Biblio Watchdog
MEN, WOMEN, AND CHAIN SAWS Gender in the Modern Horror Film
By Carol J. Clover Princeton University Press
(41 William Street, Princeton, NJ 08540) 253 pages, $12.95 (softcover)
Review by Anthony Ambrogio
AND HALLOWEEN begot a slay- ing [ie., a slew] of holiday-inspired
# ■ imitators, all of which retoldeth the story of some tragedy in the past causing trauma in the present—often with Jamie Lee Curtis, always with dead teenagers—as they attempted to re­ capture the elusive quality that did netteth their sire such big bucks at the box office. And the imitators begot imitators, which be­
got FRIDAY THE 13TH and yea, as the blood flowed, so did the coffers f ill to overflowing. And the producers looked at the receipts and saw that they were good. And thus did the pretender usurp the father, and the slasher film was truly born. But, lo, there arose across the land a great
outcry, for the mainstream critics did gnash their teeth and rend their garments and exclaim “Verily, we have come to naught when the camera doth become the eye of the killer and the viewer is made to identify with such abominations. Look not upon them!" And the howl of the censor was heard in the land, and the “video nasties ” were taken off the shelves, but the people did still look upon them, but they (at least some of them) were ashamed.
Every fantastic film aficionado can recite, prac­
tically by rote, the preceding “received wisdom” from the Horror Film Bible. Those of us who came of age before the advent of the slasher(slash)gore film were sometimes hard pressed to defend the genre as a whole against charges of misogyny— even as we recognized that the message of these
films was not “Have sex and die,” as many Puritans would have it, but was instead that sexual repres­ sion is evil and leads the repressed to express themselves violently against their sexually active peers. Most critics were too blindly biased to notice that the women were not only the victims, but also the victors, in these films. The geometry of the classic horror film is an
isosceles triangle: Man/Woman/Monster—with Woman at the apex, and Man and Monster at the base, both striving for her. Sometimes Man and Monster are one and the same (THE WOLFMAN, any version of DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE), but Man must always overcome his darker nature in order to achieve union with Woman. In the slasher
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