#men women and chainsaws

[martyrbat]

men, women, and chainsaws – carol j. clover

[TEXT ID: (the hero part always understood as implying some degree of monstrosity)]

[doomsayings]

men, women, and chainsaws

[biitchesbrew]

some thoughts on TCM: The Next Generation part 1:)

[agirlnamedbone]

“One of the most disturbing things about I Spit on Your Grave, I think, is its almost perverse simplicity. The men are not odd specimens but in the normal range of variation; their acts of brutal rape are not traced to dysfunctional upbringing (no Mother Bateses here); Jennifer takes the revenge she does not for deep-seated psychological reasons but because it is the punishment that fits the crime; there are no extenuating circumstances; the law is not involved, nor are legal questions raised; and there is no concern whatever, not even at the level of lip service, with moral and ethical issues. In short, I Spit on Your Grave offers no outs; it makes no space for intellectual displacement. [...]

I Spit on Your Grave shocks not because it is alien but because it is too familiar, because we recognize that the emotions it engages are regularly engaged by the big screen but almost never bluntly acknowledged for what they are.”

--Carol J. Clover, from Men, Women and Chainsaws (1992)

[bizarrocloudy]

I wonder if I'm the first person to have listened to the audiobook reading of Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chainsaws while hurtling along in my car at 65 mph while shoving a beef n ched down my gullet

[post-modern-prometheus]

im so at odds with the final girl trope bc it was actually coined to describe a misogynistic trend in slashers but then has been “reclaimed” without first understanding that it was a critique so like. nothing has changed??

[veryslowreader]

Men, Women, and Chainsaws by Carol J. Clover

Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin: "Chapter Six: Scars"

[ddenji]

i technically already posted this panel but the gender dynamics in csm are so beyond anything else in shonen rn. yoru occupying a more traditionally masculine, agressive, perpetrative space here and denji always, always, always occupying the space of the female, the subdued, the taken advantage of. his wording here is so defensive, trying to deflect the act, because he is always being acted against. yoru, the living embodiment of war (a traditionally male system and responsibility!) being trapped in the body of a teenage girl. fujimoto does a good job of subverting traditional gender dynamics in some very subtle ways earlier in the manga, but this one seems far more blatant and disturbing in the context of denjis entire experience.

[finalgirl1984]

So in btvs, like in other horror media, the line between death and violence and sex can be blurry. The act of a vampire biting or turning someone is explicitly metaphorical for sex. (See angel sucking buffys blood at the end of season three, angel drinking blood from darlas breast, spike begging drusilla to turn him, riley cheating on buffy by getting sucked on, etc.) Similarly, staking could also be metaphorical for sex. (See buffy playfully using a baguette to stake angel). A phallic symbol penetrating a heart. Therefore, riley basically used a dildo on spike that one time he staked him with fake wood, in this essay I will-

[martyrbat]

men, women, and chainsaws – carol j. clover

[TEXT ID: "Tortured survivor" might be a better term than "hero."]

[angel-eyes05]

really funny screenshot i found on twitter to help me ignore what the fuck just happened in chainsaw man chapter 136👍

[pinkeoni]

Awhile ago, my bestie @bellaswan-kinnie, who at the time was working on her thesis about female horror and mythology (which turned out amazing btw) made an observation regarding this scene:

In particular, she pointed out that the posters behind Mike, one for the 1975 film Jaws and the other for the stage adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors, might be there to offer additional queer-coding.

Vagina dentata, or toothed vaginas, is an old and multicultural myth, and "is rooted in the idea that the female body has hidden, dangerous secrets and that a man who has sex with a woman may risk castration."

This idea made it's way into modern horror, most literally in the 2007 film Teeth, a movie about a girl who literally has dick-biting teeth in her vagina, but the visual of a yonic monster with sharp teeth has appeared elsewhere, from Jaws, Little Shop of Horrors, to even the sarlacc pit of Star Wars.

So maybe Will just likes these two properties and has those posters in his room, but is it a coincidence that during a heart-to-heart with his gay boy bestie, where he says that he's been worrying too much about his girlfriend, that two symbols of fear of female sex is positioned squarely behind Mike's shoulders?

Gives a new meaning to "creature with a gaping mouth" doesn't it?

[biitchesbrew]

my thoughts on TCM: The Next Generation part2

[agirlnamedbone]

“The eyes on promotional posters and videocassette boxes are in the great majority of cases threatened, frightened eyes--commonly a woman’s eyes reaching in horror at a poised, bloody knife, an advancing shape, or something off-poster or off-box. ‘One of the most frequent and compelling images in the horror film repertoire,’ writes J.P. Telotte, ‘is that of the wide, staring eyes of some victim, expressing stark terror or disbelief and attesting to an ultimate threat to the human proposition.’ A standard moment in horror is one in which a person is caught by surprise--her vision assaulted--by the sight of things she does not want to see. Laurie in Halloween, for example, who looks into a closet only to see the dead body of her friend staring her in the face. And as Telotte points out, the effect is maximized by the reversal of the normal sequence in such a way that the reaction comes first. Over and over, horror presents us with scenarios in which assaultive gazing is not just thwarted and punished, but actually reversed in such a way that those who thought to penetrate end up themselves penetrated.”

--Carol J. Clover, from Men, Women and Chainsaws (1992)

[hiddenramen]

i oftentimes get frustrated with the way that people use the term "male gaze" online because one, i don't particularly love that essay even in its original context (which was as a lens to analyze film), and two, because it's often misconstrued to mean "anytime a woman is hot"

[devilsskettle]

i think some of the popularity that meta horror has garnered is a little bit disingenuous tbqh even though i do like some of the movies that have come out of the subgenre, people don’t realize that the foundation of the slasher genre was established in the 60s/70s and a lot of the 80s movies that have become so classic were already riffing off of the tropes established by those movies before full fledged meta took off. the idea to make friday the 13th was sparked by the commercial success of halloween. the original script for slumber party massacre was a parody of the genre and the movie retains much of that humor which is referential to past slashers by nature. + it intentionally uses typical slasher tropes around gender and sexuality to bring forward the concerns of teenage girls. is that not something that meta horror is frequently touted as doing? child’s play is like a slasher, “except —” which is what a lot of meta horror comedies do now (“slasher except it’s a possessed doll” is not that far off from “slasher except it’s freaky friday” and whatnot). this isn’t to say that scream isn’t foundational to what the slasher genre evolved into or that contemporary meta slashers aren’t doing something interesting but i also think they tend to lean towards cynicism towards the movies they’re deriving their themes from + they’re not even as different as they think they are from “classic” 80s movies that already are borrowing from classic slashers which in turn borrowed from even older horror (for example, in halloween, laurie is watching the thing from another world from the 50s which was adapted into the now classic john carpenter’s the thing in the 80s). and of course many of these older horror movies were adapted from literature which also inspired more literature. like the shelley/byron/polidori scary story writing contest is now legendary but also you don’t get the shining without the haunting of hill house (and you don’t get the haunting of hill house without turn of the screw, for example) and the shining is probably one of the most referenced movies by other media of all time. horror has always been an intertextual genre let’s stop pretending it didn’t become “self aware” until 1996