Gender In The Slasher Film - Carol Clover

L I N K :
  http://www.blue-sunshine.com/tl_files/images/Week4-Clover-HerBodyHimself.pdf

During my research I stumbled across Carol Clover's name numerous times, She is a feminist theorist who specialises in talking about Women's Representation in Horror Films - specifically Slasher Films. 

This article is important to what I'm writing about because it tackles Horror Film Directors attitudes to women as well as 

Q U O T E S from this article (unsorted) 

Where pornography (the argument goes) resolves that lack through a process of fetishization that allows a breast or leg or whole body to stand in for the missing member, the slasher film resolves it either through eliminating the woman (earlier victims) or reconstituting her as masculine (Final Girl)

Angry displays of force may belong to the male, but crying, cowering, screaming, fainting, trembling, begging for mercy belong to the female

 "If the killer has over time been variously figured as shark, fog, gorilla, birds, and slime, the victim is eternally and prototypically the damsel"

As slasher director Dario Argento puts it, “I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or a man.”  - -         2 As quoted in William Schoell, Stay Out of the Shower (New York, 1985), 56.

 Q u o t e s   r e l e v a n t  t o   t e x t s 

 To applaud the Final Girl as a feminist development, as some reviews of Aliens have done with Ripley, is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking.18 She is simply an agreed upon fiction, and the male viewer’s use of her as a vehicle for his own sadomasochistic fantasies an act of perhaps timeless dishonesty

Q u o t e s  a b o u t  F e m a l e  S t r e n g t h  i n  h o r r o r  f i l m s (within the article) 

 At the moment that the Final Girl becomes her own savior, she becomes a hero; and the moment that she becomes a hero is the moment that the male viewer gives up the last pretense of male identification


indeed, would-be rescuers are not infrequently blown away for their efforts, leaving the girl to fight her own fight. Policemen, fathers, and sheriffs appear only long enough to demonstrate risible incomprehension and incompetence

(about The Final Girl) We understand immediately from the attention paid it that hers is the main story line. She is intelligent, watchful, level-headed; the first character to sense something amiss and the only one to deduce from the accumulating evidence the patterns and extent of the threat; the only one, in other words, whose perspective approaches our own privileged understanding of the situation

 It is the male killer’s tragedy that his incipient femininity is not reversed but completed (castration) and the Final Girl’s victory that her incipient masculinity is not thwarted but realized (phallicization).

The gender of the Final Girl is likewise compromised from the outset by her masculine interests, her inevitable sexual reluctance (penetration, it seems, constructs the female), her apartness from other girls, sometimes her name. At the level of the cinematic apparatus, her unfemininity is signaled clearly by her exercise of the “active investigating gaze” normally reserved for males and hideously punished in females when they assume it themselves; tentatively at first and then aggressively; the Final Girl looks for the killer, even tracking him to his forest hut or his underground labyrinth, and then at him, therewith bringing him, often for the first time, into our vision as well.14 When, in the final scene, she stops screaming, looks at the killer, and reaches for the knife (sledge hammer, scalpel, gun, machete, hanger, knitting needle, chainsaw), she addresses the killer on his own terms. To the critics’ objection that Halloween in effect punished female sexuality, director John Carpenter responded: They [the critics] completely missed the boat there, I think. Because if you turn it around, the one girl who is the most sexually uptight just keeps stabbing this guy with a long knife. She’s the most sexually frustrated. She’s the one that killed him. Not because she’s a virgin, but because all that repressed energy starts coming out. She uses all those phallic symbols on the guy. . . . She and the killer have a certain link: sexual repression.

-- 14 “The woman’s exercise of an active investigating gaze can only be simultaneous with her own victimization. The place of her specularization is transformed into the locus of a process of seeing designed to unveil an aggression against itself”; Mary Ann Doane, “The ‘Woman’s Film,’” in Re-Vision, 72.

-- 15 John Carpenter interviewed by Todd McCarthy, “Trick and Treat,” Film Comment 16 (1980): 23–24



Q u o t e s   a b o u t   c a m e r a p o i n t s  w i t h i n  t h e  a r t i c l e 

E. Ann Kaplan sums it up: “Within the film text itself, men gaze at women, who become objects of the gaze; the spectator, in turn, is made to identify with this male gaze, and to objectify the women on the screen; and the camera’s original ‘gaze’ comes into play in the very act of filming
-- 6 E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (London, 1983), 15. The discussion of the gendered “gaze” is lively and extensive. See above all Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975): 6–18; reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, 3rd edn. (New York, 1985), 803–16; also Christine Gledhill, “Recent Developments in Feminist Criticism,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies (1978); reprinted in Mast and Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism, 817–45.

Thus some critics have wondered whether the female viewer, faced with the screen image of a masochistic/narcissistic female, might not rather elect to “betray her sex and identify with the masculine point of view.”5
 -- 5 Silvia Bovenschen, “Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?” New German Critique 10 (1977): 114. See also Mary Ann Doane, “Misrecognition and Identity,” Cine-Tracts 11 (1980): 25–32.)

An analysis of the camerawork bears this out. Much is made of the use of the I-camera to represent the killer’s point of view.

let us for the moment accept the equation point of view = identification

 if, during the film’s course, we shifted our sympathies back and forth, and dealt them out to other characters along the way, we belong in the end to the Final Girl; there is no alternative