"Lady Killers: Women who Killed in Film in 1990s" at PEM

Event Description

"Lady Killers: Women who Killed in the 1990's" Presentation
Peabody Essex Museum
161 Essex St. Salem, MA
Saturday, October 13th, 2018
4:00pm-5:00pm

Tickets $10-$20

Presented by Alexandra West

America in the 1990s had a women problem. From the treatment of activists and political figures like Anita Hill and Hillary Clinton to out-spoken women like Courtney Love and Kathleen Hanna to criminals like Tonya Harding and Lorena Bobitt to supposed sexual objects like Monica Lewinsky and Amy Fisher - women were a problem. They were too loud, too provocative, too angry, too present.

The 1990s film industry worked parallel to the mainstream media to perpetuate the archetype of the unhinged killer woman through various genres and to varying degrees of subversion. In this talk we'll be discussing the films Single White Female (1992), Basic Instinct (1992), Serial Mom (1994), Natural Born Killers (1994), Scream 2 (1997), Urban Legend (1997) and The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999) among others. We'll explore the various filmic archetypes these murderous characters inhabit alongside their "real-life" counter-parts and the treatment they received in mainstream culture.

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