A paradox is that, since the late 1970s, the victim-hero is usually female and the audience predominantly male. SGJ is always fun to read, and his short stories are awesome little slices of gritty East Texas life, with lots of dusty flat spaces and flea bitten dogs under dilapidated trailers.

Men, Women, - JSTOR Men, Women, - JSTOR

Female-hero films like Silence of the Lambs and Thelma and Louise may be breakthroughs from the point of view of mainstream Hollywood cinema, but their themes have a long ancestry in lowlife horror. Indeed, she commends it as a virtue of the horror approach that it reaches through gender brazenly and, though a point of no little contention, plucks out and holds in bare palms what later “serious” films will only attempt to do with thick gloves.while i like clover for challenging this assumption, the way she goes about it is at times iffy due to an over-reliance on freud. Keywords: Horror film; Slasher film; I Spit on Your Grave; The Final Girl(s); Masculinity; The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; Leatherface; Rape; Exorcism; Ms. i actually don't mind clover using a psychoanalytic lens to discuss popular symbolism in horror films because there's definitely a lot there, but IMO she should have quit while she was ahead and provided her analysis of these films without trying to argue that the young men who flock to horror movies do so to experience some kind of oedipal transference. Comprised of four essays on horror films, this book is a window not so much into the films of the era but into the ways film critics and academics watched and talked about films at that time. But, overall, a very insightful and very informative set of essays that definitely have me even looking at contemporary horror a bit differently.

Men, Women, and Chain Saws | Princeton University Press

Although such movies have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to their mostly male audiences, Clover demonstrates that they align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the females tormented—notably the slasher movie's "final girls"—as they endure fear and degradation before rising to save themselves.For example, she spends the better part of the third essay talking about Deliverance in explicit detail, while name-dropping other actual horror films with nary a description. Including a new preface by the author, this Princeton Classics edition is a definitive work that has found an avid readership from students of film theory to major Hollywood filmmakers. According to Clover, one common trait amongst all victims in slasher films (male and women) is that they are sexual transgressors. Clover asserts that this is most likely not due to audience’s fear of castration, but rather because of Western pop culture’s requirement that a hero be male. So it is through this ability towards self-help that female victims within the modern horror film are able to turn themselves into masculine final girl heroes.

Men Women and Chainsaws | PPT - SlideShare Men Women and Chainsaws | PPT - SlideShare

And Clover makes some good points about the story and its themes, before abruptly going off the rails. I’ll repeat my praise for it taking the genre seriously and diving very deep, but I just want better takes from a better perspective.

She also notes how these sorts of weapons satiate audience’s taboo curiosity to see the inside of the human body. These places can appear to be a safe space in which the victim/final girl can seek shelter, however, there is always a “penetration scene” in which the killer fights or sneaks his way into the terrible place. men, women, and chainsaws is an incisive piece of psychoanalytic film scholarship that codifies and interprets three sub-genres of "low" horror: slasher, possession, and rape-revenge movies. On top of that, Clover keeps to a binary gender reading (and uses some outdated words for transgender folks). It is no accident that male victims in slasher films are killed swiftly or offscreen, and that prolonged struggles, in which the victim has time to contemplate her imminent destruction, inevitably figure females.

Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern - JSTOR

The "last girl" trope, male gaze, and other common elements are discussed, their place in the history of horror cinema, their origin and purpose. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. That’s probably why there was a bit of a disconnect with me in that aspect but there were some good horror elements and relatability to this as I kept reading. It’s a fascinating and thought-provoking book, and really it’s concerned with much larger issues of violence in movies and not just with particular genres of horror. They certainly spoke to something people wanted to see, and I don't think it was women-in-danger or women punished for sexual activity or any of the things Siskel and Ebert suggested.

There are several good points that I had never considered, but there are probably just as many Bad Takes. Clover looks at the horror movies of the preceding two decades, focusing particularly on low-budget films and even more particularly on that most despised of all sub-genres, the slasher film. This book offered so many interesting insights into gender in horror films, the final girl phenomena and the tale-revenge sub genre of horror. We understand that not everyone can donate right now, but if you can afford to contribute, we promise it will be put to good use. If she is the hero of the story, why do audiences want to watch the killer in the following sequels?