Why are women scarier?

[GlitterUnicornsAndAllThatJazz]

I'm playing a game on the PS atm and it's basically a horror story in a game.

One of the most terrifying parts is called "the lady's quarters" and its this creepy shadowy boudoir with mannequins and a terrifying woman as the enemy.

It got me thinking about how growing up in all the fairytales I read, the scariest "enemies" were women. I was scared of malificent (sp?) from sleeping beauty, many of the witches in Russian folklore, the witch in the original little mermaid.

Even in modern horror stories often the female baddies are just so much creepier than the male ones.

Does anyone agree? But why is this?

OfaFrenchmind2 They do love to use phallic objects.

I wrote part of my dissertation on the idea of social conditioning through fairy tales from different cultures. As already explained, it is all to do with monstrous femininity and training women to be pure and obedient. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen explained that which exists outside of social norms becomes monstrous and other and their destruction serves as a form of communal carthasis (paraphrased a bit).

Because yang= light, order, good, male
yin= dark, chaos, evil, female

It’s quite sexist really, I don’t recall one male villain without a disguise so that’s a very good point. Hannibal Lecter scared me and he didn't need a disguise to do it. Any WW2 films about the Holocaust will have scary baddies who are good looking and smartly dressed (their uniforms were certainly smarter than ours) Laurence Olivier was bloody terrifying in Marathon Man and put many people off going to the dentist.

I think it is only a certain sort of film where they were a disguise.

Cathy Bates scared me much more in Misery

Kathy*

Kathy Bates might have scared you more, my point was male scary characters aren't always in a disguise.

Kathy Bates did scare me but Laurence Oliver made going to the dentist scary and I need to do that, staying with nutters in the woods is more of a niche market.

Maybe it's because we're so conditioned to being scared by men in real life.

Yes grannytomine I’m know what your point was

I*

I took it OP was alluding more to chilrens horror stories?

Passthestarmix, glad you did.

childrens

grannytomine The characters you mentioned are scary but I’m fine going to the dentist..good luck!

Just realised he actually looks like my current dentist

I was always good with the dentist but it does cross my mind occasionally when I'm having a filling. My DH on the other hand was always a bit phobic of the dentist (think as a child he had a "Laurence Olivier" type dentist) so the film horrified him. He sees a very gentle woman dentist privately but it still terrifies him.

It's a bit like Jaws put some people off swimming in the sea.

Oh no, now that would freak my husband out totally.

He’s a dead ringer: think I’m going to have to tell my dentist he has a twin. I think he’ll have a good chuckle and probably warn me not to spread that around at risk of putting his patients off! I’ve never realise that before but I must admit I haven’t seen Marathon Man for a very long time (2000)

d*

grannytomine He even has the glasses and the receding hair omg! my dentist is private and there’a an image of him online which I’m dying to show you but I won’t as the poor man isn’t Marathon Man afterall and I would feel awful doing that!

Female villains tend to be more more nuanced characters with a better developed back story, generally more character development whereas the male villains are often just really violent (often they are actually portrayed as just animals with no personality to speak of like the wolf in little red rindinghood, the giant in jack and the beanstalk etc). Violence is scary but not creepy. It's a bit more difficult to create a purely violent female character because cultural bias dictates that that doesn't really occurring in women so story tellers, writers, producers tend to create creepier, more physiologically engaging female characters. My most horrifying female character has to be the woman in black.

Ursula in Disney's The Little Mermaid is fat, old and gaudy....and fucking sexy. That close up of her shaking boobs. She's sexy as fuck.

I don't really have an analysis of that, it's just an observation. Ariel is young, beautiful, titillating, an ingenue and stupid and annoying but I wouldn't say she was sexy per se. Ursula, though, my God.

PasstheStarmix I think he needs to change his image. It might be ruining his business. It is an old film though but that scene is real horror, much more so than some of the modern stuff. Well it is to me anyway.

PoorYorick that is a good point. Sometimes the "goody" characters aren''t very interesting.

A lot of actors say they prefer playing the villain because it's just a meatier and more enjoyable role. You don't generally get to do bad things even if they make you feel good.

With regards to female characters, you generally get to be pretty or powerful. Not both. Until there was Queen Elsa, the great amazing fucking awesome Queen Elsa.