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

To me, this is where the insight in the book really comes into play – we can apply her discussion of possession films to a franchise like The Conjuring, where women are overwhelmingly at the centre of the supernatural. Even since I started getting into horror as a teenager, trends have emerged that reflect the trends from the 70s and 80s. Many of these genres have seen at least one resurgence in the 21st Century, including remakes of films Clover discusses. Here we see the solid emergence of a number of subgenres, and it’s interesting that she notes how many of these will likely die out, when we know more fully now the cyclical nature of many genres, including horror. Still, there’s a lot to consider in Men, Women, and Chainsaws, with respect to the way gender is treated as more flexible in horror than other genres, yet still with constraints, and often punishments, in a sense, for those who stray outside ‘norms’.Ĭlover takes a detailed look at a select number of films, across the horror genre at the time she was writing. She makes some excellent points throughout, but there’s heavy reliance on (by now) outdated ideas, especially in regards to the idea of the audience. This doesn’t feel like someone who is a fan of the genre, as such, but someone who still kind of wants to champion it as a genre and validity of studying it. The main thing that stands out is the way Clover approaches horror.

There’s also brief discussions around various portrayals in horror linked to LGBT+ themes, and the appeal of horror outside a cis, het, white, male audience, though Clover doesn’t hugely go into these topics. Clover examines rape revenge and possession movies, as well as theories around the voyeur, with ideas centred around who is watching who. It's the Final Girl chapter that really captured the public’s imagination, the term gaining widespread use and becoming so iconic it’s become an absolute fixture of horror, now so dissected, parodied, mimicked, and commented on you’d be hard pressed to find any horror fan who hasn’t heard the term.īut this book, in all fairness, encompasses so much more than that.

A lot of the ‘issues’ I had with this book can be explained away by the time it was written, but in an updated 2015 version it would have been perhaps useful to add something a bit more relevant. But the main takeaway from it is the reliance on Freudian psychology, the definition of Final Girl, and an overreliance on particular films. It was definitely interesting and make some good points, and I still think it’s worth a read. Still, it’s a key horror text, cited by many and which introduced the term “Final Girl” into the horror lexicon.

This took me a fair while to read, not through any fault of the book, but it’s been so long since I read anything academic I admit I struggled a bit.

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