The female horror film audience : viewing pleasures and fan practices. Part: 01

• 29 March, 1999

Abstract
The Female Horror Film Audience: Viewing Pleasures and Fan
Practices
What is at stake for female fans and followers of horror cinema? This study
explores the pleasures in horror film viewing for female members of the
audience. The findings presented here confirm that female viewers of horror
do not refuse to look but actively enjoy horror films and read such films in
feminine ways.
Part 1 of this thesis suggests that questions about the female viewer and her
consumption of the horror film cannot be answered solely by a consideration
of the text-reader relationship or by theoretical models of spectatorship and
identification. A profile of female horror film fans and followers can therefore
be developed only through an audience study.
Part 2 presents a profile of female horror fans and followers. The participants
in the study were largely drawn from the memberships of horror fan groups
and from the readerships of a cross-section of professional and fan horror
magazines. Qualitative data were collected through focus groups, interviews,
open-ended questions included in the questionnaire and through the
ommunication of opinions and experiences in letters and other written
material.
Part 3 sheds light on the modes of interpretation and attempts to position the
female viewers as active consumers of horror films.
This study concludes with a model of the female horror film viewer which
points towards areas of female horror film spectatorship which require further
analysis.
The value of investigating the invisible experiences of women with popular
culture is demonstrated by the very large proportion of respondents who
expressed their delight and thanks in having an opportunity to speak about
their experiences. This study of female horror film viewers allows the voice
of an otherwise marginalised and invisible audience to be heard, their
experiences recorded, the possibilities for resistance explored, and the

Introduction
Overview of the study
It is often assumed, by both the producers of horror films and the critics of
the genre, that taking pleasure in horrific or fnghtening images is a masculine
trait, not a feminine one. While women may watch horror films, they do so
only reluctantly and with displeasure, not least because of the representations
of violence against the female body they contain. However, Mark Jancovich
notes in Horror (1992, p. 18) that horror literature has a large female
readership. Women were the primary consumers of Gothic fiction and writers
such as Nancy Collins, Lisa Tuttle, Poppy Z. Brite and Anne Rice continue
the tradition of female authorship today, whilst the female readerships of
horror fiction, including that aimed at children and teenagers, are high.
Although horror literature is recognised as appealing across the sex and age
ranges, the widely-held notion, both within and without the Hollywood film
industry, is that the horror film is the preserve of the adolescent male and a
situation has created in which films are produced and marketed with a male
youth audience in mind. Some recent horror films such as Bram Stoker's
Dracula and Wolf have been marketed as Gothic romances, but as Nina
Auerbach observes in Our Vampires. Ourselves (1995, pp. 3-4), a female
exclusion zone has been constructed around horror. Most studies of the
horror film that have considered questions of gender and spectatorship have
concerned themselves with a theoretical male spectator. From such a critical
perspective, Linda Williams in When The Woman Looks (1984) does not
regard the female gaze as a pleasurable one and the female spectator's act of
looking is punished. For Williams, this explains why the female viewer of
horror films refuses to look, often physically blocking or averting her eyes
from the screen.
Whether most female spectators actually behave like this is another
question. Demographic profiles of contemporary cinema audiences suggest
that women can comprise up to 50 per cent of horror film audiences. As Carol
Clover has acknowledged in Men. Women and Chainsaws (1992, p. 54), it
seems inadequate to dismiss large numbers of women as 'male-identified' and
account for their responses only as 'an "immasculated" act of collusion with
the oppressor.' The presence of a large proportion of women in the horror
film audience raises important questions about horror film consumption,
gendered spectatorship and social models of femininity. In some segments of

the audience we might expect to find female viewers who do take pleasure in
viewing horror films and who, in what could amount to an act of defiance,
refuse to refuse to look.
This study recognises the increasing visibility of active female honor film
viewers and seeks to explore this audience segment's consumption and
appropriation of the genre. The aims and objectives of this study are
therefore:
• to investigate the viewing patterns of active female viewers (that is, the
female fans and followers) of the horror film;
• to investigate the tastes of active female viewers in order to ascertain
whether any particular forms of the horror film are popular with this
group and ascertain what factors make these films, as opposed to other
types, appealing;
• to examine the reception of honor films by active female viewers in order
to determine the reactions and interpretative strategies of horror by this
group;
• to assess the consumption and appropriation of horror films within the
context of honor fandom; and
• to establish how, if at all, active female viewers relate what they see on
the screen to social issues such as feminine sexuality, female role models,
violence against women, and other aspects of feminist discourse.
1n chapter 1, a picture of the horror film audience drawn from surveys of
cinema attendance and screen studies is presented, together with an overview
of horror cinema and potential feminine codings of the genre. Chapter 2
presents relevant theoretical research into the female horror film spectator and
explores questions which the existence of active female horror film viewers
raise about gendered spectatorship. This presents a context in which honor
film viewing by women might be understood. Such questions make an
ethnographic study of the female horror film audience crucial and chapter 3
proposes a strategy for investigating the female horror film audience.
Chapters 4 to 7 present the results and analysis of quantitative and qualitative
data collected in the study, chapter 4 providing a demographic picture of the
participating female horror film viewers and an analysis of the viewing habits
and preferences of the participants. The suggestion that gender socialisation
processes are important is investigated in chapter 5, along with an exploration
into the attraction of horror for the respondents from a very young age.
Chapter 5 also contains an analysis of the emotional affects reported by the
respondents and how these responses contribute to their enjoyment of horror
films. Chapter 6 investigates the interpretive activities of the respondents andsets out a range of readings which might categorise active female horror film
spectatorship. Chapter 7 examines the position of the female horror fan in
relation to fan publishing and fan organisations. In particular, it looks at
vampire fandom and the appropriation of vampire texts; this has links to the
appropriation of texts by fans referred to by Jenkins (1992) as 'textual
poaching' (after de Certeau, 1984). In conclusion, chapter 8 considers issues
arising from this study which might necessitate a reconceptualisation of the
active female horror film audience or indicate areas of further research.

Chapter 1
The Horror Film and Its Audience
Only the saddest of simpletons, one feels, could ever get a really
satisfying frisson. For the rest of us [horror films] have just
become a rather eccentric and specialised form of light
entertainment, and possibly a useful means of escape for a
housewife harrowed by the shopping. (Granger, Financial Times,
6 May 1957')
In the June 1992 edition of the woman's magazine Cosmopolitan an article by
E. Lederman entitled 'The Best Places To Meet Good Men' 2 warned its
readership against starting up a conversation with a man looking for horror
films in the local videomart since such men have 'questionable feelings about
women.' Lederman goes on to state that 'Whether buried deep within him or
overtly expressed in his words and actions, his misogynistic tendencies make
him a man to avoid.' As in the above quote from Granger's review of
Hammer's The Curse of Frankenstein, this attitude illustrates that the horror
film audience has always been regarded as completely Other, the fans
dismissed as 'them' in contrast to the normal 'us'. Unlike the 'saddest of
simpletons' of the SOs however, the 90s horror fan is a danger to women.
Granger's quote recognises that in the SOs women too gained gratifications
(albeit simple escapism) from the horror film, but by the 90s the horror film
represents only a threat to women, not only on the screen but in real life.
Since the rise of the slasher film in the late 70s, the horror film audience has
been regarded as consisting primarily of adolescent boys and men under the
age of twenty-five. Twitchell's observations of horror film audiences (1985,
p. 70) lead him to the conclusion that 'most of the audience are in their early
to mid-teens', whilst Clover (1992b, p. 6) claims that 'the proportions vary
somewhat from subgenre to subgenre and from movie to movie ..., but the
preponderance of young males appears constant.' This supposition is also
evident within the Hollywood industry. In part, this may be because the
Hollywood-based film industry sees its primary target audience as males
between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four and consequently aims many of
its films and much of its marketing and publicity at this demographic group
(Kramer, 1998). In this model, women may watch horror films, but only
reluctantly and with displeasure. As president of Miramax Mark Gill
(interviewed by Hindes, 1997) states when expressing surprise that women
went to see the slasher film Scream 2: 'Horror film audiences used to be
heavily male. If they could drag their girlfriends along you were lucky.' The

horror film audience has not always been regarded as so resolutely male; just
as in the SOs 'housewives harrowed by the shopping' may have been
recognised as an important segment of the Hammer horror film audience (at
least in the mind of the reviewer quoted above), in the 30s women were
regarded as an important audience for Dracula and other Universal horror
films. Likewise, contemporary surveys of computer games players, visitors
to Madam Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors and the readers of Goosebumps
and Point Horror pre-adolescent's and young adult's horror fiction have
revealed that women continue to be as, if not more, attracted to horrific
entertainment than men. These, and other, findings (which are given in more
detail below) are supported by demographic data of actual cinema audiences.
Recent exit polls in the USA (see Hindes, 1997) showed audiences in the
opening weekend of Scream 2 averaged 55 per cent female and 45 per cent
male. If we are to believe the accepted model of a predominantly male horror
film audience, a female audience share of over 50 per cent may seem
unusually high. The demographic profile for Scream 2 is very similar to that
for Titanic (which may be classed as a romance) where females outnumbered
males 57 per cent to 43 per cent, whereas the Bond film Tomorrow Never
jj had an audience of 60 per cent male to 40 per cent female. The fact that
Scream and its sequel are a pastiche on the original slasher films with strong
female roles may well be one reason for the high numbers of women seeing
this particular film; however, Dika (1987, p. 87) reports that 55 per cent of
the twelve to seventeen-year-old audience for films in the original slasher
cycle was female. Pinedo (1997, p. 72) concludes that Dika misread the
statistics (Dika derived the figure from data given by the 20th Century Fox
advertising and publicity department to the New York Times -see Dika, 1990,
p. 142) and that this figure is wrong. Although Pinedo may well be correct in
this, given the demographic for Scream 2, Dika's estimate may in fact be
closer to the true figure than generally believed. The Cinema Advertising
Association's audience profiles, derived from representative samples of the
British population and highlighting the age, sex and social class of British
cinema audiences for the purposes of selling cinema advertising space, also
indicate that women may make up a substantially higher segment of the horror
film audience than often acknowledged. The CAA estimate the female
audience for the films Man Bites Do g, Silence of the Lambs and Scream at
around 50 per cent, and whilst the female audience for other hormr and
honor-related films (Alien3, Reservoir Dogs and Natural Born Killers) is