Representation of women in horror films.

Women are represented in many different ways in films, some might be represented as a victim/ weak character, and some might be represented as the 'scary, villain' element of a movie.

In the movie 'The Exorcism of Emily Rose' the girl is represented as a scary/possessed person. She has had an exorcism performed on her by a priest which adds the religious element.  Emily Rose is a young girl, and often to make movies more scary and more sinister filmmakers use young girls or boys to be the villain, to be the possessed person, or to be the person with a mental illness. Emily Rose is a child so she has that sense of innocence about her, and as you see the link between her and ghosts/spirits in the movie, the viewer feels more emotion towards the character than if the role was played by an older women. In a way the film is made frightening by the fact that the child is a young girl because young girls are stereotypically nice, sweet, and innocent but none of these qualities are shown in film so the viewers would be more interested.

In the movie ‘Psycho’ (1960) there are two main women represented, the first women is the typical women who works as a secretary. She steals money from her employer’s client and runs away with it, subsequently she gets murdered, and she is shown to be the victim in this. This is the stereotypical role we would expect to see from a ‘blonde women’ as they are usually considered to be the weaker characters or even the ‘damsels in distress’. The second woman is an older woman who is quite the opposite to the first women. She is first shown as a motherly, old character who lives with her son, and they both own a motel. Later on in the movie she ends up being shown as the murderer, as she kills any people who do stay at their motel, we never actually see her face so we don’t know what she looks like but from the way she is described we can tell that she has always been like this. In this film there are two very different women who might seem similar to us at first but as the movie progresses we get to know what they are like, and they contradict each other massively.

To conclude i think that there are many different ways in which women might be represented in films, like victim, villain etc, and sometimes the viewer can predict what the characters role might be or how they are going to end up in movie, for example blonde, dumb characters are usually the ones who get killed off first or the victims. But other times , it might not be so easy to guess what a certain character is going to be like in a movie as it might be that the way the character is shown to us at first is not actually how the character ends up to be in the end, for example the mother in Psycho.