What do you reckon the most misogynistic horror film ever is?

• 10 to Midnight.
• Antichrist.
• The Cell.
• Dont Go In The House.
• Forced Entry.
• Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood.
• I Spit On Your Grave (original).
• I Spit On Your Grave (remake).
• Irreversible.
• The Last House On The Left (original).
• The Last House on the Left (remake).
• Maniac.
• Martyrs.
• The New York Ripper.
• Wolf Creek.
• Other. Specify.

edited 13th Mar '12 6:46:41 PM by Metz11

Not The Last House on the Left (original). The victims may not have been portrayed as wise, but nor were they totally dumb or unsympathetic. The female villain was competent enough as part of the sleazy gang and the mother half of the vengeful parents took power into her own hands like a boss.

Not Maniac, in which the females were portrayed neither positively nor negatively, simply tragic victims of a schizophrenic manchild with the insane drive to superficially possess them. In the end the guy's mind is too weak for his victims, and he hallucinates them coming back to life to kill him.

Not Martyrs. Hell, there were hardly any prominent male roles in that. Without spoiling too much hopefully, the one dominant male in the picture is ultimately dominated by a female.

Though I haven't seen it, I doubt I Spit on Your Grave can be considered such when the whole point of the film is supposedly the main female brutally annihilating the several men who raped her.

I don't know what is the most misogynistic horror film, I'm just presenting "the case against" for some of them.

EDIT: Perhaps The Slumber Party Massacre? From what I hear of it, it was originally a feminist satire of slasher films which Executive Meddling removed the feminist satire from, leaving only a vastly exaggerated example of the misogyny that was meant to be satirized.

Las Vegas Blood Bath is another possibility. In it a guy goes mad after he finds his wife cheating on him, kills her, then pretty much declares genocide all women... and succeeds on an extremely small scale (he kills an entire apartment full of female oil wrestlers, including one's unborn child). And survives with a smile on his face.

edited 13th Mar '12 9:31:00 PM by DoctorDiabolical

No Rosseannes Baby?

My God Its Full Of Stars, don't you mean Rosemarys Baby?

Can I speak about a horror video game instead? Phantasmagoria has a blatantly misogynistic villain (a demon that possesses husbands and makes them kill their wives in disgusting and ironic ways), but the game is so full of Narm that it's impossible to take seriously enough to even bother being offended at it.

I personally think that a lot of "torture porn" flicks are pretty exploitative, in a way that teeters on misogynistic. But some of them go both ways, too. One of the Saw sequels was criticized on this very site for having an inexplicable gender bias, where male victims weren't considered "good" enough to be saved or something. (It's been a while since I read that page.)

Manos The Hands Of Fate feels like too obvious of an answer.

I remember seeing something called An Experiment in Torture at a rental place once. I didn't get it, but according to various sites the plot involves strippers and porn stars being tortured to death, and that's about it.

Blood Sucking Freaks is way up there. (It's a crime that Ralphus never got a spinoff.)

Slaughtered Vomit Dolls is more or less puking, sex, and death. Murder Set Pieces would probably qualify too. Nice call on Las Vegas Bloodbath btw.

Along with Murder-Set-Pieces probably a lot other realistically depraved serial killer films, like Scrapbook and Snuff 102.

On the other end of the spectrum, there seems to be a lot of horrors as of late (like Deadgirl, Teeth and The Woman) that come off as kind of misandrist.

I agree with Teeth, although I think it's more sexist toward men.

edited 22nd Mar '12 5:28:32 PM by UltimateFalconFart

I heard that The Brood was like this

I dunno...if you really wanted to, you could say that a LOT of horror films are misandrist for consistently portraying men as violent, murderous lunatics. Maybe they're frequently just misanthropic, taking a dim view of humanity in general...

Can foreign horror films count?

Oh and when you mean misogynistic, do you really mean male antagonists hurting women?

edited 26th Jan '13 6:47:44 PM by SentaiToku

Just having people hurting woman is not in itself misogynist. The villain murders almost only women in Silence of the Lambs, and I haven't seen anybody call that film misogynist. What matters is how the horror is portrayed.

Does the camera focus on the suffering of the female characters? Do the women just need a man to come and save the day? Are the woman portrayed as weak while the men are portrayed as strong enough to resist their fate? Does the film kill women just to give another character motivation?

Note that being misogynist does not stop a film from being misandrist, so Men Are the Expendable Gender does not stop a horror film from being misogynist.

edited 26th Jan '13 7:26:05 PM by Scardoll

A whole lotta Giallo films.

That's probably less because those movies are "misandric" and more because there are so many movies where women don't have much of a role at all, as anything other than a supporting character to the male-driven plot with men as your violent lunatics and heroes.

Really? In my experience, women end up being the lead characters in horror movies quite frequently.

It always seemed to me that only they ended up as the lead after all the others are killed.

edited 27th Jan '13 1:18:32 AM by Vox

Counter-example: Every single Nightmare On Elm Street film. (FREDDY'S REVENGE DOES NOT EXIST IN THIS DOJO. Or, alternately, its leading man was so gay, he counts as a female character. Your pick.)

You know OP one my first post on this site was categorising rap songs by misogyny. It predictably didn't end well.

All most all modern horror films have an undercurrent of misogyny. I don't like it or understand it but it's there. One of my best friends in film school loved horror films and was such a feminist she spelt woman with a 'y'. It's a just weird sad quirk of the genre I guess.

edited 27th Jan '13 6:43:47 AM by joeyjojo

I think saying "most modern horror films" might be a bit unfair. I've watched a lot of horror, both old and new. Horror has many sub-generes, each with their own set of classic and common tropes. Slasher, gorn, psychological, supernatural, etc. And each type of horror has developed in different ways over time.

For what its worth, Roger Ebert wrote vicious reviews of both I Spit On Your Grave and its remake, citing misogyny, among other things.

edited 27th Jan '13 4:21:56 PM by Achaemenid

Yeah saying all modern horror was a bit sweeping. It's definitely the case with the poplar slasher flick sub grenre however.

It's the case with some slasher films. Stuff like Don't Answer the Phone is screamingly misogynist, but there are a lot of slashers out there that are less so.

The 2006 remake of The Wicker Man has to be one of the few movies, or indeed works of fiction ever to be both misogynistic and misandrist.

Any of Dario Argento's films are good candidates. I always had an impression that he hates women and children.