Final Revised Idea

2/ Masked/

popular, good looking guy, who gets all the girls at college. Some girls at college dont turn up and go missing. Guy tells his mate Jonesy that he is bored of hot girls and that he is going to go for a more 'geeky' girl for a change. He takes her to his house in the middle of the woods. The girl sees a masked man stnading around in various places around the guys house. She warns the guy and he dismisses it and is not bothered at all. Their mate jonesy comes round for a bit and the masked man kills him. The girl is very upset and scared but the guys seems quite calm. You then see the guy being dragged off by the masked killer and taken into the woods. The girl is trying to get out of the woods and as she is running the masked killer emerges from the trees, she starts to back off and walks into the guy she was with. He reveals he was working with the masked killer all along.
       In the trailer the last thing you see is her backing off and backs into a body but you dont see who it is.

Initial Individual Ideas

1. Ollie - Popular guy gets all the girls, girls go missing, guy gets bored of hot girls and goes for a 'geeky' girl, takes her to his house in the woods, she realises he is not normal and he has killed all the missing girls and has to get out before he kills her.

2. Joe - Friends go to the woods for a camping trip, see a masked man one night, then when they wake up one of the friends is missing, they then see the masked man again and he 'kills' another friend. All the other friends notice that the killer came when the other friend was absent so they kill him but it turns out that the friend they killed was working with another friend who he 'killed' and then he hunts them down.

3. Lewis - Group of friends go to a theme park for halloween, just before the theme park closes, they go to a newly opened horror maze, 4 come out and 2 are left in there, they then wait until the closing time of the theme park, theyre still not out so the 4 friends are forced to leave, the next day the 2 friends are still missing and the other 4 realise theyve been killed

4. Steve - Geeky teenage girl/young adult is accidentally invited to a halloween party at the end of the week whilst standing in with the wrong group of people, she then has visions and night terrors of people being kidnapped and brutally murdered by some old man, when she comes to, these people have been reported missing, no one believs her stories, and she is scared that this man will come after her. She does not want to attend the party but is forced to by her friend, and whilst at the party, the killer attacks, killing off the rest of her classmates, leaving her to fight off the killer, being the stereotypical virgin female heroin in the horror genre.

The Representation of Women in Horror Films

Usually in horror films, women are portrayed as the ‘damsel in distress’ and the helpless character being attacked by the killer either for sexual reasons or for committing a ‘bad act’ such as having sex or taking drugs. Traditionally, and throughout horror history, men often take the role of the killer or the hero and the women take the role of the victim. This in some cases is reversed according to Barbara Creed in female roles such as sirens, witches or medusa for example. The women in horror movies are usually attractive, sexually seductive and sexually active.

Horror films tend to follow the rule that the male killer kills the group one by one until he himself is killed by the ‘last girl’. This is featured in the book by Carol Clover: ‘Men, Women and Chainsaws’. This suggests that the female is usually the survivor or one who kills the killer therefore giving females in horror power over males, which is feminist ideology. However now with the influence of feminism and modern ideologies women are more successful and therefore the representation of women has changed in horror films to intelligent women who try to figure out who the killer is and stop them rather than be overwhelmed with fear and get killed stereotypically as they were before. For example, the female character in the movie Scream played by Courtney Cox. They take the role of a male hero and take charge of the movie, trying to find the killer and either capture or kill him.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the theory was that the motivation for the killer was derived from relationships with women i.e. a mother, sister of ex-girlfriend. This type of thing can be seen in movies such as Halloween (1978) where Michael Myers is provoked by his sister’s neglect and Psycho (1960) where Norman Bates has trouble coming to terms with his mother’s death and her relationship with him before she died. This shows the female role as the cause of the killings and responsible for releasing a crazed killer onto the world.

The ‘Male gaze’ is mentioned as many people claimed that men who watched brutal, bloody deaths of women were somewhat aroused by the voyeur element of the shots, and this arousal being brought to light because of camera techniques such as angles or lighting. Laura Mulvey suggests that films put the viewer in the position of an ‘appraising heterosexual male’ which present women as an object to be viewed – the audience is made into the main male protagonist who looks voyeuristically at an objectified female.

Carol Clover, the writer of the book: ‘Men, Women and Chainsaws’ has many points of feminism in horror, one of them is the audience identification. She questioned who the audience identifies with in the film. It was previously assumed that the males of the audience identified with the male killer. Clover argued the audience rather identifies with the ‘final girl’. This means that the audience identifies with the fear of being attacked as opposed to the satisfaction of the killer as he kills people or sneaks up on them. Secondly, Clover mentions the gender fluidity or repressed sexuality of the murderer. There are some examples: Freddie Krueger raped children before he was burned, and Michael Myers kills because of his jealousy of his sister having sex, and uses a phallic symbol in the form of a knife to deal with his repressed feelings.
Jeremy Tunstall argued that the existing research on gender representation found that representation of women in the media highlighted womens; deomestic, sexual, consumer and marital activities to the exclusion of everything else . Women are portrayed as housewives, mothers and sex objects. This is supported by the movie The Shining in which the Jack Nicholson character works at the hotel and the Shelly Duvall character is a housewife who looks after her house and her son.

My preference of the critics and the one i agree with most is Carol Clover. This is because  i think that the audience never sides with the killer as most people relate to the survivor and the 'final girl'. They identify with the fear of being chased or killed rather than the enjoyment of watching someone being stalked or killed. I do not agree with the male gaze theory by Laura Mulvey as personally i do not become aroused when a woman is brutally murdered and i disagree with anyone who says they do unless there is a background of deep mental problems.
 A video of a typical female death scene in Scream
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3_sdD1ecmg&feature=player_embedded