Blog post written by Liberation is Lit's intern, Kendra Nunnery! As first posted on the Substack The Modest Solid Blog
Happy Halloween readers! I hope you enjoy this special spooky edition of my rambling. This post will also contain very small spoilers for the following horror movies: Psycho (1960), Friday the 13th (both the 1980 and 2009 versions), and Terrifier (2016). This post also mentions graphic and sexual violence against women, so please read at your own discretion! Nothing is shown, but some clips from films are linked/described.
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As a self-proclaimed horror aficionado, October has quickly become one of my favorite months. If I’m not cramming for the upcoming end of the semester, I can usually be found watching my favorite horror flicks with any free time I do have on my phone or playing horror games on my Nintendo Switch. In preparation for the spooky 31st day, my entire month of October is dedicated to engaging with horror media.
I think I like horror so much because it engages with a part of my psyche I don’t often get to experience: fear. My life, as chaotic as it is at times, is carefully crafted to avoid the things I fear. I don’t like crowds, so I avoid them by being a homebody. I don’t like loud noises or sudden sounds, so I keep my college shenanigans to a very, very scarce bare minimum. I can count on exactly one hand how many times I’ve willingly been to college bars with sticky floors and strange smells. I thrive in the mundane, in my weekly routine of internship, grad school classes, rest, and repeat. I say this not to paint myself as a depressed homebody, but to illustrate the almost clinical control I have over my life. I think that’s why I find the horror genre so fascinating in the first place; characters often experience a spiral, a loss of control that no other genre can quite encapsulate.
However, as horror movies slowly began to diversify their stories, I’ve found my enjoyment of the old classics waning. The infamous shower scene in the horror classic Psycho does not scare me anymore; it only makes me feel uncomfortable in the kind of way that feels voyeuristic. The scene is shot in such a way that Marion is always exposed. Bloody and naked, Marion’s stabbing goes on for an agonizing 2 minutes. Normally, my ‘critical thinking about pop culture’ feelers would be shut off while watching a schlocky horror film, but perhaps the times have hardened me, or I’ve grown from the last time I watched it.
To say Alfred Hitchcock’s film was groundbreaking would be an understatement. The film set the precedent for many other of the horror greats: Halloween, the Scream franchise, and Silence of the Lambs, just to name a notable few. It also radically changed how sexuality and the female body were portrayed in film. From then on, the horror film genre seemed to teem with a sort of psychosexual violence against women; Barrymore is killed within the first few minutes of Scream after a flirtatious opening with the killers, Jason Voorhees specifically targets a sexually promiscuous couple as his first victims both in the original Friday the 13th from the ‘80s and the Friday the 13th (2009) version, and in Terrifier, female victims are tortured and killed much more graphically than their male counterparts.
The victimization of women has become so prominent in the horror genre that the trope has gained a name, at least for their leads: the Final Girl. The Final Girl trope is common, especially within the golden age of slasher horror flicks. Think of your titular leads like Laurie Strode, Alice, and Sidney Prescott. It typically describes when there is only one final, female character left—often the lead—confronting the male slasher. The final girl also, most importantly, doesn’t normally engage in any sexual actions in the film. It’s just her, her smarts, and the slasher.
I think what has drawn me away from the famous horror classics is how they portray their women. On one hand, if a female character is sexually promiscuous, they are swiftly punished. There’s a perverted sort of punishment that can be seen in movies where female characters are having sex just before the killer gets them: graphic, brutal, gory depictions of women being stabbed in vulnerable positions, with little to no clothing. On the other hand, if the character is the final girl, she has to face the tall, almost Goliath-esque slasher knowing she may be killed, or worse. It plays on the real fear that all women face: the fear that violence may be perpetrated against them by an overwhelmingly masculine and uncontrollable force. Whether that fear is being killed, tortured, or even a sexual crime, it mirrors a very uncomfortable reality that all women have to live in every day.
Whether this was purposeful or not, I can’t say. I don’t think Hitchcock was in the writing room for Psycho with a perverted fantasy of punishing ‘sexually promiscuous’ women for decades to come. Even less so when you remember that movie was actually based on a book first. But I do think the horror movie genre is shifting (and has already shifted) from this tired narrative of virginal final girls and masculine slashers. The golden age of the slasher is long gone, relegated to reruns on cable movie channels that my dad insists we still need, even though everything is subscription-based now.
More recently, I find my gaze turning to the subversion of these tropes or completely new stories altogether. Jordan Peele’s Us and Get Out alight new perspectives on the fears of racism that I’ve never seen in the horror genre. Pearl and Midsommer, while not specifically falling within the final girl trope, do depict female leads in a unique twist. Longlegs is both darkly funny and profoundly disturbing. One of my favorites, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, tells the story of an already dead girl seeking revenge from beyond the grave.
Needless to say, I could go on and on about the landscape of modern horror. While the issue hasn't totally disappeared, directors and authors are finding alternate ways to evoke the feeling of fear without resorting to violence against women. That’s not to say I’m completely against violence in horror films; it’s the exaggerated gore in some films that often makes it fun, if a bit cheesy. I do think, however, we have moved passed the tired tropes of ‘virgin final girl’ and ‘sexually promiscuous first victim.’
After all, the draw of horror is that it can scare anyone, not just women.
