Targeting American Women: Movie Marketing, Genre History, and the Hollywood Women-in-Danger Film

Abstract

By concentrating on elements of film content and the cultural politics of feminist activists, scholars have suggested that Hollywood’s women-in-danger films of the early 1980s represented the greatest misogynist trend in the history of American cinema. However, by focusing on the marketing of such films as Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980), He Knows You’re Alone (Armand Mastroianni, 1980), and The Fan (Ed Bianchi, 1981), it is clear that Hollywood distributors consistently framed these thrillers less as celebrations of violent misogyny than as cautionary tales of a backlash brewing against American women. Accordingly, this article suggests that Hollywood’s women-in-danger films were part of an industry-wide effort to retain older moviegoers, especially mature women. The author argues that Hollywood companies used marketing materials to differentiate their women-in-danger films from sensationally promoted exploitation fare such as Snuff (Anon., 1976) and Maniac (William Lustig, 1980). This practice crystallized in the late 1970s following a controversy over Paramount’s mis-marketed rape-revenge opus Lipstick (Lamont Johnson, 1976), and the promising returns of Columbia’s Eyes of Laura Mara (Irwin Kershner, 1978) and When a Stranger Calls (Fred Walton, 1979). Approaching women-in-danger film marketing as a dynamic historical process reveals that Hollywood’s greatest successes involved emphasizing female participation in the production of the films, spotlighting similarities to other female-oriented production trends, and invoking the figure of the female spectator.