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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Good for him, Jenna told herself, and turned neatly away, hating how hot her eyes already were, and hating even more how her back straightened when she knew he had seen her through the crowd.

There are some really interesting and vital points about the relationship between the audience and horror movies but rather than plumbing that particular depth; the reader is instead treated to an endless stream of psychoanalytic recursion (which weirdly is very much about Carol J Clover's relationship to horror films and less about the relationship between horror films and their actual audiences because most audience members are not Carol J Clover). Her dad had told her her bio-parents had died in a car, and “wreck” was the only thing that made sense to ten-year-old Jenna, who didn’t really need every sticky detail.Of course, the most important part of this introduction chapter is Clover’s explanation of gender within the horror film.

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. The "Final Girl" is in our lexicon because of Clover and she makes a powerful argument that the popularity of horror films, even among its mostly male viewers, is rooted in identification with the victim and from a perspective of masochism.Still, it’s a key horror text, cited by many and which introduced the term “Final Girl” into the horror lexicon. while i like clover for challenging this assumption, the way she goes about it is at times iffy due to an over-reliance on freud. She suggests that the "low tradition' in horror movies possesses positive subversive potential, a space to explore gender ambiguity and transgress traditional boundaries of masculinity and femininity.

I don’t think I’ll be able to watch another horror film the same, and it has definitely ignited a passion in me about the subject. On the other side of the coin, this is also a bit of an outdated read and far too much time was spent on Freud for comfort.Jenna blinked her feelings away, reversed down the dirt road, and drove emptier and lonelier roads for the next three hours, until dusk sifted down around her and the Subaru. Though they will be familiar to the experienced horror audience by now, the author takes us through the tropes and traditions of horror films and from the commonalities of a broad survey we emerge with three separate subgenres that will be relevant to her treatment of gender: the slasher film, the possession film, and the rape-revenge film. She was actually writing about identification (there Is a reason Final Girls are virgins with boy names, because boys Identify with them). For example, she spends the better part of the third essay talking about Deliverance in explicit detail, while name-dropping other actual horror films with nary a description. It was published in 1992, right before horror films were relegated to direct-to-video sequels of 80's hits and Scream's reinvigoration of the genre later in the decade.

And if anybody’d towed it here for whatever batshit reason, they surely would have sat those soft turbine wheels up on cinderblocks or wood, at least. Victor boosted Jenna over the tall, solid fence—like she hadn’t grown up scrambling over half the fences in East Texas herself? That, I suspect, is what people liked to see in these movies in an era of rising mega-corporations and big business: the little guy winning for once, even if it's only for a while.Just to look up at the faded old screen, half its huge white tiles missing, the other half peeling at the corners. To only have Jessica (“Spit”’s victim) as our hero is unacceptable as our only perspective, not to mention that she leaves no witnesses to her triumph (which leads to a whole other thesis point), because the SA victim is seen as less. 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. I guess Laurie had to be once more unmanned so that the dramatic journey towards becoming-hero could occur once more in the sequel.