Discussing Gender Roles In Alfred Hitchcock's Take Psycho
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Imagine your favorite classic horror movie; most films portray men as killers and monsters where the females are almost always shown as a victim and defenseless to create more fear within the movie. Have you ever thought about if the roles in a movie were switched, would it still give the audience the same emotion and anxiety in the film? Take Psycho for example if the shower scene was shot with a male in the shower instead of a female would it have made a difference. I feel that horror has pegged females to be weak for centuries and because of this switching gender roles won’t make a difference to the overall effect of the movie to some people. Over the years there have been many horror movies, sequels, and remakes. Horror is something can…show more content… According to a student from an online essay:
In most horror films women seem to be slower, less powerful, and simply less dominant. Men in the same films are going to die too, but are not shown as being so defenseless. Females are commonly shown getting killed slowly and getting carried off into the night screaming. On the other hand males will be killed quickly with fewer struggles…
A good place to analyze this is in the 1960’s version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Let’s use the typical shower scene. A person naked in the shower is probably one of the most vulnerable places to imagine. In the scene the female is in the shower and the audience can see a dark figure slowly appearing in the background; the curtain is then pulled back quickly and she is stabbed multiple times and left to die. Now, picture this scene if it was a male in the shower. Would it still bring the same fear and anxiety as it did with a female? I feel that it does make a difference between the two scenes; a murder in the shower is universally scary to anyone but, portraying it as a female enhances the fear to the audience. This just goes to proves that gender plays a huge role in horror film and is the reason that women are found as weak in many different