This paper compares the gender politics expressed in Ringu and The Ring, paying particular attention to specific and noteworthy distinctions and crucial underlying cultural differences that structure and shape the gender politics articulated in the two films. While highlighting the divergences in the films' narratives and examining how their depictions of female characters reveal the fundamental historical, cultural, social and ideological forces that structure Eastern and Western views of femininity, women, and their roles in society, this paper argues that although both films reflect a misogynist patriarchal perspective in their depiction of evil, violent, destructive females, it is the American remake that is ultimately more conservative and reactionary in its simplistic alignment of women, the feminine and maternity with evil and monstrosity. In comparison, the Japanese original offers a more ambiguous treatment of a key female character, the mysterious and deadly Sadako, allowing her to emerge as a potential figure of resistance against conservative patriarchy, an element that is distinctly absent in the American remake.

Lincoln Ls Manual Transmission Swap. In almost all critical writings on the horror film, woman is conceptualized only as victim. In The Monstrous-Feminine, Barbara Creed challenges the mythical patriarchal view that woman terrifies because she is castrated, by arguing that woman primarily terrifies because of a fear that she might castrate. With close reference to a number of classic horror films including Alien, The Brood, The Hunger, Carrie, The Exorcist, Sisters, I Spit on Your Grave and Psycho, she presents a sustained analysis of the seven faces of the monstrous-feminine from a feminist and psychoanalytic perspective, discussing woman as monster in relation to woman as archaic mother, monstrous womb, vampire, witch, possessed body, monstrous mother and castrator. Her argument disrupts Freudian and Lacanian theories of sexual difference, as well as existing theories of spectatorship and fetishism in relation to the male and female gaze in the cinema, to provide a challenging and provocative re-reading of classical and contemporary film and theoretical texts.