“All they want to see is demented madmen running around in ski masks hacking up young virgins.”

Slasher movies and films with women as villains are still being made, but the force and power of women in horror cannot be ignored and can be seen in many intelligent horror movies. Although much progress is still needed with some films seeming to move back in time with women characters, instead of forward.

The first true slasher film is widely acknowledged to be Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’, with the murder of Janet Leigh’s character we see a sexually independent women being stabbed with the ever phallic knife, a symbolic punishment for these women. The sexually repressed male killer fears a sexually independent woman and this is shown through her death, when the male killer thrusts his knife into her, thus taking away her sexual power through the symbolic rape of her body. Male sexuality is shown through the act of murder, since most killers in slasher films are sexually repressed, such as Norman Bates in ‘Psycho.’

In slasher movies, young women are often objectified and shown as nothing more than sex objects. The ‘Friday the 13th’ series shows this well (with the exception of the original), many of the women are shown half clothed and hyper-sexualized, taking away the audience’s ability to sympathize with them because they are seen as less valuable in society. Classic slasher films usually show a direct cause and effect link between sex and death, with murder serving as a symbolic punishment for any kind of immoral intercourse. This symbolism illustrates a kind of unconscious moral lesson to the viewer.

Horror movies show heavy symbolism, especially in the portrayal of women and femininity, through images of sexual intercourse, fear of castration, and the strength of females. Horror films, and the slasher subgenre, are famous for portraying women as hypersexual damsels in distress who are usually murdered within the first five minutes as punishment for their indiscretions in such films as ‘Friday the 13th’ and ‘Halloween.’ They are also portrayed as antagonists, which can be seen as a reflection of men’s pathological fear of women, their power, and menstruation, resulting in castration anxiety. Horror is a genre that rarely features women in a non-exploitative way, even with modern movies such as the new ‘Friday the 13th’ being extremely sexist.