Portrayal of Women Changed in Horror Films Since The 1920’s

Introduction:

Fear is the most powerful emotion in the human race and fear of the unknown is probably the most ancient. You’re dealing with stuff that everybody has felt; from being little babies we’re frightened of the dark, we’re frightened of the unknown. If you’re making a horror film you get to play with the audiences feelings.

The main purpose of horror films is to entertain, frighten and to invoke our repressed worst fears, in a terrifying and shocking way, while captivating and entertaining us at the same time. Horror films feature a wide range of styles, from the use of shadows and mise-en-scene within the early classic horrors films to the psychotic human serial killer and CGI monsters and aliens present in today’s horror movies.

The horror film genre is nearly as old as cinema, with the first silent short film directed by Georges Melies in 1896: Le Manoir du Diable. It only lasted for a few minutes and the audience adored it and it left them wanting more due to the way he made supernatural events the main aspect of this film. German filmmakers started to produce horror films and the first feature length vampire horror film was F.W Murnau’s Nosferatu released in 1922. However it was down to the genius work of Robert Wiene director of The Cabinet of Dr. Calligari released in 1920 that lead the way for the ‘serious’ horror films. In the early 1930’s the Universal studios created the modern horror film genre and brought a series of successful gothic-horror including Dracula directed by Tod Browning and Frankenstein directed by James Whale and both were released in 1931 followed by numerous sequels. In the 1950’s the horror film genre shifted from gothic to more modern horror. Aliens and monsters threatened to take over the world and humanity had to try and overcome the threats of these invasions. In the late fifties horror films became gorier which saw the remakes of traditional horror stories such as Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher & The Raven which starred the iconic actor Vincent Price.

The early 1960’s took the audience much deeper into the world of horror films, with the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960 which used a human as the monster and killer instead of a supernatural one to scare audiences. According to Prince (2004), the deeply disturbing admission, which undermines the audiences belief in rationality, with an existence where terms can be controlled or at the very up-most understood. With it’s savage attack on the audience and belief system, Psycho provided the path for modern horror and for our contemporary sense of the world. It seems that Monsters today are everywhere, and they can not be destroyed. (Prince, 2004.p. 4)

The psychological aspects that this can cause on the viewers is it can allow them to find their “Dark, unnatural, hidden self.” (Skal, 1993, p.17).This is because:

So much of our imaginative life in the twentieth century has been devoted to peeling back the masks and scabs of civilisation, to finding, cultivating and projecting nightmare images of the secret self (Skal, 1993, p.18)

This means that changing and developing the monster into a psychotic killer, externalises the viewer’s fear as the murderer could be anyone they know, right down to the person sat next to them in the audience in the cinema or at home. It makes the film seem more realistic and that it could actually happen to them. Tudor 1989, uses key words to explain how the viewer is feeling and shows how they move from an ‘external’ threat, ‘monsters are not real, so this won’t happen to me’, to an ‘internal’ threat, the killer seen as a human and ‘could be anyone they know’. This moves them from a sense of ‘security’ to ‘paranoia’.