{"id":213,"date":"2019-01-29T16:40:59","date_gmt":"2019-01-29T21:40:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/?p=213"},"modified":"2019-01-29T16:42:45","modified_gmt":"2019-01-29T21:42:45","slug":"duality-seen-through-women-in-the-horror-genre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/2019\/01\/29\/duality-seen-through-women-in-the-horror-genre\/","title":{"rendered":"Duality Seen Through Women in the Horror Genre"},"content":{"rendered":"

After reading Creed’s article on the sexualization of the feminine in the horror genre, and continuing to read A Head Full of Ghosts<\/em>,\u00a0a movie I had previously watched came to mind entitled\u00a0It Follows <\/em>(trailer<\/a>).\u00a0I believe this movie simultaneously reinforces and rejects Creed’s claims of the horror genre’s stereotypical “feminine evil – beautiful on the outside\/corrupt within” in an interesting way.<\/p>\n

The movie summed up (with no spoilers) is about a girl, Jay, who inherits a sexually transmitted “disease” that comes in the form of the possessed trying to kill her, only seen by those who have this same STD\/curse. She is told from her sexual assailant that the only way she can get rid of the possessed killer is to pass the STD on to somebody else. The catch is that if the person who she passes it on to dies, the killer will come back to get her. The killer can come in any form, a family member, a friend, or a stranger and the only way to identify them is that they walk slowly towards you and try to kill you.<\/p>\n

It Follows<\/em> reinforces Creed’s claim that the horror genre relies on the sexualization of women and the exaggerated duality of their innocent outside and corrupted inside. In the movie, Jay is introduced as an innocent teenage girl just wanting to find a decent boyfriend. Jay meets a boy and the two go on a picturesque date, a movie spiced with sexual tension. The two then spend some alone time together which ultimately leads to a consensual sex scene. Her date then precedes to drug her and relocate her to an abandoned building where he informs her of the STD he has gave her. This quickly moving plot flips Jay into a sexual deviant, more or less suggesting that her consequence of this deviancy is an STD (baffling, I know). Many of Creed’s points are seen\/validated in the exposition of this film as the woman’s innocence is contorted and how a strict male gaze is enforced upon her, not only for his benefit but for the audience’s as well.<\/p>\n

However, most of film’s remaining plot rejects Creed’s claim by building Jay herself to be the one who tackles her “indirect possession” (that taking the form of the stalking killer) instead of a male force as seen in many horror films. Though Jay eventually enlists the help of her friends, both male and female, it is ultimately her that needs to take on the demon. She is more or less alone in the effort to kill the demon once and for all because she is the only one who can see it. This detail is where I see\u00a0It Follows<\/em> rejecting the established horror tropes of sexualized women. Instead of relying on the powerful male presence to defeat evil, Jay uses both male and female friends, and more importantly herself, to take on the evil presented by the film. Whereas\u00a0The Exorcist<\/em> and\u00a0A Head Full of Ghosts<\/em> have external male powers attempting to defeat evil (religious clergymen),\u00a0It Follows<\/em> has a combination of internal (Jay) and external male and<\/span> female powers combating the possessed.<\/p>\n

Spoiler ahead:<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the end of movie finds one of Jay’s friends, male, nabbing the final kill of the demon.\u00a0It Follows\u00a0<\/em>tries to subvert the horror tropes it is critiquing but ultimately relies on them to tie the movie up and bring it to a close. It is interesting to see when horror films try to turn the horror genre on its head by characterizing the female as the one who rids evil instead of a male (see\u00a0Nightmare on Elm Street<\/a><\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0Hellraiser II<\/em><\/a>), but these still rely on some male force to drive the plot to an end.<\/em>\u00a0I can see future horror films trying to portray women as the ones who “take care of business” but I have yet to see one that does it one hundred percent without sexualizing the protagonist (a la\u00a0Kill Bill<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>or\u00a0Buffy the Vampire Slayer<\/em><\/a>). Let me know if you know of any that do so effectively.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After reading Creed’s article on the sexualization of the feminine in the horror genre, and continuing to read A Head Full of Ghosts,\u00a0a movie I had previously watched came to mind entitled\u00a0It Follows (trailer).\u00a0I believe this movie simultaneously reinforces and rejects Creed’s claims of the horror genre’s stereotypical “feminine evil – beautiful on the outside\/corrupt …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":229,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-d"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paB9Ga-3r","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/229"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":218,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213\/revisions\/218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}