Of course, it’s been quite a few years since Clover wrote this book and horror has undergone some interesting changes in the between time. They also could’ve already begun identifying with Drew Barrymore’s character as the final girl which could’ve been part of the reasons why this film’s first scene managed to create such a big shock. awesome read, chock-full with slasher knowledge and backed with a lot of film theory (especially affect and audience/spectator theories). You can’t claim to study slasher films (or horror films more generally) without first reading Carol Clover’s field-defining text Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992).

In this book, Clover defines and explores the role of the surviving female character and labels her the “final girl.On top of that, Clover keeps to a binary gender reading (and uses some outdated words for transgender folks). R/HORROR, known as Dreadit by our subscribers is the premier horror entertainment community on Reddit. I’m reading and listening to Men, Women, and Chainsaws by Carol J Clover (hardcopy and audiobook because I like being read to and following along), which is about the women of horror movies. She’d heard he was back, that he was using his experience on his series of offshore rigs to bag girl after girl, but seeing him in the flesh was a whole other thing.

Wine coolers took some of it, the tip at the diner back in town took twenty more—Jenna had so much she could tell the sophomore girl who brought her her coffee, but she didn’t want to ruin things for her—and the last thirty-five went for a sledgehammer. Subversion in genre lit is unsurprising, to put it mildly, but the fact that horror is more feminist than legal dramas is both surprising and completely logical. It can feel a little dry at times, but it truly gives some interesting insights that can still be explored today.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. They are, in fact, protagonists in the full sense: they combine the functions of suffering victim and avenging hero. The book is a cultural critique and investigation of gender in slasher films and the appeal of horror cinema, in particular the slasher, occult, and rape-revenge genres, from a feminist perspective. 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. It is also a shared masculinity, materialized in “all those phallic symbols”- and it is also a shared femininity, materialized in what comes next (and what Carpenter, perhaps significantly , fails to mention): the castration, literal or symbolic, of the killer at her hands.

As we know, society tends to view SA survivors with, at best, pity and, at worst (and horribly too commonly) with culpability in their own assault. This book offered so many interesting insights into gender in horror films, the final girl phenomena and the tale-revenge sub genre of horror. the new prominence of women is the structural effect of a greater investment in the victim function… modern horror seems especially interested in the trials of everyperson, and everyperson is on his or her own in facing the menace, without help from the authorities…it is not only in their capacity as victims that these women appear in these films.What about the way the Final Girl has changed, becoming more of a focus for satire and parody, yet still with the elements of the original girls? When she should have been clocking in, she was back at the drive-in, the Subaru idling like a lawnmower behind her because turning it off wasn’t always the best idea. She gulped the spit in her mouth down, eased in, and touched the driver’s side fender, telling herself there was no chance the metal was going to be hot, or, if it was, that was just the day’s heat, collected there—not an engine. Favorite novels change daily, but Valis and Love Medicine and Lonesome Dove and It and The Things They Carried are all usually up there somewhere. And this focus on phalluses really brings the bio-essentialist perspective to the forefront, which makes it all even worse.

During one scene, the teenaged son character played masterfully by Alex Wolff is terrified, panics and cries, begging his mom to stop her meddling with the undead by crying out “mommy, stop, mommy, mommy…” There were definitely a few uncomfortable giggles in the audience, and I saw some negative reactions to this moment online.There is no condescension in this significant and probing discussion of psychology and sexuality and their role in lurid fantasy.