Why in French Horror the Women are the Hero

I guess you are right. If you want to show equality why not beat them equal as men.

This may be the reason the makers of Inside went a step further and tortured a heavily pregnant lady.

Thank you for the remarks.

my personal theory is that all the feminist crap thats being going on hit the movie industry and now they are forced to make it a woman for them to go and see it.

----------
In this universe, there's only one absolute... everything freezes!

... except that the 'load of crap' theory is right.

There were some horror films that made women the hero, but now EVERY horror film has to make women the hero. The same is happening to action films. It's the product of feminism and the decline of the male.

If you truly think it's natural you just have to watch the horrid remake of "The Hitcher" to have your belief debunked. It's politics.

Good point about sympathizing better with a female victim. (On a side note, you mentioned Alien as well as the argument about "male tormentors." Interestingly, the Alien franchise also has female antagonists. The random aliens throughout the film could be whatever sex, but the boss fight is lots of estrogen. When Ripley and the big queen bee alien b!tch duke it out, there's a very strong mothering instinct and protection/survival of one's offspring playing a major factor.)

And the "needing to become men" part of the asinine theory: Female leads often are portrayed as more or less equal to their male co-stars in terms of capability, toughness, intelligence, etc. To me, "becoming men" implies not only being equals, but surpassing men and becoming superior, just as men traditionally have been perceived.

There's a lot of saving of one's teammates, special skills, critical thinking, etc that doesn't favor any one gender. I mean, nobody's putting men in impractical shoes that make them fall over every few steps when the villain's chasing them. The female character might be more *important*, and she might be the only survivor at the end, but it's not necessarily because the men are incompetent--and often there are plenty of women who have died along the way as well.

"Come on, pelican!"

How would one "survive a brutal murder"? That must be quite a trick.

Is all that we see or seem, but a dream within a dream?

to the OP: the 'scream queen' principle has been used since the beginning of the slasher genre, regardless the country of origin.

[deleted]

Grace, The Omen, etc...

Anyway, as a man I'm here to say boo frickin' hoo to all the little boys posting here complaining about the "decline of the male." Given that most of REAL LIFE'S horrors (rape, incest, domestic violence, murder, war, weapons of mass destruction, Riverdance...) are perpetrated by men, I don't see any problem with giving women a little vengeance in a theatrical fantasy land. Nevermind for a moment that all feminism as a philosophy really says is that women are people, too, and that if you have to deal with 35 or 40 years or so of female dominated cinema, I'd say that's a small price to pay for the misogyny OF TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS OF HUMAN EXISTENCE, which incidentally still exists even in the first world where there are laws in place that supposedly guard against it (anti-workplace discrimination legislation, for instance).

Oh, and did any of the people complaining actually watch *this particular film*? Funny they should accuse it's makers of anti-male sexism in light of the fact that even when Yasmine was taking out bad guys, she was whimpering and shuddering (something you've never seen a male hero do) the whole time, AND the final two "bad guys" in this film were actually WOMEN! Same sort of scenario in the aforementioned High Tension.

Not for nothing, but I think it's also worth mentioning that the 'Final Girl' in other French horror films is a lot of the time luck of the draw. Take for instance La Horde. The only reason the Aurore character survives is because a man heroically sacrifices himself.

The Final Girl has been a staple of slasher/horror movies for so long that it has become standard. These films generally follow a fairly rigid formula, and while recent French films have tried to bring something new to the genre, the female survivor has remained.

There's probably a few good reasons for this. For one, these films are generally aimed at men and men like to look at women. Moreso, men are instilled with the notion of chivalry (whether we act upon it or not!), and it just wouldn't be kosher to see a male character survive when his girlfriend has been killed. Another reason, as one another poster pointed out, is that generally in real life serial killers are men and their victims are women. It makes sense for a woman to triumph over a male tormentor.

There is also some sense in Carol Clover's idea that we (men) identify with the killer(s) initially. That way we can vicariously side with the predator, before switching our allegiance to the feisty lady who has more than 'earned' her survival. In many cases in early slashers, it was simply a case of nearly all the characters being female. In the case of Frontier(s) however, it's simply that women are kept for breeding (nice) and there is only one woman in the group. She is kept alive while the others are slaughtered.

One other thing to consider is that often the last surviving character is merely that - a survivor, and not a hero in any sense of the word. Often there is just as much luck involved as determination, and they are rarely able to rescue anybody as we might expect a hero to do.








Le temps détruit tout