With Halloween creeping closer, students are diving into the scream-inducing realm of horror movies to get into the holiday spirit. For many, this includes scouring for recommendations of cinema’s most gut-wrenching and depraved creations.
This desire often leads individuals to the horror subgenre known as exploitation films, which are cheaply made movies that rely on cultural taboos like sexual assault and extreme violence to rake in profit. These films typically feature excessive violence or sexual content that appeals to the sordid desires of their audience.
Exploitation movies are often recommended on the internet despite their excessive use of brutality. Women tend to be subjected to a majority of violence, and watching these films can reinforce misogynistic tropes.
With the horror genre being so widely beloved, it is crucial for women’s victimization to not be sensationalized. Though it’s understandable for students to seek out intense horror films this time of year, they should avoid exploitation films at all costs.
Temple film professor Eugene Haynes has noticed the harmful trends in horror and believes repeated victimization of certain characters can reveal filmmakers’ immoral intentions.
“It’s not really the horror that you watch,” Haynes said. “It’s the other more exploitive visual things that are going to play. That’s where I draw the line.”
“A Serbian Film” is one of horror’s most infamous films, as it contains graphic depictions of various forms of sexual violence. Exploitation movies like “A Serbian Film” rely on the victimization of women to satisfy their male characters and appeal to the male audience. The female characters are rarely explored outside of the context of their abuse.
Rylee Mahnesmith, the editor-in-chief of Lunar Journal, Temple’s intersectional feminist literary magazine, has noticed this trend in extreme horror movies and it has turned her away from the genre almost completely, she said.
“It makes me think about the tie between a woman’s value and her ability to be sexually desired or attractive to men,” said Mahnesmith, a junior English major. “So [it’s like] women are only able to get away or to be stronger, to survive when they are a sexual object or an object of desire to a man.”
Students should be able to parse through movies for insensitive tropes and know what trends to avoid. One of the most prominent tropes in exploitation films is the Woman in the Refrigerator trope, which describes the trend of victimizing women to motivate a male character.
Supporting movies that employ the Woman in the Refrigerator trope can have measurable side effects on female audiences. The repeated objectification of female sexuality in mass media causes low self-esteem and promotes sexual aggression, according to UNICEF.
Being able to identify ethical sex in movies is a crucial skill in media literacy. Responsible portrayals of sex should serve a purpose and be edited without sensationalizing the scene, according to Raindance, a UK-based film festival and training program. The use of violence in movies must also be treated with the same care.
Kartik Nair, a film professor, believes debates about excessive violence are not new, but the nature of exploitation movies may prove unique moral concerns.
“It is certainly the case that gore film production can be challenging,” Nair said. “Because of actors’ bodies to place themselves in dramatic, performative situations, and because the films are often low budget, there’s a kind of further precarity to the labor.”
Distressing imagery is a powerful narrative device and should only be consumed by students when it is intentional and develops the film’s story. Analyzing the consequences of violent or sexual scenes is an easy way for students to decipher a filmmaker’s intentions, and differentiate horror movies from exploitative films. The use of intense visuals should serve as a symbol for a broader social conflict or reveal another layer of a character.
Examples of horror films with effective uses of violence are the original “Hellraiser” and the thriller “Titane.” Both films utilize bone-chilling violence to make cogent social commentary on gender and domesticity. A more recent release that students should support in theaters is “The Substance,” which tackles feelings of aging as a woman through traditional body horror.
Instead of avoiding horror altogether, students should find horror films that intentionally use graphic imagery for the sake of artistic expression instead of exploiting the pain of the female characters. Recommending films with excessive brutality and sexual content only spreads harmful ideologies and should have no place in modern discourse.
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