Some initial thoughts:

• The first chapter about slasher films was the most compelling. The analysis of gender roles was cockeyed enough to be novel without being so baroquely Freudian that I rolled my eyes.


• Clover's running concern with who the audience is identifying with could be expanded beyond the gender focus that she takes. Stories manipulate our sympathies, that's one of the things they do. (Iago is more interesting than Othello. We admire the Corleones even though we in the audience are not killers. Etc, etc.) It would be interesting to consider what sorts of manipulation are specific to horror beyond the gender identification stuff that Clover describes.


• The main scheme in the chapter on occult films—occult = mysterious = feminine = weird gooey things you go inside of—was more obvious than the Final Girl stuff, but no less true. Clover's innovation here seems to be in identifying an "occult film" subgenre, which is less clearly defined than the "slasher" subgenre.


• I'm sympathetic with Clover because she's clearly responding to a horror-movies-are-misogynist meme, but isn't simply trying to redeem the genre by moving it over into the "feminist" column. She's definitely not just a slumming academic.


• That said, I still skipped the end of the "Eye of Horror" chapter because it stuck me as largely being an intramural spat between Clover and Laura Mulvey for which I had insufficient context.


• I found the claim in the afterword that Thelma and Louise is a cleaned-up version of I Spit On Your Grave convincing. (Not that I've actually seen I Spit On Your Grave, but still.)


• An excellent book about the horror genre as a whole is Stephen King's Danse Macabre.

( )

One of the most exciting pieces of recent literary criticism if only because of her notion that the target audience of young males is vicariously identifying with the target girls. This reversal of expectations, and a subtle dig at some of the less dialectical frminist writing in her intro, makes it a seminal work. ( )

A bit tedious and academic and I'm not sure the conclusions are as far-reaching as I'd like them to be, but some good food for thought nonetheless. ( )