Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton Classics): Gender in the Modern Horror Film - Updated Edition: 15 (Princeton Classics, 15)

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But my complaints aside, I still enjoyed this book, I appreciated that it gave me things to think about, and I'd make the argument that it's something anyone interested in horror media should really consider reading and using for points of discussion. Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases.

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. She makes some excellent points throughout, but there’s heavy reliance on (by now) outdated ideas, especially in regards to the idea of the audience. 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. I loved learning more about the genre, the author is obviously a very distinguished scholar in her own right and this is a foundational book to read on the subject. 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.Ten minutes after midnight, she plopped down in the junkyard again, and picked up the sledgehammer that had taken her four tries to finally sling all the way over the fence.

While discussing the role of the killer in the slasher film, she mentions that, just like the final girl, the killer also slides between genders.

Various genres are covered (slasher, possession, haunting, revenge-I Spit On Your Grave gets a lot of attention), as well as films that influenced horror, like the Alien movies, Deliverance, and even The Accused.

for me, the strongest aspect of the book is the way she traces the origins of these sub-genres and their influence on later "high-brow" films that garnered more critical acclaim. Under the rust she’d touched, there was that distinctive midnight blue that so many of these Z/28s had been painted with.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. To me, this is where the insight in the book really comes into play – we can apply her discussion of possession films to a franchise like The Conjuring, where women are overwhelmingly at the centre of the supernatural. Jenna hesitantly touched the pad of her finger to the bare steel of that rear wheel, painting it, and an instant later, she whole-body flinched—that rear wheel had drained all the blood from her hand, it felt like, so that she had to rip her finger away. On the other side of the coin, this is also a bit of an outdated read and far too much time was spent on Freud for comfort. It was still sitting on its turbine wheels, no rubber, and it was still a rust bucket, but there was no denying that this was the same Camaro from the junkyard.

Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.She wasn’t just going to wail on that Camaro’s hood, she was going to jail for it, she didn’t care anymore.