Revisiting the Final Girl Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards

Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (bio)
University of Barcelona

Stacy Rusnak (bio)
Georgia Gwinnett College

Autumn of 2017 marks thirty years since the publication of Carol J. Clover’s “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” The most enduring premise of this essay—which was originally included in the special issue Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy in the journal Representations and later re-published in an abridged version in Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992)—is Clover’s theorization of the Final Girl, a term that encompasses the common attributes of female survivor figures in slashers. As Clover famously argues, the Final Girl constitutes a powerful source of identification for the slasher’s (mostly) adolescent male audiences.¹ Through this concept Clover challenges the pervasive assumption that horror cinema is produced purely for misogynistic men in order to indulge their voyeuristic fantasies against women, advancing a radical rethinking of fundamental categories in Film Studies such as the gaze, identification, and spectatorial pleasures.

The remarkably mobile and infinitely interpretable figure of the Final Girl has evolved into an important concept for theoretical work on film, gender, and sexuality by scholars including Jack Halberstam, Isabel Pinedo, and Kathleen Rowe Karlyn. Despite its unquestionable influence on horror studies and on the directions often taken in this field in the intervening years, Clover’s model has been widely critiqued in academia. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Clover’s formulation has been the characterization of the Final Girl as a “male in drag” (216), which refers to her presumed masculine aggression and phallic agency. One of the central arguments in “Her Body, Himself”—and one that has led to many misconceptions that continue to surround Clover’s theory today—is that the Final Girl is gender non-normative or, in Clover’s words, “boyish” (204): “Just as the killer is not fully masculine, she is not fully feminine…. Her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from the other girls” (204). In fact, as Clover clarifies at some point, the Final Girl is not even a girl, but an “agreed-upon-fiction” (214); she merely stands-in for male desires, a subject for a man to identify with, to use “as a vehicle for his own sadomasochistic fantasies,” “an act of perhaps timeless dishonesty” (214). Significantly, and against the comprehension of the Final Girl as a strong, feminist heroine who turns the knife on the killer—an interpretative framework that has largely determined the reception of “Her Body, Himself”—Clover states: “to applaud the Final Girl as a feminist development … is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking” (214).²

Another reading strategy that has persisted in the contemporary circulation of Clover’s theory—that the very raison d’etre of the masculinized Final Girl is to become a source of identification for teenage males—was challenged by Barbara Creed as early as the 1990s in her book The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Creed’s contribution to these debates largely pivots on her insights into the “monstrous feminine,” a concept that has turned out to be equally groundbreaking and long-standing in horror criticism. According to Creed, “the avenging heroine of the slasher film is not the Freudian phallic woman whose image is designed to allay castration anxiety … but the deadly femme castratrice” (emphasis in original, 127). The castrating woman in 1970s horror films, such as the rape-revenge I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) and the psychotic slasher Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973), points not so much to male fantasies of being subjected to feminine sensations, but to men’s fear of (and, importantly, ambiguous fascination with) monstrous women. Like Clover, however, Creed is cautious of reading these images as immediately progressive: “I am not arguing that simply because the monstrous-feminine is constructed as an active rather than passive figure that this image is ‘feminist’ or ‘liberated’. The presence of the monstrous-feminine in the popular horror film speaks to us more about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity” (7). Both scholars agree, then, that horror cinema is about the male psyche and male desire, and does not reveal much about the female experience of watching terror.

This particular premise has been revised by Jack Halberstam in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. According to Halberstam, although the psychoanalytic tools adopted by Clover and Creed have resulted in highly productive ways of approaching horror films, especially as far as notions of fear and desire are concerned, “fear and monstrosity are historically specific forms rather than psychological universals” (24). In his provocative analysis of the cult splatter films, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Tobe Hooper, 1986), Halberstam reads Stretch, the tomboy Final Girl of the second film, as a representation of the monstrous gender—or gender that splatters—that exceeds human categories, transforming into “something messier than male or female” (143). Pointing to the queer tendency of horror film in general—its capacity “to reconfigure gender not simply through inversion, but by literally creating new categories” (139)—Halberstam argues that the Final Girl’s femininity is recycled and transformed in new gender regimes. Thus, in his queer reassessment of the slasher film, Halberstam challenges Clover’s notion of the Final Girl as “boyish,” arguing that this approach “remains caught in a gender lock” (143): it re-establishes normative gender positions in relation to fear and violence, leaving little space for addressing identification between female audiences and the aggressor.

The assumption that the Final Girl operates as a masculinized point of identification for a young male viewer has been repeatedly questioned in scholarly writings on horror media. However, while Halberstam reads the slasher storyline as the process of “becoming-monstrous”—”enabling and activating monstrosity as opposed to stamping it out” (143)—other scholars seem to reclaim the Final Girl mainly as a figure of female agency and a potential source of female viewing pleasures. In Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (1997), for instance, Isabel Pinedo points to the productive possibilities of such pleasures: “Dancing through the minefield of the contemporary horror film, with its bloody display of the all-too-often female body in bits and pieces, is fraught with danger for women. But pleasure shares the field with danger” (69). Although their approaches differ in many ways, Pinedo coincides with Halberstam in her view that an ongoing overemphasis on the masculinization of female characters in horror films runs the risk of inscribing the genre within “a male-dominated discourse where power is coded as masculine, even when embodied in biological females” (81–2).

This revisiting of the Final Girl does not happen in a vacuum and should be considered as part of wider trends in feminist horror scholarship, which reclaims the horror genre for female viewing pleasures, usually under the assumption that it provides its viewers an aesthetic access to violence and rage, released in a previously assumed male-orientated form (Rowe Karlyn 2011, Kaplan 2012, Paszkiewicz 2018). Scholars such as Rhona J. Berenstein (1996) and Brigid Cherry (2002) offer evidence that women have always enjoyed horror, even in earlier days. In her examination of the marketing and reception of Hollywood horror films produced in the 1930s, Berenstein observes that “male and female spectators were offered a range of publicity, exhibition, and critical discourses that invited them alternately to act in line with traditional gender mores and to act out unconventional gender roles” (85). For example, classical Hollywood monsters provided spaces where female audiences could project fantasies of agency.³ Cherry, in turn, has addressed female horror fans who “refuse to refuse to look,” similarly challenging assumptions about horror film spectatorship with empirical research on processes and modes of consumption. Notably, her study references an earlier piece by Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks” (1983/2002), yet another key text in feminist horror scholarship. Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s (1975) theory of the male gaze in narrative cinema, Williams suggests that horror is not a genre that can be enjoyed by women. Just as classical narrative cinema reproduces the structure of the active male gaze and the quality of the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of women, in horror film the male spectator is said to identify with the active subject of narration, exercising a controlling look, while women are denied this look or are punished for exercising it (“When the Woman Looks” 62). When the woman looks, both as a character within the film and as a viewer in the audience, she invariably “is punished … by narrative processes that transform curiosity and desire into masochistic fantasy” (“When the Woman Looks” 61). Because horror cinema tends to represent women as passive victims (of the male gaze), the presumed female behavior when watching these films is that of a passive spectator who refuses to look.⁴

Such assumptions were radically questioned in the mid-1990s, partly because of the broad circulation of Clover’s Final Girl as a theoretical concept that enabled such revisions, and partly because of the appearance of a new slasher formula, alongside the growing visibility of female fans. As Alexandra West argues in her study of this new slasher cycle, films like Scream (Wes Craven, 1996), I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie, 1997), Scream 2 (Wes Craven, 1997), I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (Danny Cannon, 1998), Urban Legend (Jamie Blanks, 1998), Halloween: H20 (Steve Miner, 1998), Scream 3 (Wes Craven, 2000), and Cherry Falls (Geoffrey Wright, 2000) differ significantly from what came before: “The Final Girls of this cycle were the products of third wave feminism, 90s alternative culture and the more mainstream ‘Girl Power’ which allowed the focus to shift to the female protagonist, her friends and their survival” (West). All of these examples tap into what can be considered “a female experience” or, as Kathleen Rowe Karlyn calls it in her influential analysis of the Scream trilogy and its Final Girl, Sidney, “issues of particular concern for teen girls: 1) sexuality and virginity; 2) adult femininity and its relation to agency and power; 3) identity as it is shaped by the narratives of popular culture” (101–2).⁵

In addition to addressing the changes within the slasher form, considerable scholarship on the Final Girl has been devoted to the problems of definition. The most frequently quoted critiques, by Richard Nowell (2011) and Janet Staiger (2015), stress that the number of films investigated by Clover in her formulation of the Final Girl trope is too small to generalize across the subgenre. Interestingly, Nowell questions Clover’s assertion that the 1970s and 1980s slasher film was mainly consumed by young male viewers. He notes that several economic factors during the first slasher cycle already pointed to the heroic Final Girl as “being mobilized to appeal to a female youth” (128) in order to expand the potential audience and enhance box office results.⁶ Nowell suggests that Clover’s model of the Final Girl as boyish, which anchored her notion of the male viewer playing out sadistic and masochistic fantasies, fails to address the many Final Girl characters who exhibited traditionally coded feminine traits and looked glamorous (rather than “boyish”) on screen. In a similar vein, Staiger points out that Clover’s corpus of films is too narrow and selective. She expands her study to thirty-one films, and from this sample deduces that instead of being a Final Girl, the woman in slashers is more likely to be placed in the position of a “Final Victim.” Moreover, unlike in Clover’s definition of the Final Girl, this character is not necessarily masculine, a virgin, or disinterested in having sex: “Women are usually the victims and the heroines, but they are not always ‘Final Girls’ in the strong sense that Clover implies” (Staiger 222). An additional revision comes from Jeremy Maron (2015), who urges a shift away from thinking about the Final Girl as a specifically gendered female character, noting the presence of male characters in this structural position. He prefers the term “Final Subject” because it is more gender inclusive and appropriate in films where the Final Girl is identifiably gendered male, as in the case of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985) and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Joseph Zito, 1984).

These critiques raise questions about the usefulness of Clover’s term in contemporary thinking about horror film. Although frequently dismissed as promoting a universalizing and monolithic notion of the Final Girl and for limiting itself to psychoanalytic theories of the subject, Clover’s approach has been, in fact, extremely productive in interrogating the ways in which feminist film theory (and film theory in general) understand gendered spectatorship. Clover’s take on malleable gender identity and “painful seeing” has opened up questions not only about cross-spectatorial identification and the indeterminacy of gender itself—notably in recognizing the fluidity of our responses to screen fictions and that, as Pam Cook (2012) suggests, we go to the movies to “experience the thrill of reinventing [ourselves] rather than simply having [our] social identities or positions bolstered” (33)—but also about an embodied mode of film viewing that further undoes the binary sexuality (see, for example, Powell 2005 and Rizzo 2012), questions that resonate with the recent preoccupation of film theory with cinematic affect, materiality, and film experience more broadly.

Three decades later, Clover’s work continues to be a significant reference in scholarly writing on the horror genre. It has also extended beyond the academic realm into popular culture. As Shelley Cobb and Yvonne Tasker observe (2016), Clover’s key term—along with other concepts such as Mulvey’s “the gaze” and “to-be-looked-at-ness,” or Creed’s “monstrous feminine”—found wider application in new online media and journalism, regularly appearing in feminist magazines including Jezebel, Bitch, Bust, and Feministing: “while popular feminist criticism is not in the business of providing in-depth readings of individual texts, criticism of patriarchal cinema and media culture is now widely generated by journalists and other cultural commentators who use feminist critical tools to question the circulation of sexist images and gendered value systems.” The widespread adoption of Clover’s term in popular culture is attested to by an increasing visibility of the Final Girl across a variety of media: the 2015 films Final Girl (Tyler Shields) and The Final Girls (Todd Strauss-Schulson); TV’s popular series Scream Queens, which concluded its first season with a finale titled “The Final Girl(s)” (Brad Falchuk, 2015); Clock Tower video games, whose main character, Jennifer, is crafted to be a Final Girl; Lolo’s “No Time For Lonely” lyrics, again with explicit references to the character; and Riley Sager’s novel Final Girls (2017), which plays on horror movie themes from Scream, among many others. These contemporary reformulations of the Final Girl in film, TV, fan blogs, and literature confirm the pervasiveness and flexibility of the trope, as well as the need to expand discussion of Clover’s framework beyond the traditional ruminations of the slasher subgenre that have been so central to most of research to date. While the Final Girl continues to materialize in slasher remakes, usually in a highly self-conscious way, it also circulates in other genres, such as dystopian Young Adult literature or science-fiction graphic novels, that refocus critical attention on the trope as a cross-media phenomenon (see Paszkiewicz and Rusnak, forthcoming).⁷

On the other hand, the most recent revisions of the slasher formula, such as the Oscar-nominated Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017), demonstrate that discourses and ideologies of racialized identities provide even more opportunities for renewal and reinvention. Such a reinterpretation of the Final Girl model provokes questions about the racialized “Final Boy,” the oppositional gaze and black spectatorship (hooks 1992), and the capacity of horror film to mediate contemporary issues of race and racism, which are experienced, negotiated, and challenged by an audience more diverse than the white male viewership Clover described as “the majority audience” (209) for the slasher genre. The need for such analysis is particularly pressing because critical race theory has generally been underrepresented in reflections on the Final Girl. As Brigid Cherry (2009) reminds us in her study of horror cinema, “any one factor of identity cannot be analyzed without considering others: gendered identities can be strongly linked to class or racial identity, for example, and the one cannot be discussed without considering the other” (176).

While race in horror has been examined to some extent, mostly in relation to black male viewers, very little work has been done to address black female characters (and viewers) in slasher cinema even in feminist studies.⁸ Another recent film, Breaking In (James McTeigue, 2018), which alters Clover’s Final Girl model by placing a middle-class black mother at its core as a “Final Woman,” opens up a space where such issues can be reconsidered, for example by questioning the stereotypes associated with the strong black woman, traditionally represented as driven by either matriarchal or sexual instincts (Brooks 464, 467). Both Get Out and Breaking In push the boundaries of the Final Girl trope, urging us to rethink the intersections of gender, sexuality and race in contemporary horror film.

Given the abundance of onscreen material that has been produced since the beginning of the twenty-first century, it seems that the Final Girl, in all her guises and mutations, has yet to be accorded critical attention. This is not to suggest either an uncritical celebration of the trope, or the inevitable subversion of gender, sexual, or racial ideologies by horror’s inherent self-reinventing reflexivity. Rather, we want to emphasize the figure’s continuous inflections, and its status as a living trope, even though it frequently relies on older traditions and conventions. Therefore, our focus in this issue, on Revisiting the Final Girl, presents an engagement with two key questions: How does the contemporary horror film press us to reconsider Clover’s term of thirty years ago? And how can early manifestations of the Final Girl trope help us redefine or expand its parameters as a theoretical concept? In the process, we do not wish to discard old questions and knowledge, but to rethink, reconfigure, and revisit what is most useful from the past. What the Final Girl represents historically is a new way of seeing and thinking about identification, the gaze, and spectatorship; this idea, together with a sense of dialogue between past and present—looking backwards and looking forwards—was crucial for our purposes. We envision this temporality not as singular or evolutionary, but rather as a nonlinear, multidirectional flow of ideas that allows for a reconsideration of both our previous understandings of Clover’s term and its contemporary permutations and reworkings.

These issues are interrogated in the two essays that compose our dossier: Murray Leeder’s “X-Ray, the Final Woman, and the Medical Slasher Film,” which productively employs Clover’s theory to rewrite the slasher history, broadening the archive of films that articulate the Final Girl paradigm, and Lucia Palmer’s “The Final Girl at the US-Mexico Border: The Politics of Saving and Surviving in Undocumented (2010),” which points to present and future directions in the horror genre—notably by acknowledging the intersectionality of the Final Girl and the current popularity of torture porn, a form that has evolved from earlier cycles of the slasher. Although they build on Clover’s work, insisting on the importance of her intervention in horror studies, the two essays offer a useful exploration of her main tenets, both in terms of the Final Girl and the slasher form.

Palmer demonstrates that, while torture porn films deviate from the slasher subgenre in important ways, they certainly inherit the slasher’s conventions of sexualized violence and the spectacular display of the mutilation of women’s bodies. In her insightful analysis of Undocumented (Chris Peckover, 2010), with its longest and most poignant scene involving the slow dismemberment of a Mexican woman’s body, Palmer postulates that these generic fluctuations should be read in the context of post-9/11 anxieties surrounding the penetration of national borders and the anti-immigration rhetoric that has gained currency in an increasingly xenophobic political climate. If, as Clover argued, the 1970s and 1980s slashers expressed the shifting sexual attitudes of their time and the fears about the instability of the normal, then how are such anxieties manifest in the twenty-first century?⁹ Situating Undocumented within the context of ever more visible nativist sentiments in the United States makes it possible to interrogate not only the representation of women—whether as victim or as Final Girl—but also to ask how the conjunction. of white masculinity and white supremacy operates “when manifested as a monstrous psychokiller on the border, motivated less by a psycho-sexual rage than by a psycho-nativist fury.”

Focusing on the intersections between gender, race, class, and nationality (which, as previously mentioned, are almost unattended in the now-voluminous scholarship on the slasher film), Palmer offers new insights into Clover’s cinematic gaze, structures of identification, and painful seeing. As Palmer rightly observes, even though there are notable exceptions that challenge the normativity of whiteness embedded in the trope of the Final Girl, it “remains relatively unexamined in terms of intersectional identity formations and socio-political struggles.” The protagonist of the film, Liz, a level-headed female character who uses her intelligence to negotiate with, and eventually escape from, the white psychokillers who kidnap her and her friends from her filming crew as they travel across the US-Mexico border, proves to be yet another incarnation of a white, middle-class Final Girl. Following Kinitra D. Brooks’s critique of the predominantly binary treatment of gender relations in horror scholarship, Palmer addresses ways in which the complex layers of identification structured in the film around the Final Girl, her friends, and the abject Mexican victims rely on racial hierarchies and shows that they unequivocally reaffirm whiteness as the norm for female empowerment. Palmer contrasts the film’s camerawork with the common use of a subjective camera in earlier slashers that often aligns the viewer with the point-of-view of the killer, to argue that the use of a documentary-style aesthetic in Undocumented—which clearly evokes films such as The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) and Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008)—allows the audience to watch the atrocities and the pain of the immigrants through the perspective of the crew members. This, together with Liz’s “investigative gaze” that questions, if only subtly, the racialized, classed, and national power relations, seems to confirm the film’s progressive stance.. However, Palmer’s careful analysis of the structures of the gaze and hierarchies of identification reveals that whiteness is rendered a precondition for challenging the racist and patriarchal status quo, both in the film and in Clover’s Final Girl model, while women of color continue to be reduced to signs of abjection in the slasher film, a facet of the genre in need of critical attention.

Leeder, on the other hand, argues that there is continued value in exploring the Final Girl in early slasher films, underscoring its surprising pervasiveness in marginal texts that are often overlooked as part of the first slasher cycle because they do not fit neatly within Clover’s paradigm. In particular, Leeder examines how Boaz Davidson’s 1981 film X-Ray—never discussed by Clover or other early thinkers on the slasher films—both belongs to and does not belong to the Final Girl model, and addresses these findings by extending the conceptual frameworks offered by previous scholarship and by engaging with debates on early “keyhole” films and pornography, medical horror, and the medical gaze in a wider sense. For instance, his analysis shows that the film fuses the killer’s sadistic voyeuristic gaze with a Foucauldian medical gaze, which reveals anxieties about spaces and practitioners of masculine medicine as they relate to the surveillance of women’s bodies. Such a revelation points to deeply embedded hegemonic discourses not usually associated with the slasher subgenre; the film’s appropriation of different kinds of gazes enriches our understanding of the Final Girl, while bringing to light highly significant issues of power and agency within medical discourses on female sexuality.

In his evocative reading of the film’s interplay between the doctor’s “assaultive male gaze” upon the female body, the protagonist’s “reactive gaze,” which positions her as the object to be “looked at,” and her brief “counter gaze” when she tentatively scrutinizes the medical gaze of the doctors, Leeder proposes that the processes of identity construction vis-à-vis the power of looking have always already been more complicated than Clover’s Final Girl model implies. Furthermore, he observes that the X-Ray‘s Final Girl—the surviving female character—is, in fact, a middle-aged “Final Woman,” and not the typical teenager of the slasher film. What Leeder’s study of X-Ray demonstrates is that there is still room to consider other slashers not included in the Final Girl paradigm and that these films might help us to rethink the definition of the trope as outlined by Clover in her original essay.

In her later work, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Clover claimed that a strong “case could be made for horror’s being, intentionally or unintentionally, the most self-reflexive of cinematic genres” (168) due to its obsessive focus on eyes and looking. Interestingly, both articles published in this issue offer approaches that broaden Clover’s theory beyond a psychoanalytic framework, but they do return to one of its key terms: the question of the gaze. Leeder shows that the gazes in slasher films can be attached not only to the killer and his intended victim, but also to the space of the hospital and its technologies; Palmer, in turn, underscores the complex structures of looking and hierarchies of film identification in Undocumented to bring light to intersectional identity formation and the normative positioning of the Final Girl. These two contributions to scholarship on the Final Girl demonstrate the ongoing usefulness of Clover’s concept and its surprising pervasiveness across the last thirty years, in both academic criticism and popular culture. It is our hope to invigorate the debate within Film Studies about the relationship between horror, the gaze, and identification, as well as highlight the rich and diverse facets of the Final Girl trope.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Peter Marra, whose organization of an SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) panel on the Final Girl led us to the production of this special issue. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers at Postmodern Culture for their useful insights on the essays.

Footnotes

1. In her new preface to the 2015 edition of Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Clover offers an insightful reflection on the discursive circulation of the trope, arguing that, in the course of history, the Final Girl seems to have “hijacked” the later debates on slasher media, eclipsing other figures and issues discussed in the book—such as the Final Girl’s victim-hero status, with an emphasis on “victim.”

2. Klaus Rieser, still in 2001, argues against the Final Girl as a potentially feminist figure. He suggests that scholars who have followed Clover’s model and reconsidered the Final Girl as a sign of female agency overestimate the progressiveness of the paradigm. For Rieser, the moments in slasher films when male viewers alter their identification towards the Final Girl and become “feminized” function merely as “‘playful’ intrusions into the gender field” (390) that fail to disrupt the hegemonic, heterosexist order.

3. Harry Benshoff (1997) makes similar claims in reference to queer audiences.

4. In a 2001 reflection on her earlier work, entitled “When Women Look: A Sequel,” Williams does acknowledge that the “Mulveyan paradigm” could not account for “the pleasures, however problematic, women viewers may take in this genre” and that women could learn “how to look” at horror in subversive ways.

5. While taking into consideration this revisionist impulse that turns to the female viewer, recent scholarship on gender and horror film seems more critical of understandings of the Final Girl through fantasies à la “Girl Power.” Much as it is potentially reductive to read the Final Girl in terms of a phallic woman, an unconditional exaltation of the Final Girl as a feminist subversion and/or agent of violence generates doubts about the extent to which these images can be considered empowering (see Paszkiewicz and Rusnak, forthcoming).

6. Between mid-1977 and the spring of the following year, profit margins significantly decreased for adult-centered horror films. In an attempt to increase ticket sales, the industry began targeting female youth as a cost-effective solution (Nowell 128).

7. As Ryan Lizardi argues in his study of the contemporary slasher remake, “the horror film genre has fully embraced this cinematic trend to remake, or re-imagine, its past.” It is significant, he argues, that “these remakes mostly stem from a particular period of slasher horror films, the 1970s through the early 1980s,” the era which “has been theorized heavily for its ideological issues with gender and political ambivalence” (114).

8. See Isabel Pinedo, Robin Wood, Robin R. Means Coleman, and Harry M. Benshoff on race and the horror film.

9. As Anthony Hayt has recently argued in his study of contemporary slasher remakes, “since 9/11, a common trend in horror film criticism has been to focus on the genre as a way of understanding and processing the trauma of the terrorist attacks that forever changed the cultural landscape of America, and of the world” (131). For Hayt, this approach frequently downplays gender, and he interprets it as evidence of “the misogyny of American culture at large, and of the ‘post-feminist’ era specifically, [which materializes itself in] making moves to discount the importance of upholding the vigilance of gender-based political struggle in favour of more ‘important’ political causes” (131–2). In this light, it is interesting to observe how the trauma motif is closely intertwined with gender, racial, and sexual politics in Palmer’s piece.

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