While the previous posters have put up some valid points, I think there is a much simpler one at heart:
Because a male in the same role would either be emasculated, and thus not sympathetic to the audience, or be someone you can assume will fight back and win and thus the horror will be reduced.
Seriously. It is all gender related. Male leads, especially in movies, are not allowed to be scared without losing their masculinity. That is why male leads mostly pops up in horror movies where they can fight and strike back without reducing the horror. That mostly means zombie movies, since fighting and killing the zombies is a typically manly job for a hero. There the horror is that it really doesn't matter, because they are too many. Same with for example, the Blob, that also has a male lead that fights back, because it is so utterly futile. Or other lethal creatures horror movies like The Thing. No problems with male leads there. They are scared, sure, but they are manly scared with weapons.
However, have a more supernatural/creepy/unfightable/serial killer/single murderer horror and you have to have a girl.
I mean just try to imagine Halloween with a male teenage lead?
In an interesting sidenote, the female lead in the Ring is actually male in the book the movie was based on. They changed it to a mother instead of a father in the japanese movie because the movie producers thought it would be too weird and unbelievable for a japanese audience to believe a man would invest that much interest in his child.
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Date: 2008-03-28 09:26 am (UTC)While the previous posters have put up some valid points, I think there is a much simpler one at heart:
Because a male in the same role would either be emasculated, and thus not sympathetic to the audience, or be someone you can assume will fight back and win and thus the horror will be reduced.
Seriously. It is all gender related. Male leads, especially in movies, are not allowed to be scared without losing their masculinity. That is why male leads mostly pops up in horror movies where they can fight and strike back without reducing the horror. That mostly means zombie movies, since fighting and killing the zombies is a typically manly job for a hero. There the horror is that it really doesn't matter, because they are too many. Same with for example, the Blob, that also has a male lead that fights back, because it is so utterly futile. Or other lethal creatures horror movies like The Thing. No problems with male leads there. They are scared, sure, but they are manly scared with weapons.
However, have a more supernatural/creepy/unfightable/serial killer/single murderer horror and you have to have a girl.
I mean just try to imagine Halloween with a male teenage lead?
In an interesting sidenote, the female lead in the Ring is actually male in the book the movie was based on. They changed it to a mother instead of a father in the japanese movie because the movie producers thought it would be too weird and unbelievable for a japanese audience to believe a man would invest that much interest in his child.