Surviving Nightmares WOMEN IN HORROR
I always believe in following the advice of the playwright [Victorien] Sardou. He said, ‘Torture the women!’ … The trouble today is that we don’t torture women enough.
– Alfred Hitchcock1
Hitchcock’s oft-quoted statement expresses a sentiment that predates cinema; Edgar Allan Poe famously claimed that ‘the death […] of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world’.2 And let’s not forget Italian giallo-horror maestro Dario Argento s : I women, especially ones. they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or a man.’3
And here we have the troubling tension that pulses away at the heart of the horror flick. It is the blood-curdling scream of a woman staring down death that is the codified sound of the horror movie. Within horror’s aesthetic regime, an attractive young woman in peril will frequently command top billing. But to assume (like so many writers and critics do) that the horror film is inherently misogynistic is a gross oversimplification. And there are many pressing reasons why we are doing our students a disservice if we overlook horror in our classrooms.
There is a misconception among some educators that horror is a ‘lowbrow’ genre and not fit for our curriculums, or that it panders to an immature teenage sensibility and is therefore limited in its capacity to provide powerful learning opportunities. Yet we know that meaningful learning takes place when our students are emotionally aroused and excited by a topic. Horror is the cinema of sensation; it ticks this box better than any other genre. In fact, this genre of transgression, of crossed boundaries, of sex and of death perhaps speaks most emphatically to a teenage audience. The buzz in our classrooms on the Monday after a new horror release shouldn’t be quietened, but explicitly harnessed.
While it’s unsurprising that 60 per cent of the US horror audience is aged between fifteen and thirty – a figure that could be expected to mirror that And they have been turning up to cinemas in droves over the last few years; 2017 was horror’s biggest year at the box office to date.
