Men, Women, and Chain Saws

Carol J. Clover is the Class of 1936 Professor Emerita in the departments of rhetoric, film, and Scandinavian at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Medieval Saga.

"[A] brilliant analysis of gender and its disturbances in modern horror films... Bubbling away beneath Clover's multi-faceted readings of slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films is the question of what the viewer gets out of them... [She] argues that most horror films are obsessed with feminism, playing out plots which climax with an image of (masculinized) female power and offering visual pleasures which are organized not around a mastering gaze, but around a more radical "victim-identified' look."--Linda Ruth Williams, Sight and Sound "Carol Clover's compelling [book] challenges simplistic assumptions about the relationship between gender and culture... She suggests that the "low tradition' in horror movies possesses positive subversive potential, a space to explore gender ambiguity and transgress traditional boundaries of masculinity and femininity."--Andrea Walsh, The Boston Globe "Clover makes a convincing case for studying the pulp-pop excesses of 'exploitation' horror as a reflection of our psychic times."--Misha Berson, San Francisco Chronicle "Clover actually bothers (as few have done before) to go into the theaters, to sit with the horror fans, and to watch how they respond to what appears on screen."--Wendy Lesser, Washington Post "In her reading of both particular horror films and of film and gender theory, Clover does what every cultural critic hopes to: she calls into question our habits of seeing."--Ramona Naddaff, Artforum "Clover, takes the most extreme genre, horror flicks, seriously. There is no condescension in this significant and probing discussion of psychology and sexuality and their role in lurid fantasy."--Desmond Ryan, Philadelphia Inquirer "Fascinating, Clover has shown how the allegedly naive makers of crude films have done something more schooled directors have difficulty doing - creating females with whom male veiwers are quite prepared to identify with on the most profound levels"--The Modern Review "It's easy to see why this book is considered such a landmark in film analysis."--Rod Lott, Flick Attack

• Preface to the Princeton Classics Edition ix Acknowledgements xv Introduction: Carrie and the Boys 3 Chapter 1 Her Body, Himself 21 Chapter 2 Opening Up 65 Chapter 3 Getting Even 114 Chapter 4 The Eye of Horror 166 Afterword 231 Films Cited 237 Works Cited 243 Index 255