Chainsaws and bombshells: Brutality and victim sexualization in slasher films, 1960–2019
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines the evolution of slasher films from the 1960s to the present, focusing on their portrayal of violence, brutality, and the sexualization of female victims in relation to shifting societal attitudes toward victimization. By conducting a data-driven content analysis of violence and sexualization trends through the decades, the research fills a gap in the literature on the intersection of cinema, victimology, and culture. The findings reveal that films from the 2000s and 2010s exhibit the highest levels of brutality, while 1980s slasher films are marked by the most explicit sexualization of female victims. These trends are analyzed through the lens of victimology, demonstrating how depictions of female victimization reflect and reinforce societal attitudes toward crime, serial killing, rape culture, and gender dynamics. The study highlights the reciprocal relationship between slasher films and cultural movements, illustrating how filmmakers both shape and are shaped by public perceptions of victimhood. Ultimately, the research argues that slasher films serve as a cultural mirror, revealing shifting views on gender, power, and crime, and offering insights into broader societal concerns about the victimization of women and changing notions of justice and empowerment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".