Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992, $19.95). Pp. ix + 260. ISBN 978 0 6911 6629 2.
2024 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), a classic of Southern Gothic horror cinema that directly inspired Carol J. Clover’s monograph Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992). One of the most influential and lasting studies in feminist film scholarship, Clover’s book is particularly notable for formalizing and critiquing the “Final Girl” trope. As defined by Clover, the Final Girl is “the one who did not die” and who “perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril.” This roundtable offers four perspectives on the legacy of Clover’s work, both within the academy and in broader popular culture, specifically in terms of representations of race and gender in present-day horror cinema. These short essays both celebrate the innovations and criticize the limitations of Clover’s book in the years since its publication.
My copy of Men, Women, and Chain Saws is shabby. It is covered in scribbles, underlines and turned-down pages (I have always been a tactile reader, ready to debase, pen in hand). Yet in and amongst this ink explosion there is undeniable evidence that I have read this book from cover to cover on at least three separate occasions: one set of notes in pencil, one in blue fountain pen, and one in black gel pen. None of these notes are dated. Now when I buy an academic book, I write the date of purchase inside the front cover, but this copy is so old that I didn’t do that then, whenever “then” was. I rarely read academic books from beginning to end, so in this essay I want to work out why I reached for this book on those three separate occasions, and what this book offered me with each reading. But these text annotations alone do not offer enough clues yet.
My hunch is that my first encounter with Carol J. Clover’s work was in the early 2000s, on my MA programme at the University of Lancaster. I clamber into my attic, where I find my annotated printouts from the “Women in Film” module, taught by Professors Jackie Stacey and Julianne Pidduck. As I read, I remember. In the fifth week of the module, Stacey introduced us to Barbara Creed and her theory of the “monstrous–feminine” and referenced Men, Women, and Chain Saws as further reading. This reference became the basis for my assessed essay for the module, a comparative reading of Clover’s “Terrible Place” in The Shining (1980) and The Others (2003). Clover’s definition of the Terrible Place provided the architecture of my essay, a place to house close readings of character, narrative and textual address.
This postgraduate essay doesn’t just give me my entry point into Clover, though; it provides the necessary information to read my book annotations. The read-through in pencil consistently references The Shining and The Others. Therefore the pencil must be my MA years. The comments themselves also give it away, though. I have underlined “a figure does not cry and cower because she is a woman; she is a woman because she cries and cowers,” and then scribbled “woman in room 237” at the side, demonstrating my fervent desire to read against the grain of any academic argument, to disagree, even when Clover is talking about a different kind of horror film altogether and the comparison doesn’t stand (the pencilled comments are the ones I cringe at the most).
Reviewing these annotations, I now understand what drew me to this book as a twenty-two-year-old graduate student, when I discovered feminist readings of horror film for the first time. I was drawn in by Clover’s ability to schematize, to recognize an audiovisual or narrative pattern across multiple films and multiple decades, to give that pattern a name and a concrete definition, as we see here, in relation to the “Terrible Place.” She then makes concrete her claims evidencing examples from a dizzying number of films. Clover’s schema offers a compelling case for the power of the supercut as an evidentiary method, a “database episteme” that compels us to conviction.Footnote 1
Men, Women, and Chain Saws thus endures because of the extractability of this schema. Clover may have thought through this project using Freud, Jacques Lacan and Thomas Laquer, but it is what she does with her own close analysis of horror films that has had the lasting impact. For example, she suggests that it is the “conventional task” of the slasher film “to register in close detail the victim’s dawning understanding, as they survey the visible evidence of the human crimes and perversions that have transpired there. That perception leads directly to the perception of their own immediate peril” (30–31). The ideas that she presents are clear and simple (and let us not forget that writing clearly and simply is much more difficult than writing in dense, obfuscatory prose). Crucially, these concepts cannot then be unseen. After reading her work, you see evidence of her ideas everywhere, not just in the 1970s and 1980s American horror films she explores, but far beyond.
My MA was when I read Clover for the first time, but it was not until my PhD that her work played a major role. Ignoring the pencil marks, and returning to the beginning of the book, I trace the annotations in blue fountain pen and find an early scribbled reference in the margins to White Zombie (1932). This can only be the cover-to-cover reading for my PhD thesis, “The Destruction of the Male Body in 1930s Horror Film,” which was then rewritten as my first monograph, After Dracula.Footnote 2 Tracing my inky scribbles, I note a distinct transition in how I used Men, Women, and Chain Saws between my MA and my PhD. Books change as your thinking changes, and only a rich, layered text (such as this one) can sustain multiple, distinct mining for different treasures. As a postgraduate student, I read this book for its schematic tropes, but as a research student, I read it for its theories of looking relations, for its in-depth exploration of the relationship between identification, spectatorship and masochism. The influence of this book on my PhD is undeniable. The first paragraph of the first page of my thesis announces that this is a study of “spectatorship and identification in cinema, aiming to shed light on filmic horror’s textual processes and the nature and mechanics of its address to viewers.”Footnote 3
Given my focus, it is no surprise that the fourth chapter of Clover’s book, entitled “The Eye of Horror,” is where my heaviest annotations are found. In this chapter, Clover presents her theory of masochistic looking relations; defining assaultive gazing, failed gazing and reactive gazing; and asking, “where is the masochism in all of this?” (209). My PhD purported to offer an answer, suggesting that in 1930s horror film, masochism could be found through looking at the mutilated bodies of male victims and male monsters. It is not just chapter 4, though; the whole book works its way into my doctoral research. In chapter 1, deep, blue furrows of ink soak the statement “knives and needles, like teeth, beaks, fangs and claws, are personal extensions of the body that bring attacker and attacked into primitive, animalistic embrace” (209). Without even turning to my thesis, I know exactly why I circled this passage. I had been studying Werewolf of London (1935) and thinking through the relationship between the protagonist and antagonist, Dr Glendon and Dr Yogami, who (to my mind) were passionately attracted to each other, yet fought to the death. Reading this statement, I understood how this tense undercurrent of same-sex desire spilled over into violence, as Glendon and Yogami transformed into werewolves and desperately, miserably, fought tooth and claw, to the death.
In 2019, as an associate professor in film and media, I was commissioned by Arrow Films to write an essay on Dementer (2019), a female-led, demonic, low-budget horror film.Footnote 4 I knew straightaway that I wanted to consider the film through “Opening Up,” the second chapter of Men, Women, and Chain Saws, so I returned to my battered paperback and reread it (this time with a black gel pen). In this chapter, Clover deftly parses how the possession film is built around the spectacle of the female body, but at the same time the narrative is driven by the male experience of witnessing this manifestation. More than in any other chapter, the black gel pen intersects endlessly with the blue fountain ink and the silver pencil, awash with triple underlines.
What is it about this chapter that resonates so concretely across the thinking I have done in my MA, in my PhD and in my tenured role? What is it about this chapter, in particular, that has brought me back to it, time and time again, over two decades? The answer is a simple one, that offers yet another reason why Men, Women, and Chain Saws retains currency today. This chapter is a close study of female bodies in horror film. Feminists have always been interested in – and will always remain interested in – how female bodies are represented on-screen. The theories that underpin our thinking about gender may evolve, but our fascination with gendered spectacle endures. Not least because, in horror film, the female body is frequently understood to represent the locus of contemporary social and cultural anxieties.
Now it is 2024, and I am a professor of film studies, asked to reflect upon my engagement with Men, Women, and Chain Saws. I have one, final thought about what this book has done for me, that goes beyond the supercut schematics, beyond the feminist model of looking relations, beyond the ongoing obsession with how horror film figures the female body. A clue to this idea can be found in a single sentence in chapter : “it is only by referring to her body that his story can be told” (101). What I am getting at here is that – unlike many academics – Clover can write. Despite her eye-poppingly long paragraphs, despite her proliferation of discursive footnotes, she retains complete control over reader experience. There is an ease in her sentence structure, everything flows, it has that Joan Didion-esque effortless style. She has a subtle disregard for (stodgy and unappealing) academic writing conventions; she opens paragraphs with ledes, telling us stories, beginning sentences with “But.” An example from her introduction: “needless to say, horror movies spend a lot of time looking at women, and in first-person ways that do indeed seem well described by Mulvey’s ‘sadistic-voyeuristic’ gaze. But the story does not end there” (8).
I do not read many academic monographs from cover to cover, and yet I have done so, repeatedly, with this one. This is because, even when she is working through abstract and complex theoretical constructs, Clover communicates so clearly with us. Her style throughout remains, always and endearingly, intimate.
The Final Girl, that resourceful survivor of slasher horror films, does not need saving; she can save herself. This is just one of the many profound lessons that Carol J. Clover taught us in Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (hereafter MWC). But at the moment when I first encountered Clover’s work, I felt like I was a budding film scholar very much in need of saving and that I could not do it myself. So I will always be grateful that MWC materialized to rescue me just when I needed it to. Clover’s book, more than any other, showed me the way toward what we can now call an emergent field: horror studies.
In 1992, the year MWC was first published, I was a naive but stubborn undergraduate student who had managed to convince a quite conservative English department that I should be allowed to write about the modern horror film for my honors thesis project. But now that I had secured permission to proceed, I was facing a conundrum. How was I going to make this thesis work? How would I prove to a skeptical department that analyzing horror films provided the same kinds of opportunity for critical and theoretical significance that, say, the plays of Shakespeare or the novels of Faulkner invited? In hindsight, the echoes of such questions are still very much with us today. After all, we live in a culture where “elevated horror” is a common designation used to divide “mature” ambitious horror from “immature” routine horror. What such a division implies, of course, is that horror is naturally lowly and “elevated” only in exceptional circumstances.Footnote 1
But back in 1992, I figured that since my thesis focussed on the films of David Cronenberg, I could probably try to dodge the horror bullet by taking the auteurist road instead. In other words, I could argue that Cronenberg, with his increasingly sophisticated and literary approaches to horror (he had just adapted William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1991)), is more of an artist like Shakespeare and Faulkner than he is a horror genre filmmaker. But this did not feel quite right to me, as such an approach would almost by necessity have to minimize precisely those spectacles and shocks that drew me to his films in the first place: their visceral, embodied horror.
Enter Carol Clover. Even though MWC does not focus particularly on Cronenberg’s films, she includes them as significant examples of a genre she is absolutely certain deserves and demands the full engagement of our critical intelligence. For Clover, the horror film is not an embarrassing affront to serious discussions in contemporary film theory by leading scholars such as Laura Mulvey and Christian Metz, but precisely the genre that enables us to recast those very debates. To assert, as Clover did, that the horror film was more about masochistic viewer pleasures than about sadistic ones was to resist an entire set of entrenched critical assumptions that horror films could only be understood as misogynistic and retrograde. Even Robin Wood, Clover’s most influential predecessor in terms of taking the horror film seriously in social and political terms, drew the line at horror films of the sort that he felt were beyond the pale, that harbored politically reactionary tendencies rather than politically progressive ones, especially slasher films like Halloween (1978) and Cronenberg films like Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), and The Brood (1979).Footnote 2 And these were the very films that Clover made room for in MWC, that she considered just as worthy of analysis as Wood’s preferred examples.
In short, Clover showed me that horror films can matter because of their genre affiliation, not despite it. Horror films need not be elevated above the genre’s dominant tendencies, whether through auteurist or political exceptionality, in order to be worthwhile as objects of analysis. Clover valued horror films for their adherence to genre patterns rather than their subversion of those patterns. She was fascinated by the workings of a form that she believed had significance in its own right, so that genre-based horror films were worthy of our critical attention rather than beneath it. For example, even when she allows that Cronenberg’s films may be closer to an “intellectual or metacinematic mode” rather than “straight horror,” she ultimately argues that Cronenberg’s spectacularly embodied imagery (“bodies slit, heads exploded, and the like”) must be reckoned with as “very much in the tradition of real horror” (209 n. 92).
I was not tuned in to it at the time, but on reflection there was something very special about Clover’s approach to horror films that came from her disciplinary vantage point. She was coming to these films as a professor of Scandinavian and comparative literature, not as a film studies scholar. What this meant was that she could look at these films in a fresh, original way, without the need to sound like other film scholars working on horror. This is not to say that MWC is not critically informed –on the contrary, it is more thorough, learned, and carefully researched than many “traditional” books in film studies – but that its cases, interpretations, and conclusions always feel surprising and unorthodox. For example, Clover detects continuities between slasher films and the cinema of art film icon Ingmar Bergman in terms of “gender displacement”:
Just as Bergman came to realize that he could explore castration anxiety more freely via depictions of hurt female bodies (witness the genital mutilation of Karin in Cries and Whispers [1972]), so the makers of slasher films seem to know that sadomasochistic incest fantasies sit more easily with the male viewer when the visible player is female. (51)
When Clover makes such unexpected but illuminating comparisons, she enhances rather than diminishes her authority to speak about film and horror. She has watched the films deemed canonical by film studies and read the feminist and psychoanalytic film theory then dominant in the field (the influence and support of film studies colleagues such as Kaja Silverman and Linda Williams is everywhere apparent), but her voice is very much her own. Clover remakes film studies by approaching the field through her own idiosyncratic lens where horror matters as horror in its own right.
Clover’s lens permits a number of important and uncommon critical encounters to occur. In terms of cases, Clover insists on juxtaposing canonical and noncanonical films as equally worthy of analysis. So Psycho (1960) and Halloween are present, but so is Hell Night (1981) and Friday the 13th Part II (1981). The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is not more significant than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986). The Exorcist (1973) receives attention, but so does Witchboard (1987). Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), which by 1992 had been recognized as a masterpiece championed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, occupies a central place, but so does the brutal, low-budget rape revenge film I Spit on Your Grave (1978), which was championed by almost no one. Clover’s logic in selecting these cases amounts to a defense of horror as a genre-based form, where “high” and “low” examples are mostly beside the point. What matter instead are the basic horror genre structures that all of these examples share. With a nod to her own disciplinary background, Clover writes, “Students of folklore or early literature recognize in horror the hallmarks of oral narrative … this is a field in which there is in some sense no original, no real or right text, but only variants” (10–11).
By demoting the question of horror as art and promoting the question of horror as horror, Clover permits horror to speak about the spectators who watch it, the culture that surrounds it, and the concerns with gender that obsess it. In the process, horror emerges not as a marginal or regrettable footnote to film theory’s investments in gendered spectatorship, but as an absolutely central film form for understanding these investments. In other words, Clover argues that we need horror to understand film theory, rather than horror being irrelevant to film theory or an exception to it. If we care about film theory, about its implications for gender and spectatorship, then we must care about horror.
It is difficult to overstate the significance of Clover’s move here for the growth of horror studies. By transporting horror from the margins to the center of film studies and gender studies, Clover paved the way for horror to function as its own center. If horror could teach us valuable things about film studies and gender studies writ large, then surely it deserved consideration as a possible field in its own right. Clover’s conviction that horror matters as horror gave so many others – myself included – the courage to study horror in new ways, and eventually to imagine what a field called horror studies might look like.
In this sense, my discovery of Clover’s work as an undergraduate student was only the beginning of a long and continuing relationship with MWC. When it came time to write my PhD dissertation and then revise it as my book Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (2005), Clover’s model mattered immensely to me. For example, I felt that if she could devote a chapter to a film as widely reviled as I Spit on Your Grave, then I could do the same with The Last House on the Left (1972). And many years later, when I published Horror Film and Otherness (2022) as a manifesto for horror studies, I returned to Clover. This is not to say that our approaches to horror are the same, since I tend to emphasize questions of history as often as Clover tends to deemphasize them. For instance, my own analysis of The Last House on the Left is as deeply embedded in the film’s Vietnam-era historical context as Clover’s is distant from it.Footnote 3 But my return to Clover in Horror Film and Otherness was motivated by a keen sense that her work, however different from my own, had played an invaluable role in making horror studies possible.Footnote 4 I felt strongly that if horror studies was to have a future, then its origins needed to be mapped. Clover is at the heart of those origins, so we are all still learning from her. The Final Girl may not need us to rescue her, but we still need Clover – to remind us of where we have been and where we would like to go.
Claudia: I’m done enduring. I’m going to kill him.
Interview with the Vampire (2022)Footnote 1
Beyond
In his Academy Award-winning film Get Out (2017), director Jordan Peele memorably rebuffed the familiar trope of the “Black Guy Dies First.” The film’s star, Chris, not only skirts death but, significantly, avoids horrifying carceral repercussions (or worse) for what he is forced to do to ensure his survival. Peele jettisoned his original ending of seeing Chris live, only to be doomed to imprisonment. The choice for Chris to survive and thrive (as signaled through the film’s line “consider this shit handled”) is reaffirmed by award-winning horror author Tananarive Due in the documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror (2019) when she insists, “We’ve seen enough Brothers in orange jumpsuits.”Footnote 2
Peele’s cinematic vision intentionally speaks to a range of (still elusive) Black audience desires – fully realized representational inclusion, Black life presented as worthy or even heroic, an absence of “trauma porn.”Footnote 3 Understanding the longing, Peele rejects a long history of perfunctory deaths ascribed to Black people in support of whiteness in US cinema, be it, for example, the Messenger’s just after the opening credits slashing (for comedic effect) in Spider Baby (1967) or Evelyn’s “sacrificial Negro” suicide in Annabelle (2014).Footnote 4
Notably, Peele was unequivocal that there would be no “Black woman dies first” in his next films, NOPE (2022) and Us (2019).Footnote 5 Peele spurns apathy about Black women’s lives by introducing a scrappy, monster-destroying hero in NOPE’s Emerald and a monstrous antihero in Us’s Adelaide. His representations inhabit space alongside an attenuated (but extant) film history presenting Black women as tragic villains (Chloe, Love Is Calling You, 1934), saviors (Scream Blacula Scream, 1973), and heroes (Demon Knight, 1995), and as resourceful (Alien vs. Predator, 2004) and unconquerable (Sweetheart, 2019). These films present Final Girls … Black ones. These films are curative for those looking for the still elusive representational inclusion on the screen and in Clover’s Final Girl thesis – both, in turn, present an opportunity to inform our criticism and analyses.Footnote 6
Erasure
For three decades, critics and lay readers have contemplated Clover’s seminal approach to textual analysis and feminist media criticism. Her (perhaps deceptively simple) conceptualization of the Final Girl is widely accepted and quoted and is in service to a larger analytic regarding gender roles and identification. The Final Girl functions for Clover to uncover, per visual culture and horror scholar Jerome Dent, “the possibilities and realities of cross-gender identification,” thereby disrupting our assumptions about gender.Footnote 7 Are fear and pain feminine performances in cinema? What does it mean, then, if men throw “their emotional lot, if only temporarily, with not only a woman but a woman in fear and pain” (61)? Clover stakes her theoretical claim on gender portrayals, arguing “that something crucial to the system of cultural representation is at stake.”Footnote 8
Many have found a lack of engagement with nonwhite races’ systems of cultural representation in Clover’s work. Kinitra Brooks, whose scholarship focusses on Black women, feminism, and media genres, is pointed in her observation that “fascinating work concerning gender continues within critical studies of horror, even after thirty years, but it has often proven inattentive to the intersections of race, failing to examine its own privileging of whiteness.”Footnote 9 Brooks is correct; not only have Black women been relegated to invisibility in mainstream horror, but such confining marginalization has restricted culturally competent scholarly interrogations of the form and function of Black women’s roles. Moreover, one can add to Brooks’s argument that it is not just exclusion that is worrisome, but also a missed opportunity around how other races (here, Blackness) complicate Clover’s cross-gender identification/Final Girl conceptualization.
Though Clover sees the 1970s as the start of an intriguing feminist turn in the treatment of (white) women in (white) horror, she refrains from contemplating that turn happening too in Black horror and/or with Black women.Footnote 10 The neglect is perplexing given the universality of the Final Girl: “The final girl is the protagonist of the slasher film who represents a surprising amalgam of differing normative gender constructions to connote an active defense of nimble strength and mental acuity.”Footnote 11 For example, the 1970s so-called Blaxploitation era gave us the Black horror film Sugar Hill (1974), starring the sexy, vengeful, and heroic Sugar.Footnote 12 Indeed, the attractive Sugar (with her nominative determinant nickname) successfully takes on “Whitey” to avenge the death of her boyfriend, while also ridding her community of a violent, racist gangster and his crew. Using her wits and Voodoo, Sugar is no shrinking violet as she neutralizes the menace – “I hope they are into White trash,” says Sugar as she feeds a gangster to ravenous hogs. Crucially, she survives to tell the tale and secure her revenge-turned-justice.
Still, Sugar Hill disrupts some of the key assumptions that drive the Final Girl formulation, beginning with her non-masculine-sounding name – Sugar – and continuing with her sultriness, which may invite new and different forms of cross-gender identification. The disruption continues as there is something more to be discovered in the absence of “the qualities of character that enable” white Final Girls such as the “the Girl Scout, the bookworm, the mechanic” who is “not sexually active” (Clover, 39). Be it a sexually realized woman or not (unproblematically) the seductress stereotype – the desexualized and partnerless woman with a masculine name is not the typical presentation of Black women.
There is yet another missed opportunity to explore Black womanhood in horror when Clover turns to the films The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) and Angel Heart (1987) to explore what she calls “White Science” and “Black Magic” (66–67).Footnote 13 She reaffirms what we know all too well about racialized representation – whiteness is akin to rationality and problem solving. Surgery, pharmaceuticals, and psychotherapy in the hands of doctors are the instruments for restoration. Blackness represents the illogical; problem solving relies on superstition. Male witch doctors, Satanism, and Voodoo are the tools of the trade.
Clover devotes one sentence to Angel Heart (1987) as part of her discussion of White Science, Black Magic, noting in a parenthetical, simply, that two women – “a white spiritualist and a Cajun voodoo practitioner”– are killed (86). However, there is much more to consider. Angel Heart’s “Cajun voodoo practitioner,” Epiphany Proudfoot, is a minor, just seventeen years old, who has a baby (no Girl Scout/bookworm here), and who performs as a concupiscent seductress until she is subjected to a revolting rape/murder. The Epiphany character evidences that there are additional crucial questions to be asked about the intersections of race and gender identification in the modern horror film. These questions have at their core: how do we understand the identities that we inhabit in relation to filmic representations at the intersection of Blackness and gender? This core question, however, invites further problematization; issues such as history, identity and identification, difference, commonness and community, meaning, and power and privilege must be considered. The answers will inevitably center on cultural perceptions of Black womanness and the ways in which cinematic horror de/ attaches from objectification, stereotype, spectacle, and politics of representation.
Enduring women
Anti-Blackness is deeply ingrained in US society, and horror often works at the peril of Blackness. As Peele observes, “Part of being black in this country, and I presume being any minority, is constantly being told that … we’re seeing racism where there just isn’t racism.”Footnote 14 This means that Black horror films (which did not grab Clover’s attention) understand all too well that systems of racism are not fleeting, but enduring. They cannot be dispatched like a single, crazed monster. Indeed, Black women must endure as “their battle is often more systemic with racism, community exploitation, and socio-political corruption as the enemy.” Significantly, there is no certainty of finality for Black women after their battle is done; “in this regard, there is no going to sleep once the ‘monster’ is defeated, as the monster is often amorphously coded as ‘whitey,’ and whitey and the oppression that they circulate and institutionalize are here to stay.”Footnote 15 Police violence, guns, drugs, and other exploitation are enduring.
Even the celebrated Jeryline from the film Demon Knight (1995), who is often pointed to as the Black Final Girl, must endure.Footnote 16 By the movie’s end, she is left alone to stare down the monster, kill it, and save herself (Clover’s ending B). But she is also left to endure. She is burdened with a new fixed identity of demonfighter as evil returns in pursuit of her, while also threatening humanity. In short, White Final Girls get to breathe a sigh of relief and enter hypersleep, cuddling their cat. Conversely, Black women must not only wage battle against a monstrous threat, but also endure and persist against systems of oppression that undergird those monstrous threats.
Uncivil disobedience
“The independent, low-budget tradition,” Clover writes, “has been central in the manufacture of the new ‘tough girls’” (6). For Clover, the 1970s (a bastion of lowbudget, indy films with tough girls) gifted her the 1976 Brian DePalma film Carrie (but overlooked were “Blaxploitation” films like Sugar Hill). Carrie, the victim of a monstrous mother and monstrous classmates, herself becomes the monster. To stop there, according to Clover, is to miss a key point. Carrie is a complex tripartite of female, victim, and hero – a soup of identities and actions that thereby enables women’s liberation (6).
If and when Black women are written as Carrie-like vengeful, does the rejection of more respectable, civil approaches to secure their liberation or vengeance limit an identification with their gender and Blackness? I include prayer (Beloved), self-sacrifice (Annabelle), and running (Zombiez) as civil. Are we able to identify with Black women and their violence in this context and in service to Black feminist liberation? To make things harder, what if their incivility is not motivated by social justice?Footnote 17
Philosopher/political scientist Candice Delmas in A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil considers uncivil-disobedience approaches to social justice in the real world. Society, she reminds us, prizes solutions that avoid radical social destabilization.Footnote 18 Additionally, as political scientist Cathy Cohen offers, respectability is based on the hope that “conformity will confer full citizenship status.” Taken together, we must not threaten the sensibilities of those who find respect and restraint unworthy. Such respectability limits the diversity of our choices to pursue justice in that it is predicated on removing from view nonconformist behaviors.Footnote 19
Reform is certainly an atypical horror methodology. Nevertheless, horror, as in the real world, often mitigates the conditions under which incivility can be enacted by Black women – when (1) conformist behaviors are not serviceable, (2) allyship has failed, and (3) equal citizenship status remains elusive.Footnote 20 Only then can Brianna summon Candyman to eviscerate Chicago police officers (Candyman, 2021), or Veronica bayonet and burn alive murderers and rapists playing dress-up as Confederate soldiers while reenacting chattel slavery (Antebellum, 2020).Footnote 21
Forward
Clover’s White Final Girl and her role in gender identification are a masterclass in innovative feminist media criticism. Filmmaker and horror scholar Ashlee Blackwell reminds us that we must move forward toward inclusion with attention to Black women writers and characters: “how they incorporate their voices within a space that is overwhelmingly white, and what they are saying that adds texture to the genre … ensures they will never, from here on, go unnoticed.”Footnote 22 What comes next is to see, really see, Black women (and intersecting identities of women of color, nonbinary/trans women) as essential to the Final Girl conversation. That inclusion, of course, is not predicated on overdetermining heroism or positive representations. This is, after all, the horror genre where “we are both Red Riding Hood and the Wolf” (Clover, 191).
Already, scholars have stepped up to inform the Final Girl ecology. Dent, Brooks, Blackwell, and Means Coleman, to name a very few, have extended the ecosystem to include Black women. Popular essayists such as Alexis Oatman (2023), writing for Essence magazine, and Publishers Weekly’s Iyana Jones (2023) are also rooting for more Black Final Girls.Footnote 23 In 2022, even the Museum of the Moving Image sought to inform the analysis: “The final girl has long been racialized as white – what happens to the prototype when the Final Girl is raced as Black? These screenings will explore the parameters of the Black final girl and … her increasingly popular presence in contemporary horror.”Footnote 24 Indeed, continued inclusion, interrogation, and extension of that ecology are important work. This collection of essays, which celebrates, critiques, and extends Clover’s Final Girl, is, invaluably, exactly that.
As an academic and screen studies scholar who is also a horror fan, a feminist, and a nonbinary queer person, this invitation to refiect on the Final Girl and on horror is both welcome and challenging. Carol J. Clover (and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) have been part of my university teaching of horror for many years. In my experience, students love Clover’s theorization of the Final Girl, admiring its application of more traditional/academic film theory to a (still) somewhat disreputable genre with a dubious record on gender representation. They also appreciate the clarity with which she sets out her argument in “Her Body, Himself.” (In fact, Clover’s work is so popular that marking endless essays on it has led to a fair amount of Pavlovian eye rolling from me when it’s mentioned.) While, as Clover herself notes, the slasher film’s popularity was already waning by the time her book was published, both the subgenre and her theorization of it continue to impact the creation and reception of horror, and scholarship about it.Footnote 1
In the introduction to Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Clover recounts how a friend dared her to see The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, giving rise to the 1987 article “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film” and eventually to the book in 1992. Watching the film, she says, “jolted me into questioning for the first time the notion of the ‘male gaze’ and its assumption of masculine mastery” (19). North American horror has addressed gender dynamics since Hooper’s film (fifty years ago) and Clover’s book (thirty-two years ago), with movies like Wes Craven’s postslasher Scream (twenty-eight years ago), television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (twenty-seven years ago), the ahead-of-its-time and much-misunderstood Karyn Kusama film Jennifer’s Body (fifteen years ago), the Soska sisters’ American Mary (twelve years ago), and, more recently, Misha Green’s HBO series Lovecraft Country (four years ago) and Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (three years ago). Clover’s book is subtitled “Gender in the Modern Horror Film,” though it primarily deals with US horror cinema. This was not particularly unusual for anglophone film theory and horror scholarship at the time, though advances in technology have since vastly expanded the international market – and viewers’ knowledge of global horror film and television.
Horror as a genre has changed enormously since 1974, and since 1992, from a niche or cult genre to a commodity that can be both mainstream and profitable. The expansion of television ushered in by cable and satellite and then streaming has only increased demand for television horror (notable US examples being Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), The Walking Dead (2010–22), and American Horror Story (2011–present)). When Stacey Abbott and I began working on TV Horror a decade and a half ago, we could not have guessed there would be quite this much great horror yet to come, though we certainly wished for the expansion of horror studies that has accompanied it.Footnote 2 To me, television horror – almost by definition – disrupts the structures of cinematic horror. I would also suggest that, in some respects, horror on television disrupts the structures of hierarchy, elitism, taste, and critique that accompany and gatekeep cultural and pop-cultural products. Television was long regarded as disposable, domestic, degraded, and diluted in comparison to cinema, and horror cinema is no exception. Issues of audience, taste, and value cycle round regularly in discussions of horror.Footnote 3
Over the last fifty years, concepts of gender, sex and identity have also undergone significant changes as binary conceptions of sex and gender are increasingly challenged. This poses problems for some of the foundations of film theory and particularly for psychoanalytic theory, which dominated horror scholarship for years. Feminist thinking and theory have had to adapt and keep up with these changes or risk irrelevance. Greater acknowledgement of intersectional pressures serves to complicate thinking about identity and how it is narrativized and mediated. Harry Benshoff’s Monsters in the Closet was published in the same year as Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992), and both are taken up in Darren Elliott-Smith’s 2016 book Queer Horror, analysing versions of horror that fit neither male-gaze theory nor binary models. (One chapter is titled “Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys”). Robin Means Coleman’s Horror Noire (2011, 2nd edn 2023) lays out the history of Black American horror, providing another challenge to (white) dominant structures of identity and genre that is a go-to for horror scholars. Means Coleman’s book has been made into a 2019 documentary film of the same name that is currently available on horror streaming service Shudder, a testament to how far the genre has come.
#MeToo, #TimesUp, and renewed #BlackLivesMatter activism have all had global repercussions. While fans and audiences call regularly for greater representation of underrepresented groups and better content for underserved audiences, media industries must move to address these issues. “No male character of any stature lives to tell the tale,” says Clover of the later slasher films (44), pointing to one of their remarkable features. In 2024, more and more reputable film or television productions can afford to field, or justify (economically or otherwise) fielding, a cast that includes “no male character of any stature” nor any white character of stature. Behind the scenes, things are changing more slowly, but Isabel C. Pinedo notes that “the rise of Peak TV has vastly increased the demand for programming, opening opportunities for female producers and top-tier actors, resulting in some productions with significant female creative control.”Footnote 4
Some might think that horror, a “low” genre with an assumed audience of young, white men, would be lagging in these terms, but this is not the case. While debates about whether the horror genre is “dead” recur on a regular basis, I contend that traditional Western horror, created by white, straight, cis Anglo-American men, may be lacking innovation and ideas, yet the genre itself goes from strength to strength. The rise and influence of Jordan Peele are indisputable since the success of Get Out in 2017;Footnote 5 the anthology series American Horror Story co-creator Ryan Murphy was lured from FX to Netflix with a deal reportedly worth $300 million;Footnote 6 while Korean period zombie/political thriller Kingdom, created by Kim Eun-hee, was brought to global audiences via Netflix and triumphed across taste boundaries, being declared a “must-watch” by Bloody Disgusting and one of the best international television shows of 2020 by the New York Times. Footnote 7 Much of today’s talked-about horror is being made by creators from minority groups who bring their lived experience and distinct perspectives to their creations. “I made gay sidekicks the leads,” Ryan Murphy said in one interview, while Misha Green notes, “In horror, there’s a level of anxiety that your life can be taken at any moment. That’s the Black experience.”8Footnote 8
The identity politics of horror have moved beyond the generally white, middle-class “final girls” analysed by Clover, and for good reason. Debating some of the complexities of cross-gender audience identification, Clover notes that the Final Girl’s success depends on engaging the identification of male viewers and then “violating that [feminine] body … in ways otherwise imaginable, for males, only in nightmares” (53). While #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo initially focussed on Anglo-American contexts, they drew attention to structural inequalities affecting people globally. Discussing the horror genre on television may seem trivial in the face of real-world horrors like widespread femicide and transphobic and racist violence, but it is exactly these issues that equip women and minority creators with a unique perspective. Vera Miao, creator of the anthology television series Two Sentence Horror Stories (2019–22), says that pitching her idea for the show prompted her to ask, “What worldview was driving the conversation about what the real horrors are in the current day?”Footnote 9 Women – and minoritized groups – experience horror every day and therefore perceive the dynamics of horror differently (affectively, physically, and creatively).Footnote 10 Horror media, which has deliberately employed women, trans and nonbinary people, and/or people of colour – often against industry tradition – innovates in ways that have barely been realized, let alone understood, owing to the assumption of white male dominance among producers, consumers, critics, and fans of the genre.
Returning to “Her Body, Himself,” Clover argues that at a certain point in slasher films, the power of the gaze shifts from the killer to the Final Girl; indeed, “her triumph depends on her assumption of the gaze” (60, original emphasis). Current industry research indicates that minoritized creatives in global media industries are assuming the gaze and producing, writing, directing, editing, composing, and otherwise creating horror that tells (and shows) stories from different perspectives, with different priorities, attracting different, hitherto underserved, audiences. This is the future of horror – exciting, visceral, engaging, moving, bloody, graphic, at times hilarious, always outrageous, and often political. The Final Girl “perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril,” says Clover: “we see [her] scream, stagger, fall, rise and scream again.” The Final Girl is “the one who did not die: the survivor” (35). The rising stars of global horror media today are survivors who perceive the full extent of preceding inequalities, who have seen (many firsthand) the perils of minoritized existence and erasure. They have staggered, fallen, and screamed (in fear,in rage, in frustration, in silence) – but still they rise.
