The 'Final Girl' is an expression primarily used by Carol J. Clover in her book 'Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.' The name refers to a female character in a horror film who is normally left to defeat the villain and come out victorious. This character will normally have a unisex name (like Laurie Strode in Halloween) and be depicted as someone plain, smart, sensible and virginal. She will normally be brunette (like Nancy Thompson in Nightmare on Elm Street) and be portrayed as quite a maternal figure which can be clearly identified in the film Halloween, where our final girl Laurie is babysitting and then protecting some children from the villain, Michael Myers. The reason behind the final girl not being portrayed as overtly feminine is because the audience for Slasher films consists of men and women so males as well as females have to identify with the protagonist too.
Professor Barbara Creed wrote the critical essay 'The Monstrous Feminine' which examines the stereotypical depiction of women as being abject creatures throughout history and film. Creed proposes two main questions in her essay, the first being: 'To what extent do such images (i.e. those of the hideous Gorgon Medusa or vicious Sirens and Witches) empower women?' and 'To what degree do they enforce misogynistic stereotypes?' These notions originally stem from the Oedipus complex theory in which it is stated that a child thinks that it and its mother are one entity. This is known as the pre-Oedipal space. This is a key developmental stage in life and, if disrupted, can have damaging consequences on a child's psyche. The psychologist Freud came up with the assumption that male children are attracted to their mothers but do not pursue these feelings due to an innate fear of castration. This then leads to adult men seeing women as a threat to their masculinity.
In terms of Creed's ideas, the 'Final Girl' character in Slasher films manages to represent both readings of the text in that she is a symbol of female empowerment as well as a figure of stereotypical monstrosity. Certain readings of Creed's essay can infer that the 'Final Girl' in a Slasher film will start out as a woman in the typical position of oppression and subjugation yet by the end of the film she will have transformed into a somewhat monstrous figure as she attempts to protect others and herself by murdering the monster who is preying upon her.
There are very few accurate representations of 'Final Girls' in Slasher films that do not use the 'Male Gaze' which is a theory discussed by Laura Mulvey who believes that in almost all forms of media women are presented in such a way that the audience and camera take on the role of a heterosexual man. The theory suggests that women are overly sexualised and represented in terms of pleasure rather than accuracy.
My film is one that subverts the typical codes of a Slasher film in that there is no enigma surrounding the identity of our killer. In terms of whether we wanted to subvert the character of our 'Final Girl' we decided it was best to keep her as conventional as possible. We have chosen to use the unisex name: Charlie and within our trailer we aim to portray her as a studious, pure character by using various shots of her at school and of her walking past a church to display her innocence. At no point in the trailer will we show Charlie starting to become the monster and assume the role of a killer as she overcomes her oppression as this is a feature that is better suited to the full film in order to avoid any spoilers.
The monstrous feminine theory is one that has a lot of basis in the media from Ancient Greek mythology such as the famed story of Helen of Troy who was an albeit beautiful character but one that was said to have launched a thousand ships and inspired a monstrous, bloody war to post-modern horror films such as Teeth and Carrie. I personally find Barbara Creed's opinion one that is substantial and well supported; the premise of females being portrayed as either disempowering or empowering is one that I have now come to identify within films I have seen, enjoyed and whose female character's origins I have wondered about and attempted to assess in a critical fashion. Her essay has caused me to consider what angle I wish to portray my 'Final Girl' and how I will successfully represent that in my Slasher film trailer.
No comments:
Post a Comment