Theory Summaries

Final Girl:

The final girl refers to the last remaining female survivor in a horror film, typically in slasher survival films. She is typically the one to confront the antagonist in the film’s final act. She is a conventional character and carries typical tropes, which include but are not limited to; being a virgin, being innocent, being resourceful and innovative and being someone the audience feels sympathy and roots for in the context of the story. She is also someone the audience relates with, as she is the moral compass for the group and is relatively normal in comparison to other characters such as the “slutty blonde girl”. 

Feminist, Carol Clover created the theory of the Final Girl and discovered that this changed audience’s views on female characters. Females are typically seen as victims and/or are sexualized with horror films usually being male centred.  Carol J Clover, a feminist who studied slasher films came to the realisation that the final girl changed the idea that women are constantly being sexualized and or victimized as they essentially play the hero roles in their respective stories. However, there have been criticisms of how this theory has become very typical and predictable in our contemporary society as the final girl trope is used quite frequently in horror films.

An example of a final girl would be Sidney Prescott in the first Scream movie. Sidney supports Carol Clovers theory as she is a very capable and smart character, having survived through four films. She exhibits strength, intelligence and vigilance in each of these movies.

How horror has changed:

Horror began as fables and tales told by different tribes long before technology was created. As time went on, these different stories were then made into literature which was then adapted into film. In the 1930’s, horror films were based off such literature Dracula and Frankenstein. In the 1950’s to 1960’s, alien and monster movies became the mainstream and were extremely popular. These movies were created to take away the fear created by the cold war and acted as an escape from the cruel reality. These movies allowed humans to feel in control and gave them that sense of peace they craved. In the 1970’s, there was an added sense of realism in these films as most of them were movies about serial killers and home invasion as this is what most of them found scary, most likely due to the fact that it could easily happen to us. Films like Psycho were created during this time. In the 1980’s, slashers were the most popular of horror films such as Nightmare on Elm Street. There was a much higher use of special effects in film, creating monsters in films such as An American Werewolf in London and The Thing. The 90’s had a higher saturation of psychological horrors such as The Blair Witch Project which kick-started this sub-genre of horror. The 2000’s have used much more religious connotations in films such as The Day After Tomorrow and Final Destination, with this idea of “inescapable death”. There has also been this idea of comedy horror, which came into play. I believe that nowadays, there is this demand for horror movies to be more creative and different as to not be oversaturated by over used plot devices and tropes, movies as Cabin in the Woods addresses this issue very well.

Horror movies I believe has to keep up with what is popular in our society. It is always evolving as to not become repetitive and boring, hence why new sub-genres and ideas are being created, in order to keep audiences captivated.

The Male Gaze:

The gaze is a term in film theory to describe how the audience looks at visual representations. The term “male gaze” is a feminist film theory which suggests a sexualized way of looking at women, usually used to satisfy the heterosexual viewer by empowering men and objectifying women. The female is visually positioned usually as an object of heterosexual desire with her emotions and personality being less important to the male. They are to be looked at more than anything else as they are the spectacle of the film, depending on context.

The Male gaze can be identified in situations whereby the camera is positioned in way that allows us to “gaze” at the female characters body. The first Transformers movie does quite frequently with the character Mikaela Banes played by Megan Fox, a popular sex icon. Filmmakers nowadays attempt to keep female characters from being only sexual objects so they give them their own motivations, backstory and character development. However, the male gaze could still be present, even in these cases. Wonder Woman in the critically acclaimed film “Wonder Woman” falls into this, as whilst she is the protagonist of the story with her own goals and being the driving force of the story, she is still a visual spectacle, something for the heterosexual viewer to look at.

The question on whether there is a female equivalent to the male gaze is subjective, although some argue that there is not. Some say that despite there being very attractive men in cinema, the point of the male gaze is to produce power imbalance and to show how in our real life society, the female gender is sexually objectified. Therefore, to argue, in this sense, there cannot be a female version of the male gaze.

What do zombies represent?

Zombies are undead beings that feed off human flesh and brains, which results in that person turning into a zombie themselves. A virus in an experiment gone wrong usually creates them, but this depends on context. The deeper meaning behind zombies also changes in different contexts and there are varying opinions on them.

With some research I’ve conducted as well as my own personal opinion, I believe that zombies represent humans and our constant greed as a society as well as how dangerous we really are. We as humans have desires, desires that need to be satisfied and sometimes we go too far to have get these desires. In the original Dawn of the Dead for example the plot involves survivors taking surviving in a mall that is eventually swarmed by zombies. This movie represents consumerism and how we become mindless in this sense. There is even an image of a store during black Friday, which perfectly mirrors a scene with zombies in Dawn of the Dead.

However, horror movies now a days tend to focus on the survival aspect of a zombie apocalypse when society collapses. In the TV show the walking dead, the human survivors are just, if not more, dangerous than the zombies as a result of their violent nature. They adopt a “kill or be killed” mentality and do whatever it takes to survive. This is a very good social commentary on the extent humans will go to get what they desire. How violent will we become? Who are the real monsters? There is even a scene in The Walking Dead where the protagonist Rick has no choice but to bite off the throat of one of the survivors after their group is about to rape and kill his son. This scene perfectly illustrates the idea that we as humans can turn into savages if it gets us what we want. This applies even to today’s society albeit less dramatic most likely.

To conclude, I believe that zombies are in fact a deeper look into what we as humans actually are when we are pushed to the edge. The monsters we may become in extreme situations.

Postmodern Horror:

Postmodern horror normally challenges views or traditions of the ‘modern’ era, and proposes new ways of thinking in a horror film. This may be through parody or subtle similarities of other forms of media. An example of a postmodern horror film is Cabin in the Woods which starts out as a typical teenage horror film with a group of teens going to the woods but end up having to survive, each with their own stereotypes (the jock, the slut, the virgin, the fool and the smart one). However, it then turns into meta-commentary on the tropes it set up and subverting all horror genres as it turns out there is an organisation that uses means to put civilians in horror movie situations to appease the gods. This could be interpreted as how filmmakers have to keep making new horror movies to please their target audiences but driving away from the typical ideas and tropes we are used to be bad and is what causes negative critical reception to horrors.

The jock is even actually an intelligent person but through some kind of device, the organisation manipulates his personality to turn him into the dumb athlete seen in most horror films. The Cabin in the Woods is such a great example of postmodernism in film as it acknowledges the traditions and tropes of its genre while successfully undermining them and drawing attention to the issues faced for filmmakers in the media institutions.