Men, Women and Chainsaws

A groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Although such movies have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to their mostly male audiences, Clover demonstrates that they align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the females tormented—notably the slasher movie’s “final girls”—as they endure fear and degradation before rising to save themselves. In this book, Clover first coined the term “final girl.”