Quote:
Originally Posted by shadyJ
Until slasher movies started to become more self-aware (thanks largely to Scream), it used to be the virginal girl that survived, NOT because the filmakers were trying to present a feminine strength, but because it catered to a fantasy archetype for males. In these stories, the ideal woman preserves her life by preserving her purity. You might think of the killer as an avatar for that element in the male psyche which judges and damns those woman which it can not wholly own. Once a female character has 'given' herself (by which I mean her innocence and her honor, etc) to someone else in the story, she must be destroyed for squandering that which is most precious.
For these same reasons, victims of rape must also die in so many movies. Rarely in an older film (and even in many recent movies) will you see a rape victim survive. However, the death of the raped woman is usually treated as a tragic necessity, whereas the murder of a promiscuous woman is treated with glee. But willing or unwilling, their fate must be the same; in the contest of manhood, someone else has claimed that prize, so she must be destroyed as a penalty of that defeat.
Of course, this is all very barbaric, but I believe it really is the reasons for the writer's decisions in these stories, subconscious or otherwise. And these reasons are ample cause for horror in themselves; nothing is more terrifying than the landscape of the naked male psyche.
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Thanks, Shady, I had never thought about it that way -- that the promiscuous women are killed off because they are women the male viewer cannot wholly own, women who have squandered their purity that is precious to a male both in a procreative-evolutionary and psyche-intimate-holy sense. It, the male (even human) subconscious or the Freud "ID" (from ID, Ego, Super-ego), is sweeping through the film doing what it does, which I would think would be quite evocative.
Shady, did you conceive of this yourself? If not, where did you hear it from? Did one of the slasher films speak of it, like Victor Miller?