Men, Women, and Chain Saws by Carol J. Clover

45 Castration Witchboard Male gaze Pornography Frankenhooker Blood Diner Incubus Great Male Renunciation Redneck Body Double Mad scientist Tootsie Libido Incest His Woman Videodrome Sam Peckinpah Leonard Maltin Hunter's Blood Butcher knife Robert Siodmak David Lynch From Reverence to Rape Psychoanalysis David Cronenberg Brian De Palma Pumpkinhead (film series) Scanners Susan Brownmiller Carrie White Jacques Lacan Cannibalism Castration anxiety Penis Gaze Some Men Act of Violence Splatter film Strait-Jacket Those Who Trespass The Eye Creatures Diegesis Vampyr Ghoulies Rape culture The Two Mrs.

Keywords: Horror film Slasher film I Spit on Your Grave The Final Girl(s) Masculinity The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Leatherface Rape Exorcism Ms.

Edition: Updated edition with a New preface by the author.

Linda Ruth Williams, Sight and SoundĬlover 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. 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. 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.

brilliant analysis of gender and its disturbances in modern horror films. There is no condescension in this significant and probing discussion of psychology and sexuality and their role in lurid fantasy. Rod Lott, Flick Attack,įascinating, Clover has shown how the allegedly naïve makers of crude films have done something more schooled directors have difficulty doing - creating females with whom male veiwers are quite prepared to identify with on the most profound levelsĬlover, takes the most extreme genre, horror flicks, seriously. It's easy to see why this book is considered such a landmark in film analysis. 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. Misha Berson, San Francisco ChronicleĬarol Clover's compelling challenges simplistic assumptions about the relationship between gender and culture. Ramona Naddaff, ArtforumĬlover makes a convincing case for studying the pulp-pop excesses of ‘exploitation' horror as a reflection of our psychic times.

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.

Men, Women, and Chain Saws by Carol J. Clover