Thursday, April 26, 2012

Horror Films and Sexualized Violence

Here's the video that Emily and I put together!

2 comments:

  1. Hey guys, first of all this film is AMAZING!! I think this film is very well done and honestly kept me on the edge of my seat the first... second... and yes, third time I watched it. However, I wanted to do a little more research (aka... I just wanted to know more about the plot of "Jennifer's Body") and I found this clip from Wikipedia (I know not the most reliable)::

    Working with Cody again following their collaborative efforts on the film Juno, Jason Reitman stated he and his producers "want to make unusual films".[4] Cody said she wanted the film to speak to female empowerment and explore the complex relationships between best friends.

    :: OK do you find that weird and completely wrong?? After you guys displayed how women are sexualized in all of these horror films especially Jennifer's Body, why do you think that the writer would say he is trying to "empower" women?? Thoughts? Hopefully Sarah will read this and have some insight!

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  2. I'm glad you enjoyed it! :) Thanks for your comment!

    I'd be wary of saying much about the writer, director, and producers' artistic intentions for any of the three films, mostly because I haven't seen the movies themselves. What we wanted to do, in examining the trailers, was look at the way in which movies are presented through them. Particularly, we wanted to examine the way in which the trailers for horror films play on depictions of hypersexualized women and images of violence, quite often in such a way that sex and violence are linked together. I would hazard to say that, with many and most horror films (like Sorority Row, or Halloween 2, whose trailer we watched but didn't examine in our video project), you would find the same tropes of abused and sexualized women as you would find in the trailers. But I would also hazard to say (though I haven't seen the films themselves, so this has to be taken with a liberal dose of salt) that there are a number of movies that subvert these tropes.

    Trailers are most often produced by outside sources. There are companies whose sole occupation is creating trailers that will lure in an audience. As such, trailers are pieces of marketing, more so than they are summaries of the story or artist statements. for that matte,r they often misrepresent the movie itself. Sarah Bacot, in class and in a piece on this blog, demonstrated that Cabin in the Woods in fact plays on and subverts all the degrading horror tropes we pointed out in the trailer. The same might be able to be said of Jennifer's body. It's worth keeping in mind that Diablo Cody also wrote Juno, which features a very strong female character as the lead role.

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