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

by Carol J. Clover

A particular example may have original features, but its quality as a horror film lies in the way it delivers the cliche.

"They and their sisters remain significant exceptions to the continuing pattern of male domination of the genre's central situations. Women have always featured as horror-movie victims, and it is therefore to be expected that they should seem more prominent in a period of victim centrality.

I do not, however, believe that sadistic voyeurism is the first cause of horror. Nor do I believe that real-life women and feminist politics have been entirely well served by the astonishingly insistent claim that horror's satisfactions begin and end in sadism.

If I err, in the chapters that follow, on the side of complication, it is because I believe that the standard critique of horror as straightforward sadistic misogyny itself needs not only a critical but a political interrogation.

Like others before me, I discovered that there are in horror moments and works of great humor, formal brilliance, political intelligence, psychological depth, and above all a kind of kinky creativity that is simply not available in any other stripe of filmmaking; one of the benefits of this project has been the discovery of the unexpected gem.

A t t h e bo t to m of the horror heap lies the slasher

masculinity and femininity are more states of mind than body.

wedding night he attempts (needless to say) not sex but murder. Actual rape is practically nonexistent in the slasher film, evidently on the premise—as the crotch episode suggests—that violence and sex are not concomitants but alternatives, the one as much a substitute for and a prelude to the other as the teenage horror film is a substitute for and a prelude to the "adult" film (or the meat movie a substitute for and prelude to the skin flick).14

In the slasher film, sexual transgressors of both sexes are scheduled for early destruction.

But even in films in which males and females are killed in roughly even numbers, the lingering images are of the latter. The death of a male is nearly always swift; even if the victim grasps what is happening to him, he has no time to react or register terror. He is dispatched and the camera moves on. The death of a male is moreover more likely than the death of a female to be viewed from a distance, or viewed only dimly (because of darkness or fog, for example), or indeed to happen offscreen and not be viewed at all. The murders of women, on the other hand, are filmed at closer range, in more graphic detail, and at greater length.

What filmmakers seem to know better than film critics is that gender is less a wall than a permeable membrane.33

When De Palma says that female frailty is a predicate of the suspense genre, he proposes, in effect, that the lack of the phallus, for Lacan the privileged signifier of the symbolic order, is itself simply horrifying, at least in the mind of the male observer. Where pornography (the argument goes) resolves that lack through a process of fetishization that allows a breast or leg or whole body to stand in for the missing member, the slasher film resolves it either through eliminating the woman (earlier victims) or reconstituting her as masculine (Final Girl). The moment at which the Final Girl is effectively phallicized is the moment that the plot halts and horror ceases. Day breaks, and the community returns to its normal order.

The Final Girl is, on reflection, a congenial double for the adolescent male. She is feminine enough to act out in a gratifying way, a way unapproved for adult males, the terrors and masochistic pleasures of the underlying fantasy, but not so feminine as to disturb the structures of male competence and sexuality.

To applaud the Final Girl as a feminist development, as some reviews of Aliens have done with Ripley, is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking.47 She is simply an agreed-upon fiction and the male viewer's use of her as a vehicle for his own sadomasochistic fantasies an act of perhaps timeless dishonesty.

Or should we conclude that males and females read these films differently in some fundamental sense? Do females respond to the text (the literal) and males the subtext (the figurative)?49

Or are the processes of patriarchy so one-way that the female can identify with the male directly, but the male can identify with the female only by transsexualizing her? Does the Final Girl mean "girl" to her female viewers and "boy" to her male viewers?

Abject terror may still be gendered feminine, but the willingness of one immensely popular current genre to rerepresent the hero as an anatomical female would seem to suggest that at least one of the traditional marks of heroism, triumphant selfrescue, is no longer strictly gendered masculine.

One is deeply reluctant to make progressive claims for a body of cinema as spectacularly nasty toward women as the slasher film is, but the fact is that the slasher does, in its own perverse way and for better or worse, constitute a visible adjustment in the terms of gender representations. That it is an adjustment largely on the male side, appearing at the furthest possible remove from the quarters of theory and showing signs of trickling upward, is of no small interest in the study of popular culture.67

"the thing that was Regan"

Indeed, satanic possession is gendered feminine even when the portal is a car.

In Poltergeist, as in a great many horror films, capitalist greed is the first cause of horror.

reminding us again that Roman Catholic priests and women are functionally one and the same in horror.)

Cronenberg is generally inclined to put men at very much the same risk as women.

What the action film mystifies, the horror film confesses. If action cinema mourns the passing of the "real man," horror in general urges it along, and occult films go so far as to imagine a new, revised edition.46

Crudely put, for a space to be created in which men can weep without being labeled feminine, women must be relocated to a space where they will be made to wail uncontrollably; for men to be able to relinquish emotional rigidity, control, women must be relocated to a space in which they will undergo a flamboyant psychotic break; and so on.

The cultural observer hoping for signs of change in the representation of females and femininity will find little satisfaction in the female story, the spectacular story, of occult horror. If anything, the cliches are more remorseless than ever and the efforts to form and reform the feminine in relation to the definition and redefinition of the masculine depressingly familiar.

The vision is hardly an egalitarian one. The garish monstrification of the female in these dramas makes it abundantly clear that the project is one of rezoning, not equality.

we have as much to learn, in the study of popular culture, from what frightful women are meant to conceal as from what they are meant to represent.

pinning down politics can be a tricky business even in the most seemingly transparent of cases,

I Spit on Your Grave shocks not because it is alien but because it is too familiar, because we recognize that the emotions it engages are regularly engaged by the big screen but almost never bluntly acknowledged for what they are.

In a sense, each of the men is right to feel that he is not individually responsible, for the film keeps insisting that the dynamic of male groups is larger than the sum of its parts. But that does not mean, in this primitive universe of the lex talionis, that the individuals are therefore not responsible for the actions of the group. On the contrary, as under the laws of blood feud, they are corporately liable; any of them—in this case all—are proper targets for retribution, regardless of their own degree of participation.

That Matthew never quite made it off the bench is beside the point; what matters is that he would have played if he could.

In horror, the man who does not take care of his teeth is obviously a man who can, and by the end of the movie will, plunder, rape, murder, beat his wife and children, kill within his kin, commit incest, and/or eat human flesh (not to speak of dog- and horsemeat, lizards, and insects), and so on and on.

"The expropriation of Indian land and the exploitation of black labor lie at the root not only of America's economic development, but of its political conflicts and cultural identity as well.

and the folks who write about them are, if not hearing different drummers, then reading different passages of Freud.

Peeping Tom, in short, should also be taken at face value as a commentary not only on the symbiotic interplay of sadistic and masochistic impulses in the individual viewer but equally as a commentary, within the context of horror filmmaking, on the symbiotic interplay of the sadistic work of the filmmaker and the masochistic stake of the spectator, an arrangement on which horror cinema insists.30

Identifying male sadism, especially toward women, and holding men at least theoretically culpable for such acts as rape, wife beating, and child abuse are major achievements of modem feminism.

Whatever else the Siskel-Ebert position may be, it is also the critical equivalent of Revok's eye: its insistence that I Spit on Your Grave makes rapists of us all works, in fact, to deflect attention from the possibility that it just as well makes Jennifers of us all, and that the powerful feelings the film evokes may have less to do with a sense of mastery than with the sense that one has just been shafted.

horror operates in an allegorical or expressionist or folkloric/mythic mode, whereby characters are understood to concretize essences;

I suspect we will soon be back to the dominant fiction in its dominant forms, out of which we must dig meanings rather than have them displayed so obviously and so spectacularly before us.