Unleash your inner horror film critic through this deep dive into feminist film theory. Through the works of Carol J. Clover, Laura Mulvey, and Martine Beugnet, explore key concepts such as gender theory of the lens, audience self-identification with on-screen characters, and the trope of the “Final Girl.” Additionally this horror filled post concludes with tricks and treats on how to locate material for your own spine-tingling research. Do you have what it takes to survive like the famous Final Girls of the 1970s and 1980s–Sally Hardesty (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Laurie Strode (Halloween), and Ripley Allen (Alien)?
Caution–this post contains spoilers for Psycho (1960); enter at your own peril!
Carol J. Clover argues in “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film” that a lack of innovation within film criticism results in characters being taken “on the face of it.” The audience, or spectator, self identifies along traditional gender lines–males identify with on-screen males, females identify with on-screen females. This occurs due to the lag in deeper criticism, specifically within the horror genre. However, a deeper understanding of spectator self-identification reveals that both male and female spectators identify with the male character. This relationship between audience and screen results in the feedback loop where:
…men gaze at women, who become objects of the gaze; the spectator, in turn, is made to identify with this male gaze, and to objectify the women on the screen; and the camera’s original “gaze” comes into play in the very act of filming.
This observation builds off of Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” where she argues that films are structured around the heterosexual “male gaze.”
According to Martine Beugnet and Laura Mulvey, “The limit between the body and the world…in terms of existential ease or horror, awesome or awful encounters with inanimate ‘things,’ inherence in the world or alienation from it.” This existential horror experienced by the spectator, through the heterosexual male perspective, alongside the self-identification along traditional gender lines legitimizes “impulses towards sexual violence in males and encourages victimization in females.” Clover includes discourse from both sides of the argument of “cross-gender” identification, specifically whether women self-identify with their on-screen film counterparts, or rather, in a betrayal of their own sex, they identify with the men on screen.
Such a film where the loyalty of the female audience may “betray” their own sex is Psycho (1960). Spectator loyalty temporarily shifts from that of Marion Crane to Norman Bates, until the final reveal. Female characters can serve as devices intended to disrupt homoeroticism, where they break up male relationships in which one male behaves in a “feminine” manner. Often the feminine male character meets a similar fate as the female who dares to defy the yoke of proscriptive, submissive femininity. Crane does not disrupt homoeroticism, but she does serve as a catalyst for the struggle faced by Bates and men who lived against societal standards. Bates’s character arc embodies the internal struggle of external pressures placed upon men to act and behave in a more stereotypical masculine manner. Bates is introduced in the film as a stuttering, shy man–qualities associated with virginal women. Balancing these feminine qualities, is a level of implied masculine brutality through the taxidermy Bates creates. However, Bates fails to balance the feminine and masculine, as well as representing the harm that can take place when faced with living within a more rigid, masculine, patriarchal society and the inability to fully live out one’s authentic self. The internal struggle results in Bates having a dissociative personality–“Mother.” The Mother personality is the one who commits murderous acts, flies into a rage, and upholds a strict, rigid, and warped sense of morality; Mother forbids Bates from dining with Crane because of Crane’s seeming lack of morals. Further, Clover argues that the killer, or monster, reads as feminine by the spectator, down to the setting of the murder. Bates lives in a dark, remote area near a swamp. Many of the murders on-screen take place within dark, dank environments. Crane is stabbed to death in the shower and her body sunk into the swamp; Arbogast, a private investigator, is pushed down a dark canal–a staircase–to his demise. Both settings fit within “the ‘intrauterine’ quality of the Terrible Place, dark and often damp, in which the killer lives or lurks and whence he stages his most terrifying attacks,” according to Clover.
Romantic relationships depicted through the lens and on the screen are often of traditional heterosexual partnerships. Female characters are depicted through submissive femininity, and those who dare to deviate often meet bloody ends, like Marion Crane in Psycho (1960). In the beginning of the film, Crane steals money from her employer and leaves town with the intention of paying off the debts of her boyfriend, Sam Loomis. Crane believes this is the cause of a delayed engagement and marriage. In these aspects Crane deviates from societal standards for women–participation in extramarital intercourse (as implied by the early scenes of her with Loomis), theft, and an unmarried status. Before Crane can rectify her actions, she is brutally murdered in the motel.
Mulvey’s future of feminist film theory includes non-commodified corporealities and desires of women explored on screen–”the crossroads between the beautiful and the abject…” Beugnet further expands on Mulvey’s theory:
There is no doubt that the reworking of the conventions of the genres of excess, including the appropriation of a cinematographic language that breaks away from the safe standardized visions and set tropes of mainstream cinema, opens a space where a subversive, abject femininity can be explored, one that refutes the normalizing power of commodification and spectacle.
Clover continues this argument through the exploration of the “Final Girl” found in slasher films. The Final Girl typically embodies “intelligen[ce], watchful[ness], and levelheaded[ness].” She is one of the first characters introduced, and she is the first character to sense that something is amiss, and notes the patterns in the increasing volume of evidence of an existing threat. The Final Girl’s perspective is the closest to that of the spectator in the context of the near omniscient knowledge of the situation. The Final Girl manages to subvert the relationship between spectator and lens, where self-identification shifts from that of the antagonist (killer) to that of the Final Girl. The perspective of the camera reinforces the shift in allegiance through the shift in the point of view from that of the killer to that of the Final Girl by the film’s conclusion. “We are in the closet with her, watching with her eyes the knife blade stab through the door…with her, we become…the agent of his expulsion from the narrative vision.” Through this argument, gender is a permeable membrane allowing for cross-gender self-identification, where male spectators identify with the on-screen heroine by the film’s end.
Final Girls such as Sally Hardesty (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Laurie Strode (Halloween), and Ripley Allen (Alien) break from the traditional submissive femininity
through their fight for survival, in essence reclaiming control of the narrative.
Despite the strides that such Final Girls created in gender permeability for self-identification, Clover states that the horror film “stubbornly genders the killer male and the principal victim female.” The male-killer, female-victim is attributed to theory from Sigmund Freud, specifically that of bodily fright. The bodily fright, Clover argues, derives not only from repressed content but also from bodily manifestations of the repressed. This is communicated to the spectator through violations of the female body such as Marion Crane’s gruesome murder by Norman Bates. Brandishing a knife, Bates brutally stabs Crane to death in the infamous “shower scene,” arguably symbolic of his own sexual repression.
Although the gendered dichotomy of killer-victim seems rigid, Clover posits that the genders on film contain more flexibility than what is initially perceived. The killer’s weapon typically acts as a phallic symbol, and while it can be argued that the violation represents sexual repression, Clover further delves into the symbolism of the connection between Final Girl and killer. A shared masculinity links the Final Girl and killer, but also a Freudian femininity–that of literal or symbolic castration of the killer. When the Final Girl delivers bodily harm to the killer, she mans herself, while unmanning an oppressor whose masculinity was in question. Psycho (1960) fails to provide the spectator with a true Final Girl. Lila Crane, despite surviving an attack from Mother, only does so with the assistance of Sam Loomis. She lacks the opportunity within the plot to become “phallicized,” where the horror ends and normality is restored.
Additionally, abject terror within the horror genre is gendered as female, and the more the film is focused on abject terror, the more likely the victim reads as female by the spectator. As in Psycho (1960), more time is spent with the female victim than the male victim. Nearly half of the film follows Marion Crane before her murder, and the on-screen depiction of her murder lasts approximately 45 seconds compared to the sudden and swift murder scene of Arbogast.
An aspect of abject terror manifested on-screen is gender ambiguity. The Final Girl, Clover concludes, survives and is the hero because she vacillates between the masculine and feminine. The masculine qualities she possesses enable her to defend herself against the fatal, penetrative phallus of the murder weapon; she may be stabbed, conveying her weak femininity, but she ultimately survives because of her masculinity. “She is a physical female and a characterological androgyne: like her name, not masculine but either/or, both, ambiguous.”
Take a stab at locating our resources:
-JSTOR: Via the UCA Torreyson Library home page, hover your cursor on the Research Tools tab, then select Databases A to Z. Select the letter J, then select JSTOR! Using JSTOR, you may search the topic of your choice for papers written for the arts and humanities disciplines, including film criticism. For this essay, I searched for articles using “Laura Mulvey” and “Carol J. Clover” as search or keyword terms. Other applicable search terms include “feminist film theory” or “final girl.” Pro tip: Use the Refine Results feature to limit the amount of results generated from your search; this can save you time when finding resources for your assignment.
-Psycho (1960): Via the UCA Torreyson Library home page, enter “psycho” into the search bar. About 57,900 results are generated from that keyword search! Using the left sidebar, limit your search by clicking the box for Video. This will reduce your search results to 9 catalog offerings within the library. The first search result is Psycho (1960). By selecting the catalog record, you can verify if this is the correct film you wish to locate and borrow by viewing the descriptive data including cast information. Pro tip: You may also see if the item is available, the call number, and the location of the item in the Access Options box.
- “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (eBook): Via the UCA Torreyson Library home page, enter “her body, himself: gender in the slasher film” into the search bar. The search generates 10 results! Full-text access of the original article is available, but if you want to take a deeper dive into film theory, scroll until you see result number 5, Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, edited by Sue Thornham. This work includes “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film” by Carol J. Clover as Chapter 17. In the Access Options box, select View eBook. Pro tip: Look at the descriptive information of the book, specifically the Contents section to view the titles and authors of the other chapters to see if they could drive your research progress.
