Jenna has seen some shit and been through some shit, and I just wanted her to have some kind of happiness, or at least peace. Whilst Clover’s treatment of possession films is thoughtful and of rape-revenge films daring and refreshing, it’s her rescuing of the slasher film from the jaws of critics that is the heroic act here -or rather how she throws the film into the predicament of its own “final girl” and allows it to fend for itself. Do you like Camaros, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, classic horror cinema, and all out sense of past haunting dread? But, overall, a very insightful and very informative set of essays that definitely have me even looking at contemporary horror a bit differently. But my complaints aside, I still enjoyed this book, I appreciated that it gave me things to think about, and I'd make the argument that it's something anyone interested in horror media should really consider reading and using for points of discussion.

As we know, society tends to view SA survivors with, at best, pity and, at worst (and horribly too commonly) with culpability in their own assault. For example, she spends the better part of the third essay talking about Deliverance in explicit detail, while name-dropping other actual horror films with nary a description. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992) by Caitlin Duffy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4. Her bio-mom was leaning forward to be beside him, and, yeah, okay, yeah, Mom, it was one of those perfect-magical photos. Men, Women, and Chainsaws makes for an excellent Halloween read featuring revenge, female rage, and tons of references, so I would definitely recommend it to fans of the horror genre.This book offered so many interesting insights into gender in horror films, the final girl phenomena and the tale-revenge sub genre of horror. stars rounded down, primarily because I've only seen a handful of the films examined in the text (of note, Carrie and the original I Spit On Your Grave), so it was a bit difficult to really get into it. 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.

While this isn't my favorite of his blood drinkers (that honor—so far—remains with "Wait for Night"), it's certainly the most inventive, which earns it points! I’m thankful that this book gave us the term “Final Girl” and made a serious attempt at analyzing the tropes of the genre.And Clover makes some good points about the story and its themes, before abruptly going off the rails.

They are, in fact, protagonists in the full sense: they combine the functions of suffering victim and avenging hero. It was published in 1992, right before horror films were relegated to direct-to-video sequels of 80's hits and Scream's reinvigoration of the genre later in the decade.It is no accident that male victims in slasher films are killed swiftly or offscreen, and that prolonged struggles, in which the victim has time to contemplate her imminent destruction, inevitably figure females. She did still have one snapshot of them—her mom had insisted she’d want it someday—but other than that, all she had was a mix of their blood, she figured.