Although teen film is littered with tales of young women coming of age, the messages presented in most of these films follow a formula centered on a patriarchal nuclear family ideal, which leads to damaging perceptions regarding gender roles in teenage society. There is the main traditional model of stay at home mother with a father in the role of the breadwinner; the rise of rape culture; and the glass ceiling in the workplace. The young females consuming a mass amount of this media then reflect negatively on themselves. The research following this conundrum was broken into two parts: the production of a film looking to remedy the many problems of female representation in teen media and then monitoring the reaction to said film against its target audience: young females between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one. The purpose of this thesis is to explore what makes females within the teenage demographic react to certain kinds of media. If they react negatively or positively towards a media representation of themselves, to what extent does this affect the participants' activity in their daily lives? Therefore, through a process of screening three short films focused on teen issues - including the one made by myself for this study - and then conducting a survey focusing on questions regarding the participants' feelings towards the subject matter, their hopes for themselves, and teen media in general, there was an ability to gauge how deeply teen media affects the modern teenager.

Il presente studio mira a constatare lo stretto collegamento tra la figura femminile e il cinema thriller e horror italiano, qui denominato genericamente “fantastico” in un’ accezione estensiva, a evidenziarne caratteristiche comuni relative a entrambi i generi. La periodizzazione della ricerca va dagli anni sessanta agli anni ottanta ed il primo obiettivo è stato quello di valutare secondo un approccio culturalista l’interdipendenza donna-horror, spesso sfociata in un approccio misogino al genere. I risultati sono stati spesso discordanti rispetto alle premesse di partenza: le donne sono raffigurate solo come vittime, il gradimento del pubblico è esclusivamente maschile. La messa in discussione di questa tesi si è resa possibile attraverso una ricerca empirico-applicativa di un campione di film e una disamina di scritti più recenti che mirano in qualche caso a rovesciare il paradigma di partenza. Il secondo obiettivo ha rilevato differenze tra rappresentazione femminile nel cinema italiano e americano, muovendo dal presupposto che le teorie su cui ci si è basati provengono dagli stati uniti e hanno previsto un campione per lo più di film non italiani. quindi l’ intento dello studio è stato anche quello di misurare l’applicabilità di alcuni paradigmi teorici al caso italiano. lo svolgimento della ricerca ha previsto un’indagine di tipo quantitativo (rilevazione del corpus estensivo di film) e intensivo-qualitativo (analisi di alcuni principali stereotipi femminili, tratti dalla letteratura e dal cinema: damsel in distress, belle dame sans merci, final girl), per giungere poi alla conclusione che il genere fantastico italiano ha risentito forse più di ogni altro di una conflittualità permanente, tra bisogno di emancipazione e resistenza conservatrice. / This current study aims to ascertain the close connection between female figure and Italian horror/thriller, cinema, here called "fantastico" in an extensive meaning, in order to highlight common features related to both genres. The periodization of research goes from 60s to 80s and the first purpose was to evaluate, according to a culturalist approach, the woman-horror interdependence, often focused in a mysoginic approach to the genre. The results have often been conflicting with respect to the starting presuppositions: the women are represented only as victims, the audience’s satisfaction is exclusively male. The discussion of this thesis was possible through an empirical and applicative research of a film sample and a careful investigation of latest writings that aim in different cases to reverse the paradigm of the starting point. The second objective detected differences between female representation in the Italian and American cinema, moving from the assumption that the theories which we are based on, come from united states and have provided a sample of more American films than Italian ones. Therefore the intent of this essay was testing the applicability of some historical theoric paradigms to the Italian case. the research’ s method involved a quantitative cataloging of extensive film corpus and an intensive one, which analyzes the main female stereotypes drawn from literature and cinema (damsel in distress, belle dame sans merci, final girl ). the conclusions show that the Italian fantastic genre has resisted more than other ones of a permanent conflict between emancipation and conservative resistance.