Carol J. Clover

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.

Gender in the Modern Horror Film

Men, Women, and Chain Saws

Ruth Parker 

Not going to lie, this book took me a long time to get through. I started reading it years ago after my obsession with slashers and my university course led me to watch Peeping Tom. My interest was renewed when I watched the Deadmeat Podcast talking about the Final Girl, an idea I’d always found interesting - who doesn’t love a final girl! So I purchased a new copy of this with an updated preface and gave it a go. Managing at a snails pace of around one chapter every 2 months. But we’ll worth it. Interesting and although tough to follow at times, really in-depth and enjoyable.

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.

Gender in the Modern Horror Film - Updated Edition

Djordje Vlaisavljevic

Lindsay Cronk

Katie Bell

A study of contemporary horror films in which feminist film theorist Carol J. Glover investigates the enduring popularity of the genre, and the questions which films such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween raise about gender in the cinema.

Men, Women, and Chain Saws Gender in the Modern Horror Film

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