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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Maybe the dropping of the weapon is also another means to bring everything back to normal by the end of the film. Clover also argued against the notion that the predominantly male audiences of the time identified with the (usually) male killer, stating that audience members identified across gender lines and with the surviving female character.

I’m enjoying enjoying the book so far and do recommend it to anyone interested in a feminist analysis of horror film.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. 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. John Carpenter responded to this claim by stating that Laurie was able to fight against Micheal because she has a lot of repressed sexual energy, not because she’s a virgin. She wasn’t just going to wail on that Camaro’s hood, she was going to jail for it, she didn’t care anymore. Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases.

Jenna hesitantly touched the pad of her finger to the bare steel of that rear wheel, painting it, and an instant later, she whole-body flinched—that rear wheel had drained all the blood from her hand, it felt like, so that she had to rip her finger away. And a lot of times, even the Good Takes become Bad Takes by sliding down a subconscious slippery slope. The fact that horror deals with sensitive and disturbing subjects, while also often being pretty fun, is one of the most unique and compelling aspects of the genre. Angry displays of force may belong to the male, but crying, cowering, screaming, fainting, trembling, begging for mercy belong to the female. My issues with her approach to Carrie started in chapter two, but she grossly misunderstood and skewed the knowledge of Firestarter to the point I felt like she was really reaching for an excuse to include it and force it like a square peg into a round hole for the "Eye of Horror" chapter.Even though this was written in the 80s and published in 1992, leaving a huge gap between then and the current display of horror films, it is still an important work that for the most part refutes the viewer identification with sadism thesis. This book offered so many interesting insights into gender in horror films, the final girl phenomena and the tale-revenge sub genre of horror. 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). but i would only recommend this book to people that have serious interest in psychoanalytic film theory and horror, because otherwise it's pretty dense and a little dated. Men, Women, and Chainsaws makes for an excellent Halloween read featuring revenge, female rage, and tons of references, so I would definitely recommend it to fans of the horror genre.