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Makale Özeti:
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There has been some feminist work on horror films and most
contemporary feminist studies of horror films are psychodynamic. Horror as a genre
has been popular and it is precisely what the psychodynamic feminist theories
speculate about why we are interested in horror and more basically about why
certain things are horrifying. Typically, these feminist film theories rely on the
psychoanalytic framework. The purpose of this paper would be to locate women
within the genre of horror, where they are described as representing threats
evoking the male castration anxiety. Horror is the genre that seems to endlessly
repeat the trauma of castration as if to “explain” by repetitious mastery the
originary problem of sexual difference. These theories as a standard presume some
connection between gazing, violent aggression and masculinity and they suggest
that there are particularly “male” motives for making, watching, and enjoying
horror films.This is corroborated by Linda Williams in her scholarly work too where
she isolates three distinct genres and labels them as body genres, those being
pornography, horror and melodrama. In each of these genres the bodies of women
figured on screen have functioned traditionally as the primary embodiments of
pleasure, fear and pain. In her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
on psychodynamic approaches to film in general, Laura Mulvey argues that
narrative forms characteristic of mainstream Hollywood cinema differentially use
women and serve men. Typically, in horror, the woman or visual object is also the
chief victim sacrificed to the narrative desire to know about the monster.
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