Women are Inferior and Sexualized beings

‘Women are Inferior and Sexualised beings’

The film Horror of Dracula is a film about a vampire preying on young women.  The Horror of Dracula is produced by Hammer Film productions or as they are better known as ‘Hammer Horrors because of their legendary Horror films they produced in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

I have been asked to relate and discuss the following statement ‘women are inferior and sexualised beings’ to the film Horror of Dracula. I have broken the statement into two parts so I can fully explain it.

Throughout the film, women are often seen to be inferior to the male characters, in many shots the female characters are shown to be a lot smaller than the male characters in the frame so therefore the male presence is more dominate in the shot and throughout the film, this implies that the women are less important than the men because of their presence in the shot.

Women could also be seen to be inferior in the horror of the because they are always the victim, and a male character is stereotypically the protagonist of film, this makes the female characters of the film seen helpless and are the ‘damsel in distress’ .

Furthermore, the male characters were always dismissing the female characters, for example when the two main male characters are planning what to do, the female character asks what they are doing, but they do not tell her, this makes her look inferior because she has been left out of the plan and her opinion or voice is not heard.

The second part of the statement suggests women are ‘sexualised beings’ in the horror of Dracula, and in this horror film specifically, this statement is true.

The women of horror of Dracula are often seen wearing low cut tops, this is sexualising the women because they are dressed and told to act in a certain way to please men, and they are normally wearing white which is normally a colour symbolising pure or virginity and maybe even easy targets, this relates to a earlier point I made about women always being the victim.

They also have been specifically been cast as young pretty women to attract men to gain more viewers, which is sexualising women because they are using gender to gain a bigger audience.

Overall this film uses gender and female bodies to appeal to a certain audience and the statement ‘women are inferior and sexualised beings’ is practiced in the horror of Dracula, to gain a certain audiences.