Here we see the solid emergence of a number of subgenres, and it’s interesting that she notes how many of these will likely die out, when we know more fully now the cyclical nature of many genres, including horror.

Horror films manage to have a largely male audience identify with a female survivor; the viewer goes with her into the bad place, cheers on her escape and empathises with her suffering. Come sunrise, they were going to have to tackle her to get her to stop, and then they’d better get those cuffs on her fast, because she was going to be trying to slip away, pick that sledgehammer up one more time, come at that rusted-out memory like a fucking Valkyrie.As she finds out some ugly truths about Victor, as well as some hidden truths about what happened to her biological parents, my heart broke for her as she seeks out a connection, seeks out not only the hope of taking out a user and abusive prick, but also the hope of finding a connection to the parents she never knew, and finding not only meaning in their loss, but also perhaps an otherworldly reunion. Not only was she one of the more well known actors in the film, but the marketing of the film made it appear that she could have been the final girl (admittedly, Neve Campbell does show up quite a bit in the trailer as well). 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. However, I think she misses an opportunity to discuss an unacknowledged motivation of the “critical” viewer, which is 1) Sadism as the only acceptable form of masculinity left to the 20th century male and 2) that the disgust felt in the r*pe revenge horror I Spit On Your Grave is less about the graphic violence of women regardless of her own successful revenge, but is due to internalized misogyny or simple misogyny of the viewer who are not given a white knight who would stand for them in the film. 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.

It is the fraught relation between the "tough girl" of horror and her male fan that Clover explores. however, clover's argument about what audiences get out of horror--the main project of the book, according to her--ultimately falters.Castration; Witchboard; Male gaze; Pornography; Frankenhooker; Blood Diner; Incubus; Great Male Renunciation; Redneck; Body Double; Mad scientist; Tootsie; Libido; Incest; His Woman; Videodrome; Sam Peckinpah; Leonard Maltin; Hunter's Blood; Butcher knife; Robert Siodmak; David Lynch; From Reverence to Rape; Psychoanalysis; David Cronenberg; Brian De Palma; Pumpkinhead (film series); Scanners; Susan Brownmiller; Carrie White; Jacques Lacan; Cannibalism; Castration anxiety; Penis; Gaze; Some Men; Act of Violence; Splatter film; Strait-Jacket; Those Who Trespass; The Eye Creatures; Diegesis; Vampyr; Ghoulies; Rape culture; The Two Mrs. It certainly gave me a lot to think about and analyze, and while it did take me quite some time to read, I attribute that more to my own desire to take my time digesting the topics in this book. In this book Carol Clover argues that sadism is actually the lesser part of the horror experience and that the movies work mainly to engage the viewer in the plight of the victim-hero - the figure who suffers pain and fright but eventually rises to vanquish the forces of oppression. Her assertions are based on second wave feminism (she began writing in ‘86, so this is unsurprising) and Freudian analysis, which I argue is just as flawed in literary study as it is in psychology, without the potential real-life consequences of the latter.

They are, in fact, protagonists in the full sense: they combine the functions of suffering victim and avenging hero. Always and forever, babe,” Victor assured her, and, like that, she hiked herself up onto the Camaro’s hood. He never really mentioned the book being any influence to any degree on him on writing Kill Bill… he did happen to have it recommended at a time when he was writing Kill Bill early on (early 1999)… so it could have provided early framework for Uma Thurman’s character… but who knows ultimately what influence it will have had since he has been writing Kill Bill for at least the last 3-4 years (finishing late last summer). The victims of slashers are incidental to the fact that someone - an underdog, smaller and weaker than the towering Jasons and Michael Myers, usually a woman, sometimes a child, sometimes a woman and a child together, inevitably the nicest person in the movie - holds evil at bay, at least for a while, at least until the next installment.

According to that view, the power of films like Halloween and Texas Chain Saw Massacre lies in their ability to yoke us in the killer's perspective and to make us party to his atrocities. Her lie about needing the Subaru Brat they shared was enough to get Jenna dropping Cray-Cray off at the salon, with a promise to be there to pick her up right when the Chevy house closed. And now, for his six months out on the water, what Victor wanted more than anything in the world, it was his girlfriend—soon to be fiancée, Jenna had her fingers crossed for—posed on that hood just like Stretch, right down to those jeans shorts.

This all is true, however, where does this reading leave us when Laurie drops the knife/knitting needles? To examine an objectively outsider view of the genre through the lens of a relative outsider (in her foreword Clover states as much) to the genre is endlessly fascinating and she makes valid and interesting points, especially in regards to representation of victim and killer in sub genres. Took had said early on, when they were still decorating the trailer, making it not look so thirdhand. This book, from 1992, while being real film theory, is culturally notorious, for the first use of term Final Girl which took on a life of its own, especially in recent years ( I have seen it become much more popular). 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.On top of that, Clover keeps to a binary gender reading (and uses some outdated words for transgender folks). And this focus on phalluses really brings the bio-essentialist perspective to the forefront, which makes it all even worse. 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.