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

October 16, 2024 6:49 PM

From its first publication in 1992, Men, Women, and Chain Saws has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. 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. The lesson was not lost on the mainstream industry, which was soon turning out the formula in well-made thrillers. -- publisher
posted by johnofjack (2 comments total)

I started listening to this last night and am really enjoying it, and mostly agreeing with it (I think I disagree with Clover on whether slashers preclude auteurship, but it's possible I might be remembering the point more forcefully than she made it).

There's so much more to this text than just the explication of the "final girl" trope: in the first chapter alone she talks about sexual dysfunction and gender confusion, the "sex=death" trope, gendered differences in how deaths are presented onscreen, the "killer cam" (which she calls "eye camera"), how POV shots force viewer identification and also how the POV in slasher films tends to shift over the course of the story from the killer to the victims, how slashers have a victim-hero but that the "victim-" part of that often gets overlooked, how there's usually a "terrible place" which will get visited at some point, and how abject terror tends to be gendered feminine. There's more but, I mean: that's a lot already for a book which is mostly remembered for one (admittedly hugely influential) part.

At any rate: so far, at least, I'm finding this a dense but rewarding text.
posted by johnofjack at 6:59 PM on October 16, 2024 [1 favorite]

Kudos for posting this. I would simply never think to post a work of this stature here, one that was and remains influential. It's a core text shaping how people talk about horror (whether in Horror Studies or otherwise), along with folks like Noel Carroll, Jeffery Jerome Cohen, Julia Kristeva, etc. Folks who see this and want a taste of similarly important works might enjoy Jeffrey Weinstock's The Monster Theory Reader.
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:00 AM on October 20, 2024 [2 favorites]