Scream queens?
Don’t assume horror is just for men says Lorna Jowett, Reader in Television Studies at the University of Northampton.
Halloween is this weekend and horror film releases and horror TV season premieres abound. As a feminist scholar and a horror fan I have frequently found my commitment to my favourite genres (horror and science fiction) queried by others. Despite evidence to the contrary, many people assume that horror is targeted at, and most popular with, young men, but look around when you’re in the cinema watching the latest Halloween horror movie and see if this holds true. Another common assumption is that horror regularly shows — and perhaps endorses — male violence towards female characters, and is therefore not something a feminist or a female viewer would, or even should, be interested in. Of course, women are drawn to horror for the same reasons as men: it’s a popular genre, now more than ever; its excess and spectacle can be exhilarating, hilarious or viscerally disturbing; it can use the fantastic to provoke and to challenge received ideas about morality, power and identity.
Naturally, given male dominance in both the film and television industry, there are few well-known examples of horror directed or written by women (Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire Western Near Dark 1987 being one of the most cited). And while the rise of horror in recent decades can be tied to the resurgence of fantasy genres across a range of media, the notion of female horror might suffer from the anti-fandom surrounding the Twilight franchise. Yet there are plenty of horror films and TV series that do not reproduce the retrograde gender politics of popular horror cycles like the slasher film. This might be to do with the type of story they tell, or the type of characters they include. Not all horror tales offer female victims and male predators, and not all female horror characters are simply scream queens.
Films like Ginger Snaps (Dir. John Fawcett, 2000), Teeth (Dir. Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007), American Mary (Dir. Jen and Sylvia Soska, 2012) or The Babadook (Dir. Jennifer Kent, 2014) offer stories from a female perspective, about female experience, highlighting double standards, exploring sisterhood (literal and metaphorical) or parenthood, and turning mundane and familiar female experiences (menstruation, vaginal examinations) into body horror. It’s fair to say that horror involving a literal vagina dentata (Teeth) or extreme body modification (American Mary), or even the trials of single parenting (The Babadook) might divide opinion and provoke debate.
Horror on television often works with longer form narrative and has time to develop its characters, as well as exploiting an ensemble cast for range and reach. Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and Scully from The X-Files (1993–2002) are both deliberately constructed as unconventional female characters. Chris Carter had to fight to cast Gillian Anderson as Scully because she wasn’t a typical US female television lead (or, as she says, the execs wanted someone ‘taller, leggier, and bustier’), while Joss Whedon stated from the start that Buffy was there to subvert the notion of the helpless blonde girl in the alley. As contemporary TV horror has expanded its range, it’s given us popular female characters like Carol from The Walking Dead (2010-) a domestic abuse survivor who shines in the series’ grim, macho post-apocalyptic world. Series such as True Blood (2008–2014) and American Horror Story 2011-) deliberately queer the conventions and tropes of horror, while Hannibal’s final season (2013–2015) was a kind of slash fiction brought to aesthetic perfection. True Blood gave viewers a range of female characters from ditsy to downright creepy, with vampire Pam getting some of the best lines (‘I don’t know what it is about me that makes people think I want to hear their problems. Maybe I smile too much. Maybe I wear too much pink. But please remember I can rip your throat out if I need to’). AHS’ innovations in rebooting each season with a new premise, setting, and cast of characters enabled its producers to offer regular roles for older female actors like Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, Frances Conroy and Angela Bassett, as well as making effective use of younger talents such as Sarah Paulson and Down’s Syndrome actor and activist Jamie Brewer. If these series retread familiar ground it’s to unsettle it.
Two points to note in conclusion. One, many of the above productions are directed and/or written by men and are popular with a broad demographic. Challenging conventional gender roles and genre conventions isn’t the prerogative of female creators. Two, while Twilight may be mocked for being romance rather than ‘real’ horror, the same cannot be argued of the films and series cited here. It doesn’t get much more real than The Babadook, which stints on neither atmospheric tension nor old school scares. Horror is no longer — if indeed it ever was — only exploitative and aimed at boys. In 2015, it’s gory, it’s grown up and it’s challenging conventional gender roles.
The latest TV series from American Horror Story creators Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy, Scream Queens, debuted on E4 Monday 26 October.
Lorna Jowett — Reader in Television Studies
