I kind of cheated on this question because I have an answer that isn't the obvious one. & because you brought up where male leads show up I'm going to reply to it here.
Male leads tend to show up in horror films that are either sci-fi (aliens, zombies, etc...) or that involve fighting other people. One stand-out exception is the Alien series, which is important because of the concept of motherhood as a driving force in the film series & it is necessary for the lead to be a female for her to even begin to understand the monster. Men fight the visceral.
It's not that men can't be scared. I mean, look at Hitchcock. A lot of Hitch's best movies demand a terrified male lead being plunged into the depths of neuroses over his fears-- Vertigo, for example. But that, I think, is part of what makes Vertigo believable. A woman would not let that happen to herself. Nor would a woman be victimized in the same way were she stuck in the station in The Thing. I think that's a case where a female character wouldn't be believable.
And what I think it is has more to do with what you mentioned about The Ring-- A man wouldn't be believable not because he wouldn't take an interest in his child, though, but because for a man to be in touch with the spiritual/supernatural requires him to be an eccentric or a priest (eg The Exorcist). Women are given an unspoken power in the collective unconscious; women are closer to ghosts, closer to psychic vibrations naturally than men are.
The Godzilla series is a good example of this. In the earlier movies, where Godzilla is being fought with lasers, etc., the leads are male. In the later, 1990s Godzilla movies, when psychic communication & issues of earth power become important to the story, Miki Saegusa becomes the heroine of the films & her ability to understand monsters on a deeper emotional/spiritual level becomes central to the plots.
I would like to say that the women in horror films and even the gothic novels kiwi_magic brought up above are descendants of Medea, Circe, Cassandra and other classical female figures who have a deeper understanding of the supernatural that the men around them can't begin to comprehend.
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Date: 2008-03-28 03:43 pm (UTC)Male leads tend to show up in horror films that are either sci-fi (aliens, zombies, etc...) or that involve fighting other people. One stand-out exception is the Alien series, which is important because of the concept of motherhood as a driving force in the film series & it is necessary for the lead to be a female for her to even begin to understand the monster. Men fight the visceral.
It's not that men can't be scared. I mean, look at Hitchcock. A lot of Hitch's best movies demand a terrified male lead being plunged into the depths of neuroses over his fears-- Vertigo, for example. But that, I think, is part of what makes Vertigo believable. A woman would not let that happen to herself. Nor would a woman be victimized in the same way were she stuck in the station in The Thing. I think that's a case where a female character wouldn't be believable.
And what I think it is has more to do with what you mentioned about The Ring-- A man wouldn't be believable not because he wouldn't take an interest in his child, though, but because for a man to be in touch with the spiritual/supernatural requires him to be an eccentric or a priest (eg The Exorcist). Women are given an unspoken power in the collective unconscious; women are closer to ghosts, closer to psychic vibrations naturally than men are.
The Godzilla series is a good example of this. In the earlier movies, where Godzilla is being fought with lasers, etc., the leads are male. In the later, 1990s Godzilla movies, when psychic communication & issues of earth power become important to the story, Miki Saegusa becomes the heroine of the films & her ability to understand monsters on a deeper emotional/spiritual level becomes central to the plots.
I would like to say that the women in horror films and even the gothic novels