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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She makes some excellent points throughout, but there’s heavy reliance on (by now) outdated ideas, especially in regards to the idea of the audience. Her killings escalate from would-be attackers to casually-sexist men, eventually culminating in a massacre of men of all kinds.

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. Clover highlights the fact that female victims’ death are always slow, close-up, and detailed, while male characters are always murdered off-screen, quickly, or not very clearly. awesome read, chock-full with slasher knowledge and backed with a lot of film theory (especially affect and audience/spectator theories). obviously the coining of the term final girl is iconic, and i also enjoyed the rape-revenge chapter's argument that the genre was a natural progression from the westerns of the 30s and 40s.Our main character is Jenna, a woman who has had to deal with a fair amount of loss in her life, the most recent one being that of her boyfriend Victor, who went to work on oil rigs and sent her a break up letter. 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. 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.

I read this as one of my "20 Books of Summer" challenge (to help clear at least a little of ypur TBR). The party hadn’t even dialed its volume down from the glass breaking, meaning either nobody cared or she was too far away for anyone to have heard. But the main takeaway from it is the reliance on Freudian psychology, the definition of Final Girl, and an overreliance on particular films.

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. She seems to feel the need to authenticate the horror films she discusses by aligning them with mainstream Hollywood movies. The real story was that the floorboard of that Camaro had been rusted through, and Jenna’s mom and dad were at the drive-in right before Thanksgiving, had been idling that small block to keep the heater warm. The chapter “Getting Even” explores rape-revenge films, particularly I Spit on Your Grave, one of the most unfairly reviled and condemned films of its type.

Carol Clover's compelling [book] challenges simplistic assumptions about the relationship between gender and culture. 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). In the chapter, “Her Body, Himself,” Clover coined the term “Final Girl” to describe the lone female survivor of slasher films. While many aspects of the book are still relevant today, the horror genre has gone in new directions, sometimes creating new subgenres that are now likewise being unfairly dismissed and condemned.But the conclusion reached above is absolutely bonkers and is completely at odds with the climax (and honestly, most) of the movie. It wasn't my top favorite story of all time from SGJ, but I definitely enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone who likes this fantastic author as much as I do! I have no idea how harshly to judge a 28-year-old book when it comes to our modern understanding of gender.

She was so glad Jenna was finally looking into them—it wasn’t their fault they hadn’t been there for her. My issues with her approach to Carrie started in chapter two, but she grossly misunderstood and skewed the knowledge of Firestarter to the point I felt like she was really reaching for an excuse to include it and force it like a square peg into a round hole for the "Eye of Horror" chapter.

Do you like Camaros, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, classic horror cinema, and all out sense of past haunting dread? 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. He was trying the door handle again and again, but, unlike every girl in town, it wasn’t submitting to him. She also notes that the killers are the staples that remain throughout (almost) all of the sequels of the film’s franchise. As for Caroline Williams, she was the reason for this daring junkyard break-in: last summer, the horror magazine Victor drove down to Houston to get once a month had run an interview with her, and the photo spread part of it had been shot right here in town.