Awesome discussion going on people!
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In these stories, the ideal woman preserves her life by preserving her purity. You might think of the killer as an avatar for that element in the male psyche which judges and damns those woman which it can not wholly own. Once a female character has 'given' herself (by which I mean her innocence and her honor, etc) to someone else in the story, she must be destroyed for squandering that which is most precious.
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ShadyJ, I think you just might be dead-on correct here. Superb analysis of slasher films. I also loved this line:
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nothing is more terrifying than the landscape of the naked male psyche.
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The best horror speaks to us on a primal level, and not just a flight or fight level, but on a deep subconscious level where our animal instincts lie, and it's this kind of analysis that we need more of. You don't have a blog do you? I'd follow it in a heart-beat!
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The guys were really nasty to him - the woman seemed to like him, but did to some extend participate in the jokes behind his back. And I know from a conversation that I had with him, that he had a really hard time finding woman who would actually date him. Ironically - he turned my offer down when I asked him out, because he was looking for someone more "feminine"
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Yeah it is interesting how all that works. See I would have thought that his natural proclivity towards feminine hobbies would be a massive 'in' for him in regards to success with the ladies. I didn't think women rejected men for being too feminine in the same way that men rejected women for being too masculine (I thought women were somehow less shallow in that regard).
I myself was raised pretty much by my mother (my father was largely absent in my life) and I think that I've got feminine qualities (such as understanding and nurturing attitudies-- which is why I'm a primary school teacher), but I'm really self-conscious of appearing too feminine and so modify my speech to be more masculine (especially in a school setting for some reason).
I have a girlfriend, and she seems to enjoy having sex with me, so I don't know, I'm doing something right. Maybe its a fine line with these matters.
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Okay how about this:
I've been dabbling with writing horror fiction for the last few months (massive Stephen King fan, but I want to write a bit more subversively than him), and I've come up with an idea for a novel that is a subversion of the slasher movie.
Instead of a male killer, the killer is a woman, and instead of women dying for being promiscuous, men are killed for only valuing women for their visual appearance. I wanted the female killer to be a Kathy-Bates-in-Misery type character.
Is it too on the nose, do you think?