Slumming academics | Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film

Good in spite of itself | Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film | Carol J. Clover

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	• Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film Carol J. Clover Princeton University Press, 1993 - 276 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
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One of the best books I read last year.

This book is so fun! Solid litcrit meets a genre that does not get much mainstream exposure. Clover makes her case well, and also makes it entertaining. Although it was published several years ago, this book is still relevant to the genre, and I recommend it highly!

Slumming academics

It's amazing that horror films, of all the genres, have undergone such 'serious' analysis in the academic film studies arena. It tells you a lot--considered to be a kind of low art form, it attracts serious scholars who, rather than applying common sense or rational thinking, literally invent whole vocabularies to disguise their utter lack of knowledge and general cluelessness with regards to these staples of 'pop' culture for the 'little people'.

It's classic academic constructs. It's obvious that Clover, and she's not alone, is either incapable or unwilling to just say what she means. Instead, and in order for a university press to pick these things up, the ideas have to be draped in dense, unreadable, and often laughable language.

Are there interesting ideas here? Yes, certainly. Are they easy to understand? They can be, but not here. You may feel like a moron after reading about your favorite slasher, but don't worry--you haven't been exposed to the careerism and isolation of the cinematic ivory tower yet.

The book can be half as long if they tried to make it accessible to the people who actually WATCH horror films, but it is instead geared toward people who want to study the people who watch horror films, from a detached perspective, armed with a dictionary and a black turtleneck.

I would actually recommend this book for horror fans, but with reservations. It does try to get at what is happening in this genre, and why we watch these movies. But don't feel bad if you laugh at some of it--that's part of the real world.

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Good in spite of itself

The author is obviously an academic, and seeks to dignify her pop-culture subject with ludicrous rhetorical tropes borrowed from the grad school version of pop psychoanalysis. She says "gender" when she means sex. She is capable of writing phrases like "the killer's phallic purpose. . ." and sentences like "What -is- clear is that where there is -Wiederholungszwang- there is historical suffering --- suffering that has been more or less sexualized as 'erotogenic masochism.'" Clarity, it seems, ain't what it used to be. Charlatans like Gilles Deleuze and hatemongers like Susan Brownmiller appear in the bibliography, and the book is obviously addressed to an audience that has not yet learned to laugh at them.

Still, the central thesis of the book is in fact a cogent analysis of the ritual of the 1980s variety "slasher" film, and if you overlook the bogus jargon she gets it mostly right. The book convincingly goes through the rituals involved in this highly stereotypical variety of film. Even the vaguely radical academic version of sexual politics has some purpose in this: these slasher films, like all accepted exercises in gore and the temporary suspension of tabooed subjects, attempt to justify their existence by claiming in some obscure way to reinforce social norms. It would be a much better book if it were written in workaday English, but it is nevertheless an interesting read, and insightful almost despite itself.

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No opinion either way.

The book is undeniably well written. Alot of the author's points are valid, and her(?)ideas about the role of gender in horror films are interesting. What really burns me is that I'm not too sure that she actually watched some of the films she mentions. Or if she did, she didn't really pay too much attention.

I think that if one were to write a book about character study, they should probably pay closer attention to the characters they study. Make sense to me.

Overall, reading this book was helpful in the way it describes a relativly small audience....not horror fans, but people who want to pick apart horror movies in order to make sense of horror fans. For the academics, who don't know how to shut their brains off in order to just kick back and enjoy a good old fashoined "Killin' Movie", this book could really come in handy. For those of us who need no help in enjoying the genre, this book might help you speak the language of people who don't. This new ability could be useful when you get dragged into either an argument or a sophist's conversation on the subject. (Sophist being different than sophisticate...sophists only pretend to know what they're talking about when they are around people whom they believe to not know any better.)

All things being equal though...its an allright book.

P.S.

I secretly wonder sometimes, when people talk about how its always women being beaten, tortured and killed in horror films.

99% of these slasher films are about slashers. Duh...ok with that out of the way, let's ask ourselves who these slashers are.
Maniacs, (Almost always male) with some sort of abhorrent social disfunction. Sounds alot like our real life serial killers.

As bad as Jason Voorhese is, he doesn't even compare to the Green River Killer, or Edmund Kemper. As witty and Terrifying Freddy Kruger might be, his evil genius pales in comparison to guys like Carl Panzram or H.H. Holmes. As ruthlessly deranged Michael Meyers seems to be, he can't hold a candle to guys like Richard Speck or Richard Ramierez. Now, what do all these fellas, (real or screen character) have in common? THEY ALL KILLED WOMEN. Point of fact, our onscreen killers are much more equal opportunity than our real life madmen. So, is it any wonder that women are victims in these movies? Also, the women in most of these films tend to get off with just a nasty death. In most instances, the real life killers would do some fairly terrible things to their victims before they killed them.

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Do the pleasures of horror movies really begin and end in sadism? So the public discussion of film assumes, and so film theory claims. Carol Clover argues, however, that these films work mainly to engage the viewer in the plight of the victim-hero, who suffers fright but rises to vanquish the forces of oppression.

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