The "Girl" in Final Girl: What Children's Films Can Tell Us About the Generic Boundaries of Slasher and Female Gothic Cinema
"Children's horror" is a particular subset of horror film targeted explicitly toward a pre-teen audience. Children's horror films can come in practically any horror subgenre: zombie, vampire, ghost story, haunted house... slasher?
Known for graphic violence and gore, often sexually explicit in nature, it might seem that the slasher is one horror subgenre that cannot be adapted to meet the content restrictions of children's media. However, many children's horror films adopt the formal and structural qualities of the slasher subgenre, especially those identified by Clover (1992) and Dika (1990), such as an emphasis on the act of looking as expressed through voyeuristic camera shots. Children's horror films Coraline (2009) and The Watcher in the Woods (1980) do exactly this. However, as films that exclude graphic violence as a necessity of their status as 'children's films', and which focus on the plights of female protagonists who are terrorised within mysterious domestic spaces, these films have just as much, if not more in common with the Female Gothic tradition. In this paper I will show how Coraline and The Watcher in the Woods operate within both the slasher and Female Gothic subgenres. As such, these films highlight the commonalities between these modes and question distinctions between them, as well as distinctions between horror and the Gothic, and between adult and children's horror. The slasher and Female Gothic are rarely considered together within existing scholarship, but children's horror films are uniquely positioned to highlight their shared cinematic language of female entrapment.
- Catherine Lester (University of Birmingham, UK)
"Children's horror" is a particular subset of horror film targeted explicitly toward a pre-teen audience. Children's horror films can come in practically any horror subgenre: zombie, vampire, ghost story, haunted house... slasher?
Known for graphic violence and gore, often sexually explicit in nature, it might seem that the slasher is one horror subgenre that cannot be adapted to meet the content restrictions of children's media. However, many children's horror films adopt the formal and structural qualities of the slasher subgenre, especially those identified by Clover (1992) and Dika (1990), such as an emphasis on the act of looking as expressed through voyeuristic camera shots. Children's horror films Coraline (2009) and The Watcher in the Woods (1980) do exactly this. However, as films that exclude graphic violence as a necessity of their status as 'children's films', and which focus on the plights of female protagonists who are terrorised within mysterious domestic spaces, these films have just as much, if not more in common with the Female Gothic tradition. In this paper I will show how Coraline and The Watcher in the Woods operate within both the slasher and Female Gothic subgenres. As such, these films highlight the commonalities between these modes and question distinctions between them, as well as distinctions between horror and the Gothic, and between adult and children's horror. The slasher and Female Gothic are rarely considered together within existing scholarship, but children's horror films are uniquely positioned to highlight their shared cinematic language of female entrapment.
"You Love Her, Don't You?" Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon and the Slasher and the Final Girl as Romantic Heroes
The longstanding connection of horror and romance is largely attributed to the genre-bending tropes established in canonical Gothic-Romantic literature (Hirst 2021; Lee 2008). But despite the well-documented relationship between contemporary horror and these early texts (Smith 2013), there appears to be little academia examining how horror cinema, specifically slasher cinema, might exhibit these same themes of horror and romance being uniquely connected. Therefore, to contribute to this academic omission, my paper will be examining Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) and its representation of a deliberately romantic narrative amidst its metatextual slasher narrative. The purpose of this paper is not only to analyse the present romantic narrative in Behind the Mask between its titular slasher and Final Girl, as well as the nod to its canonical slasher predecessor Black Christmas (1974), but also to examine how it replicates the romantic tropes established by the canonical texts which proceeded it. It will additionally use theory presented by genre writers such as Carol J. Clover, Robin Wood and David Church to establish a means of narrative and feminist theory with which to analyse the film through a critical lens.
- Thea Bamber (University of Roehampton, UK)
The longstanding connection of horror and romance is largely attributed to the genre-bending tropes established in canonical Gothic-Romantic literature (Hirst 2021; Lee 2008). But despite the well-documented relationship between contemporary horror and these early texts (Smith 2013), there appears to be little academia examining how horror cinema, specifically slasher cinema, might exhibit these same themes of horror and romance being uniquely connected. Therefore, to contribute to this academic omission, my paper will be examining Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) and its representation of a deliberately romantic narrative amidst its metatextual slasher narrative. The purpose of this paper is not only to analyse the present romantic narrative in Behind the Mask between its titular slasher and Final Girl, as well as the nod to its canonical slasher predecessor Black Christmas (1974), but also to examine how it replicates the romantic tropes established by the canonical texts which proceeded it. It will additionally use theory presented by genre writers such as Carol J. Clover, Robin Wood and David Church to establish a means of narrative and feminist theory with which to analyse the film through a critical lens.