Thinking About Genre

Scream and Halloween - Female Lead
                                                                  Sidney Prescott

Laurie Strode

In the movies Scream and Halloween, one of the main conventions used is the Female Lead. This is used in both movies to help show how the women could protect themselves from evil things and that they don't need others' help. They are used as the main victim in both movies but they overcome the killer and become the heroine for example in Scream, Sidney attacks the killers and kills them and in Halloween Laurie helps to save herself and other children.
Laurie is an academic woman who is very caring of the kids. Before her friends are killed, they depend on Laurie as she is a strong and protective woman. She has the strength to kill Mike Myers three times before Dr Loomis saves her.
Sidney is a quite and innocent girl who surprises us when she is needed to fight back against the killer. She is a regular teenage girl who attends school and has a boyfriend but doesn't get pressured into anything she doesn't want to do.

This convention was used this way to show in Halloween how Laurie is the motherly type female who doesn't get pressured into having sex and so has purity which shows the audience that she deserves to stay alive. In Scream, Sidney has sex but it still shows the audience that she gets a bit pressured into it and even after she can protect herself from what everyone else is doing. Using this convention helps to show that both the female leads are not the helpless victims that most other movies would. This links to the film as a whole because they are the last main characters to survive including most of the males which you would expect to live because they are portrayed as the strong protective people. I think the audiences response was that they would not expect the female victim to live because the women are portrayed as helpless and fragile so we would think that they would give up and not fight back. The way this convention was used to show them departing from tradition was shown because the woman in many movies who are the victim would be helpless and scared to do anything to help themselves and others but in both of these movies, both Laurie and Sidney are able to fight towards the killer and not just sit back and let the men do all the work.


The impact this convention had on these films was it made it more of a mystery for the audience because you would think that they wouldn't last/live through the whole movie. This convention helped with the success of the movies as they achieved a lot of money. I think this is because Sidney and Laurie are the main characters which would make it appeal to audience's more as they would want to know what would happen to them. Scream's box office sales were $173.046,663 and Halloweens got $60 million worldwide. After these films were made there were more horror movies made that had female leads and more and more of these movies they are surviving through to the end. Before these movies were made there were less movies with these conclusions and the females were the scared characters who hung behind the men for protection. The effects that these movies could have on society is that it could give people ideas on things to do and not to do and how to eg kill and torture people. It could also have a psychological effects on people because they could get scared and might be traumatized for life.