Carol J. Clover

Carol Jeanne Clover, born July 31, 1940, in Visalia, California, is an American scholar who has spent her career at the University of California, Berkeley as a professor of medieval studies and American film. Her research bridges two seemingly distant fields, early Northern European literature and modern horror cinema, and she is best known outside academic circles for her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, which introduced the widely cited concept of the final girl to describe the surviving female protagonist common to slasher films. That idea reshaped both scholarly and popular understanding of gender roles in horror. Clover has also appeared as an interviewed expert in documentary treatments of the genre, including the film S&Man, screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006.