Communications in Humanities Research
- The Open Access Proceedings Series for Conferences
Communications in Humanities Research
Vol. 23, 20 December 2023
Open
Access | Article
Visual Violence Against Women in Hollywood
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Abstract
Slashers, a subdivision of horror peaked during the 1900s, had a lasting impact in the cinematic world as a wide range of audience continues to watch them today. Often centered around a masked killer that targeted their audience against female victims, an explosion of cinematic violence against women prevailed. Though young white males were initially the targeted audience, females craved slashers as well due to the genre’s features of enabling them to acquire masculine traits, such as anger, frustrations and violence by overturning stereotypical gender roles propelled by women’s movement during the period. Through diving into various elements of slashers, including motives of killers, reasons behind the audience’s crave for slashers, characteristics of the survivors and the symbolic utilizations of pre-technological weapons in the genre, this paper examines this violence through contrasting typical female victims with the Final Girl, who becomes the only one that survived the seeming impossible. Aspects of film and literary theories, gender studies, and psychoanalysis were examined throughout research.
Keywords
Horror, Slashers, Final Girl, Film Studies
References
1. Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations, vol. 20. Special Issue: Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy, Autumn, 1987.
2. Nummenmaa, Lauri. “Psychology and Neurobiology of Horror Movies.” PsyArXiv, 2021.
3. Kaplan, Ann E. “Is the gaze male?” Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera, Routledge, 1990.
4. Staiger, Janet. “The Slasher, the Final Girl and the Anti-Denouement.” In Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film, 2015.
5. Lauretis, Teresa De. Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Indiana University Press, 1984.
Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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- Volume Title
- Proceedings of the International Conference on Global Politics and Socio-Humanities
- ISBN (Print)
- 978-1-83558-241-1
- ISBN (Online)
- 978-1-83558-242-8
- Published Date
- 20 December 2023
- Series
- Communications in Humanities Research
- ISSN (Print)
- 2753-7064
- ISSN (Online)
- 2753-7072
- DOI
- 10.54254/2753-7064/23/20230614
- Copyright
- 20 December 2023
- Open Access
- This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited