![]() ![]() ![]() Professor Clover also goes to great lengths on how gender and body identification is constantly in flux in horror films, especially within the slasher genre. This survivor becomes the main focus of the film and becomes the heroine when she saves herself like Sally in Texas Chainsaw Massacre or dispatches her killers like Stretch in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. The final girl comes into play when all of the men fail to save the woman and she becomes the sole survivor. Clover states that, “the preferred weapons of the killers can be knives, hammers, ice picks, hypodermic needles, red hot pokers, pitchforks and the like.” These weapons, according to Clover, “are personal extensions of the body that bring attack and attacker into primitive, animalistic embrace.” With these sexually confused killers, their instruments of murder are most of the time phallic in nature, and the varieties of these tools are vast. ![]() The killers themselves often times have sexual confusion, such as Norman Bates in Psycho, the transvestite slasher in Dressed to Kill, and Chop Top and Leatherface In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In chapter one, entitled “Her Body, Himself”, Professor Clover introduces us to “The Final Girl” as most of the killer’s victims are women. Sandwiched between a foreword and an afterward are four chapters of insightful criticism of horror films. ![]()
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