The female horror film audience : viewing pleasures and fan practices. Part: 01

• 29 March, 1999

Abstract The Female Horror Film Audience: Viewing Pleasures and Fan Practices What is at stake for female fans and followers of horror cinema? This study explores the pleasures in horror film viewing for female members of the audience. The findings presented here confirm that female viewers of horror do not refuse to look but actively enjoy horror films and read such films in feminine ways. Part 1 of this thesis suggests that questions about the female viewer and her consumption of the horror film cannot be answered solely by a consideration of the text-reader relationship or by theoretical models of spectatorship and identification. A profile of female horror film fans and followers can therefore be developed only through an audience study. Part 2 presents a profile of female horror fans and followers. The participants in the study were largely drawn from the memberships of horror fan groups and from the readerships of a cross-section of professional and fan horror magazines. Qualitative data were collected through focus groups, interviews, open-ended questions included in the questionnaire and through the ommunication of opinions and experiences in letters and other written material. Part 3 sheds light on the modes of interpretation and attempts to position the female viewers as active consumers of horror films. This study concludes with a model of the female horror film viewer which points towards areas of female horror film spectatorship which require further analysis. The value of investigating the invisible experiences of women with popular culture is demonstrated by the very large proportion of respondents who expressed their delight and thanks in having an opportunity to speak about their experiences. This study of female horror film viewers allows the voice of an otherwise marginalised and invisible audience to be heard, their experiences recorded, the possibilities for resistance explored, and the

Introduction Overview of the study It is often assumed, by both the producers of horror films and the critics of the genre, that taking pleasure in horrific or fnghtening images is a masculine trait, not a feminine one. While women may watch horror films, they do so only reluctantly and with displeasure, not least because of the representations of violence against the female body they contain. However, Mark Jancovich notes in Horror (1992, p. 18) that horror literature has a large female readership. Women were the primary consumers of Gothic fiction and writers such as Nancy Collins, Lisa Tuttle, Poppy Z. Brite and Anne Rice continue the tradition of female authorship today, whilst the female readerships of horror fiction, including that aimed at children and teenagers, are high. Although horror literature is recognised as appealing across the sex and age ranges, the widely-held notion, both within and without the Hollywood film industry, is that the horror film is the preserve of the adolescent male and a situation has created in which films are produced and marketed with a male youth audience in mind. Some recent horror films such as Bram Stoker's Dracula and Wolf have been marketed as Gothic romances, but as Nina Auerbach observes in Our Vampires. Ourselves (1995, pp. 3-4), a female exclusion zone has been constructed around horror. Most studies of the horror film that have considered questions of gender and spectatorship have concerned themselves with a theoretical male spectator. From such a critical perspective, Linda Williams in When The Woman Looks (1984) does not regard the female gaze as a pleasurable one and the female spectator's act of looking is punished. For Williams, this explains why the female viewer of horror films refuses to look, often physically blocking or averting her eyes from the screen. Whether most female spectators actually behave like this is another question. Demographic profiles of contemporary cinema audiences suggest that women can comprise up to 50 per cent of horror film audiences. As Carol Clover has acknowledged in Men. Women and Chainsaws (1992, p. 54), it seems inadequate to dismiss large numbers of women as 'male-identified' and account for their responses only as 'an "immasculated" act of collusion with the oppressor.' The presence of a large proportion of women in the horror film audience raises important questions about horror film consumption, gendered spectatorship and social models of femininity. In some segments of

the audience we might expect to find female viewers who do take pleasure in viewing horror films and who, in what could amount to an act of defiance, refuse to refuse to look. This study recognises the increasing visibility of active female honor film viewers and seeks to explore this audience segment's consumption and appropriation of the genre. The aims and objectives of this study are therefore: • to investigate the viewing patterns of active female viewers (that is, the female fans and followers) of the horror film; • to investigate the tastes of active female viewers in order to ascertain whether any particular forms of the horror film are popular with this group and ascertain what factors make these films, as opposed to other types, appealing; • to examine the reception of honor films by active female viewers in order to determine the reactions and interpretative strategies of horror by this group; • to assess the consumption and appropriation of horror films within the context of honor fandom; and • to establish how, if at all, active female viewers relate what they see on the screen to social issues such as feminine sexuality, female role models, violence against women, and other aspects of feminist discourse. 1n chapter 1, a picture of the horror film audience drawn from surveys of cinema attendance and screen studies is presented, together with an overview of horror cinema and potential feminine codings of the genre. Chapter 2 presents relevant theoretical research into the female horror film spectator and explores questions which the existence of active female horror film viewers raise about gendered spectatorship. This presents a context in which honor film viewing by women might be understood. Such questions make an ethnographic study of the female horror film audience crucial and chapter 3 proposes a strategy for investigating the female horror film audience. Chapters 4 to 7 present the results and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data collected in the study, chapter 4 providing a demographic picture of the participating female horror film viewers and an analysis of the viewing habits and preferences of the participants. The suggestion that gender socialisation processes are important is investigated in chapter 5, along with an exploration into the attraction of horror for the respondents from a very young age. Chapter 5 also contains an analysis of the emotional affects reported by the respondents and how these responses contribute to their enjoyment of horror films. Chapter 6 investigates the interpretive activities of the respondents andsets out a range of readings which might categorise active female horror film spectatorship. Chapter 7 examines the position of the female horror fan in relation to fan publishing and fan organisations. In particular, it looks at vampire fandom and the appropriation of vampire texts; this has links to the appropriation of texts by fans referred to by Jenkins (1992) as 'textual poaching' (after de Certeau, 1984). In conclusion, chapter 8 considers issues arising from this study which might necessitate a reconceptualisation of the active female horror film audience or indicate areas of further research.

Chapter 1 The Horror Film and Its Audience Only the saddest of simpletons, one feels, could ever get a really satisfying frisson. For the rest of us [horror films] have just become a rather eccentric and specialised form of light entertainment, and possibly a useful means of escape for a housewife harrowed by the shopping. (Granger, Financial Times, 6 May 1957') In the June 1992 edition of the woman's magazine Cosmopolitan an article by E. Lederman entitled 'The Best Places To Meet Good Men' 2 warned its readership against starting up a conversation with a man looking for horror films in the local videomart since such men have 'questionable feelings about women.' Lederman goes on to state that 'Whether buried deep within him or overtly expressed in his words and actions, his misogynistic tendencies make him a man to avoid.' As in the above quote from Granger's review of Hammer's The Curse of Frankenstein, this attitude illustrates that the horror film audience has always been regarded as completely Other, the fans dismissed as 'them' in contrast to the normal 'us'. Unlike the 'saddest of simpletons' of the SOs however, the 90s horror fan is a danger to women. Granger's quote recognises that in the SOs women too gained gratifications (albeit simple escapism) from the horror film, but by the 90s the horror film represents only a threat to women, not only on the screen but in real life. Since the rise of the slasher film in the late 70s, the horror film audience has been regarded as consisting primarily of adolescent boys and men under the age of twenty-five. Twitchell's observations of horror film audiences (1985, p. 70) lead him to the conclusion that 'most of the audience are in their early to mid-teens', whilst Clover (1992b, p. 6) claims that 'the proportions vary somewhat from subgenre to subgenre and from movie to movie ..., but the preponderance of young males appears constant.' This supposition is also evident within the Hollywood industry. In part, this may be because the Hollywood-based film industry sees its primary target audience as males between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four and consequently aims many of its films and much of its marketing and publicity at this demographic group (Kramer, 1998). In this model, women may watch horror films, but only reluctantly and with displeasure. As president of Miramax Mark Gill (interviewed by Hindes, 1997) states when expressing surprise that women went to see the slasher film Scream 2: 'Horror film audiences used to be heavily male. If they could drag their girlfriends along you were lucky.' The

horror film audience has not always been regarded as so resolutely male; just as in the SOs 'housewives harrowed by the shopping' may have been recognised as an important segment of the Hammer horror film audience (at least in the mind of the reviewer quoted above), in the 30s women were regarded as an important audience for Dracula and other Universal horror films. Likewise, contemporary surveys of computer games players, visitors to Madam Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors and the readers of Goosebumps and Point Horror pre-adolescent's and young adult's horror fiction have revealed that women continue to be as, if not more, attracted to horrific entertainment than men. These, and other, findings (which are given in more detail below) are supported by demographic data of actual cinema audiences. Recent exit polls in the USA (see Hindes, 1997) showed audiences in the opening weekend of Scream 2 averaged 55 per cent female and 45 per cent male. If we are to believe the accepted model of a predominantly male horror film audience, a female audience share of over 50 per cent may seem unusually high. The demographic profile for Scream 2 is very similar to that for Titanic (which may be classed as a romance) where females outnumbered males 57 per cent to 43 per cent, whereas the Bond film Tomorrow Never jj had an audience of 60 per cent male to 40 per cent female. The fact that Scream and its sequel are a pastiche on the original slasher films with strong female roles may well be one reason for the high numbers of women seeing this particular film; however, Dika (1987, p. 87) reports that 55 per cent of the twelve to seventeen-year-old audience for films in the original slasher cycle was female. Pinedo (1997, p. 72) concludes that Dika misread the statistics (Dika derived the figure from data given by the 20th Century Fox advertising and publicity department to the New York Times -see Dika, 1990, p. 142) and that this figure is wrong. Although Pinedo may well be correct in this, given the demographic for Scream 2, Dika's estimate may in fact be closer to the true figure than generally believed. The Cinema Advertising Association's audience profiles, derived from representative samples of the British population and highlighting the age, sex and social class of British cinema audiences for the purposes of selling cinema advertising space, also indicate that women may make up a substantially higher segment of the horror film audience than often acknowledged. The CAA estimate the female audience for the films Man Bites Do g, Silence of the Lambs and Scream at around 50 per cent, and whilst the female audience for other hormr and honor-related films (Alien3, Reservoir Dogs and Natural Born Killers) is