In Wes Craven’s Scream, the portrayal of women is differently shown from any other slasher film that was released before this 1996 flick. Generally, women in slasher flick are represented as a passionate person in trouble and normally being assaulted by the killer since they’re the backbone of the story or have a past history with the killer. Professor Carol Clover’s believes that the term “Final Girl” in horror film is always present according to her Final Girl Theory.
With the arrival of Scream to the big screen, the horror genre changed during the nineties, since the director broke the rules of horror films in the first part of the Scream series. With Wes Craven’s Scream, the term Scream Queens was reborn in the characterization of Sidney Prescott, Gale Weathers and the males, also considering that the portrayal of the gender role in the film is uniquely different from any other slasher movie, as the term Final Girl is represented in a new way.
The portrayal of the lead females Sidney and Gale in Scream are shown as smart and brave to have the capacity to survive the entire film, while the various characters, including the men that have been killed by a serial killer. This is also known as the “Final Girl.” The idea of the “Final Girl” was created by Carol Clover. According to Clover, the Final Girl is “introduced at the beginning and is the only character to be developed in any psychological detail. We understand immediately from the attention paid it that hers is the main story line.
She is intelligent, watchful, level-headed; the first character to sense something amiss and the only one to deduce from the accumulating evidence the patterns and extent of the threat” (131) As Carol states, these Final Girls are not to be shown as the typical blonde or bimbo character that you see in a slasher film normally. They are someone more like Sidney or Gale that would be perfect for the Final Girl. Gale characteriza…
Horror Movie Female Characters. (2019, Dec 05). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/paper-on-female-characters-in-horror-movies/