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)

Product Information

Jenna closed her eyes, kept them closed, her mom’s voice from California consoling but also far, far too loud for right now. Do the pleasures of horror movies really begin and end in sadism? So the public discussion of film assumes, and so film theory claims. Carol Clover argues, however, that these films work mainly to engage the viewer in the plight of the victim-hero, who suffers fright but rises to vanquish the forces of oppression. Do the pleasures of horror movies really begin and end in s Do the pleasures of horror movies really begin and end in sadism? So the public discussion of film assumes, and so film theory claims. Carol Clover argues, however, that these films work mainly to engage the viewer in the plight of the victim-hero, who suffers fright but rises to vanquish the forces of oppression. Do the pleasures of horror movies really begin and end in sadism? So the public discussion of film assumes, and so film theory claims. Carol Clover argues, however, that these films work mainly to engage the viewer in the plight of the victim-hero, who suffers fright but rises to vanquish the forces of oppression. [120]…more Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film – Updated Edition by Carol J. Clover – eBook Details 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 Standing there and shaking their heads, grinning grins that you don’t really ever want grinned at you.

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 It was long since empty, had layers and layers of spray-painted G + R–kind of stuff—Glenda plus Robert, from four years ago, when Robert got Glenda pregnant the first time—but what Jenna was interested in was down in the grass. Under the grass. There was still a big char-spot where all the bonfires usually were, and there were bottles and cans all around, and over by the roofless projection booth somebody’d dumped an old fireworks stand, it looked like. 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.) He peeled a ten out of his wallet, told her to get a burger at the drugstore, the double-meat. That it looked like she needed it, cool?

Table of Contents

But he was sitting there turning the dial this way then that way, and her real parents were... they were right where they’d always been, weren’t they? To be one hundred percent certain this would work, though, Jenna went to the pawn shop up in Longview—she didn’t want to get mired down in Houston traffic—and walked out with one of those TV/VCR jobs that plug into a cigarette lighter. Instead of hauling the chainsaw out and chasing him with it—if he could keep thousands of pounds of equipment from pulling him to the bottom of the ocean, he could probably bat these spinning teeth away—she angled it forward, chewed a ragged hole in the rear seat, connecting the trunk’s air with the air Victor was breathing.

You don’t have to apologize,” Jenna said, trying to wipe her face clean now. “He’s... he’s him, yeah? I fell for it too.”

In this Book

It’s all right, it’s all right,” Jenna’s mom would say in her easy voice, and then tilt her head over to the driver’s seat, where Jenna’s dad would be leaning across to look up and out. And yeah, the Freudian stuff is completely exhausting. Of course there’s a lot to be said about the sexual subtext of many horror films. But wow, I never knew there were so many ways to subconsciously symbolize genitalia. Penises and vaginas and metaphorical sex as far as the eye can see! And this focus on phalluses really brings the bio-essentialist perspective to the forefront, which makes it all even worse. Kip wasn’t thrilled about giving Jenna the rest of the day off, especially after her showing up late two times already this week, but he said he couldn’t have her falling down and conking her head in the workplace, either. She jerked her hand up to protect her eyes and caught a piece of glass in the heel of her hand. She held it up into the moonlight to see what she’d done now, and—yep: bleeding.

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 PostClover attended the University of California at Berkeley for both her undergraduate and graduate studies. In 1965, Clover was a Fulbright Fellow at Uppsala University in Sweden. From 1971 to 1977 Clover was an assistant professor at Harvard University before returning to Berkeley, where she became Class of 1936 Professor Emerita in the departments of rhetoric, film and Scandinavian. [6] Honors [ edit ] She flipped her hand over, gazed instead at the engagement ring, so perfect on her finger. Three months later, after Victor’s last letter, she drove down to Houston and sold it at a pawn shop for seventy-five dollars. The story is constructed with a lot of homages and references to classic horror, most notably the film Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and the actress Caroline Williams, with a photo of her atop an old rusted Camaro figuring prominently into the story. Something I truly enjoyed was the way you can feel Jones’ excitement about all the references built into the story, which in turn makes you excited about them (even though I really know nothing about cars and have never seen the film, but it’s like how you get excited about things your friend likes because you are just happy to see them happy). Jones builds the story through Jenna’s narration, often having you witness events without much context for the motivations. Yet. That context comes, and the slow reveals create a really palpable tension. She leaned into it, screaming with the effort, not wanting to lose any ground, and then, unaccountably, the car surged forward, almost out from under her hands.

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 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 GlobeShe wasn’t just going to wail on that Camaro’s hood, she was going to jail for it, she didn’t care anymore. Halfway around the car, though, the open trunk hiding her from the rearview mirror, she stopped, had to look twice to be sure she was seeing what she was seeing, what she guessed she could have seen if she’d had that whole camera roll with her parents in it, instead of just one random snapshot: the reason they were each covered in chaff and dust.