Men, Women, & Chain Saws – Gender in the Modern Horror Film: Gender in Modern Horror Film

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It reminded me a lot of Jack Halberstam’s comment in his Skin Shows (which I can’t wait to re-read for this list! 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. He was trying the door handle again and again, but, unlike every girl in town, it wasn’t submitting to him.

Men, Women, and Chain Saws | Princeton University Press

Because horror is a genre that creates physical reaction (see my notes on Carroll’s Philosophy of Horror), the audience takes on the female victim role, while the film itself becomes a male attacker/monster. 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. I suppose that, despite the fact that the final girl does become the active hero, pushing the action forward as she hunts the killer during the film’s final act, it is the killer who continues to push the action forward past the film’s conclusion. The "last girl" trope, male gaze, and other common elements are discussed, their place in the history of horror cinema, their origin and purpose. She] argues that most horror films are obsessed with feminism, playing out plots which climax with an image of (masculinized) female power and offering visual pleasures which are organized not around a mastering gaze, but around a more radical "victim-identified' look.

Thesis: There are a number of component categories of the slasher film which help to create the genre: killer, locale, weapons, victims, and shock effects. Although horror films are broadly discussed, three main threads are examined in detail: slasher films, satanic possession films, and rape-revenge films. 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.

Men, Women, and Chain Saws by Carol J. Clover - Ebook | Scribd Men, Women, and Chain Saws by Carol J. Clover - Ebook | Scribd

Indeed, she commends it as a virtue of the horror approach that it reaches through gender brazenly and, though a point of no little contention, plucks out and holds in bare palms what later “serious” films will only attempt to do with thick gloves. The supernatural element here pays homage to a long line of horrors featuring (possibly) possessed (or otherwise ) cars. Horror movies, she concludes, use female bodies not only for the male spectator to feel at, but for him to feel through.Her main contention is that there’s a considerable amount of cross-gender identification going on in horror movies, and that audiences may well be identifying much more with the victims, and much less with the victimisers, than is generally thought. But the conclusion reached above is absolutely bonkers and is completely at odds with the climax (and honestly, most) of the movie. Clover makes a convincing case for studying the pulp-pop excesses of ‘exploitation' horror as a reflection of our psychic times. 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.

Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror…

They certainly spoke to something people wanted to see, and I don't think it was women-in-danger or women punished for sexual activity or any of the things Siskel and Ebert suggested. A paradox is that, since the late 1970s, the victim-hero is usually female and the audience predominantly male. There are several good points that I had never considered, but there are probably just as many Bad Takes. This unique turning of the tables is something that outsiders to the genre don’t always understand or even consider.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied. But it’s weighed down by dated views on gender, some truly baffling takes, and just way too much Freud. She also notes that the killers are the staples that remain throughout (almost) all of the sequels of the film’s franchise.