Treatment of women and femininity in the horror genre
Eden Lake 2008
Comment on:
Mise-en-scene elements
Performance and gesture
The treatment of the female body
Jenny’s narrative journey
Jenny – purity and childlike. Soft lighting – halo. Softness to her eyes. Constructed as natural beauty. Looks angelic. But becomes contaminated. Creep, 2005
Comment on:
Mise-en-scene elements
Performance and gesture
The treatment of the female body
The passive female – Mandy
The active female – Kate
Mandy is passive. Strapped to the table – vulnerability, is contained.
Considering both films:
List 6 key words that describe the experience that women are subjected to in the horror genre
Ordeal
Stalked
Purged
Degraded
Masculinised
Contaminated
The final girl theory is used in both films. Kate the young protagonist in Creep, she must purge herself through trauma to then take on masculine traits – revealing the monster to the audience.
Masculinity and monstrosity
List the range of micro devices that are used to hide the identity of the monster in Creep
Off screen action
Costume
Lighting: darkness
Setting: sewer
Blurred footage: illusory imagery
Fragmentation
What traits does Craig have of conventional masculinity?
Agression
Isolated
Hunting – hunter – for hid vulnerable prey
Protective of his lair
Brutatilty
What is absent from Craig’s construction of masculinity?
How does this conform to the conventions of gender in horror films?
Throughout the last two-thirds of the film we get a real eye-full of the "monster" & a few clues so that we can put together how he came to exist as a deformed feral man acting out gross & grotesque fantasies of being a surgeon.
The father-figure of his childhood, who may well have been a mad scientist, did surgeries on children, whether to help the already deformed or to create monsters we're never fully informed.
