The Rise of Women in Horror Fandom and Film

Essay from the year 2010 in the subject Communications - Movies and Television, , language: English, abstract: Most scholarship on the horror film has assumed that males are the primary spectators of horror; however, there have been developments, both in scholarship as well as in mainstream media, to contradict this point. In 2009, journalist Michelle Orange pointed out, in an article written for the New York Times, "Recent box office receipts show that women have an even bigger appetite for these [horror] films than men." Furthermore, Brigid Cherry has continually underscored the point that horror has its roots in the Gothic, a traditionally female genre whose roots are traced back to the sexually transgressive Horace Walpole and female writer Mary Shelley. Cherry also points out that a 1996 market survey "found that Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors was 'more popular with women than men, with over twice as many women than men liking it,'" and that despite claims by Linda Williams that women "refuse to look" at scenes of horror, the gratuitous shows played at the renown Grand Guignol often resulted in women assisting men from walking out of the theater after the men had fainted at the scenes of blood and gore. Cherry's implication, obviously, is that women have always enjoyed horror, but their enjoyment of the genre has gone unnoticed, and perhaps this is true, however, both Cherry and Orange have missed an even more significant emergent trend in horror.