Issues of Representation of gender in the horror genre

Like every other genre, Horror as a medium has always stuck to certain rules and conventions that have created stereotypes and structures that we have become associated with. One of these stereotypes commonly put forward is that of horror having a reactionary agenda in terms of the genders (commonly with women being objectified, weak and in a damsel in distress role whilst the men are head strong, objectifiers and commonly actually play the roles of the monsters themselves). Throughout this essay I shall seek to analyse this stereotype to see just how valid it is.

First of all we must recognise a basic structure of horror that largely owes its conception back to the ‘slasher’ films of the late 70s and the 80s starting all the way back in Halloween. Typically there will be a small list of main characters (largely in their teens or considered young by society’s standards) of which most will be promiscuous and hedonistic except for one girl who is commonly identified as “the final girl”. Whilst the rest are slaughtered by the psychopath/monster; the final girl will largely survive, and fight back against the monster in turn becoming slightly monstrous herself. It is this whole “promiscuity = death” ideology reflected in the horror genre that has propagated for many the reactionary stereotype. However is this an implied intention of the genre or simply a misreading on part of the audience?

John Carpenter (director of Halloween) claims that it has been a misinterpretation. He claimed that the reason for the deaths of the more sexually active teens in Halloween over Laurie (the virginal and androgynous protagonist of Halloween) is that they were distracted by modern life over their hedonistic life styles, whilst Laurie is smarter due to her being far more observant.  Whilst this is perhaps true, Halloween had created a larger force horror films to come that would perhaps propagate this incorrect image.

One interesting interpretation of the issue of gender representation is the consistency at which characters are indeed promiscuous. It could indeed be argued that the large consistency in which characters engage in sexual behaviour in the horror genre could be an attempt by the individual creators to show sexual conduct as an act of normality and merely part of society having little to no agenda implied upon it. By and large the horror usually begins as an unusual event in the otherwise normal lives of the individual which if anything interrupts their usual lives rather than condemns it, perhaps vilifying the monster for being the interrupting force oppressing the progressive viewpoint.

Whilst this does perhaps create an interesting discussion point, it also does not deny the general nature of the characters. In class we have been studying for instance 3 distinct films in the forms of Halloween, The Shinning and Eden Lake. By and large we see Laurie from Halloween as weak cowering and screaming for help, Wendy (the female lead of ‘The shining’) attempting to be merely a wife and mother whilst cowering from her violent and abusive husband and finally Jenny (The female lead of ‘Eden Lake’) being originally identified as a sex object and until the very end of the film (in which she kills two children) she is identified as also being helpless. The men on the other hand are shown to be monstrous in the form of Mike Myers, Psychotic and abusive in the form of Jack and Brett being violent and largely one minded. Indeed were we to analyse this from a straightforward basis we would gain the impression that women are the weaker and more vulnerable of the genders whilst men are the more controlling and powerful which is certainly a reactionary agenda. With such a large percentage of the horror audience being men as well, perhaps it could be interpreted that this is an attempt at earning more profit merely by reinforcing the ideology of male empowerment in an otherwise more progressive time.

It must however be noted how the final girls eventually become. In all three cases displayed, the final girls all rise to the occasion and fight back against their male oppressors (with Laurie repeatedly killing Mike Myers, Wendy hitting jack with a baseball bat and stabbing his hand and finally Jenny aiming to stab the hand of the man who ultimately does indeed kill her) perhaps signifying a counter attack to the male empowerment idea with the more reactionary female empowerment as all three women change to their times and events to attain more masculine qualities to survive (e.g. violence and in the cases of Jenny and Wendy a paternal like defensive role).

Weighing the arguments back and forth, I would say that Horror as a genre is perhaps more progressive than it is reactionary, however it is largely deniable that there is at least some very reactionary elements within the medium as a whole.

Horror Magazine 1st Draught

1st Draught of Horror Poster

An explanation of the functions of a film distribution company

The role of the film distributor is primarily and promptly to  ensure that the film gets as many views as possible and is "distributed" to the widest number of sources.

The distribution plan will help the producer when  making the different media items used to advertise the film. The distribution plan will focus on what their target audience wants, their potential competition (something of an issue for any distributor due to the increasing number of people illegally downloading movies every year as well as the number of pirate dvds now on the market) , how succesfful have certain elements been in the past and they must seriously capitulate on the advantages of the cinema experience (e.g. the recent trend to have practically every film in 3D) etc and if made correctly should ensure that the marketing plan runs smoothly and effectivly

The Marketing plan should focus on three key areas, advertising, publicty and promotions  to determine how  they are going to target the right audience.

Advertising will usually include trailers, posters, fliers etc, television advertisements etc. Basically anything that directly advertises the film itself as a product of the company.

Promotions will usually work in accordance with another, non film related company. The best example of this is how Disney Pixar often promotes its movies through Mcdonalds which will sell Pixar toys, show images on the happy meal boxes and on their teleivision adverts, advertising both Mcdonalds and Pixar.

 Publicity is usually generated by the Distribution company arranging interviews for the stars and director. This can include things such as televised interviews on some form of talk show, to giving exclusives to a magazine company so that they orient their magazine and focus on the movie product.

In theory if the marketing and distribution plan is stuck to effectivly, the film should be advertised very effectivly.

The difference between a teaser trailer and a theatrical trailer

When advertising a film, we will usually see a teaser trailer that will later be followed by a theatrical trailer.

The teaser trailer is usually meant to entice the audience and create hype for the production without revealing too much information. The idea is to create a sense of intruige to work alongside the advertising campaign
Likewise, a theatrical trailer is usually meant to explain the plot and general themes of the film, allowing the person watching to make an informed descision as to if they want to watch the film or not.

Common themes that the teaser trailer will have in comparrison to the theatrical trailer is the use much faster music, much shorter shots and generally the trailer as a whole will be smaller.
Whilst both the theatrical and the teaser trailer will often use a large title as part of the usual design, the teaser trailer will usually have a much bigger emphasis on the title (at least in how it stays on longer than most shots)

The Shotlist

The Shotlist includes our original ideas for what we were going to shoot. Due to spur of the moment creativity and issues with some of the shots however, it remained only a very loose guideline rather than an unquestionable set of instructions.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

In this modern age, technology has majorly influenced the way in which every form of media is now created, be it from books to films and has forced both time saving and innovating methods to replace the old.

In this evaluation, I shall seek to demonstrate how these new technologies heavily influenced every stage of this project, from the beggining to the end.

Research and Planning

When researching the project, we had to look at the two key areas that our trailer had to be designed, both the movie industry (and of course its trailers as a focus) and the target audience.

Early on, we were set the task of researching different horror trailers to find out common conventions that they shared (not just as a part of the horror genre, but of course as part of a trailer as well) and to write up on these things. It is perhap proves beyond a shadow of a doubt how influential new technology is that the entire class immediatly thought of using youtube to create the trailers over any other form of convention.

Youtube.com was useful for this because it provides the free and on demand service of watching whatever people have posted on there. In part due to its popularity and in part due to its accessability, film companies are keen to get their trailers out on youtube to ensure the maximum number of people see them.

In our case, youtube was useful because we could access any horror trailer, both from the past and the contemporary and analyse them at our hearts content.

Youtube also came in useful due to another innovation of this modern age in its ability to cross integrate with other social websites. Blogger for instance was able to utilise this, and therefore any youtube videos that we found specifically insightful (e.g. the Sorority Row trailer)

Thanks to this, we were able to gain useful insights into how trailers are structured, and would constantly seek to refference these throughout our project.

On the audience side of things, once again technology proved vital to our research. We had already found out thanks to what we had learned in class that the typical member of our target audience were teenagers, with a larger focus on the male orientation. Realising this, we decided to create questionnaires that would enable us to find out futher insight into how to structure our trailer accordingly.

We decided to create the questionnaire in Microsoft word compared to using a more online based service. Whilst an online service would have provided results that were more easily viewable, provided more results and would perhaps have been much quicker, there were too many concerning flaws that could easily have jeapordised our results (e.g. what if the people taking the survey had lied about their identity and were not a part of the target audience? What if they decided to mess with the results due to modern internet culture and thus provided us fake answers en mass?) therefore it was decided that the semi-old fashioned way of creating a survey and then printing it off to pass around would have to do. Whilst it was not as quick, we were able to identify members of our target audience to hand the survey too, and of course not take seriously any answers that were clearly jokes. It also came with the much greater advantage of a customisability that many online services do not provide, and therefore we were able to tailour our survey to our exact requirements.

This being done, we then had to analyse the data we had acquired and to do this we would need a method of sorting it out. Microsoft Excel was almost the perfect peice of technology for this task, due to its ability to easily make graphcs, collaborate data into results and for its ability to nicely display this information, giving us clear insight into our target audience and how our trailer would need to be to be directed towards their interests. The only issue I personally had with Microsoft Excel was the tedium involved in having to count up each individual result and then input the data manually due in part to the physical nature of the documents being analysed,  but also due to Excels inability to scan such information (something that some items of software in this modern age can actually do).

With this stage of the project done, we then moved on to the project itself...

The Production

Upon having completed the filming and being at the stage where editing was essential, we would move onto what was perhaps the most used peice of technology within the entire project, Final Cut Pro.

Final Cut Pro was a very interesting peice of software to use because of its industry standard technology (having been used in such modern films as The Simpsons movie, 300 and X-Men Origins Wolverine) and would test our editing skills.

We soon found out how very versatile Final Cut Pro was when it was able to take all the clips of the camera we were using, and store them all within that project file, saving us hours of time compared to if we were using the old fashioned methods, and would allow us to keep going back to see if our trailer could benefit from scenes that we had not intended on using.

When the scenes were put in, I found that Final Cut Pro allowed for the more basic editing tools the progamme offered to be used by almost anyone (with myself having only had experience with Windows Movie Maker in the past) with a very basic Drag and Drop methodology for the insertion of specific segments (something very useful when inserting the music files later on) and could cut scenes with extreme prescision by clicking on the exact second on the timeline you wished to cut.

What I did find difficult to use throughout the project however were the more advanced tools. Perhaps it was the direct "crash course" in Final Cut Pro, or my inexperience with general film editing software, but the extreme varieties in different editing tools (such as the ability to slow a scene down, add earth quake effects and change filters) took quite a while to learn, and therefore whilst extremely useful did provide frustrating when having to go through quite a lot of feilds to find the exact effect I wanted, compared to more simpler editing software.

One of the more interesting tools of Final Cut Pro that we used was actually inspired once again by watching trailers on youtube. When one of us was not directly editing, we would often have 1 person looking for interesting effects from other trailers that we could perhaps implement into our own now that we had increased knowledge of how editing worked. On one of these occasions, I had noticed a rather formulaic effect used in seemingly all genres of film (and not just horror) and that was how they would emulate night. Rather than film directly at night (something rather difficult due to the camera having difficulties picking up light), most films would use a dark blue filter in editing that would create the illusion of night, and yet allow for visible footage to be taken. This was immediatly applied to our trailer and (whilst perhaps not as effective as if a professional had done it) did make many, previously bright scenes, into scenes that did actually look like they were filmed in the late evening/night!

Whilst Final Cut Pro was very useful, If I were to do the project again, I would perhaps refrain from using it due to a proficciancy I have developed using Adobe Flash due to it allowing much more creative effects, more interesting characters and its ability to save time on the filming segment of the project. Nevertheless, Final Cut Pro was very useful for the tasks that were applied to it.

Garage Band was another useful peice of software we used throughout the actual production. Whilst Final Cut Pro did have some very basic sound recording and editing software built into it, the problem was that it was rather mediocre and could only be relied upon if the people editing it could perform music/sounds to be recorded in front of it. As such Garage Band was an exceedingly useful peice of technology, thanks to its ability to import sounds and highly edit them and of course for its inumerable free sounds that were already built in to the program. Upon finding a song that we liked to be our background courtesy of freeplaymusic.com (a website dedicated to royalty free music usable for any project, useful in itself so as to not breach copyright) we were able to use the programme to edit the music to synchronise with the scenes exactly how we wanted it to (e.g. hunting drum based music for the horror bits, and party music for the party scenes).

Garage Band was majorly useful largely because of the fact we as a group did not have the knowledge to compose and create music on our own (with nobody in our group even playing an instrument) and as such the music needed for the trailer could simply not have been done at all had it not been for Garage Band (or at least software similiar to it).

In the creation of the two Ancilliary tasks, I have to give large credit to the use of Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop was to the Ancilliary tasks what Garage Band was to the musical aspects of the main product. A complete life saver.

In the creation of the poster, Photoshop was used for its wide variety of effects that could be used to create the exact style that I wanted, allowing for the extreme Red theme on my edited face, allowing the face to blend into the background and through simply copying the layer, changing the opacity and moving the copy slightly, create the blur effect on the face.

On the rest of the Poster, Photoshop was useful for its ability to not only create text in the grungy, bloody style that I wanted, but also for the blending effects which allowed for me to create what looked like blood splatterings all over the text adding to the general theme.

In the creation of the Magazine cover, Photoshop proved itself useful once again, mainly for its ability to change the opacity. Thanks to this, I was able to use an issue of EMPIRE magazine as a refference point from which to create the front cover allowing me to emulate it as an issue of EMPIRE. From an editing stand point, it also allowed me to insert the image of me into a background that did not involve myself quite realistically, as well as for the very easy creation of a filter to make the images look like they were at night (similiar in style and refferention to the trailer and the filter effect used within the trailer).

For the Ancilliary tasks, I cannot think of any programme that would have been more useful to me than Photoshop. Whilst some programs offer you a similiar service, they usually do not offer you the same quality of editing (e.g. Microsoft Paint) and would have resulted in my poster and magazine cover looking quite cartoony.

With the production stage done, I then had to move on to the Evaluation stage...

Evaluation stage

One of the online programmes used earlier on in the project and during this stage especially was Flickr, a programme designed to display and annotate photos uploaded by the user to the web, and then to be integreated (in a manner similiar to youtube videos) onto other websites such as Blogger.

Flirck was useful due mainly to the annotion function. Whilst I could very easily have just displayed the Photos on blogger and explained them in detail, Flicker allowed for me to have tagged notes attatced to different areas of the Photos so as to avoid clutter and to assist with the explanation of the Ancilliary tasks. I did however find some issues with Flickr due to my password sometimes refusing to work (despite it being a password I hold dear to me and thus would not forget) and forcing me to make new accounts every time I tried to log in despite the email service telling me my password was correct, however I cannot judge it too highly on this considering this may have just been a glitch specific to myself rather than one that many others would suffer.

The final peice of software that was most used throughout the Evaluation section of the project was the website, Blogger.com

Blogger.com allows the user to create their own personalised and stylised blogs with a number of interactive features due to its integration with a number of different social networks (such as youtube, flickr and facebook for example) and thus provides with the ability to be a largely easy to edit multi-media blog.

Throughout the project, I found blogger easy to use due to a system of writing that was very similiar to microsoft word, and therefore familiar to myself, as well as the rather useful conveniance that it could be accesed from anywhere with an internet connection, as opposed to other methods of submitting my work (e.g. through written document and offline programmes) and this was a feature that I seeked to use throughout the project.

However as a whole, were I given the choice I would not use blogger again for any form of project, due to my preference for Microsoft Powerpoint.

Whilst Blogger was easy to customise, Powerpoint provides far greater customisational abilities, with greater text options, text placement, background colours and image placement, in a much easier and less clunky fashion than that supported by Blogger.

Whilst Blogger allowed easy access from any location with the internet, this was included with slower load times depending on your internet connection compared to the virtually instantaneous loading and editing of Powerpoint and for a person such as myself who largely carries a laptop with them wherever they go (a trend becoming more popular in this modern age), it would also have been far more practical in these aspects too.

The only particular aspect that I would give Blogger an advantage with is its use of Flickr. Whilst both can utilise youtube clips and pictures, the superior labelling and stylised notation skills of Flicker are far more aesthetically pleasing than directly labelling and placing arrows over specific bits, something that Powerpoint would have had a disadvantage with.