Carol J. Clover

Right.

Um, so Marcel, in our episode on obsession, you quoted from Carol J. Clover's Her Body, Himself: Gender In The Slasher Film.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm gonna make you do it again.

Billy is the final girl from the original Camp Miasma.

So we're gonna pause on the idea of the final girl for a moment.

This is a concept that Clover created.

Oh.

It's something that refracts, I think, quite lushly throughout the film.

And I think obviously the big framework and a book that was very important to me, again, as I was about 18, 19, and I was starting to think about Film criticism writing about film is Carol J. Clover's book, Men, Women and Chainsaws, Gender in the Horror Film, which came out in 1992 and is really where the term final girl comes from and where a lot of our sort of like idea of the final girl has been crystallized from and it's it's kind of taken on its life of its own and that book has its own limitations but that's something that is definitely sort of like a frame of reckoning within the film the idea that a final girl is a vessel of fluidity But also these very fraught refractions of fear and desire of the people watching the film and projecting themselves onto it and identifying and empathizing with it.

But also the vessels within the film themselves sort of refracting ideas about sort of like sex and fear that are happening in the culture at the time.

Yeah.

But I have... movies that I assign and then I've got like a whole bank of recommended films in kind of each unit that I do in the class.

So I'm definitely going to add this one to the syllabus and say like, Hey, if you want to watch this and you want to like write a paper on it or incorporate that into conversations about other stuff that we're reading like we always read uh a segment of um you know carol clover's article on the what you know what is a final girl um and so if they wanted to incorporate some of you know what we're doing in the class and use it to read this film that would be great and i'd love them to do it but um tbd i wasn't sure it would be out to assign it at the time i'd need to assign it so i

don't know A great summary from Sarah, unsurprisingly.

The only thing I would add is even though the vibes and the aesthetics are so much Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp of the Camp Miasma movies, I did feel like the trajectory of them really did remind me of Nightmare on Elm Street.

That was tough.

But I think all the candy also speaks to this idea of embracing that kind of pleasure in all aspects and just bringing pleasure into every element of your life in a healthy and kind of, again, unified way.

But then the other thing I want to pick up on is this kind of And this gets us into Carol Clover territory and thinking through The Final Girl and kind of sex as a thing to be punished in horror movies.

This is a movie where obviously the opposite is the case, right? Sex is sort of this incredible...

We're aligned with his perspective in the eyes of the watcher.

You know, this is very Laura Mulvey, Carol J. Clover territory.

We're the voyeurs, as he is, equally interested in seeing more of this actress, both in terms of screen time and whatever else, other implication you want to put onto that.

At the same time, Verhoeven and Stone let Tramiel gain power from being viewed, whereas typically the act of being viewed as a woman on screen or the object of voyeurism could more traditionally be argued as disempowering.

I've heard a lot of people in commentary on the film reference Mulvey, I mean, movies related, but like not central to this, I would argue.

And Carol Clover, duh.

But there are other deeper, more Freudian texts that are being referenced here, like a child is being beaten.

So I hope we can bring that in.

You get browbeaten very easily in high culture settings.

But I would be driven to it.

And my dissertation advisor was Carol Clover, who wrote Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Gender in Modern Horror Films.

um who who came up with the concept of the final girl uh you know so i was in the seminars when she's working out that are you i was in gender and horror films i was there for the arguments and some of the dumbest fucking arguments for me and not hers she had basically you know i think she was on it you know she came up with quite an intelligent way of reading you know slasher films and she wrote she literally wrote the book on slasher films she was quite famous for an academic she was beyond belief famous I was in her office trying to get advice on my dissertation while people from around the world were, were