Barry Sapolsky
Related: slasher films - violence
Profile
Barry S. Sapolsky is an American academic teaching at the Florida State University.
Sex and Violence in Slasher Films [...]
By Barry S. Sapolsky and Fred Molitor
Published in In: Mass Media and Society edited by A. Wells and E.A. Hakanen. 1997. Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing
Summary
Slasher films are an outgrowth of "gore" cinema, a 1960’s genre of teenpics that featured the gross-out butchering and eating of human flesh. Slasher films, referred to by some critics as "women-in-danger" or "violence-to-women" films, have been blasted for disproportionately showing vicious attacks on women, linking images of violence to sex, and dwelling on extreme brutality augmented by often remarkable special effects.
Analyses of many slasher films have called into question some of the assumptions made about their content. Females have not been found to be the primary victims. Moreover, the pairing of sex and violence is rare. However, slasher films do display a substantial level of extreme violence.
What are the consequences of these findings? Social scientists have expressed concern over the negative effects that slasher films may have on audiences. In particular, exposure to scenes that mix sex and violence is believed to dull males’ emotional reactions to filmed violence, and males are less disturbed by images of extreme violence aimed at women (Linz, Donnerstein & Adams, 1989). These effects on male viewers are said to derive from "classical conditioning": Arousal from sexual images is classically conditioned to subsequent violent scenes. However, the finding that slasher films only infrequently pair sex and violence calls this explanation into question. If arousing sexual portrayals rarely occur in conjunction with violence, then conditioning is not likely to occur.
The concern over potential negative effects of exposure to slasher films remains. Possibly, depictions of violence directed at women as well as the substantial amount of screen time in which women are shown in terror may reduce male viewers’ anxiety. Lowered anxiety reduce males’ responses to subsequently-viewed violence, including violence directed at women. Accordingly, the desensitizing effects of slasher films may result from a form of "extinction" and not from classical conditioning.
The heyday of slasher films has come and gone. Producers continue to search for new blends of death and mayhem to entertain and scare young audiences. It remains to be seen how far filmmakers will go to achieve these effects, and how audiences will react to what will no doubt be new levels of explicitness, deviance, and gore. --Barry Sapolsky via http://comm2.fsu.edu/faculty/comm/Sapolsky/research/bookch/slasher.html [Jun 2004]
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