how women are portrayed in horror films?

How women are portrayed in Horror films?

Women in Horror films are being portrayed as weak, vulnerable and fragile but mainly as hyper-sexual damsels in distress, who are usually killed within the first five minutes as a punishment for their indiscretions in the films such as 'Friday the 13th' and 'Halloween'. They are also portrayed as antagonists, which can be seen as reflecting the men's pathological fear of women and their powers etc.

In slasher films, women are perceived as nothing more than just sex objects. We know this because within films like Friday the 13th and Halloween, they show half clothed, hypers-sexual women. This takes away the audience's ability to sympathize to them because they are seen as less valuable in society. In the classic slasher films, they usually show a direct and effective link between sex and death with murder serving as a symbolic punishment for any immoral intercourse, this suggests and symbolizes a kind of unconscious moral lesson to the viewer.

In Alfred Hitchcock's  'Physco' we see the murder of Janet Leigh's character quite graphically and sexualized. We see her as a sexually independent woman being stabbed with a phallic knife, a symbolic punishment for these women. The sexually repressed male killer fears these types of women and this is shown within her death when the male killers thrusts the knife into her thus taking away her sexual power through the rape of her body.
Male sexuality is mainly shown through acts of murder in horror films since most killers in the slasher films are sexually repressed for example Norman Bates in 'Physco'.

On the otherhand, Women can also be seen as defeating typically male villians and exhibiting strength and intelligence which means moving from the victim to heroine. This suggests that women can be represented as positives within the genre, within the films such as 'the descent' and 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' and these films are usually more respected by critics and the public. 

The part that I found interesting within the article was when they spoke about that the horror genre very rarely shows women in a non-exploitative way, even in modern horror films such as the new 'Friday the 13th' film which is extremely sexist and also when they go into depth about the original 'Friday the 13th' film and how some of the women within the film are portrayed as muscular and masculine, whereas in the 2009 version; where all the women were objectified. 

 'All they want to see is demented madmen running around in ski masks hacking up young virgins' Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall) from 'Fright Night' 

Words I don't understand within the article. 

Hyper-sexual, menstruation, Castration anxiety, Pathological, Sexually repressed, indiscretions, Perceived, moral lesson, acknowledge.