With terror in their hearts: a structural and textual analysis of gender, transmission, and the enjoyment of horror in slasher films and contemporary legends

Abstract

The contemporary legend canon contains many different kinds of legends, including but not limited to food contamination, embarrassing sexual situations and incidents with automobiles. However, there is a particular subset that involves a maniac (usually assumed to be male) attacking a victim who is usually young and female. I have dubbed these contemporary horror legends. They bear a strong resemblance to the violent and gory horror films I watched in my youth, which I refer to as slasher films. In these slasher films, teenaged victims are butchered by killers who are frequently male. Are slasher films merely using a different mode of transmission to tell the same stories as contemporary horror legends? In this thesis, I use textual and structural analyses to compare contemporary horror legends and slasher films: their modes of transmission, their depictions of gender and their audiences. Why do we continue to enjoy telling, and watching, these horror stories?