Women in Horror Month 2015 - Introduction

[glitter_n_gore]

Now that we've all had some time to recover from Halloween, let's get revved up for another Women In Horror Month! Last year, I took a look at some box office numbers to see what the genre looks like right now. And first of all, let me apologize. I don't remember what search engine I was using to get those numbers, but I clearly did something wrong because I somehow overlooked World War Z, The Purge and Warm Bodies while gathering my data, which should have bumped half my original contenders off the list. It's still a pretty cool list, but I'll get back to that later.

So this year, instead of looking at just one year's box office results, I decided to look at the overall trends since 2005. The reason I'm focusing squarely on box office numbers is because money and audience demand are what drive the industry. Nothing gets changed if the status quo isn't challenged in a recognizable way. And for better or worse, looking at box office numbers is a way to quantify what people wanted to see in a given year. Otherwise, I'd just be talking about my own personal tastes, and while I'll never stop recommending cool, under-the-radar stuff like Stoker, We Are What We Are and The Moth Diaries, that's not the point of this project.

Whenever I get excited about a new short story collection/TV show/movie/book with positive female representation either in the characters or behind the scenes, inevitably someone makes the argument that it's not enough that women be present in this type of media. It has to also be good, high-quality, intelligent, thoughtful media. Now, I don't have any problem with asking for good quality stuff, but I feel like this argument is asking for female creators and characters to be that much "better" than their male counterparts in order to make up for the fact that they're female. Which I don't think is fair. Get them into the rotation in the first place, and we can worry about whether they're awesome enough to deserve their places later. More to the point: horror fans in general, myself included, sometimes develop a taste for really appalling, cheesy, low-grade trash. I don't want to see that stuff go away. It is awesome in its own way. If the boys are allowed to have their cheese and eat it too, then dammit, so should we.

I asked Twitter and Absolute Write who were their favorite Horror Heroines prior to 2005, just to get a starting baseline. Here are the top 5 results, in descending order from most chosen to least:

Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), Alien
Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), Halloween
Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), Silence of the Lambs
Alice (Milla Jovovich), Resident Evil
Nancy (Heather Langenkamp), A Nightmare on Elm Street

These are the golden oldies, the ones we've looked up to and cheered on for decades--with no leading on my part, and no parameters specifying any particular definition of "heroine." And I gotta say, Alice surprised me. I didn't realize she was so well-loved, since she's the relative newcomer to the lineup here. I also thought Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton, Terminator) would get more votes--when I started asking, she was only mentioned once. This is all very informal of course, and my sample pool is very small, so the net I'm liable to cast isn't but so wide.

Still, here's my question: Who are the new Horror Heroines? Who have we, the viewing public, deemed worthy successors to the badass, monster-fighting ladies of yore? And who does the horror community, always with its ear to the ground for cool, under-the-radar stuff, wish more people knew about and celebrated?

The results might surprise you. Stay tuned, and I'll be back with the numbers from 2005 next time!

Comments

[xerinmichellex.livejournal.com]

Now, I don't have any problem with asking for good quality stuff, but I feel like this argument is asking for female creators and characters to be that much "better" than their male counterparts in order to make up for the fact that they're female.

I. . .I have to disagree with you here. Yes, I'm more of a quality over quantity person. But I don't think it's a matter of making the women characters better than the male characters, but making them equal. Male characters, I feel, can get away with more stuff than female characters. An audience is ready to accept a male anti-hero and even root for him (see: Walter White) over a female character that plays the same role (see: Amy Dunne). (Generally, though, it seems like the "rooting for" aspect is divided among the gender lines. Obviously the male fans are more prone to root for Walter and call Amy a "monster" and vice versa.)

As for your second point: Get them into the rotation in the first place, and we can worry about whether they're awesome enough to deserve their places later.

I find this sad. If fans get into complacency about "okay, there's 4 women in this thing and they're all one-note but that's okay because there are 4 women and we could've been stuck with only one", then that becomes acceptable to the creators and they rarely will strive to make things better. Again: I'm not asking for women to be better; but to be EQUAL to the men. If you can make a goddamn male character multi-layered, it shouldn't be hard to do the same to a female character. Screw the noise that it's "hard" to make women interesting like their male-counterparts. Just NO.

Alice surprised me. I didn't realize she was so well-loved, since she's the relative newcomer to the lineup here.

There's been a lot of Resident Evil movies--I think they're up to 5 now--so that may help keep her in the forefront of people's minds. Plus the built in audience with the Resident Evil games. I'm honestly surprised that Sidney Prescott from Scream didn't make the cut, as those movie re-energized the horror business in the '90's.

I also thought Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton, Terminator) would get more votes

See, I think of Sarah Connor as more of an "action chick" than "scream queen"/"horror heroine", so that's maybe why she didn't get much love. Still, she's a badass no matter what category you put her in.

[glitter-n-gore.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's a matter of making the women characters better than the male characters, but making them equal. Male characters, I feel, can get away with more stuff than female characters.
I actually think we're saying the same thing here, but with different words. A lot of the criticism I'm seeing for female characters that already exist is the same type of actions that male characters have been, as you put it, getting away with for years. It's similar to what S. E. Sinkhorn talks about in this post. It's about YA heroines, but it's the same sentiment: female characters can't just be people. They have to be perfect in a lot of bizarre, carefully constructed ways, or they're written off as "not good enough" by someone.

A perfect example of this is the Evil Dead series; Ash was originally written as a deliberate gender-flip of the Final Girl trope. (That being, everyone else dies, this one character is mostly reactive rather than proactive, and runs away screaming and covered in blood, but survives.) In the first movie, that's pretty much what happens, and he upgrades to Badass over the course of the trilogy.

Mia, in the remake, has a much more interesting and developed backstory, LOADS more work to do acting-wise, and has to face what's essentially a physical embodiment of her own inner demons at the end. And she still got criticized by some superfans for not being enough like Ash. I include myself in that list, and that's partly why I went back and changed my mind on it--I still don't think it's a perfect movie, but changing the main character's gender and giving them more to do was a good decision on the part of the filmmakers.

That's what I'm talking about, the tendency to take female characters that are actually pretty nuanced and interesting, and focus only on their flaws or on how they fail to measure up in some way to existing male characters. I'd like to see a lot less of that overall.

[orangerful.livejournal.com]

Hm, I would not have classified the Terminator movies as horror so I wouldn't have thought to mention Sarah Connor. Actually surprised that Clarice showed up but that makes more sense to me. :)

[glitter-n-gore.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's hard to know where that line falls between sci-fi and horror for some movies. How would you classify Alien, or Event Horizon, or A Clockwork Orange? Cult cinema tends to draw similar audiences no matter where genre line fall though, and she was mentioned, just not that often.

Clarice surprised me too; I guess because Silence of the Lambs is more mainstream than a lot of the others in that list. Everyone can quote it even if they haven't seen it, and some people classify it as a "thriller" rather than "horror." Not complaining though! Starling is awesome. *crossing fingers for Hannibal to last long enough to get to that plotline*