Journal of Student Research 2019

Journal of Student Research 94 slowly freeze rather than be put out of her misery, such as Jerry. The total on-scene time it took for her to die as she is tortured is 87 seconds. The fourth victim, Franklin, is speared several times in the chest with a chainsaw in the woods. The total time for him to die is 13 seconds. The final victim and only survivor, Sally, faces the most hardships within the film, as she is forced to watch her friend die and flee for her life at 52:16 in the film. The remaining 30 minutes of the film is centered around her and her being tortured and chased. Things get especially hard for her at 1:06:45 when she is tied up at the dinner table and mocked and ridiculed as she begs for her life. She is then held down as an old man attempts to kill her with a hammer, one time giving her a powerful blow to the back of the head. The torture is continuous until 1:18:30 where she is able to escape her male captors. The only other character to die in the film is the hitchhiker antagonist as he attempts to catch Sally and bring her back. His death is instant, however, when a semi runs him over. While the film may have deeper meaning as to why it victimizes women more so than men, without deeper thought put into the themes of the story, this is not clear to audiences. Rather, it became a popular film due to its use of violence and the concept of being trapped and killed by cannibals. In the long drawn out scene of the dinner table, the sadist voyeuristic “look” is introduced. The sadistic voyeuristic look is based upon the 1975 Male Gaze Theory by Laura Mulvey. The male gaze, in essence, is how women are objectified by the camera for the pleasure of heterosexual male audiences. In addition, the voyeuristic look portrays the actions that are harmful to women. It can include physical, emotional, and mental violence. The woman is no longer seen as just a sexual object, but rather an object to play and torment, and in worst case scenarios, to kill. This can be seen when comparing the treatment of the women within The Texas Chainsaw Massacre , as opposed to the men. While a majority of the deaths that took place were male, the time spent torturing the women was more than tenfold that of the time spent on the men. In the film, it took 37 seconds for 3 men to die while for just one female victim, it took 87 seconds. It is not the kill count that matters, but rather, what happens to the victim before they are killed that is impactful on the audience. Some films take the violence on screen and push it further. In The Nightmare on Elm Street (Dir. Wes Craven) the antagonist, Freddy Krueger, visits a woman as she sleeps in the bath. The audience is shown his hand moving between her spread legs and toward her bare body. In a two-minute-long scene in the 1981 film, The Evil Dead (Dir. Sam Raimi), the audience watches as the female victim is forcefully held down and then raped by a tree. To clarify, I do mean that the female victim was forcefully raped by a demon possessed tree. Far too often are women and their bodies used for shock value. In the 1987 film, I Was a Teenage Zombie , a woman is raped by the zombie antagonist. The zombie then rips off the top half of her body and continues to rape her lower half. This can be seen as symbolic of how a woman is not necessarily

Navigating Modern Horror Films with a Feminist Perspective important as a person, but as an instrument to utilize.

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In 1984, researchers Linz, Donnerstein, and Penrod had conducted a study that “measured the reactions of college-age men to films depicting violence against women over a five-day period with five horror films” (Daniel Linz, et al. 758.) At the end of the five-day period, the men were then asked to view a real rape trial. At this point, the men had begun to show less sympathy for the fictitious female victim onscreen so the researchers wanted to see real-world results. When viewing the rape trial, the men were less anxious, less depressed and once again, less sympathetic to the female victim, regardless of this woman being real and having had endured sexual violence. These results are opposed to a control group of men that had not viewed the films. The control group had higher levels of sympathy for the woman. Again in 1988, men were exposed to three slashers (a sub-genre of horror) films that depicted women in different ways: “(a) those that are overtly violent, (b) those that are not overtly violent but are sexually explicit and arguably depict women as sexually degraded objects, and (c) those that are not sexually explicit but, like the sexually explicit material, nearly always portray women as sexual objects” (Linz and Donnerstein, 759.) Both of the studies showed that the violence against women on screen had real-world effects on the viewers and their treatment toward women as the second experiment bore similar results to the first. The men would become desensitized to the violence and alter their views on women, both fictitious and real. As this experiment has been conducted multiple times with similar results each time, it is relatively conclusive that on-screen violence to women is harmful in how men view female victims. In a similar study to the 1984 study “Effects of Long-Term Exposure to Violent and Sexually Degrading Depictions of Women,” Dr. Linz continued his work this time accompanied by Dr. Charles Mullin. This study was rather similar to the first but, “effect[s] of slasher films on mood changes was found, but the affected mood was hostility rather than depression or anxiety. Viewers were apparently finding themselves more comfortable with the violent material, and thus the ability of the film to induce a feeling of hostility and annoyance was diminished somewhat with repeated viewings (Mullin, et al. 456).” In addition to discovering hostility to the content had gone down, Mullin, et al touch on an important topic of re-sensitization. They theorized that “long-term, frequent exposure to violence may cause viewers to become more easily desensitized during subsequent exposures (Mullin, et al, 458).” They then reference the 1967 study by Kimmel & Goldstein that resulted in evidence that after re-sensitizing and distancing one’s self to a stimulus that, that person will be quick to re-habituate to that stimulus in the future. In the case of horror films, this means that men that have already been exposed to degrading imagery and been desensitized will quickly pick up those thought patterns again in the future when exposed to similar content. In 2002, a group of researchers found that “young

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