Very disappointing. I love Blade Runner, and was hoping to love this too, but no. Somehow far more creepily sexist than the film. The message is bizarre and confusing, and seems to be that you shouldn’t grow to have empathy with escaped slaves, because actually they are cold-blooded sadistic killers. I have begun to think that actually Philip K Dick is very right-wing, and people only think he’s progressive because of all the drugs he took. Minority Report and Total Recall are two other films that are quite left-wing while despite being based on right-wing stories by Dick. Probably not going to be reading anything more by him.

I first read this a few years ago and didn’t like it. I decided to reread to see if my opinion might have changed, but sadly while I didn’t hate it quite as much, it’s still not good.

The setup for the Earth One Titans origin story is blatantly ripped from Runaways, including having one of the teens turn out to be a traitor. Unlike Runaways where that’s a pulled off well and is a huge shock when you find out the identity of the mole, here there is no payoff. None of the characters have any real character development (there is lots of big beautiful artwork but barely any dialogue, and none of it very good), so when one of the bland protagonists turns out to be evil, you just don’t care.

The book aims for lots of drama, but the cartoony art style says “goofy”, and the two do not mix.

The Native American stuff seems real racist.

As is usual with Teen Titans media, the women characters are all in impractical skintight and revealing clothing, while the men aren’t. Raven’s black catsuit with cape and cowboy boots (which is implied to just be normal daywear for Native Americans in New Mexico) and Starfire’s Leeloo-esque “sexy bandages” are particularly notable.

Watching the cartoon and then Reading runaways would be a better use of your time, and much more enjoyable.

Really good. Great characters. Very moving. I’d heard that Jonathan Larson ripped this off to write RENT and I believe it (this is infinitely better). Angry, political, artful.

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.