes to align with the Men's Association's values, sealing his wife's destiny in the process.

The 2004 Stepford Wives blows all this out into a campy joke that's pretty fun thanks largely to Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler, and Glenn Close's vibrant extremes. But an eerie shadow is cast across the movie, as if in 2004 we thought we were safe to laugh, as if the stakes of the original text no longer applied. The ending of the updated version is nice 'n' tidy too: A husband stands by his woman, the true villain is rooted out, all is resolved. Phew! It'sas palatable as a lemon-meringue pie and may similarly leave you in a saccharine stupor. A thinking, breathing, messy human woman in 2022 might opt instead for the original's ending, which insists onnotresolving the horror. When Joanna faces her empty-eyed replica - her future in this misogynist, technocratic nightmare - she turns to the men's leader and asks, "But why?" He answers with a simple, Elon Musk-ian "Because we can."

Don't Worry Darling (2022)

I know you don't want to spend any more time in the kitchen, but be a good girl and go see Don't Worry Darling, which takes the basic Stepford premise - a cabal of men doing things to women to create a "perfect" world - but offers some keen updates for a contemporary audience. Among them: The grand technocratic scheme now has a VR component (!), the men are more explicitly motivated by a fear of failing to meet a breadwinning masculine ideal, and the head megalomaniac has a Jordan Peterson-style podcast. But our central couple (Harry Styles and Florence Pugh) drip with sex and charm, and their 1950s domestic setup looks suspiciously like a very cool mid-century-modern Joshua Tree home. What's not to like? That sounds rhetorical, but Don't Worry Darling's contribution to the genre is actually taking that question seriously. Given how difficult the real world is, what's the genuine cost benefit of living a lie in an ersatz reality? What if the counterfeit life the men are enforcing is more comfortable, wealthier, easier, or happier on some level? What if there's an abundance of orgasms and cocktails, and the women still get to be funny? Then what do you do when you discover the same old misogynistic values are underpinning the project? "Beauty in control, grace in symmetry, the enemy of progress is chaos" is this town's motto. It's the familiar Stepfordian ideal, now with a fascist twist toward uniformity and regimentation. All of this raises the exceedingly pertinent question, What willful ignorance is your comfort trading upon? How much inhumane horror does it take to get another drink around here?

In this slow creep of a thriller, Carol White (Julianne Moore) is an affluent, 1980s housewife in the San Fernando Valley who's getting sick and doesn't know why. It starts out like a classic horror movie, with ominous music accompanying Carol and her husband as they wind their way up a hill at night. But the only monster waiting for them at the top is a clinically clean suburban home, a stale marriage, and bad sex. Maybe that's it then: Carol is just "allergic" to the boredom and beauty standards for rich white ladies of a certain set ("fruit diet" and hyper-spandexed aerobics class be damned!). But Carol's symptoms exceed this diagnosis too: She's suddenly allergic to milk; she has a coughing fit from a truck's exhaust; she collapses from chemicals at the dry cleaner. With condescending and sexist doctors who are no help at all, Carol investigates Multiple Chemical Sensitivity and heads to a healing retreat center in the desert. But the community's culty vibes don't quite make this the happy ending we, or Carol, have been looking for.

In fact, we can never quite pinpoint who or what is to blame for Carol's illness, and that's the subtle horror here. What if it's not just the doctor, or your husband, the pressure to meet strict feminine standards, or a world full of toxic chemicals - but all of it together? What if, instead of a bad guy, you're trapped in an overwhelming, interlocking system? Then what do you do? Then where do you go?

Go ahead and disregard the 34 percent Rotten Tomatoes score for this suspense thriller, which has a twist or two that I, for one, didn't see coming. Someone's going around decapitating women, and Franny (Meg Ryan) gets entangled in the investigation - as well as with the lead detective (Mark Ruffalo). It's the hostile, sexually oversaturated atmosphere director Jane Campion creates that's so compelling here. Women are constantly running from something in the background of this movie, and huge flags (the film takes place post-9/11) drape across buildings as quiet memorials and omens of wars to come. Fear is in the air.

In the Cut takes those age-old questions ( Can I trust him? Did he do it?) and applies them to the whole world, so that every character, every street corner, every comment, and most definitely anything sex-related becomes a potential threat. Like in the real world, this is confusing, uncomfortable, and exhausting - which is maybe why some viewers don't like it. There are also some seriously under-interrogated racial dynamics as well as a cheesy moment or two. What In the Cut gets right, though, is this unrelenting hum of sexualized fear. It's about meeting your sister for coffee the morning after being mugged, and tearing up when she says, "Oh sweetie," upon seeing your black eye. And you don't even make a big deal about the mugging, talking instead about how you don't really trust the guy you just slept with. And then your mentally ill, stalker ex-boyfriend (here, Kevin Bacon) shows up to the coffee shop with his hairless dog and just stares through the glass, waiting for you to leave. And when you do, and you gently tell him again, "You know I don't think we should see each other anymore," he says, "Well I'll have to think about that," as if it were an open question, as if your words - and fear - don't matter.

Come for the coming-of-age story, stay for the grotesque, campy castration sequences. In some tellings of the vagina dentata myth, the toothed genitalia and the woman it belongs to might be construed as villainous. Not so here, where the boys and men are squarely to blame - they go too far, don't hear "no," and treat women as either conquest or quite literally like dogs (there's a rottweiler named "Mother" as well as some unmentionable foreplay with a dog biscuit). I can't imagine it's a spoiler to tell you the arc of Teeth takes our female protagonist from virginal nymph to somewhat more self-actualized owner of "teeth ... down there!" The deeper, more satisfying arc, though, is that she's a promise-ring clad, abstinence-preaching girl who finally removes the censorship sticker from her textbook's female anatomy page, holds a mirror up to herself, makes thorough use of a vibrator, and - in her final smirk - seems to imagine the advantages her vaginal peculiarities might offer.

Have you ever seen a ballerina break in new toe shoes? It's a horror unto itself. Following Nina (Natalie Portman) as she vies for preeminence in the New York City ballet world, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swandraws out the physical brutality and grotesque pressures of this, the most graceful corner of hell. It's all cracking joints, bleeding cuticles, rearranging ribs, and secret pukes for Nina. What's more: The company director (Vincent Cassel) deploys a breathtaking lack of boundaries, the girls' competition is fierce to the point of debilitating, the aging starlet (Winona Ryder) brims with resentment, and an infantilizing stage mom (Barbara Hershey) grants no mercy. The currency is perfectionism, and everyone trades in it. Add in a desperate fear of getting old and an even more desperate fear of getting fat, and you pretty much have the scene covered - both the ballet world and the expectations of femininity writ large. Nonetheless, Nina ascends to Swan Queen, which offers its own slate of metaphors about an impossible feminine ideal. Nina must play both the white swan (precise, delicate, passive) and the black swan (impassioned, powerful, sexual). In other words: be the virgin and the whor, starve yourself but get a tattoo, nail your pirouettes but do molly with Mila Kunis, and be trained your whole life as a white swan, then suddenly, when summoned by the guy in charge, emerge as the black swan. Sustain all the contradictions of femininity while twirling "effortlessly" on a pinpoint, a single broken, bleeding toe. It's enough to drive a woman mad.

Also see:

Want more ballet horrors, this time with witches? Thought so. See Suspiria, both the 1977 Italian original and the 2018 remake. Add Starry Eyes (2014) and Neon Demon (2016) for a recent look at Hollywood's gendered pressure chamber. And don't sleep on the classics about women absolutely coming undone in the spotlight, among them: Opening Night (1977), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), and Sunset Boulevard (1950).

Under the Skin is a weirdo, sci-fi, art-film take on a genre I'd like to call "the streetwalker revenge film," a subset of the feminist revenge film genre that's just brimming with movies you should see. While these fantasies of female rage and empowerment are thrilling because you finally get to see ladies kick ass while giving zero fucks, Under the Skin does something a little different and therefore belongs on this list. Scarlett Johansson is an alien who lures innocent-ish men into her van, and then into her black tarpit-like lair. Before she can get to snatching dudes, though, she has to undergo a process of feminization - she inhabits ScarJo's body, gets a fur coat, puts on lipstick for the first time. She flirts. The ostensible horror of the film is the creepy senselessness with which she disposes her male victims, but her arc of becoming a woman is the much more terrifying and compelling horror, as proven by the film's final act. By then, she's doing exceedingly human things like going sightseeing with a man, being cared for, and having feelings, and there's a sense that maybe her narrative will end - like that of all "good" women - in satisfied domestic bliss. But the devastating brutality of the last scene makes her quite literally come apart at the seams, and she looks as if she's shocked that such violence had found her in her new traditional female role, as if she thought she were above such earthly humiliations and ruin.

This movie opens with a child's voice waking up his mother ("Mom! Mom! Mom!") and never really stops being about how annoying kids can be - and how hard parenting is. Amelia (Essie Davis) is a widow and single mom whose 7-year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) is a chronic under-the-bed-checker who is deeply worried that his mother, like his father, will be taken away. The monster that does eventually come, the Babadook, emerges from a terrifying children's book and, while Samuel's petrified nightly, Amelia grows increasingly impatient. Soon though, Amelia too must recognize the horror of the Babadook, which for her results in various failures motherhood: she can't cook, clean, or sleep enough; she pops pills, makes ice cream for dinner by way of apology, keeps the house dark and the TV on. She says cuttingly mean things just to finally get some peace and quiet.

This is no boring domestic drama though - it's all extremely scary. Scariest of all, for a while the movie does a brilliant job conflating Samuel's terrified claims about the Babadook with his extremely normal but deeply annoying demands of his mother ("Look at me! Look at me!"). In this, The Babadook makes its most incisive commentary on the horrific pressures of motherhood: It's so easy not to listen to your kid and consider the midnight-what's-in-the-closet fears as foolish instead of versions of our own worst nightmares. But, "the more you deny it, the stronger I get," says the Babadook.

Mariama Diallo does here what I wish every other director of social-commentary thrillers would do: stay focused on real-world terrors rather than having some deus ex machina explain it all away in the third act ( It was all a dream! It was aliens all along!). Don't get me wrong, Master has enough witches, legends, and nesting maggots to satisfy any horror appetite, but it understands that nothing is scarier than racism.

Jasmine (Zoe Renee) starts at an elite New England college the same year Professor Bishop (Regina Hall) has been appointed to the coveted position of "master." Their parallel horrors as Black women on an exceedingly white campus unfold in keen detail, from the cloyingly "woke" language of white professors ("We really needed your voice at the table today"), to the rampant condescension ("Your family must be so proud!"), to the horde of white teens screaming the N-word along with a song, to the white men's portraits lining the walls next to the bells that not so long ago called the servants. Not to mention the noose left hanging on a dorm-room door and the cross burning on a lawn. Meanwhile, the school holds up Black women as the face of the future, the great promise of the institution's "staying relevant," a relief to anxious white liberalism, a marketing tool. To make matters even worse, amid this cavalcade of racism and sexism Jasmine's dorm room is cursed! A witch was burned centuries before, and a girl jumped to her death a few decades back. And Bishop's "master house" is haunted to the max too. As increasingly creepy stuff goes down - ghosts abound, lights cut out, nightmares strike - Bishop starts to see her colleagues for who they really are, while Jasmine digs into researching her room's curse. What they both discover is nothing short of America's most horrifying ghost story: the suffering of Black people at the hands of white institutions. Jasmine and Bishop must reckon with this violent past as well as their racist present and the school's notion of a "diverse" future. When it comes to these contradictory demands on Black women, it is perhaps telling that Diallo's writing and Renee's and Hall's performances are brilliantly on point, natural, and troublingly lived-in.

Yes, all men. If the title weren't enough of a hint that we'll be dealing in archetypes, we know we're in for a parable as soon as Harper (Jessie Buckley) arrives at her English countryside getaway, picks a plump red apple, and promptly takes a sensuous bite. Queue "the men," who arrive one by one to terrorize her on her solo retreat. The innkeeper, the boy, the police officer, the priest, the ex-husband, the creepy naked lurk who lives in the forest - they're all here, each waging his own little manipulative fear campaign. But Harper "didn't come here to be afraid!" After her ex-husband's death - its own manipulative maneuver of sorts - she rented this house to heal. Thus unfolds the film's central nightmare: What happens when the site reserved for healing becomes haunted?

Men ultimately goes in big for monstrous body horror, but before it does, Harper puts on her Wellies and ventures out for a morning stroll. She descends into a forest where she's surrounded by green: mosses of your dreams, ferns to write home about. When she comes to an abandoned tunnel, she layers her voice's echoes in airy harmonies in a reverie of finally being surrounded by a song of self. But a menacing figure appears, as always. Frozen, she calculates her safety, he advances, and she turns and runs, her voice's echoing melody now the haunting soundtrack that will accompany all the fear to come.

In this year's The Invitation (not the 2015 film by the same name), Evie (Nathalie Emmanuel) is a struggling artist and waiter living in New York. When a DNA test turns up an enthusiastic British cousin (Hugh Skinner) who invites her to the wedding of the century back in England, she agrees to come and meet her long-lost relatives. With this, Evie steps out of her life and into what is essentially a Downton Abbey episode. She is, of course, summarily wooed by the decadence of it all, especially by her host, a friend of the family and stone-cold fox named Walt (Thomas Doherty). Even ancient great uncle Alfred (Ian Lindsay) is excessively welcoming, which is a little shocking since Evie, who is biracial, "represents the family scandal" of yore. But these old, moneyed white people harbor a dangerous secret, as they so often do.

In its own garish way, The Invitation lays bare the idea that conspiracy, death, and secrecy are always needed to maintain great white wealth. Behind all those Victorian turrets, there's an insider's game in which the rules are known only to those in power and are designed to maintain that power. Welcome to colonialism - I mean capitalism, I mean our castle. The footman will take you to your room.

Let the games begin. Like The Invitation, this movie is in the newcomer-meets-aristocracy genre, but Ready or Not further literalizes the idea of the "insider game" the protagonist is invited to play. New bride Grace (Samara Weaving) is initiated by her in-laws, a board-game family dynasty, through one wild and murderous night of not-so-friendly competition. Hide-and-seek is the game of choice, and it transforms the family mansion into a battleground - horse stables become a graveyard, the dumbwaiter a guillotine. "The game" here is not only the family business but, as with The Invitation, the rituals and traditions by which the family maintains the status quo, a brutal one at that. The future of the family jewels hinges upon our class-interloper female protagonist. Will she play along or flip the board? What does it look like to beat the ruling class at its own enterprise? As in life and U.S. elections, the women must decide between complicity or burning the whole thing down.

Fresh from the genre of narcissistic, power-hungry exes coming back to torment their special ladies comes Resurrection, starring a very haunted Rebecca Hall and a wholly new kind of demon in Tim Roth. True to the genre (and to real-life stalker stories), there's a history of abuse, a woman's account that the police can't (or won't) act on, gaslighting galore, and the unraveling of the female psyche. But somehow, it all feels new here thanks to the uniquely perverse hold that David (Roth's villain) has on Maggie (Hall's leading lady).

The problem in abuse stories like this is twofold: Not only does the woman have to learn to trust her own eyes ( He's really back! And following me!), but she then also has to convince everyone else that this is happening, too. Maggie has escaped her aggressor, can finally see through his manipulative tricks, no longer thinks he's the only one in the world who really understands her, and now just needs the rest of the world to catch up and see the situation for what it really is. #BelieveWomen, ya know? But this invocation gets even tougher when the dudes do such insane shit that it sounds like it couldn't possibly be true. Which brings to mind another recent movie, The Invisible Man (2020), in which - I can't imagine it's a spoiler to say - an actual invisibility suit is integral to the terror campaign wrought against Elisabeth Moss. In these stalker-ex movies, ghosts and abusers aside, the cascading betrayals of not being believed are the deepest threat, yet Resurrection goes further to do something even scarier. This terrifying movie proposes that, for all your progress and for all the ways you've finally learned to see clearly, he may still find a way to drive you mad and, worse, may still have the very thing you're most looking for.

Also See ...

For more women battling exes and fighting for their sanity, see Unsane (2018) and Gothika (2003), in which women ( Claire Foy and Halle Berry, respectively) are literally locked up in psychiatric wards for reporting male violence with every piece of mounting evidence indicting them as crazy, rather than the men as criminal.

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21 Great Movies Exploring the Unique Horror of Being a Woman

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This Halloween, watch a scary movie about the most terrifying aspects of being a woman. These woman-centric horror movies and psychological thrillers include 'Gaslight,' 'Carrie,' 'Rosemary's Baby,' 'Ready or Not,' and 'The Babadook.'

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How horror films respond to feminsit themes in 2023?

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How horror films respond to feminsit themes in 2023?

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Fashioning Horror: Dressing to Kill on Screen and in Literature

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Fashioning Horror: Dressing to Kill on Screen and in Literature

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https://www-bloomsburyfashioncentral-com.arts.idm.oclc.org/encyclopedia?docid=b-9781350036215

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The Monstrous-Feminine : Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis

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The Monstrous-Feminine : Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis

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In almost all critical writings on the horror film, woman is conceptualised only as victim. In The Monstrous-Feminine Barbara Creed challenges this patriarchal view by arguing that the prototype of all definitions of the monstrous is the female reproductive body.With close reference to a number of classic horror films including the Alien trilogy, T

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=683972#

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LAST NIGHT IN SOHO - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters October 29

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Hard(core) Images: Orlan’s Carnal Art, the Monstrous-Feminine, and Spectatorship How Do I Look?

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Hard(core) Images: Orlan’s Carnal Art, the Monstrous-Feminine, and Spectatorship How Do I Look?

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This richly informed study analyzes how various cinematic tools and techniques have been used to create horror on screen--the aesthetic elements, sometimes not consciously noticed, that help to unnerve, frighten, shock or entertain an audience. The first two chapters define the genre and describe the use of pragmatic aesthetics (when filmmakers put technical and budgetary compromises to artistic effect). Subsequent chapters cover mise-en-scene, framing, photography, lighting, editing and sound, and a final chapter is devoted to the aesthetic appeals of horror cinema. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/UAL/detail.action?docID=4929947

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How horror films respond to feminist themes in 2000s？

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How horror films respond to feminist themes in 2000s？

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Hatching - Official Trailer | HD | IFC Midnight

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We were so dazzled by the trailer for In Fabric - the latest from retro-thriller specialist Peter Strickland (The Duke of Burgundy, Berberian Sound Studio); it's about a fabulous dress that curses its new owner - that we started thinking about other horror movies that take inspiration from the fashion world. It's a realm that has yielded mostly documentaries, docu-dramas, and romantic comedies, but there are some glamorously gruesome gems in the mix, too.

7. The Sentinel

Despite her troubled past, life's on the upswing for Alison Parker (Cristina Raines) at the start of this 1977 supernatural thriller. She's an in-demand model with a portfolio full of commercials and magazine covers, and she's amassed enough self-confidence to move into her own apartment, even though her lawyer boyfriend (Chris Sarandon) keeps pestering her to marry him.

Unfortunately, her real estate choice turns out to have unforeseen consequences when her suspiciously affordable, fully furnished new spot in a ramshackle Brooklyn brownstone is revealed to be, uh, built over a hellmouth.

Along with her mental and physical health, Alison's glamorous career soon takes a sudden sharp dive, but not before we see her at flashy photo shoots overseen by future legend Jeff Goldblum (whose lines are dubbed over for some reason) and Jerry Orbach, just two instantly recognisable faces in a movie that's curiously full of them (including Christopher Walken, Burgess Meredith, Ava Gardner, Eli Wallach, John Carradine, and more).

6. Bloody Pit of Horror

Made in 1965, this Italian production from director Domenico Massimo Pupillo imagines that a group of pin-up models and photographers break into an old castle, thinking it'll be the perfect location for their horror-themed photo shoot.

The gothic backdrops are indeed ideal, but the crumbling manse has a grim history involving a sadistic fiend known as "the Crimson Executioner," complete with a dungeon filled with macabre torture devices that've been collecting dust for hundreds of years... until now.

Sadly, for our comely protagonists, the resident caretaker (Mickey Hargitay, a beefy former Mr. Universe) feels deeply connected to the castle's former owner, and costumes himself like the long-dead killer (whose kit more than slightly resembles that of a pro wrestler) - all the better to start cruelly and creatively picking off his unwanted guests. Bloody Pit of Horror hasn't aged terribly well, but its goofy premise and staunchly low-budget production values have ensured its status as a camp classic.

5. Delirium

This unapologetically sleazy 1987 giallo from Lamberto Bava (son of Mario Bava, the godfather of Italian horror, who also has a film on this list) tells the lurid tale of Gloria (Serena Grandi), a voluptuous former model who takes over running Pussycat magazine - a publication that specialises in voluptuous models... mostly topless - after her wealthy husband's tragic death in a speedboat accident.

When a mysterious killer, whose surreal POV varies from victim to victim (the face of one woman suddenly transforms into a giant, veiny eyeball; another becomes a bee before she's murdered by bees), starts executing Gloria's associates and sending her gory, oddly personalised photos of the bodies, she decides she better get out of the magazine biz before it's too late.

In between crimes, though, Delirium has some cheesy photo-shoot scenes that are meant to be titillating, and when its actors are actually wearing clothes, there are massive shoulder pads and other 1980s fashion clichés as far as the eye can see (there's even a murder in a department store).

As an added bonus, first-wave supermodel Capucine pops up as Pussycat's pushy prospective buyer, while Daria Nicolodi (a staple of her then-husband Dario Argento's films, and also the co-writer of the original Suspiria) plays Gloria's ultra-efficient assistant.

4. Eyes of Laura Mars

Not long before he made horror history with Halloween, John Carpenter sold the spec script that formed the basis for this 1978 thriller, though it went through some significant rewrites before it hit the big screen.

Directed by Irvin Kershner (yep, the same guy who went on to make The Empire Strikes Back), Eyes of Laura Mars is about a stylish photographer played by Faye Dunaway, whose extravagant photos (which heavily feature fashion models, fur coats, fire, and violence) have caused a stir in the New York City art world.

Unfortunately, something far more sinister than paparazzi has also attached itself to Laura's notoriety, in the form of a vicious killer who starts targeting her close friends. Even worse, somehow she's able to psychically "see" the awful crimes happen, as if peering through the murderer's own eyes.

The impossibly chic Dunaway is obviously the main draw here, but the supporting cast is also pretty great, with Brad Dourif, and Tommy Lee Jones (all impossibly youthful) making memorable appearances.

3. Blowup

Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 thriller follows Thomas (David Hemmings), a fabulously mod fashion photographer, who hits pause on his decadent routine of hanging out with eager models and tooling around in his Rolls-Royce when he becomes convinced he's accidentally snapped images of a murder in progress.

The process of puzzling through what's lurking in the background of his photo series stirs something in his long-slumbering soul and he suddenly finds new meaning in his superficial life... which turns out to be the movie's point since the answers he seeks never quite materialise.

In 1981, Brian De Palma directed a remake, Blow Out, with John Travolta playing a sound engineer who accidentally records a suspicious car crash-an entertaining twist, but only the original film endures as an authentic time capsule of Swinging London, an era later mocked by the Austin Powers movies but presented with much more realism here.

However, that doesn't mean it's devoid of glitz by any means - at one point, Thomas chases after a possible witness/accomplice/mystery woman (Vanessa Redgrave) as she attends a Yardbirds concert, complete with Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck performance cameos, and the movie also features appearances by period style icons like Veruschka and Jane Birkin.

2. The Neon Demon

Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive) directs this bewitching, candy-coloured nightmare that delves into the world of models in Los Angeles, where the competition is literally cutthroat (and a whole lot worse). Elle Fanning plays Jesse, a wide-eyed 16-year-old whose cover-girl dreams are soon sidetracked when she falls in with a particularly vicious group of fashionistas who are dangerously obsessed with youth and beauty.

The fact that she's staying at a seedy motel with an even seedier manager (played by Keanu Reeves, one of few male characters in a mostly female cast) where very strange things tend to happen doesn't make things any easier and while you may suspect early on that The Neon Demon is going to take a deeply malevolent turn, Jesse's ultimate fate ends up putting the "gore" in "phantasmagoria."

It may be the only movie ever made that references Vogue magazine, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Elizabeth Báthory in equal doses.

1. Blood and Black Lace

The scandalous secrets bubbling just below the jewel-box surface at a boutique Italian fashion house spark a murder spree in Mario Bava's 1964 lushly colourful classic, a movie as stunningly beautiful as it is enduringly influential.

Blood and Black Lace inspired not just the countless giallo films that followed in its wake, but basically any movie with a masked killer and a mounting body count.

It begins on a dark and stormy night with the brutal murder of one of Christian Haute Couture's models, a woman with so much dirt on everyone that multiple characters look like they're about to explode when her diary suddenly turns up right before the latest fashion show.

As the victims start piling up-in the film's most brutal scene, a young woman's face is pushed into a burning-hot furnace grate-the police try to puzzle out the whodunnit as the movie slowly reveals the mechanics of its mad crimes, building to a twist ending that other thrillers have been stealing ever since.

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7 Glamorously Gruesome Movies That Combine Horror And High Fashion

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We were so dazzled by the trailer for In Fabric - the latest from retro-thriller specialist Peter Strickland (The Duke of Burgundy, Berberian Sound Studio); it's about a fabulous dress that curses its new owner - that we started thinking about other horror movies that take inspiration from the fashion world.

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The Rise of Feminist Horror, by Lou Tremblay

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About the Author: I am currently studying Cinema and Communications in the ALC program. This essay was written in the context of my Explorations in Cinema class where we got the freedom to write about any type of media that resonated with us.

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Men, Women, and Chain Saws : Gender in the Modern Horror Film - Updated Edition

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Men, Women, and Chain Saws : Gender in the Modern Horror Film - Updated Edition

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From its first publication in 1992, Men, Women, and Chain Saws has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Although such movies have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to their mostly male audiences, Clover demonstrates that they align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the females tormented--notably the slasher movie's "final girls"--as they endure fear and degradation before rising to save themselves. The lesson was not lost on the mainstream industry, which was soon turning out the formula in well-made thrillers. Including a new preface by the author, this Princeton Classics edition is a definitive work that has found an avid readership from students of film theory to major Hollywood filmmakers.

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/UAL/detail.action?docID=1910581

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The Male Gaze: This is a core concept in feminist film theory, used to describe how films are often constructed from the perspective of male directors and audiences. In horror films, the male gaze may manifest as the excessive objectification and sexualization of female bodies, reflecting unequal gender perspectives.

Final Girl: The final girl, a recurring character in horror films, is typically the last surviving female character who often displays qualities of strength, independence, and intelligence to confront evil. Some feminist perspectives view the final girl as a symbol of female resilience, while others argue that she is still influenced by the male gaze.

Gender Power Relations: The fear and threats in horror films are often related to gender power dynamics, which can involve threats to women's bodies or power. Feminist theory focuses on these power relations and seeks to analyze gender inequalities in films.