Essays

By Bryan DiTolvo

Now that our Controllers have stepped up their false flag operations (sending their mind controlled patsies crashing into IRS buildings, strolling up to the Pentagon with firearms brandished, sticking bombs in their underpants and boarding airplanes) in order to garner the nearly-braindead public's support for demonizing peaceful dissent and shutting down freedom of speech once and for all, conspiracy researchers have once again hit the top of society's shit list (number one with a bullet, you might say, as it's only a matter of time before they begin rounding us up and gunning us down).

Despite this stigma, women sometimes observe the goings-on in the male dominated conspiracy theory universe and think to themselves, "I want to play, too." So they try, but it usually only takes one time calling into the Alex Jones show and getting yelled at before they throw in the towel. What they don't know is that before there was Alex Jones, Alan Watt, David Icke, or even the sainted William Cooper (R.I.P.), there was Edith Starr Miller...

By Heidi Martinuzzi and Amanda Reyes

We went through the best and worst Christmas movies ever, and picked out the most awesome females from each film for your holiday enjoyment. There are so many wonderful bad horror Christmas movies, it'll make you cry tears. Tears of AWESOME...

The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror By Donato Totaro

One of the more important, if not groundbreaking, accounts/recuperations of the horror film from a feminist perspective is the 1993 Carol Clover's "Men, Women, and Chainsaws". One of the book's major points concerns the structural positioning of what she calls the Final Girl in relation to spectatorship. While most theorists label the horror film as a male-driven/male-centered genre, Clover points out that in most horror films, especially the slasher film, the audience, male and female, is structurally 'forced' to identify with the resourceful young female (the Final Girl) who survives the serial attacker and usually ends the threat (until the sequel anyway.) So while the narratively dominant killer's subjective point of view may be male within the narrative,the male viewer is still rooting for the Final Girl to overcome the killer. We can see this operating archetypically in Halloween (Jamie Lee Curtis, 1978), Friday the 13th (Betsy Palmer, 1980), Eyes of a Stranger (Jennifer Jason Leigh, 1981), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (Heather Langenkamp, 1984)...

Monstrous Feminism and the Avenging Amazon By Paula Graham

On the whole, feminists and lesbians tend to treat the figure of the Amazon as a positive trope for lesbianism and/or feminism. On the one hand, she has the 'masculine' characteristics of strength, physicality and activity and, on the other, she is female-oriented. Her combination of male and female characteristics apparently undermines the exclusivity of gender categories. Her 'chastity' combined with her 'phallic' physicality has obvious lesbian implications. She is perceived by many lesbians and feminists as both 'positive' and 'subversive'...

Lips of Blood: Female sexuality and desire in the modern vampire film By Brigid Cherry

The vampire in film has always been associated with elements of sexuality and morality. This association between vampirism and sexuality is related to the violation of taboos, but more importantly allows the identification of the other which is then repressed. Erotic and sexual characteristics are equated with vampirism, which for the female character - who is herself other and therefore subject to repression - means that to embrace the vampire is to embrace sexuality. For that, a forbidden act for the woman who is constrained by patriarchy to suppress her sexuality, she is punished - she is or becomes the vampire and dies, frequently staked through the heart. She is contrasted strongly and starkly with the heroine, the victim who remains coded as virginal, who is therefore pure and can be returned to normality at the climax of the film...

Bisexual Horror: Gaze and Desire in David DeCoteau’s The Sisterhood by Heidi Martinuzzi

Traditionally, horror films have been made for a straight, white, male audience. Most film studios release their horror movies with young males, aged 14-22, in mind and tend to create storylines to accommodate their perceived tastes; gratuitous amounts of blood and sexualized female nudity. While mainstream cinema has included gay storylines and filmmakers in increasing numbers in recent years, horror movies have invariably catered to a static audience and excluded gay characters (except as villains and comic relief.) This reluctance to sell and make queer horror movies has relegated those films to low-budget releasing and production budgets through select studios like Here!...

Welcome to Finals Week, inspired by real life college finals! We'll have a new academic paper on horror films every day this week!

Gender Roles within Scary Movies by Alex Boles

“What’s your favorite scary movie, Sidney?”

These words haunted American society for at least five years when Scream, Scream 2 and Scream 3 were released in 1996, 1997 and 2000 respectively. At least, the words haunted middle-aged women home alone in their big houses in the middle of nowhere scared to answer the phone at night. The fear and portrayal of women also allowed stereotypes and other characters to form for the future of women roles in scary movies. Sidney, played by Neve Campbell, says at the beginning of the first Scream film after receiving a phone call from one of the killers, that there is no point in watching scary movies because they all display the same representation of women...

Horror author Sarah Langan's new essay "Why I Write Horror" was just published in the Spring, 2008 issue of the St. John's Humanities Review. Read it here!

I have been reading a lot about women in horror and what exactly their role is in regards to film, literature, art, and media. I have read several pieces waxing philosophic about what horror means to a woman from both male and female standpoints. There are articles exploring feminism and the roles that are cast for women in horror films; especially during this new rash of Hollywood-violence that has America turned on its ear.

Didn’t we go through this during the eighties? Apparently Americans have selective amnesia. If anything, this newest craze of blood-drenched, torturous, and re-hashed horror films has proven that controversy, sex, and a "big name" can sell you pretty much anything; and more than once, at that. At any rate this is a valid subject and it should be addressed. However, I would like to touch upon something on a smaller scale, but no less important.

Motherhood and horror.

By Mark H. Harris, Creator, Webmaster, Resident Ass of BlackHorrorMovies.com

Black women in cinematic history have long faced the double-barreled Hollywood stigma of race and gender "otherness", their fleeting moment of glory coming in the '90s when "You go, girl!" was introduced into the popular lexicon. On the more formal level of Oscar recognition, meanwhile, the black female images thus far celebrated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have been limited to "the three 'M's": mammies (Hattie McDaniel), mystics (Whoopi Goldberg), and mammaries (Halle Berry)...