Men, Women, and Chainsaws

But, uh, there's also the idea that like, we don't need to like, you know, we need to talk at like the c- at a common denominator level that everyone can get to you at.

And so when you read something like, you know, Men, Women and Chainsaws, like, that's not designed to be something that you read and you just passively pay attention to.

Like, the language is dense, the information's dense.

Um, it's almost intimidating, whereas I think sometimes the reason why people are turned on by so much of documentary and also by the more visual ways of delivering information is because it does meet you at your level, and usually doesn't talk above the audience.

There's room for all, I, I think.

Yeah.

Because, you know, the book that comes to mind when you say Men, Women and Chainsaws just for me is, like, Kayla Janese's House of Psychotic Women.

It's more of a, like, less academic approach to, like, trying to understand where people come from.

And this was, wasn't just like, "Ah, yeah, men are saying that this is [laughs] feminist and women are saying it's exploitive." No, it was actually quite like a, there's a lot of authors and things like that, like, uh, um, I think there's like a, a book, and I read this when I was in uni.

It was, was I think Men, Women and Chainsaws.

Yeah.

Which was all about exploitative, like, um, look at that kind of era of cinema when there was a lot of that kind of mix.

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.

She fights back.

The term final girl originally comes from Carol J. Clover's 1992 book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Gender in the Modern Horror Film.

Particularly her essay, Her Body, Himself, Gender in the Slasher Film.

Clover argues that the final girl is more complicated than simply being the good girl who survives.

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

contacting her to interview her.