Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992) by Caitlin Duffy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4. 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. This is interesting considering the fact that it is the final girl who the audience is guided to ultimately identify with. 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).

Men, Women, and Chain Saws by Carol J. Clover | Waterstones

It is the fraught relation between the "tough girl" of horror and her male fan that Clover explores. Men, Women, and Chainsaws makes for an excellent Halloween read featuring revenge, female rage, and tons of references, so I would definitely recommend it to fans of the horror genre. But, overall, a very insightful and very informative set of essays that definitely have me even looking at contemporary horror a bit differently. She seems to feel the need to authenticate the horror films she discusses by aligning them with mainstream Hollywood movies.

I don't agree with all of Clover's conclusions, but then I have the hindsight of almost three decades to look back at what these films accomplished. awesome read, chock-full with slasher knowledge and backed with a lot of film theory (especially affect and audience/spectator theories).

Men, Women, and Chain Saws - De Gruyter Men, Women, and Chain Saws - De Gruyter

There is no condescension in this significant and probing discussion of psychology and sexuality and their role in lurid fantasy. Jones builds the story through Jenna’s narration, often having you witness events without much context for the motivations. Her real parents had raised her right and given her every chance, but now, in this violent fairy tale she'd stumbled into, her first parents were coming back to protect her.

She notes the very different critical reception given to a movie like I Spit On Your Grave (universally reviled, in often hysterical terms, by mainstream critics) compared to an acceptable mainstream feature like The Accused. stars rounded down, primarily because I've only seen a handful of the films examined in the text (of note, Carrie and the original I Spit On Your Grave), so it was a bit difficult to really get into it. She argues that I Spit On Your Grave was actually the more honest of the two movies, and the more radical in its gender politics. Again, her reading of the terrible place, this time, the destruction of the terrible place, is probably really helpful to ecogothic and ecohorror readings. Carol Clover's compelling [book] challenges simplistic assumptions about the relationship between gender and culture.

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

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. 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. 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. Put pithily as it is, this is a crucial point from Clover that tears apart a prevailing view of horror.She asks pertinent questions about why a form that appeals mostly to young men should feature almost exclusively female heroes, and should ask its audience to identify with these female heroes. Clover emphasizes the importance of the "low" tradition in filmmaking, arguing that it has provided some of the most significant artistic and political innovations of the past two decades. The devoted horror buff will probably enjoy Clover’s initial analysis of horror films for its own sake, but reaching past this there is something more significant on offer.

Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film

I’m glad to have read it — as it’s an iconic book — but I’m definitely more happy to be finished with it. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book.Some elements of this analysis are probably fairly timeless (the Freudian readings of slasher movies, the inevitable gendering of characters based on their function in a film, etc. Do you like Camaros, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, classic horror cinema, and all out sense of past haunting dread? If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man.