Gender in slasher films

Slasher films, such as Friday the 13th, He Knows You're Alone, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Prom Night, feature acts of extreme violence portrayed in graphic detail. "The slasher film typically involves a killer who stalks and graphically murders a series of victims in a typically random, unprovoked fashion. The victims are usually teenagers or young adults who are away from mainstream civilization or far away from help. These films typically begin with the murder of a young woman and end with a one female survivor who manages to subdue the killer, only to discover that the problem has not been completely solved". Critics and researchers have claimed that these films portray: (1) Acts of extreme violence displayed in graphic detail (2) they are labeled as "women-in-danger" or "violence-to-women" films because women are singled out for injury and death and (3) scenes in these films are couples with explicit violence that contain sexual or erotic images encroaching vigorously on the verge of pornography.Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film is generally thought of to be the cornerstone work of studying gender in slasher films.

Men are often praised and revered for their sexual prowess; however, women are often punished for sexual promiscuity. In slasher films, the final girls who survive at the end of the film almost always remain virgins. Those who engage in sexual behavior often die at the hands of the killer. Evidence produced from the Molitor and Sapolsky study on slasher films from 1980 to 1993 shows that "it takes women twice as long to die as men in these films" and "females are shown in terror for obviously longer periods of time than males". Molitor and Sapolsky's data revealed huge differences between the treatment of men and women which indicate that females are singled out for victimization in special ways in these films. One of the studies they conducted is the number of seconds that males and females display fear in these films. If a person watched all 30 films in the Molitor and Sapolsky study, they would see a total of almost five solid hours of women in states of fear and terror. This compares to less than one hour for males. Molitor and Sapolsky study also reported that the number of violent acts against males increased across the 1980s, but tended to decrease for females. Apparently, the producers were criticized for the depiction of women as victims in slasher films, so they toned down such attacks.

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