Timeline content - History of Horror films

The main focus of my article is going to be about how the representations of victims and villains have changed and how horror films no longer seem to represent the real world. Constantly we are seeing women and children playing the victims and men playing the villains and hero's.

The timeline is the main section of this article and this is going to go through the history of horror films and demonstrate whether the gender and age representations of characters have changed through the years or not.

My timeline is going to start in the 1960s as the first film will be Psycho. I have chosen to start with this film as it follows a very common representation of women in horror films, playing the victim. It also shows a man playing the villain which is also expected. Psycho was a movie by Alfred Hitchcock and he brought out another one 3 years later called 'The Birds' which again saw a woman playing the victim. This showed that a common stereotype of women was that they were 'weak, vulnerable and helpless'.

In 1973 The Exorcist was released which began the 'nightmare decade: in front of the children' as we started to see children starring in horror films. In The Exorcist in particular children were immediately stereotyped similar to women; 'naïve, weak and defenceless'. 

Shortly after The Exorcist in 1976 'Alice, sweet Alice' shocked people with the villain character being placed onto children. This immediately made people look at children's behaviour in a different way than 'weak and helpless' and saw them in a more domineering way. In the same year Carrie was released which again followed this representation of a child villain as it saw a young, abused and timid 17 year old girl pushed to her limits after being humiliated at a school prom.

In 1979 things changed slightly as we saw one of the first horror films where the female character showed dominance and rejected the common representations from other horror films. Alien showed the main character Ripley as independent and capable of protecting herself. In the film a group get called to an unexplored planet after a distressed phone call and after searching for survivors, the crew heads home only to realize that a deadly bio form has joined them.
In the group there are many other males who attempt to defeat the 'alien' however are unsuccessful and Ripley is one of the only characters to come out alive. This showed that women are not only victims but can also be just as strong as males.

Although many people thought that may have been the start of a different type of horror film, females soon went back to being the victim of male dominance as a spiritual presence influences the father into violence in The Shining released in 1980. Also Scream was released in 1996 which saw a group of young high school students fall prey to a serial killer.

In 2013 Carrie the remake was brought out which was thought to be another attempt at changing the age and gender representations in horror films to keep up with todays society. They need to take into account different roles certain people play in society and the 'evil child' is becoming more common in todays society as we are seeing more child murderers than there were back in the 1960s. In order for horror films to represent the real world, it is vital that they adapt the representations of their characters in accordance with todays society.

The timeline will end with the new film that is going to be released which the main image is going to represent. This film will see a male become a victim of a teenagers violence as he is influenced by a video game containing shootings.