The female horror film audience : viewing pleasures and fan practices. Part: 03

front
a) mixed sex groups (usually)
b) couples (often)
c) female groups (sometimes)
d) male groups (rare)
middle
a) couples
b) groups (mixed sex?)
rear
a) couples
b) female pairs or groups
c) lone males (old)5
d) lone males (young)
Even assuming that women make up only a small proportion of the mixed sex
groups (these may well be dominated by males), anywhere between 25 and
50 per cent of Twitchell's audience could well be female.
Clover's breakdown of the audience (p. 6) offers a slightly different
picture:
At theatre screenings ... the constituencies typically breakdown,
in order of size, as follows: young men, frequently in groups but
also solo; male-female couples of various ages (though mostly
young); solo 'rogue males' (older men of ominous appearance
andlor reactions); and adolescent girls in groups.
Clover did not collect any data or make any personal observations of the
cinema audience, instead relying on data reported by Austin (1983). She did,
however, conduct a small scale survey of video rentals (p. 6-7), but these
were from a very small sample of video stores and should not be taken as
statistically significant. Clover collected rental figures for two rape-revenge
films from three rental outlets in the San Francisco area for four weeks.
Results showed that between 80 and 90 per cent of renters were male and
renters of both sexes were mostly in their early twenties. However, these
figures are unlikely to give any indication of who viewed the film once it had
left the store.
The mixed-sex group is notably absent from Clover's cinema audience.
She also maintains that young men in single sex groups make up most of the
audience, whereas Twitchell rarely or never saw such groups. Clover ranks
all female groups as the lowest proportion of the audience, yet Twitchell's
observations seem to contradict this. It may be that Clover and Twitchell are
reporting on audiences from different geographical or class backgrounds, or
different generic or historic audiences; it may also be possible that, while the
adolescent male remains the majority viewer of the 80s slasher film, Clover.

significantly underestimates the female audience for other types and periods
of the horror film. (The neglect of the female spectator is, quite properly, a
deliberate omission in Clover's work, since she is concerned only with
identification in the adolescent male. It does however highlight the importance
of studying other groups of horror film viewers. If they do not have the same
stake in the horror film as the majority young male audience, it is important to
establish what might be at stake for them.)
Clover's audience profile, then, may differ from Twitchell's and from the
CAA figures because she primarily focused on low-budget slasher and
exploitation film audiences - these film types may be less well liked by
women and Clover herself supposes (p. 65fn) that the female audience for
occult films, for instance, is larger than that for the slasher or rape-revenge
genres: 'despite my impression that occult films have a greater share of female
viewers than other sorts of horror (there are no reliable statistics), it would
seem that the constructed viewer is also male.' Twitchell does not specify
what type of horror films he observed his audiences at, but his ad-hoc survey
may have taken in a wider range of post-slasher horror film types than
Clover. It should also be stressed that Clover and Twitchell are both
describing American audiences and their observations should not be assumed
to be directly applicable to a British audience. Cultural differences in audience
behaviour are well known. The descriptions of US audience behaviour
(including the stratification of the audience with younger people at the front
and older to the rear which Twitchell described) indicate that American horror
film viewers, especially the younger members of the audience, are particularly
active, calling out to characters in the films and passing comments on the
action. In the UK audiences generally are much more reserved, however
male/female audience splits may be similar, as the following observations of
Scottish audiences suggest.
In order to ascertain an approximate composition of the horror film
audience in the UK a survey of sex ratios in the audiences at six varied horror
film screenings at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh was carried out as part of the
design exercise for this research. 6 The results indicate that horror film
audiences contain between 28 and 36 per cent women (just under one-third of
the overall total). These figures are not as high as the CAA profiles, but this
may be because the films are older films being screened in a horror film
season at an art cinema, most of which are not mainstream. This survey also

indicates that mixed sex groups and all female groups make up approximately
17 per cent of the audience which might be similar to that observed by
Twitchell and is certainly more than Clover recognises. These groupings were
recorded as the audience arrived at the cinema hail entrance to have their ticket
checked and may not indicate groups meeting up inside the screening hail.
The largest proportions are lone men making up 33 per cent of the audience
(136 individuals), followed by mixed sex pairs making up 23 per cent of the
audience (96 individuals), and then two men together making up 14 per cent
of the audience (58 individuals). Other groupings are mixed sex groups at 10
per cent of the audience (43 people), then lone women at 9 per cent (37), then
groups of all women at 7 per cent (28), followed by groups of men (9) and
finally two women together (8) at around 2 per cent of the audience each.
There were 5 older rogue males and 2 rogue females counted at the screenings
(the latter was accounted for by an elderly woman at screenings of The Fly
and Dementia 13 who frequents the cinema during the winter months to save
on heating bills and was therefore discounted). In this survey, men seem
most likely to go alone or with one other man. Women are most likely to go
with one man or alone. Of other groupings, women are more likely than men
to go in groups of three or more (suggesting perhaps safety in numbers),
whilst men are more likely to go in pairs or alone than are women. (This may
be a reflection of wider issues in society, such as women preferring not to go
out alone at night because of fears about safety.) The fact that there are many
people of both sexes going to the screening alone may be due (in addition to
the possibility that they may be meeting friends inside the theatre) to the fact
that the films were screened at an art cinema. This may account for the
audience also being older than that described by Twitchell. This is to be
expected at an art cinema showing a season of older horror films and it is
assumed that many of those attending horror films in such a situation will be
individuals who are long-term habitual viewers of the horror film. 7 These
figures confirm that substantial numbers of older and female viewers of
horror films exist.
During the pilot study for this research, observation was also made of two
electronic-mailing lists for the discussion of vampires and for horror in film
and fiction and these revealed high levels of participation by women of all
ages. See chapter 3 for details.

1.1.2 Cinema audiences and the taste for horror
One problem with the scarcity of demographic data on the horror film
audience is that there is little historical material which could be used to track
the female horror film audience over time. This information could be
extremely important in ascertaining whether women have always been
interested in the horror genre (as they were in the gothic horror literature of
past centuries when they were regarded as the main readership - see below) or
whether this phenomenon is, in the history of cinema, a recent trend. General
surveys of cinema audiences could be useful, but the horror genre has not
been found to be widely popular, does not score highly on lists of preferred
genres and accordingly is not given much attention in any subsequent reports.
Apart from mentions of the widespread dislike of horror films, general
cinema audience surveys rarely contain any relevant demographic details on
who does view horror films. This confirms the bi-polar split in the taste for
horror observed by Wood (1979), yet horror films have proved enduringly
popular and are a lucrative source of income for film companies. (During the
late-80s and 90s the number of horror films getting a cinema release in the
UK declined, however many horror films are extremely successful in the
video market. The slasher film revival in the wake of Scream also emphasises
the enduring popularity of horror.)
A major study on cinema attendance and preferences undertaken by the
British Film Institute (Docherty et al, 1987) reinforces the fact that there is a
dislike of horror films generally, and that there is a trend for this dislike to
increase with age, but the report does not break down the genre preferences
of the survey group by sex. 8 A survey undertaken by the BBC Audience
Research Department in 1965 (figures reproduced by Docherty et al., 1987)
indicates a strong liking for horror films amongst sixteen to nineteen-year-
olds (reporting that 24 per cent of this age group usually enjoy honor), but
this declines sharply with age (3 per cent of twenty to twenty-nine-year.-olds,
7 per cent of thirty to forty-nine-year-olds, and 2 per cent of those over fifty).
Of interest here is the slight rise amongst the thirty to forty-nine-year-olds.
This may possibly be explained by the fact that the this age group contains
individuals who would have been in their late-teens and early-twenties when
the Universal horror films and the early Hammer horror films were first
released. Both these cycles were extremely popular moments in the history of
the horror genre and it may simply be that individuals in this age group are
recalling (or retaining) an interest in horror they had in their youth. A 1984
14

study by the Broadcasting Research Unit showed a similar overall pattern
with 14 per cent of the sixteen to twenty-nine-year-olds placing horror as one
of their three favourite film types, falling to 5 per cent of thirty to forty-nine-
year-olds and 1 per cent of the over-fifties (reported in Docherty et al, 1987).
Once again, however, these data are not broken down by sex.
An American study undertaken in 1942 (Handel, 1976) covers a wider age
range (from twelve-years-old to forty-five and over); however, horror films
are classed together with mystery films (horror has been regarded as a generic
category only relatively recently, with what we now class as horror being
called mysteries, thrillers or chillers in the 30s). This makes comparisons
with other surveys somewhat difficult. Over the entire age range, 7 per cent
of men and 5 per cent of women chose 'mystery and horror' as one of their
two favourite film story types. Obviously, this cannot be compared with the
other studies due to differences in cultural, social and historical situations, in
question presentation and in the fact that respondents could only select two
categories, but again it illustrates the low popularity of the horror film
amongst cinema-goers as a whole. Again liking for horror decreases with age
(from 9 per cent of the twelve to sixteen-year-olds to 5 per cent of thirty to
forty-four-year-olds); the age bands not being broken down by sex.
Preferences by sex have been indicated in surveys of children and
teenagers and these are more useful to this study. Barclay (1961) presents the
results of a survey of 2,526 boys and 2,794 girls conducted by the Scottish
Educational Film Association. The data analysed in this study suggest that
younger girls seem almost as drawn to horror as boys of the same age (49 per
cent of fourteen-year-old boys and 37 per cent of girls of the same age chose
horror as one of the four film types they liked best, 41 per cent of fifteen-
year-old boys and 56 per cent of girls of the same age chose horror). Girls
increasingly professed a dislike for the genre as they matured (of sixteen-
year-olds, the number of boys liking horror remains steady at '10 per cent, for
girls the figure dropped to 25 per cent). By the age of eighteen, these figures
have fallen to 29 per cent of boys and 15 per cent of girls who liked horror
films; with 30 per cent of boys and 64 per cent of girls choosing them as one
of their four most disliked genres (rising from 16 per cent of fourteen-year-
old boys and 32 per cent of fourteen-year-old girls). The reason for such a
pauern could be one of gender socialisation - the girls being discouraged from
liking honor as it is seen as unfeminine, whilst boys, who are encouraged to