BU Intstudy 110 - Gender and Horror - Spring 2020

Candyman, Romantic or Rapey? In the 1992, American Supernatural Horror film, Candyman , there is more than meets the eye with urban legend the Candyman who appears if you say his name five times in a mirror and kills people frequently in the urban street of Chicago. The films touches on topics like racism, sexism, sexual assault, and more while keeping the audience on their toes! One aspect of the film that carries throughout it is the concept of women being punished for disobedience, whether it be expressing their sexuality or making the Candyman upset directly. The beginning of the movie shows Clara cheating on her boyfriend with Billy and they call for the Candyman together. She is ultimately murdered as well as the baby she was watching, while Billy ran off. She is being punished for being promiscuous. Helen was often picking up weapons and then having someone walk in on her and dead bodies, so not too good of a plan there girl. This comes up again when Helen and Berna...

  Initially, I chose this movie because of the title. I love romance novels, story lines, plots, and movies. However, I was in for a rude awakening when I first saw the promo reels for the film, and the trailer. This film although very interesting, it did kill romance for me for a bit. The start of the film, definitely did give me an "AH-HA" moment, in the first few minutes, I immediately seen the relation to the idea of "Slasher". I have seen the promo for this film before however, I never thought it's plot was         related to any literary idea or background. The Plot The film starts in a very.... let's just say, creepy looking town. Some of a few minutes later, we are introduced to the horror in the film (they did NOT waste any time). There are 2-3 people who are killed by the main character Warren, after he awakens from a coma. They he puts a heart in a valentines day box-- Ha, ha! I see what they did there. Things move rather quickly, and if y...

Into the Dark : "Midnight Kiss" Figure #1 - The poster for the "Midnight Kiss" episode in Hulu's original Into the Dark  series. Slasher films are iconic for their standardized formula. Most, if not all, follow a similar structure when telling their story: the usage of a terrible place/location, the traits of the killer, the final girl, the weapons the murderer uses, etc. But have you ever stopped to consider if any slasher film handles its discussions in a modernized way? Making it perhaps... gay-friendly? Yes, I have found a film that tackles the slasher genre in a gay space... and it is amazing in its conversations! Be prepared to see how the LGBT+ community can also run a slasher film. As part of the Into the Dark Hulu original series, "Midnight Kiss" remixes normal horror movie conventions with gay subject-matter. To provide brief and concise summary: a group of four gay men  (Cameron, Joel, Zachary, and Logan) and one straight wom...

All the boys love Mandy Lane         In this slasher film All the boys love Mandy Lane , you see a set of high school kids, the two high strung, overly sexual teenage girls, Marlin and Chole, the three boys, Red who takes the role of the smoker, and the joker, Bird the typical jock, buff and brave, then Jake who isn't a gentleman by any means and is a very aggressive sexual being who wants Chole, Marlin and the pure untouched virgin, Mandy Lane who decided to head to Reds' Ranch for what was supposed to be a fun and                                         wild weekend, wild nonetheless.  Jake, Red who is passing a joint, and Bird hanging on the couch at the Ranch.         Many Lane doesn't fit into this tight knit group very well, but she fakes it until she makes it. Her "friend" Emmet seems to be more her pace, a lo...

We Dare You To Say His Name Five Times *Warning, Flashing Lights* Overview The movie Candyman (directed by Bernard Rose) is about a professor from the University of Illinois, Helen Lyle, trying to prove that the urban legend Candyman is not real and is just a work of fiction. Since Helen doesn't believe that he's real and starts telling some residents from the Cabrini-Green community that Candyman isn't real, strange and horrific events began happening around her. While working on her thesis, she discovers where the origin of the story came from, as a colleague of hers has written his own work about the Candyman story. The legend goes that in 1890, Candyman was a son of a former slave, who then became an inventor after the Civil War. Because of the family's wealth due Candyman's father creating a device for making shoes, Candyman grew up in a polite society. As a man, Candyman became an artist who fell in love with a landowner's daughter and got her pr...

I Know What You Did Last Summer movie poster Following the story of four friends who share a dark secret on the Fourth of July,  I Know What You Did Last Summer  is a slasher film directed by Jim Gillespie. Based off the novel by Lois Duncan, the 1997 film follows four friends after they committed a dark crime on the Fourth of July. Getting drunk on the beach with her friends, Julie James (played by Jennifer Love Hewitt) must hold onto the secret of the man they accidently hit with their car, but then dumped into the water to cover it up. A year later, Julie returns home from college to find that someone besides the four of them know what happened. As she slowly reunites with the other three (starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippee, & Freddie Prinze Jr.) from that night, the film makes it clear that someone is out to get those who were involved, even in the slightest bit.  What really adds this film into the slasher series is the use of the Final Gi...

 You would expect Candyman to be a predictable and stereotypical horror movie. But I really believe it wasn't. It caught you off guard, it left you questioning. It also really didn't have a lot of the typical stereotypes you would normally see. which kind of made it different than the rest of the horror movies. At the same time, it did have horror movie attributes. Helen when she was explaining how Candyman can actually be a real person At first, this movie started off like any horror movie. With a warning about the monster Candyman. A college student told the story of a stereotypical dumb blond who said his name five times in the mirror and dies.  Then the main character gets introduced her name is Helen and she's clearly going to be the final girl. She is this white female who is very educated and wants to study the folk tail of candyman. what ends up happening is she starts showing that candyman When Helen was in the mental hospital and she saw candyma...

Scream (1996) Poster When thinking of iconic or monumental slasher films that have been created and presented throughout film history, titles that come up are typically Halloween , Friday the 13th , A  Nightmare on Elm Street , and of course Scream . Releasing in 1996, Scream  came after the previously mentioned slasher films, among others, and in doing so it had the opportunity to take the genre and take a spin on it. However, what differentiates Scream  from other slasher films is how it takes many motifs from past slasher films and cranks them up to 100, in kind of a sense to both mock such movies and to take the genre further. Immediately from the now-iconic mask of the killer in the movie, it's generic and kind of comical, and it's Scooby-Doo esque running sequences, it did it's purpose well in creating an enigmatic character while simultaneously building up a great cast of stereotypical teenagers, most notably the virgin Sidney Prescott. Ranging from it's men...

The 2008 production of slasher film Prom Night  is a film starts out with a young fourteen or fifteen-year-old girl named Donna Keppel being dropped off at home by her close friends mother after going to the movie theatre. As Donna takes her coat off and begins to look for her family, she realizes no one is responding to her, so she slowly moves through the house to find her brother dead on his bedroom floor and a man chases her mother into the dead boys' room and kills her because she will not reveal Donna's real location. As Donna witnesses her mothers murder from under her brothers bed she sees the murderer, her former high school teacher, Richard Fenton. Fenton was a teacher of Donna's who became obsessed with her and was then fire by the school once this news came to light. But that didn't stop him, he continued to stalk Donna until her family placed a restraining order on him, which made him freak out and eventually kill her family to find her so they c...

Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie poster       Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a horror film by Marcus Nispel that is based on a true story. This film starts out with five friends traveling across the country in their van. Their journey gets interrupted when they almost run into a girl walking on the side of a dirt road. They stop to see if she is okay and she pulls a gun out and commits suicide in their van. Obviously distraught and looking for a place to clean their van and call the Sheriff, they stop at a rundown farm. While deciding what to do with the dead girl's body, creepy things start to happen to the group of friends. As the Sheriff shows up and investigates the suicide of the girl, one of the boys from the group, Kevin, gets killed by a mysterious man with a chainsaw and a deformed looking body. The plot gets progressively frightening as the Sheriff does not believe that the friends are in danger and antagonizes them, even taking one of the other boys, Morgan, t...