Ethan Robles
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) is not the best-known film of the Friday the 13th franchise. As the fourth installment, The Final Chapter seems comfortable with its formulaic construction and its embodiment of a clichéd slasher plot. We find Jason Voorhees murdered following the events of Friday the 13th Part III. He is transported to a local hospital, where he miraculously revives and begins making his journey back to Camp Crystal Lake. Near the infamous site, a divorcée, her children, and a group of unsuspecting teens are enjoying the summer days isolated in the wilderness. Their seclusion comes to an end when Jason arrives, having come home to continue his killing spree. Despite its simplicity, The Final Chapter is actually, I argue, one of the most daring of slasher films: it asks serious questions regarding the “Final Girl” of the horror genre.
The Friday the 13th franchise may be virtually synonymous with the slasher’s excesses, yet The Final Chapter offers an intriguing twist on the traditional slasher narrative. Instead of focusing on the Final Girl, The Final Chapter breaks form and gives us the first Final Boy. The film’s most complex character, Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman), offers an entirely new relationship between the survivor and the slasher villain—as well as entirely new representations of gender and sexuality in horror. Tommy Jarvis is the only character in the film who is able to halt Jason’s relentless killing, and his arc is particularly important because it parallels his sister’s, Trish Jarvis (Kimberly Beck), including her transformation into the Final Girl. By comparing these two characters, The Final Chapter discloses the fundamental differences between a Final Girl and a Final Boy and, more importantly, it illuminates the meanings of the Final Boy within the slasher genre.
Trish (Kimberley Beck) – the Final Girl
Before comparing Tommy and Trish, I want to define the Final Girl trope and its relation to the Friday the 13th franchise. Defining the term is significant, because the Final Girl is one of the few scholarly concepts that has broken into mainstream culture. From very tongue-in-cheek films like Scream (1999) and The Final Girls (2015) to Riley Sager’s novel, Final Girls (2017), the concept has accrued nuances and meanings the more it has been adapted. That’s not a bad thing. These adaptations invite conversation around the underlying themes of the slasher film and allow audiences outside of academia to see the richness in genre movies. However, understanding the Final Girl’s original definition is important, especially when examining the original trope’s evolution into the Final Boy.
The first iteration of the Final Girl came from Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. The book is known for the articulation of the Final Girl concept, but narrowing the scope of the work does a disservice to Clover’s scholarship. Men, Women, and Chain Saws is perhaps the first scholarly book to appreciate low-budget, shock cinema and ascribe meaning to a genre that was traditionally written off as low-brow. Clover is not the only scholar and writer to see meaning within low-budget horror film, but she may have been one of the first to understand the significance of horror cinema for academic scholarship. Considering how hard it is for in-depth, scholarly writing to move beyond the confines of the ivory tower, Clover’s work deserves more credit than simply for identifying the Final Girl. Nonetheless, it is the Final Girl that remains her principal legacy.
On the surface, the meaning of the Final Girl is evident. Clover writes that the Final Girl
“is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified. If her friends knew they were about to die only seconds before the event, the Final Girl lives with the knowledge for long minutes or hours. She alone looks death in the face, but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B). But in either case, from 1974 on, the survivor figure has been female.”[i]
The Final Girl, then, is the last one to face the killer and either escape or fight. Nuance arises from the Final Girl’s exposure to fear and violence. Unlike her murdered friends, the Final Girl is forced to “look death in the face” and to carry the burden of that look throughout large portions of the film. And despite the brush with death and the terror of being hunted, she is still able to escape or defeat the killer. The question, then, is why are the Final Girls the only ones who are able to survive? Clover’s answer is tied directly to gender and sexuality.
The Final Girl is not only the last survivor of the slasher; she also encompasses a shift away from the highly sexualized females that often end up as victims. To Clover, it is no coincidence that the Final Girl is usually virginal or, in some cases, portrayed as asexual. In her words, “The Final Girl is boyish…she is not fully feminine – not, in any case, feminine in the ways of her friends. Her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from the other girls and ally her, ironically, with the very boys she fears or rejects.”[ii] In calling the Final Girl sexually reluctant, intelligent, and capable, Clover signals her difference from other female horror film characters. If the Final Girl embodies these qualities, then the females that become victims cannot possess the same attributes. They are fundamentally opposed and this difference leads to their contrasting fates.
Friday the 13th, especially The Final Chapter, is rife with boys and girls who think only of sex, indulgence, excess, or transgression. They are the subject of horror film cliché, acting as fodder for shock and gore. Viewers are most definitely on the side of the Final Girl, invested in her capability, despite her consistent brushes with death and violence. Up until The Final Chapter, the Final Girl was always a girl. Perhaps she was less sexualized than the other females in the film. Perhaps she was portrayed as a tomboy or as androgynous, but the slasher never explicitly made these Final Girls into boys. It’s here that The Final Chapter moves away from form and asks the question: what would it mean to have a male survivor? As though forcing the audience to consider this question, The Final Chapter provides its viewers with both a Final Girl and a Final Boy.
Tommy and Trish Jarvis’s gender difference influences the various transformations that horror film protagonists must undergo in order to overcome the killer. Trish, our model Final Girl in this experiment, is largely what we would expect to see given Clover’s definition. Like Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) before her, Trish is coded as nonsexual. She does not dress in scandalous outfits or swoon over men. In the mornings, she jogs with her mother. In the evenings, she reads books. For the first half of the film, her only reference to relationships is a mention of the possibility of her parents reconciling their divorce. When asked to skinny dip with a bunch of teenagers, she responds, “No thanks. I think I’m overdressed.” Every facet of Trish’s characterization is designed to be in direct contrast to the sexuality of the other teenagers in the film. Trish checks every box of Clover’s definition, and, as horror fans, we can safely assume that she is our hero. The Final Chapter, however, has other plans.
Throughout the film, Tommy Jarvis is portrayed as Trish’s foil and is continually associated with monstrosity and sexuality. When Tommy first appears on screen, he wears a mask that is not dissimilar to that of Jason Voorhees.
Tommy’s monster mask illustrates his association with monstrosity
His interest in monstrosity is not unintentional. Tommy is a monster maker. His room is filled with masks and props that he created. At one point in the film, he brings Rob (whose sister was murdered by Jason and who is now hunting the killer) to his room to show off his many designs. Tommy’s interest in monstrosity and monster makeup has implications for the film’s plot, but it also contributes to one of the central differences between Final Girls and Final Boys. Tommy is allowed to associate with monstrosity throughout the film, while Trish is meant to fear monstrosity in order, ultimately, to defeat it. This factor isn’t the only fundamental difference between the siblings, however.
The Final Chapter is near comical in its brimming sexuality, and Tommy, a twelve-year-old boy, is no exception. Early in the film, there are two explicit references to Tommy’s sexuality. Upon witnessing the teens skinny dipping, Tommy is transfixed by their naked bodies. Unlike Trish and her hesitancy to participate in nudity, Tommy watches them avidly, and the camera focuses on the female bodies, mirroring his gaze. When driving away, he comments on the skinny dippers, saying, “Some pack of patootsies, huh?” In this interaction, his curiosity is rather bland. It is not surprising that a child nearing or entering puberty would have an emerging interest in sexuality. This moment feels somewhat innocent. However, things are a little different when Tommy is confronted with actual sex.
When he has an opportunity to witness sexual interaction, Tommy’s behavior presents animalistic qualities that starkly diverge from the attributes of Clover’s Final Girl. Tommy spots one of the teenage women from his window and, in a scene not unfamiliar to audiences, he watches her undress and embrace her boyfriend. As he witnesses the initial nudity, he leaps around on his bed, smashes his face into his pillow, and grunts. As the scene progresses and the boyfriend steps into the window frame, Tommy jumps around again, grunting, elated at what he is seeing. There is no mistaking that Tommy is sexually aroused by the scene. As though we needed more evidence, his mother enters his room during this episode and he hides his curiosity from her by feigning sleep. These spastic, animalistic movements are much different than the poised, uninterested sexuality of the Final Girl. While Trish is consistent in her avoidance of sexual interaction, Tommy fully embraces such desires—and he does so, moreover, without punishment from Jason.
The contrast between Trish and Tommy raises questions regarding their relation to the killer, Jason Voorhees. When the film is nearing its end, Trish is forced into the Final Girl position rather quickly and is exposed to the killer and the life-threatening violence that Clover describes. Trish is made to view corpses; she witnesses Rob’s murder; she is chased, beaten, and cornered. As we expect with the Final Girl, she is able to hurt the monster. She outsmarts Jason on multiple occasions, drives a blade deep into his hand, smashes a television over his head, and drives a hammer into his neck. Regardless of all this damage, she does not stop him. Indeed, it feels as though the Final Girl is about to fall victim to Jason, until Tommy steps in.
The confrontation between Tommy and Jason cements the Final Boy as fundamentally different from the Final Girl and a mirror image of the killer. The now-dead Rob left behind news articles regarding Jason. Tommy rifles through these clippings before the climax of the film. He learns Jason’s story and sees an artist’s rendering of Jason as a child. While Trish is being chased, harmed, and traumatized, Tommy is transforming. He cuts his hair, shaves his head, and applies makeup so that he resembles a young Jason.
Tommy’s monster mask illustrates his association with monstrosity
As Jason is attacking Trish, Tommy appears on the stairwell and reveals himself to be a carbon copy of the artist’s rendering. Once he notices the boy, Jason is immediately drawn to him. He stops attacking Trish and approaches his younger self. He is nonviolent, paused. This moment of recognition between Jason and Tommy saves the two siblings’ lives.
Tommy’s replication of Jason underlines the central differences between the Final Girl and the Final Boy. Trish and Tommy are both chased and hunted by Jason. They both face violence, and they both live through the massacre. Tommy differs, however, because he literally becomes the monster. Throughout the film, he is allowed to indulge in practices—in an attraction to both sexuality and monstrosity—that would have spelled doom for a Final Girl. These characteristics lead Tommy to the distinctive fate of the Final Boy: to survive the slasher film, the Final Boy must (exactly) mirror the killer. And this conversion is not only superficial. While uncontrollably hacking into Jason with a machete, Tommy screams, “Die! Die! Die! Die!” By killing Jason with such brutality (and Jason’s signature machete), Tommy not only looks like the killer, but he also becomes one.
The Final Chapter’s ending indicates that Tommy cannot return to normality following his encounter with Jason. Not only has his appearance changed, but his mental state is corrupted by his transformation. Having also survived, Trish asks to see her brother. Still clad in his Jason Voorhees makeup, Tommy embraces his sister. The film ends as Tommy stares into the camera, a deranged look in his eye, mirroring Jason’s dead, focused stare.
Tommy’s dead eye stare confirms his transformation into a killer
There is no doubt that the Final Girl is always fundamentally altered by a slasher film’s events. However, Tommy’s gaze indicates that he is irrevocably lost to his transformation. The Final Boy pays for his indulgences in a way that the Final Girl cannot. Indeed, Tommy eventually dons the hockey mask himself in The Final Chapter’s sequel, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985).
The differences between the Final Girl and the Final Boy exemplify the longstanding importance of binary gender to the slasher film. Indeed, the genre relies on dichotomized conceptions of masculinity and femininity. As Clover herself writes, the Final Girl is a girl precisely because “abject terror . . . is gendered feminine.”[iii] Likewise, the Final Boy relies heavily on the inherent violence that is coded masculine.[iv] Tommy’s engagement with monstrosity and his burgeoning sexuality feel “normal,” because viewers expect masculine subjects to be interested in monster movies and women’s bodies. This gender coding makes Tommy’s transformation into “monster” possible. The Final Boy continued to evolve and should certainly be studied further. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985) offers a Final Boy who is struggling with homosexuality. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) returns Tommy Doyle to the Halloween franchise and is explicit regarding the depths of his trauma.[v] Like the Final Girl before him, the Final Boy offers an opportunity to look closely at the implications of gender and sexuality within the horror film. Tommy Jarvis is only the first of many stories yet to unfold.
Notes:
[i] Clover, 35.
[ii] Clover, 40.
[iii] Clover, 51.
[iv] Clover does, of course, qualify the “femininity” of the Final Girl, who is able to adopt the “masculine” traits of seeing and effecting violence. But Clover nonetheless adheres to a binary system of gender in that she goes on to argue that, because she can see and use violence, the Final Girl is in fact “‘like a man’” (58). She is “masculine” albeit in a female body. Other scholars have critiqued Clover for her tendency to equate all the Final Girl’s strength, perceptiveness, and aggression to her “masculinity.” See Pinedo 82-84, who famously claims that Clover reads the Final Girl as a “male in drag” (82).
[v] The Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises are, perhaps, the common associates to the Friday the 13th series and are paired together to emphasize their relationship to the Slasher genre. However, there are more recent films that feature the Final Boy that deserve mention. Regarding Hostel (2005), Dawn Keetley proposed that Paxton (Jay Hernandez) becomes the Final Boy and, in doing so, allows male viewers to identify with abject terror that is normally associated with the Final Girl (Keetley). By focusing beyond the Slasher sub-genre, Keetley opens the conversation to differing horror films and allows us to view films like Saw (2004), Final Destination (2000), Get Out (2017) as continuing the Final Boy’s legacy.
Works Cited:
Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. Directed by Danny Steinmann, Paramount Pictures, 1985.
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. Directed by Joseph Zito, Paramount Pictures, 1984.
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Directed by Joe Chappelle, Miramax, 1995.
Keetley, Dawn. “The Final Girl, Pt. 4: The Hostel Films and Paxton as “Final Girl”.” Horror Homeroom, 21 Feb. 2016. <http://www.horrorhomeroom.com/final-girl-part-4/>.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. Directed by Jack Sholder, New Line Cinema, 1985.
Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.
