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mothmans_mum 's review for:
I did not enjoy this book anywhere near as much as I expected. In fact, I found it incredibly frustrating.
Where Clover excels is in describing things as they are. She has taken the time to actually watch all the films she is talking about, as well as experiencing first hand audiences watching those films in theatres, and she is able to expose the truth of these. For example, while slasher films may position the audience as the killer in the early stages of the film, for most of the film they force the audience to identify with the Final Girl as she is first terrorised by and then vanquishes the killer. And that audiences comprising mainly men cheer on the Final Girl, not the killer. This suggestion that men are able to identify with women characters is very important, and Clover should be commended for it.
There is some other good and interesting stuff in the book, such as the gender dynamics of possession films (they usually feature a woman who becomes increasingly masculine after becoming possessed, while the story is really about the man who becomes increasingly feminine as he fights to free her), or yonic/birth imagery in Poltergeist.
However the book is let down by the overwhelming deluge of Freudian nonsense that drowns every page whenever Clover goes any further that simply describing something as it is. We are treated so such gems as:
- male horror fans mostly aren’t sadistic. They’re masochistic! They fantasise about being the Final Girl and getting stabbed by the killer! Just like how in the old days,, fans of those movies where trains come towards the screen, the moviegoers fantasised about being run over and penetrated by the trains!
- in possession films, the possessed person is usually a woman, because women have vaginal openings and so can imagine having an inner life, and this imagined inner world is where the demon can go, whereas men don’t have bodily orifices and therefore are emotionally closed off and have no inner world so there’s nowhere for the demon to live inside of them
- anuses are actually just vaginas (which you would think contradicts the previous point?)
There’s also some racist nonsense about hillbillies in rural horror films being symbolically Native Americans, because apparently screenwriters feel guilt about genocide and also the natural world being destroyed by air conditioners, so they lash out at rural people/Native Americans to assuage their guilt by having them be the antagonists of horror movies. The evidence Clover gives is that she thinks the inbred hillbillies “look like” Native Americans.
I would give this book a miss.
Where Clover excels is in describing things as they are. She has taken the time to actually watch all the films she is talking about, as well as experiencing first hand audiences watching those films in theatres, and she is able to expose the truth of these. For example, while slasher films may position the audience as the killer in the early stages of the film, for most of the film they force the audience to identify with the Final Girl as she is first terrorised by and then vanquishes the killer. And that audiences comprising mainly men cheer on the Final Girl, not the killer. This suggestion that men are able to identify with women characters is very important, and Clover should be commended for it.
There is some other good and interesting stuff in the book, such as the gender dynamics of possession films (they usually feature a woman who becomes increasingly masculine after becoming possessed, while the story is really about the man who becomes increasingly feminine as he fights to free her), or yonic/birth imagery in Poltergeist.
However the book is let down by the overwhelming deluge of Freudian nonsense that drowns every page whenever Clover goes any further that simply describing something as it is. We are treated so such gems as:
- male horror fans mostly aren’t sadistic. They’re masochistic! They fantasise about being the Final Girl and getting stabbed by the killer! Just like how in the old days,, fans of those movies where trains come towards the screen, the moviegoers fantasised about being run over and penetrated by the trains!
- in possession films, the possessed person is usually a woman, because women have vaginal openings and so can imagine having an inner life, and this imagined inner world is where the demon can go, whereas men don’t have bodily orifices and therefore are emotionally closed off and have no inner world so there’s nowhere for the demon to live inside of them
- anuses are actually just vaginas (which you would think contradicts the previous point?)
There’s also some racist nonsense about hillbillies in rural horror films being symbolically Native Americans, because apparently screenwriters feel guilt about genocide and also the natural world being destroyed by air conditioners, so they lash out at rural people/Native Americans to assuage their guilt by having them be the antagonists of horror movies. The evidence Clover gives is that she thinks the inbred hillbillies “look like” Native Americans.
I would give this book a miss.