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

Wait, is "I spit on your grave" critically maligned? I feel like it's always being cited as groundbreaking classic.

This probably says more about the film critics I read than about your analysis though :-) Thanks for the post.

I highly recommend Carol Clover's book Men Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film [(amazon link)
](https://www.amazon.com/Men-Women-Chain-Saws-
Gender/dp/0691006202)

It's out of print so the only options are used, but any unversity library that has a film department should have a copy or be able to get one for you.

Horror is actually a great subject to dip into a little feminist theory. You've got Men, Women, & Chainsaws, The Dread of Difference, and The Monstrous Feminine as film studies texts. If you're already interested in horror, they're all worth a read and it's better to get a little academic/theoretical rather than letting reddit/the internet/etc. inform your understanding of feminism.

Some of the best horror fiction was written by women - Frankenstein, The Haunting of Hill House, Interview with the Vampire, Rebecca, etc.

You could argue whether a lot of movies are "feminist" because they have female protagonists, discuss gender, critique patriarchy, etc. but it's all open to debate. Like you can read Rosemary's Baby or Carrie or others as feminist films or not. As Gorgobutt said, a female protagonist does not necessarily make a movie "feminist" and conversely you can make the case that movies with female antagonists are feminist for showing women are people with an equal potential for evil as men (Antichrist, Eyes Of My Mother, etc.).

I'd throw Jennifer's Body, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, Season of the Witch, May, Ginger Snaps, The Company of Wolves, and The Descent on the pile.

I'm a big horror movie fan, particularly of 80s slashers. The appeal and appreciation for me comes from a number of factors. Some of these are purely personal and subjective and some are more about film appreciation in general:

1. I'm a child of the 80s, so 80s-nostalgia just has a personal appeal to me. I enjoy seeing the clothes, the hair, the slang, the food, the values, all that. From a superficial ironic enjoyment to a wistful 'I miss those days' enjoyment, these films just make me happy.
   
   
2. I love horror movies, particularly of the 70s and 80s (French and Asian horror from the 2000s is also really great). I love being scared, I love the soundtracks (horror soundtracks are often the most daring and interesting of any genre), I love trying to figure out the mystery and experiencing the twists when they occur. When you watch enough horror films, you start to appreciate the small differences, which brings me to more hard reasons for loving horror.
   
   
3. Studying the genre: Horror as a genre - and slasher movies as a sub-genre - have a lot of tendencies and traditions that are very interesting to identify and analyze. Just as people study the conventions of film noir, westerns, French New Wave, etc., 80s slasher movies come with a well-defined and easily identifiable set of criterion: There tends to be group of young peoples (usually of mixed sex) and one (usually) male killer who systematically kills them off one by one, typically with a knife or other sharp object. The order in which he kills them, how they die, what they are doing when they die, what sex they are, these are all ripe for analyzation. Also, how each movie tweaks the formula to make it unique is quite interesting. Halloween, Friday the 13th, Slumber Party Massacre, these all have different ways of going through this formula that vary in slight ways. Then there are examples like Nightmare on Elm St. or Sleepaway Camp that take the formula in pretty crazy directions.
   
   
4. Cult/Bad movie appreciation: To be honest, part of the reason I love the more cornier 80s slashers is similar to why I enjoy movies like Troll 2 or The Room. Partly, it's fun watching low budget, lower quality movies, seeing the errors and bad filmmaking decisions in action is entertaining. But there's also the surprise of finding something really cool or unique in a film you thought was just a turd.
   
   As for recommendations, if you haven't you should try watching Nightmare on Elm St. (the first one). It's way less campy than the later ones, Freddy is more of a menace than the wise-cracking cartoon character he becomes in later films. The music in particular is really great. I'd also suggest Black Christmas for a proto-slasher; Sleepaway Camp for some interesting exploration of gender; and Pieces for the so-bad-it's-good enjoyment. If you'd like to check out a great 80s horror film - less of a slasher, more supernatural horror - check out the original Hellraiser. It's really good.
   
   For more reading, I'd highly recommend Carol J. Clover's Men, Women, and Chainsaws which analyzes gender in slasher movies. Great read.
   
   EDIT: How could I forget the practical special FX!?! I love this special on the amazing effects in Child's Play, another unique take on the 80s slasher.
   
   And of course The Thing....

Yes. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691006202

So consider the difference between just a regular old genre movie and a "serious" genre movie -- what I take your professor means when he/she says "timelessness."

One of the characteristics of "regular" horror films like Friday the 13th or Halloween or Saw is that they're "just genre" -- they all adhere to the same basic conventions, which is why Hollywood can crank out a new Saw movie every few years and no one bats an eye. Because the whole point -- what the audience expects to buy when they purchase their tickets -- is to reproduce the same conventions over and over again again, no one thinks these are serious statements about society. They're products. It doesn't matter who directs or stars in these movies because they are essentially the same, nothing more than the sum of the genre conventions.

In a "serious" horror film like Alien or Psycho or The Shining, it really does matter who writes, directs, and stars in them because they're trying to do something different with the formula. What makes The Shinning a "serious" horror film is not the content per se--it's a genre piece insofar as it's basically a story about a haunted house--but rather the way Kubrick manipulates the conventions of film.

So it seems like your professor wants you to make a case for, first, how The Yellow Wallpaper qualifies as a "regular" piece of genre, but then (and most importantly) make a case for why The Yellow Wallpaper breaks from its typical conventions to become something more than pure genre. What does it do that a regular piece of Gothic fiction does not? What about the way this story plays with the conventions of the Gothic has made it last while 100,000 other Gothic stories have faded away?

The premise that Horror movies are about misogyny, and that men watch them for the victimization of women, has been soundly trounced as false. And is in fact the complete opposite of why men watch them.

So, yeah. You hit the nail on the head. If you're interested in reading up on it, you might start with: Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.

Men Women and Chainsaws
This book was given to me by a friend and colleague who just happens to be a fairly successful horror movie director.

@Amazon

Nightmares in Red, White and Blue is really solid. Men, Women, and Chainsaws, as well.

There's a super good book on this subject that goes into the slasher and gender roles behind it. It's called "Men, Women and Chainsaws"by Carol J Clover. She was the first person that coined the term "final girl". Her book goes into why we find these so popular, even though it's a sadistic joy.

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The slasher's ancestry starts with Psycho (1960) and winds its way to Black Christmas and Halloween before fulling ramping up into what we know now. It's popularity deals with these ideas of Freud's "uncanny" and things that frighten us but also give us some underlying gratification. Meyers, Voorhees, Krueger, even Leatherface, all speak to some primal nature that we have deep down, while also gratifying us when they are beaten or escaped.

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I've linked the essay hat she wrote before completing her book that sort of begins the discussion on this.

http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/paranoid70scinema/HerBodyHimself.pdf

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EDIT:

I also included the amazon link for the book. I cannot recommend this enough, as an English graduate, seeing academic discussion on horror is my dream come true.

https://www.amazon.com/Men-Women-Chain-Saws-Gender/dp/0691006202

Men, Women & Chainsaws, The Dread of Difference, Projected Fears are all really interesting reads!