Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Discussing gender identity in the female warriors of kung fu films, critic Kwai-cheung Lo asks, "Does maleness automatically produce masculinity? Is there a kind of masculinity independent of the biological male? Can the women who kill in action cinema occupy a position that has been historically thought of as exclusively masculine" (138)? In this paper, I am asking similar questions regarding the construction of masculinity in the male victim of a horror film. Since the slasher film genre rose to popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, horror films have often been accused of reveling in voyeuristic misogyny (a main contention, for instance, of Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure), and the recent popularity of the horror genre aptly labeled "torture porn" (including films such as Hostel, Captivity, Saw and Turistas) has created even more skepticism about just what sort of gendered work is done in/by horror films. Nevertheless, I want to argue that the film under discussion here, Alexandre Aja's 2006 remake of Wes Craven's 1977 horror classic The Hills Have Eyes, despite incorporating graphically-represented cannibalism and depicting a horrifyingly-realistic rape, departs from the standard lexicon of gender roles in both torture porn and slasher films in significant ways as it explores modern, middle-class, white male identity.
Repository Citation
Hawkins, Rebecca. "Mutating Masculinity: Embodying the Hu(man) in The Hills Have Eyes." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 9, no. 3, 2009, pp. 1–27. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol9/iss3/12