supercurricular

 A summary and review of ‘Girl Power: The politics of a slasher movie’ by James Rose. 

 

Summary 

In this article, Rose discusses how originally women were and sometimes still are represented as weak and to be saved by a male hero in horror movies. However in the late 1970s, horror cinema shifted due to the politics of the time – significantly the feminist movement – and therefore horror as a genre evolved significantly to reflect these changing social and political contexts. Women in film were no longer weak and would actively defend themselves and attempt to destroy the threat. Stalk and slash genre – according to Mark Whitehead’s book ‘Slasher films’ are incredibly formulaic and typically all follow the same structure – a group travel to a remote location and are steadily murdered by a masked or unknown killer until one member of the group remains and has to confront and take down the murderer to reveal their identity. Whitehead states that the killer either kills the group as punishment for trespassing or is avenging an earlier wrong the group may have perpetuated. Slasher films also typically contain female nudity and graphic murder to appeal to the target audience of young teenage boys.  

Rose discusses ‘The Final Girl’, which was a term invented by Carol J. Clover used to describe the sole female survivor of slasher films. The final girl is said to be smarter than her friends, morally pure, and is the first to recognize the lack of morals within her friend group. At the start of the film, she is viewed as weak and separate from her friend group, yet by the end of the film she transforms into a powerful figure – despite being shown as quite “boyish” from the start. Clover also points out that the final girl is also usually given quite an androgynous name, to make her appear more ‘masculine’ to be considered a hero. In the majority of stalk and slash films, the final girl must use a combination of skill and violence to defeat the killer, and typically kills them by cutting off body parts of the killer, which reflects the sexualized nature of the murders earlier on in the film and can be viewed as a ‘symbolic castration’ of the killer, to remove them of their masculine threat. 

Summary of section of the Mark Dixon book I read:

Chapter 1 - Semiotics: Roland Barthes Pages 7, 8,10

Barthes produced a more nuanced communications analysis tool - 5 different types of codes that work together to create meaning.

Hermaneutic codes (enigmas) - create mystery to the audience in order to generate audience interest in the product and hook interest, compelling further reading.

Proairetic codes (actions) - Moments of suspense via an action used to construct an action ie. Scan Here!

Semantic codes (connotative elements) - refers to any element within a text that produces connotative meaning.

Symbolic codes - symbols within a product, repeated motifs

Cultural codes (referential codes) - refers to material included within the product which will be understood by a cultural audience (ie. references to real life or iconic media).

 Shelter Video

https://youtu.be/Yr7Y-ddGzew?si=ZGaOQV1P3A0k-fBR

I watched the 'Good as Gold' shelter campaign video. In this video, a young girl named Maddie is at the shops with her family around Christmas time and told to watch her younger brother. She overhears a shop worker tell another child to be 'good as gold' to get whatever they want at Christmas, We then watch a sequence of Maddie completing good deeds in life in order to get whatever she wants. We then see her wake up on Christmas in her house, and we see shots of the dirty and mouldy walls, and Maddie says 'But, I was so good.' We then see the Shelter title card. This advert is effective as it starts as such a positive Christmas advert, light-hearted and funny watching this young child do good deeds, however it quickly switches to the reality of child poverty. It tricks the audience into paying attention, so that we watch and think about the real thing Shelter is advertising that people typically ignore and not think about. It also challenges typical stereotypes of homelessness - we connect to Maddie and her innocence of good deeds and Santa, so it makes her reality at the end even more shocking to us, she is so young, she doesn't deserve these living conditions.