For my genre sketch I thought that it would be a good idea to watch some of my favourite horror films to remind me of ideas and issues within this genre I would like to investigate further. In my last year of school, I focussed my media studies exam around the horror genre because I enjoyed the conventions of horror films and found the changing role of the female characters so distinctive and relatable to society movements in the period of time that the films were released.

This week I decided to watch the original ‘Alien’ film released in 1979 because yesterday we watched ‘Alien’s’ in class.  The genre we were looking at was sci-fi, but this can also I believe that this can be a hybrid genre cross with horror. I did some research into the time period of this film where I discovered at the time ‘Alien’ was released there was a new social movement that took stage for women where there was a lead of civil rights as well as the mounting protests against the Vietnam war. This film particular relates to this women’s movement as the protagonist has a unisex name ‘Ripley’. She is shown to be tough and willing to fight Alien’s off the ship. What I also got from this film is that the characters have been stripped of their first names to further remove any sense of gender as this film was concluded as a feminist film.