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

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It felt like one of those B-movie adventures with the lurid title and even more lurid trailers - and I mean that in the best possible way as really this is what it is, one of those great revenge stories that can only happen on the screen (or in this case the word). Then, eventually, at the end of so many years, they buy a camper, set out to see America, right? Why not. Just, now, instead: this. Bleeding into a magical car for too many nights, gambling on ghosts, and hoping nobody asks too many questions." Comprised of four essays on horror films, this book is a window not so much into the films of the era but into the ways film critics and academics watched and talked about films at that time. Two of the essays particularly interested me: one on the 1980s slasher craze (Clover coined the term "final girl," by the way) and one on rape/murder/revenge films of that era, specifically two movies I have not seen - Ms. 45 and I Spit on Your Grave - and one I have - Last House on the Left (based on Bergman's The Virgin Spring, which I've also seen). Clover seems to be one of the few critical apologists for these films in an era when Siskel and Ebert, and other less visible critics, were bashing them at length. If you are interested in film criticism or horror movies, give this a try. Be warned, though, it is highly academic in tone, not a light read. A] brilliant analysis of gender and its disturbances in modern horror films. . . . Bubbling away beneath Clover's multi-faceted readings of slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films is the question of what the viewer gets out of them. . . . [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. ---Linda Ruth Williams, Sight and Sound

Men, Women and Chainsaws by Carol J. Clover | Goodreads Men, Women and Chainsaws by Carol J. Clover | Goodreads

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-01-25 04:09:50 Associated-names British Film Institute Bookplateleaf 0010 Boxid IA40834304 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier I like the writing of academic books and I love analysis of horror. There is though, an obsession with identification here (and often in these books), specifically gender identification. Judging Audiences: The Trial Movie." Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams. (London: Arnold, 1998). In her reading of both particular horror films and of film and gender theory, Clover does what every cultural critic hopes to: she calls into question our habits of seeing."—Ramona Naddaff, Artforum 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.

Angry displays of force may belong to the male, but crying, cowering, screaming, fainting, trembling, begging for mercy belong to the female. Abject terror, in short, is gendered feminine, and the more concerned a given film is with that condition- and it is the essence of modern horror- the more likely the femaleness of the victim. It is no accident that male victims in slasher films are killed swiftly or offscreen, and that prolonged struggles, in which the victim has time to contemplate her imminent destruction, inevitably figure females. Only when one encounters the rare expression of abject terror on the part of a male… does one apprehend the full extent of the cinematic double standard in such matters. (51) Cinefantastic horror, in short, succeeds in incorporating its spectators as “feminine” and then violating that body- which recoils, shudders, cries out collectively- in ways otherwise imaginable, for males, only in nightmare. (53) Clover is a featured expert in the film S&Man, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006. [5] Biography [ edit ] Do the pleasures of horror movies really begin and end in sadism? So the public discussion of film assumes, and so film theory claims. According to that view, the power of films like Halloween and Texas Chain Saw Massacre lies in their ability to yoke us in the killer's perspective and to make us party to his atrocities. In this book Carol Clover argues that sadism is actually the lesser part of the horror experience and that the movies work mainly to engage the viewer in the plight of the victim-hero - the figure who suffers pain and fright but eventually rises to vanquish the forces of oppression. A paradox is that, since the late 1970s, the victim-hero is usually female and the audience predominantly male. It is the fraught relation between the "tough girl" of horror and her male fan that Clover explores. Horror movies, she concludes, use female bodies not only for the male spectator to feel at, but for him to feel through 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. Earlier was the death of her bio parents in a tragedy involving a car. Jenna’s last happy moment with Victor was recreating a photoshoot at a local junkyard involving a junked out Camaro and Caroline Williams of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2” fame, and when Jenna finds the Camaro later, the same night Victor comes home and her rejection is flaunted for everyone, things take a turn for the supernatural. It involves bloodletting, a rebuilt car, and a scorned lover’s revenge. But it’s also a story of a woman who has suffered some pretty terrible loss in her life, and how a bloodthirsty car not only can help her seek revenge but also closure.

Men, Women, - JSTOR Men, Women, - JSTOR

not to mention that she establishes young, heterosexual men as the primary audience for low-brow horror through anecdotal evidence from movie-theatre employees and video store clerks, which is weirdly weak evidence on which to support such an academic book. but we'll keep it pushing.) On the flipside, all those classic horror movies you do get to read about are to die for. Sorry...I know, but I had to say it. Speaking of cheese, comedic horror gets mostly left out. No Army of Darkness? Evil Dead does get a mention, but I would argue that movie wasn't really trying to be funny. It just was. Like her mom had always told her, you’ve got to look for the silver lining, girl. If you squint, then the world can look a whole lot better than it does with your eyes all the way open. Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000530 Openlibrary_editionFor what it's worth, I enjoyed this book for the most part. It certainly gave me a lot to think about and analyze, and while it did take me quite some time to read, I attribute that more to my own desire to take my time digesting the topics in this book. There was a lot to take in and think about, especially when accounting for the fact that this book is dated and it prompts a lot of questions about the understanding of gender, coming from a decades-older viewpoint. Clover makes a convincing case for studying the pulp-pop excesses of ‘exploitation' horror as a reflection of our psychic times."—Misha Berson, San Francisco Chronicle She describes the slasher film a a pre-technological genre because of its attachment to weapons like chainsaws, daggers, and knives, the absence of guns, as well as the consistent failing of technologies like elevators, phones, cars, etc. She also notes how these sorts of weapons satiate audience’s taboo curiosity to see the inside of the human body. 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. Whilst Clover’s treatment of possession films is thoughtful and of rape-revenge films daring and refreshing, it’s her rescuing of the slasher film from the jaws of critics that is the heroic act here -or rather how she throws the film into the predicament of its own “final girl” and allows it to fend for itself. The devoted horror buff will probably enjoy Clover’s initial analysis of horror films for its own sake, but reaching past this there is something more significant on offer. The Politics of Scarcity: On the Sex Ratio in Early Scandinavia." Scandinavian Studies, 60 (1988), 147–88. Rpt. in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature. Ed. Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen. Indiana Univ. Press.

Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film

Clover actually bothers (as few have done before) to go into the theaters, to sit with the horror fans, and to watch how they respond to what appears on screen."—Wendy Lesser, Washington Post Published by Princeton University Press 2015 Men, Women, and Chain Saws Gender in the Modern Horror Film - Updated Edition Mark Holcomb (December 1, 2003). "Girl Afraid". Village Voice. Archived from the original on November 4, 2006 . Retrieved November 17, 2006. In other words, gender is a result not of the body but of behavior. As explained in the next chapter, final girls survive because of their maleness. By the end of the film they are able to man themselves by taking on a phallic object and penetrating the killer with it, thereby unmanning him. It is through pain and trials that the final girl can become manned, she must pass from victim to hero. This book struggles in part (I think) because the author has trouble truly embracing horror. She seems to feel the need to authenticate the horror films she discusses by aligning them with mainstream Hollywood movies. This wouldn't be as distracting if she did not go into such detail about these non-horror films. Unfortunately, she winds up making them the focus at many points, losing her readers. 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. She also has a bad habit of relying on the same few films throughout all four essays. Her heavy, heavy, heavy reliance on Freud is quite tiring & irritating by the end. The worst part, though, is when she tries to force a terrible connection between "Indians" [sic] and rapists/evil-doers. That moment was just atrocious.This story reminded me a lot of Christine and seemed like it would go that way...but it doesn't. It's like a tight version of a bizarro Christine. Different, but adjacent...and that's what makes it cool. You're just so unsettled by about 80% through and that makes it so satisfying...similar to SGJ's "Night of the Mannequins" or his short story "Father, Son, and Holy Rabbit." That feeling of, "Well, it's not going where I thought but I'm hanging on for the ride." Carol Clover's compelling [book] challenges simplistic assumptions about the relationship between gender and culture. . . . 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." —-Andrea Walsh, The Boston Globe There are a lot of valid criticisms to be made of Ms. 45. It’s an imperfect and abrasive movie about one of the most sensitive subjects. But the conclusion reached above is absolutely bonkers and is completely at odds with the climax (and honestly, most) of the movie. I won’t spoil it for you, but getting a gun definitely does not protect the character or make her ending a happy one. There’s a lot about the movie that’s open to interpretation, but who should be blamed for a rape is not a question that it poses. One criticism, perhaps unfair, is that the content is a bit dated, since this was published in 1992. For that reason, many excellent recent horror films are not covered. Time for an updated edition maybe?? urn:lcp:menwomenchainsaw0000clov:epub:f632b596-4b8a-4a76-8f20-76d2c54b2873 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier menwomenchainsaw0000clov Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2r33pj0vph Invoice 1652 Isbn 0851703313