Horrorbtch is the channel; here is the first video (see below), and here is the project preview.
The next video, to be released in a couple of hours, will cover the original Halloween and its variants. I plan on uploading videos by genre (slasher, possession, rape-revenge films), beginning with the lowest of the low, the slasher genre. This project will extend beyond this class -- I plan on releasing a new video every week.
The first video, "Horror Films & Feminism: An Introduction", is literally that: an introduction to the horror movie genre. I chose horror, specifically low-brow horror, because I believe popular films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), and, to a lesser extent, I Spit on Your Grave (1978), are more explicit about its sub-cultural views on sex and gender than, say, the award-winning Alien or Silence of the Lambs. Films like Texas Chainsaw are often low-budget and unobstructed by any artistic pretense. Indeed, horror movies are about as artistic as pornography.
The first video utilizes the character of Sally Hardesty from Texas Chainsaw as an example of what female characters were like before the Final Girl trope was fully realized. I decided to go with Sally because it was after TCM (post-1974) that we see a recognizable change in the horror movie formula. The influence of Psycho (1960) has not been lost on me -- I will mention it when comparing it and Halloween, for example. But my vlog will focus solely on films released from 1974 to 1986 because that is when I believe we see the greatest changes within the culture -- changes in our perceptions of sex and gender. Psycho may have had the greatest impact on horror films in general, but its views on gender and sexuality are relativity conventional, not to mention Freudian (themes of psychosexual aggression and the Oedipus complex).
My only regret is that I failed to include other forms of discrimination in the introduction, such as classism, racism, cissexism, homophobia, etc. I have to include other marginalized groups in my analysis of horror films if I want to be a better (intersectionalist) feminist.
Bibliography
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Print.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen Aug. 1975: 6-18. Jahsonic. Web. Sept. 2013. <http://www.jahsonic.com/VPNC.html>.
Paul, William. Laughing, Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Print.
Tudor, Andrew. Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Print.
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