Horror movies are best left to the girls
Bryony Gordon
Perhaps it was because the rugby was on so early the next morning that I
couldn’t get any men to accompany me to see Troll Hunter last Friday night.
I tried, I really did, but for some reason not a single male I know was
interested in escorting me to the pictures to watch a Norwegian film about a
man who… well, who hunts trolls. They were all washing their hair, or doing
their ironing, or in screen number four down the hall, blubbing their eyes
out over Anne Hathaway’s Yorkshire accent in One Day. So, instead, I went
with three girlfriends.
Was it just me, I wailed to my friends? Was I so repulsive that none of my male chums wanted to sit next to me in the darkened back row of the cinema, putting a comforting yet masculine arm around my shoulder as a three-headed monster rampaged through the forests of western Norway? Was this not what men liked to do, I reasoned – protect ladies from threatening enemies? Judging by the audience in the cinema, three quarters of which seemed to be female, this was not the case.
A few weeks ago, some researchers at University College London published a report claiming that women are more scared of horror movies than men because they are far likelier to foresee the terror that lies ahead. But I think we are just more likely to admit we are frightened, or even that we are simply more likely to go to a horror movie in the first place.
It’s a fallacy that women only like chick flicks and drama, while all men want is blood, guts and guns. A straw poll of male colleagues indicated that the overwhelming majority of them couldn’t stand frighteners – “I would rather sit through every episode of Sex and the City while plucking out all my body hair with tweezers”, was one understated response.
Blokes don’t like to be scared, not even at the cinema. It’s emasculating, a dent in their machismo. But women love it. It’s a thrill, an event to get excited and worked up about – a bit like a Take That concert, but with even more screaming.
I used to have an aversion to frightening films on a purely feminist basis – weren’t most women cast as cheerleaders who run around half naked before coming to a sticky end in a dank basement? But think of Alien, and Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and Carrie, and – in more recent times – The Descent and Eden Lake. Even in Troll Hunter, the gutsiest character – other than the troll hunter himself – is a female student who keeps going long after her male counterparts have given up hope.
Sometimes, boys, it’s OK to scream like a girl.
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As a prolific apologiser, it’s a relief to discover that the average Briton says sorry eight times a day, 2,920 times a year and 233,600 times in a lifetime. I say sorry when someone knocks into me, sorry when someone is queuing behind me in the canteen, and then, when people point out to me that I should stop saying sorry, I say sorry for saying sorry.
This may seem pathetic but I think it’s simply polite, and possibly just a very British way of saying “excuse me”. I don’t trust people who live by the motto “never apologise, never explain” – they tend to be dictators, murderers and fraudsters. Of course, if this is the saying by which you live your life, and you happen to be none of these things… well, I am terribly sorry.
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The bookshelf is having a makeover – it is being turned into shelves that don’t actually hold books. The Economist reports that Ikea is redesigning its famous BILLY bookcase to make it deeper, so it can hold items such as ornaments and pictures, instead of anything as space-wasting as novels and autobiographies, which we are now all reading in electronic form. So there you have it: Ikea, Purley Way, Croydon – the place to go if you want to witness profound cultural shifts.
Was it just me, I wailed to my friends? Was I so repulsive that none of my male chums wanted to sit next to me in the darkened back row of the cinema, putting a comforting yet masculine arm around my shoulder as a three-headed monster rampaged through the forests of western Norway? Was this not what men liked to do, I reasoned – protect ladies from threatening enemies? Judging by the audience in the cinema, three quarters of which seemed to be female, this was not the case.
A few weeks ago, some researchers at University College London published a report claiming that women are more scared of horror movies than men because they are far likelier to foresee the terror that lies ahead. But I think we are just more likely to admit we are frightened, or even that we are simply more likely to go to a horror movie in the first place.
It’s a fallacy that women only like chick flicks and drama, while all men want is blood, guts and guns. A straw poll of male colleagues indicated that the overwhelming majority of them couldn’t stand frighteners – “I would rather sit through every episode of Sex and the City while plucking out all my body hair with tweezers”, was one understated response.
Blokes don’t like to be scared, not even at the cinema. It’s emasculating, a dent in their machismo. But women love it. It’s a thrill, an event to get excited and worked up about – a bit like a Take That concert, but with even more screaming.
I used to have an aversion to frightening films on a purely feminist basis – weren’t most women cast as cheerleaders who run around half naked before coming to a sticky end in a dank basement? But think of Alien, and Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and Carrie, and – in more recent times – The Descent and Eden Lake. Even in Troll Hunter, the gutsiest character – other than the troll hunter himself – is a female student who keeps going long after her male counterparts have given up hope.
Sometimes, boys, it’s OK to scream like a girl.
---------------
As a prolific apologiser, it’s a relief to discover that the average Briton says sorry eight times a day, 2,920 times a year and 233,600 times in a lifetime. I say sorry when someone knocks into me, sorry when someone is queuing behind me in the canteen, and then, when people point out to me that I should stop saying sorry, I say sorry for saying sorry.
This may seem pathetic but I think it’s simply polite, and possibly just a very British way of saying “excuse me”. I don’t trust people who live by the motto “never apologise, never explain” – they tend to be dictators, murderers and fraudsters. Of course, if this is the saying by which you live your life, and you happen to be none of these things… well, I am terribly sorry.
---------------
The bookshelf is having a makeover – it is being turned into shelves that don’t actually hold books. The Economist reports that Ikea is redesigning its famous BILLY bookcase to make it deeper, so it can hold items such as ornaments and pictures, instead of anything as space-wasting as novels and autobiographies, which we are now all reading in electronic form. So there you have it: Ikea, Purley Way, Croydon – the place to go if you want to witness profound cultural shifts.
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