Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film - Updated Edition (Princeton Classics Book 15)

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. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Although such movies have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to their mostly male audiences, Clover demonstrates that they align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the females tormented—notably the slasher movie's "final girls"—as they endure fear and degradation before rising to save themselves. 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 definitive work that has found an avid readership from students of film theory to major Hollywood filmmakers. 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 The author concentrates on three genres in which women and gender issues loom especially large: slasher films, satanic possession films, and rape-revenge films, especially those in which the victim is from the city and the rapists from the country. Her investigation covers over two hundred films, ranging from admired mainstream examples, such as The Accused, to such exploitation products as the widely banned I Spit on Your Grave. Clover emphasizes the importance of the "low" tradition in filmmaking, arguing that it has provided some of the most significant artistic and political innovations of the past two decades 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 Female-hero films like Silence of the Lambs and Thelma and Louise may be breakthroughs from the point of view of mainstream Hollywood cinema, but their themes have a long ancestry in lowlife horror