The Male Gaze

The Male Gaze Theory

Today in our double lesson we covered 'the male gaze'. We spent quite a bit of time looking at female representations in general not just in horror and we concluded that in most films the audience watch it through the eyes of a male which backs up Laura Mulvey's theory of 'the male glaze'. Laura Mulvey wrote an influential essay on the male gaze which included her saying horror is 'visual pleasure and narrative cinema' Some films such as Halloween and Psycho have examples of the audience watching through the eyes of a male for example when the girl in Halloween gets killed she is naked and she’s young and beautiful and in psycho Marion is young and beautiful and she is also naked when she gets murdered.

Below is the triangle that is used to explain 'the male gaze'.