For the first time ever, more women buy tickets to horror flicks than men. This interesting detail is somewhat buried in an otherwise unremarkable piece in the NY Times.The Grey Dame of Journalism has posted a piece on the state of the fright flick. The article checks in with Jennifer's Body writer Diablo Cody, her co-conspirator Karyn Kusama (that somebody would think following up Girlfight with a scare pic starring Megan Fox is a positive career move says something about the mainstreaming of horror, but I don't know what), and Halloween exhumer Rob Zombie.
It starts off with the popular "why should chicks dig horror question" which is really only interesting in light of new data that suggests women are now buying more horror tickets than men.
Long before the first big-screen vivisection of a female breast, the novelist H. P. Lovecraft wrote that horror was "supposed to be against the world, against life, against civilization." But the delight that the genre’s filmmakers, especially those behind the Saw franchise and its torture porn kin, take in depicting a steady stream of starlets being strung up, nailed down or splayed open, makes it clear that modern horror is against some more than others.
And yet recent box office receipts show that women have an even bigger appetite for these films than men. Theories straining to address this particular head scratcher have their work cut out for them: Are female fans of "Saw" ironists? Masochists? Or just dying to get closer to their dates?
The article evokes the perennially popular Clover theory of the "final girl," supported by a Cody anecdote:
"When I watched movies like 'The Goonies' and 'E.T.,' it was boys having adventures," she said. "When I watched 'Nightmare on Elm Street,' it was Nancy beating" up Freddy. "It was that simple."
By far the best quote comes from Rob Zombie, who has decided to give a great and glorious middle finger to the hordes of bloggers who felt his reimginamakethingy of Halloween II didn't measure up to the original (a charge that is somewhat like accusing somebody of not being developmental challenged enough to be in the special Olympics).
"The '80s are the decade that ruined everything for everybody," he said. "The soul went away, and it became gore for the sake of gore, and kids were cheering at killings and yelling and screaming. It became a roller coaster ride. And of course once something becomes a roller coaster, all you can do is build a bigger, more extreme roller coaster. That’s where I think horror movies really got perverted."
I'm actually sympathetic to the views expressed by C, K, and Z in the piece, though I find this particular line a bit off-putting:
For Ms. Cody this was great news, an opportunity to re-educate a jaded audience about what a horror film is.
The incessant impulse of horror fandom to school the ignorant masses around them is, I think, perhaps the worst aspect of being a horror fan. The ceaseless rants of some fans are not only monotonous, but inevitably tinged with a sort of nostalgic myopia. It's a shame to see to such a statement in an otherwise inoffensive article.
That line aside, I think the article points to a interesting, if unasked, question about the changing nature of horror and its fandom. If women are, for the first time, eclipsing men in horror fandom, is there something new and distinctly "feminine" about modern horror? And if so, does the backlash against modern horror reflect some sort of old boys versus new girls conflict?
[UPDATE: Reader Madelon wisely points out that the claim that women are buying more tickets than men should, given the article's lack of hard data, be looked at with some skepticism. Even if it is true, what would it mean? Are women buying more tickets or are men buying fewer? Are the audience numbers the same, but the cost of tickets being distributed differently?
We do have some anecdotal evidence of the shift. The LA Times reports that Final Destination's performance edge over Halloween II had a gender angle:
Fifty-three percent of theaters played "Final Destination" in 3-D, helping its overall take since 3-D theaters typically charge $2 to $3 more for tickets. That can't explain its entire $10.9-million advantage over "Halloween," however. Tracking had indicated young women were more interested in "Destination," while young guys preferred "Halloween," and it seemed girls came out in bigger numbers and were able to persuade their male friends to join them.
EW gives us a slew of data going back to 2002's remake of The Ring:
Today, however, the genre's biggest constituency of die-hard fans is women. Name any recent horror hit and odds are that female moviegoers bought more tickets than men. And we're not just talking about psychological spookfests like 2002's The Ring (60 percent female), 2004's The Grudge (65 percent female), and 2005's The Exorcism of Emily Rose (51 percent female). We're also talking about all the slice-and-dice remakes and sequels that Hollywood churns out.
''I don't think there was anyone who expected that women would gravitate toward a movie called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,'' says Chainsawproducer Brad Fuller of the 2003 remake, which became a female-driven $81 million hit. ''For us, the issue now is that it's harder for us to get young men into the theater than women.'' And female audiences stay loyal. ''I've seen married women who are, like, 35 years old at horror movies and they're like, 'Oh, our husbands are with the kids and we all came out together,''' says Clint Culpepper, the president of Screen Gems, which is releasing a remake of the 1987 slasher film The Stepfather in October. ''Men stop seeing horror at a certain age, but women continue to go.''
Even the movies popularly known as torture porn, in which hot babes in hot pants are often subjected to medieval torture devices, apparently hold an appeal for young women. Executives preparing to unveil the video-on-demand channel FEARnet didn't expect women to have the stomach for a subgenre often considered exploitative. ''When we launched the network, we went out and did focus groups and it was the women in the room who really wanted a horror channel more than the guys did,'' says FEARnet president Diane Robina. ''I actually thought that the women would be less into the Saw films, but they were much more into them.'']
The fanbase of Twilight clearly skews female. (I once asked a neighbor's kid which he'd be more embarrassed to be seen carrying through the school halls: the Bible or a copy of Twilight. He said he'd get teased less carrying the Bible.) But, data shows, so does the audience for Saw - a fact that considerably less is made of. Still, criticism of Saw occasionally follows a weirdly similar pattern. Both are criticized for their "soap opera" aspects. The tangled love stories of former and the endlessly recursive backstory of latter are both consider failings rather than strengths. People propose that interest in either franchise is symptomatic, or a byproduct of some intellectual deficiency, rather than the wholesome "fun" interest fans have in other horror franchises. Twilight fans, we're given to believe, are simply stupid young women who will "grow up" and learn to like real entertainments. Saw fans, we're told by critics who assume to be in the know, are perverse gore hounds who get sick kicks from suffering. Nothing, we can be sure, like pleasure of fans that enjoy watching the mass murder perpetrated by Freddy, Michael, Jason, and company.
Perhaps this is all coincidence. Maybe there an essential form to the Interweb rant that makes attacks on Twilight and Saw seem weirdly similar. Further, are we really in a notably period of fandom backlash? One could easily make the case that fan communities usually tend towards the artistically conservative and dismiss the new. All that's different is the ability of such fans to spread their message. The idea that we're in an unusually important period of retrenchment would then be simply an illusion of the Interweb.
Still, somebody smarter than I (and that's most of y'all out there) should look into the rise of a female-dominated horror fandom, its impact on the product, and the reaction of older fans and self-styled old school protectors of the faith. The results might come to nothing; or they might just cast an interesting on the future of the genre.
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