Representation Essay (30 minutes timed)

Laura Mulvey’s male gaze theory talks about women being objectified and sexually displayed in films making male viewers become voyeurs who experience erotic pleasure from seeing them.  The trailer for ‘The Conjuring’ is set in the 70s were most women had to cover themselves up and were frowned upon if they wore anything revealing. This is shown by the costume that the female protagonist wears which is a white and black evening gown with puffy long sleeves. Her gown is buttoned all the way up; this doesn’t correlate with Mulvey’s theory. Although the trailer doesn’t relate to the theory in that aspect it does in the area where Mulvey highlights that females don’t tend to be given big acting roles as they are just in the films for male and other female audiences to gaze at. In the trailer, most of the dialogue is said by the men in the film, this shows that they are more dominant. In addition to this, all that the women mainly do in the trailer is scream. For instance, there is a scene where one of the women falls down into the creepy basement screaming. There is a bird’s eye view shot used to make her seem inferior and weak, this ties in with Mulvey’s theory as women are just in films to simply appear, thus their characters get targeted a lot.

Furthermore, Clover believes that most horror films has a final girl in them, who ends up breaking out of her ‘shell’ as she is left to battle with the antagonist because everyone else is dead. The final girl tends to fall into Slashers were they are seen using phallic objects to penetrate the antagonist. The Conjuring is a very supernatural and psychological horror which doesn’t show a final girl in the trailer. As a whole most trailers don’t show the final girl as it ruins it for the audience as they know the last person standing making them know that everyone else is dead.

Neale who is another theorist states that there are three types of monsters in a horror film such as: the external monster; the internal monster and the man made monster. He also believes that the antagonist is created based on a social issue that is occurring during the time of the recording of the specific film. In the conjuring trailer, the evil spirit is an external monster as she is trying to haunt the family and latch onto them in the case of disrupting their lives. We hardly ever see the spirit throughout the trailer apart from once where her face is not clear. This is done to make her ambiguous so the audience is much more scared. A scene where we see this external monster disrupting the family is when a special effect is used to show the pictures on the wall falling down by themselves.