Visual Violence Against Women in Hollywood

Abstract

Slashers, a subdivision of horror peaked during the 1900s, had a lasting impact in the cinematic world as a wide range of audience continues to watch them today. Often centered around a masked killer that targeted their audience against female victims, an explosion of cinematic violence against women prevailed. Though young white males were initially the targeted audience, females craved slashers as well due to the genre’s features of enabling them to acquire masculine traits, such as anger, frustrations and violence by overturning stereotypical gender roles propelled by women’s movement during the period. Through diving into various elements of slashers, including motives of killers, reasons behind the audience’s crave for slashers, characteristics of the survivors and the symbolic utilizations of pre-technological weapons in the genre, this paper examines this violence through contrasting typical female victims with the Final Girl, who becomes the only one that survived the seeming impossible. Aspects of film and literary theories, gender studies, and psychoanalysis were examined throughout research.