Newswise — A spike in the popularity of slasher films during the late 1990s has prompted a Florida State University researcher to test popular beliefs that the genre portrays erotic violence and exploits women.
FSU communications Professor Barry Sapolsky found in a study of the 10 most commercially successful slasher films of the late '90s that they have gotten meaner than their counterparts of the 1980s. The movies - such as "Scream," "Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare," "Bride of Chucky" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer" - contained an average of 37.4 violent acts per film compared to 26 for films in the '80s. But contrary to popular belief, Sapolsky found that men were the victims of violence at nearly twice the rate of women in films from both decades.
"I don't want to diminish with this study the seriousness of women being victimized or women being brutalized. I'm just trying to straighten out some assumptions that have been made," said Sapolsky, who studies the use of offensive language and sex in the media. "But it has been stated as a fact that women are victimized more than men in this film genre. This study suggests that's not true. Men are victimized more."
The study also cast doubts on a popular assumption that violence in slasher films is typically associated with sex. Although the amount of sexual content in slasher films remained constant since the '80s, Sapolsky found that sex and violence were only portrayed together an average of less than one time per film in the '90s. In fact, two of the 10 films studied - "Scream 2" and "Bride of Chucky" - accounted for nearly all of the scenes where sex and violence were juxtaposed.
Sapolsky also reports that popular action/adventure films contained more than four times the violence as slasher films, the vast majority of which is directed at men.
So does this mean women are not exploited in slasher films? No, Sapolsky said. For instance, the study shows that slasher films spend more time focusing upon women in terror than men. Women were depicted in fear nearly five times longer than men in films of the 1980s, but that ratio dropped to about two-and-one-half times longer for women in slasher films of the '90s.
The camera also often shows terrorized women being slowly stalked through the eyes of their attacker, a technique seldom used with male victims, he said.
Sapolsky thinks the reduction in time that women are shown in fear in slasher films of the '90s may be from criticism movie makers received about such techniques in the 1980s.
Sapolsky teamed up with Fred Molitor and Sarah Luque of California State University, Sacramento, to study sex and violence in popular '90s slasher films. Their findings were published earlier this year in "Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly."
In comparing violence in slasher films to popular action/adventure films, Sapolsky studied such box office hits as "Silence of the Lambs," "Lethal Weapon" and "Tomorrow Never Dies."
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