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Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
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Author: Carol J. Clover Publisher: Princeton University Press Series: Princeton Classics Format: Softcover # of Pages: 280 Pub. Date: 2015 Edition: Updated ISBN-10: 0691166293 ISBN-13: 9780691166292
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About
the Book:
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. This book, subtitled Gender in the Modern Horror
Film, about the psychology and gender dynamics of horror
entertainment, was "the big game changer" that in part gave
us permission "to understand that maybe gender works in a far
more fluid way" when it comes to watching horror.
Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, American
academic Carol Clover looks in particular at the so-called "slasher", occult, and rape-revenge films, from a feminist perspective. Although such movies have
been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to
their mostly male audiences, film scholar Carol Clover
demonstrates that they align spectators not with the male tormentor,
but with the females tormented. She developed the concept of the "final girl" in horror movies: the
resilient female heroine who will endure fear and degradation before
rising to save herself and defeat the "monster" after all
others have failed. She will walk away bloodied but unbowed,
inevitably to fight again in the sequel. The lesson was not lost on
the mainstream industry, which was soon turning out the formula in
well-made thrillers.
Including a new preface by the author, this Princeton Classics
edition is a seminal work of pop culture analysis that has found an
avid readership from students of film theory to major Hollywood
filmmakers.
What people say:
"[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." — Sight
and Sound
"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."
— The
Boston Globe
"Clover
makes a convincing case for studying the pulp-pop excesses of
'exploitation' horror as a reflection of our psychic times."
— San
Francisco Chronicle
"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."
— Washington Post
About the Author:
Carol J. Clover is an
American Professor Emerita in the departments of rhetoric, film, and
Scandinavian literature and culture at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been
widely published in her areas of expertise, and her book, Men, Women,
and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film achieved popularity
beyond academia. She is credited with developing the "final
girl" theory in the horror genre, which has changed both popular
and academic conceptions of gender in horror films.
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