Melissa C. Macero
Grady Hendrix’s recent novel, The Final Girl Support Group (2021) begins where most slasher films end: with the female sole survivor of a mass murder. These so-called “Final Girls” meet monthly with Dr. Carol Elliott to cope with the trauma and unwanted though fleeting fame of survival, as well as the constant fear that someone will try to test 
their Final Girl status. And then someone does, as Final Girls begin to be hunted and killed. Carol Clover coined the term “Final Girl” in 1987 and defines her as not only the sole survivor at the end of the film, but also as someone who fights back against and/or kills the male villain. This definition is carried over into Hendrix’s novel, with the added caveat that to be a Final Girl you must not only be the sole survivor once, but twice because “they always come back” (43). Yet, the novel’s protagonist, Lynnette Tarkington, is not a “real” Final Girl. Instead, she is a “not-quite-final-girl” (163) because while the “other ones in group fought back and killed their monsters” (164), she did not. The Final Girl Support Group, then, appears to almost immediately undermine its own concept by highlighting Lynnette’s liminal status as a Final Girl. If the point of Hendrix’s novel is to bring the slasher film and its most well-known trope from the screen to the page by telling us what happens to these Final Girls after the credits roll on their respective films, then why tell the story from the first-person point of view of someone who doesn’t quite fit the definition?
While Lynnette did survive two brutal and deadly attacks, she never fought back, making her “more of an unfinished victim than a real Final Girl” (234). Rather than save herself through active means, she played dead: “I just hung on those antlers like a piece of meat. I just lay there on the linoleum getting my skull pulped. I didn’t save anyone. Garrett P. Cannon saved me ” (164). During her first attack, she watched her family get slaughtered by one of the Walker brothers as she hung impaled from a mounted deer head. During her second attack, she accepted defeat and waited to die as the other Walker brother beat her with a hammer. She survived both attacks, but not through her own actions. Rather, she was saved by Garrett P. Cannon, the local sheriff whom she would later marry—and then divorce. Lynette’s passivity, then, is what separates her from the other Final Girls, all of whom are “blooded” (264), in that they had to kill to survive. The only blood on Lynette, though, is her own.
This distinction between “real” and “not-quite” Final Girl is at the heart of the novel and, I argue, is the main vehicle through which Hendrix attempts to redefine the Final Girl trope. Clover argues that the Final Girl’s journey from victim to hero is also a process of regendering this character from female to male—or at least less female. This regendering primarily takes place once the Final Girl fights back against her attacker:
The Final Girl (1) undergoes agonizing trials, and (2) virtually or actually destroys the antagonist and saves herself. By the lights of folk tradition, she is not a heroine, for whom phase 1 consists in being saved by someone else, but a hero, who rises to the occasion and defeats the adversary with his own wit and hands (59).
In other words, by saving herself, she becomes a male hero, as opposed to a passive female heroine. Clover’s definition of heroine here, of course, is not the predominant one today. Her version is very much rooted in folk and fairy tales: Think damsel in distress, as opposed to warrior princess. The Final Girl is closer to the warrior as we near the end of her film, but Clover argues that this transformation from victim to hero is tethered to the identification inherent in the “male gaze” of cinema, and in particular horror cinema, which is mainly geared toward adolescent males. In order for these males—who for the first part of the film have identified with the male killer—to identify with the Final Girl as she turns the tables on the killer, she must be regendered as male through a subsumption of the cinematic gaze and unmistakably phallic weapons. For Clover, then, this ostensible symbol of girl power is not as feminist as she may first appear.
While there have been scholarly disagreements about the primacy of the male audience to horror films, it is evident that this view of horror, and in particular the slasher, is one with which Hendrix seeks to engage.[1] This engagement is most evident in the “excerpt” included in the novel from a fictitious critical reading of the “Final Girl film”: “The so-called slasher or Final Girl movie is a meat grinder with producers and studio chiefs on one end, turning the crank, and slavering male fans on the other end, lapping up their output of violent sexual fantasies” (37). This analysis quite pointedly argues that the slasher’s audience is predominately male and that these males to a certain extent embody the subject position of the killer through their shared “violent sexual fantasies.” In Hendrix’s novel, slasher films—in the world of the novel, films on true events—are met with similar criticisms of being sexist and exploitative. This fictitious critic goes on to highlight the “stinking female corpse” that is overlooked by audience and production studios alike in favor of these fantasies that are orchestrated and subsequently enjoyed by men (37). Through this critic, the novel is underscoring the male-driven nature of slasher films. The novel itself, however, is presented as an alternative to this formula, as the Final Girl—even a not-quite-one like Lynette—is able to tell her own story. Consequently, the violence that is usually at the center of the slasher is pushed to the periphery of the novel and largely contained in flashbacks and its concluding chapters. There are also no drawn-out and noticeably sexualized female (or male) deaths depicted in the novel. In The Final Girl Support Group, the Final Girl is able to claim the literary equivalent of the cinematic gaze from page 1 through the first-person point of view. She does not have to wait until she is properly masculinized in order to do so. Hendrix forecloses any potential gender realignment by refusing the male gaze of cinema and replacing it with a purely female gaze through this literary point of view.
This reclamation of the Final Girl’s femininity is also explicitly tied to Lynette’s passivity. Unlike the other blooded Final Girls, she is not a harbinger of death. Rather, she is the ultimate embodiment of the “primal feminine impulse”: “the procreative urge” (242). Chrissy, another Final Girl, also occupies a liminal space in the group because she is a “traitor”(6), who “needed the monsters to forgive her” (230), and so she sells convicts’ artwork and has a sort of Final Girl museum in her house. She is so “bat-shit crazy” (230), as Lynette calls her, in that she can see the bigger picture of the incessant struggle between Final Girl and monster. As she explains to Lynette when she is forced to go to her for help when she is out of other options: the monster “can’t destroy the essential feminine side of himself. Even destruction can’t unmake creation” (242). Chrissy’s claim here is strikingly similar to Clover’s claim that not only is the Final Girl “not fully feminine” (40) but that the male killer’s “masculinity [is] in question” (49), as most of the killers that stalk slasher films, from Norman Bates to Leatherface, are in some kind of “gender distress” (27). And so, for Clover, both killer and Final Girl ultimately realize their “incipient” femininity and masculinity respectively through the death of the killer (the ultimate castration) at the hands of the Final Girl (the ultimate phallicization) (50). Hendrix’s novel, on the other hand, conspicuously leaves out the Final Girl’s status as less female and instead only focuses on the killer’s “essential feminine side.” This omission only makes sense because when Lynette became a Final Girl, she did not fully realize her essential masculine side, as she remained passively feminine and did not kill her monster. Therefore, Lynette fully embodies the feminine and serves as the ultimate foil to the male monster. As Chrissy says, “When you boil everything down, when it’s reduced as far as it will go, that’s what’s left. Creation and destruction, female and male, life and death, birth and murder” (242). In order for this dichotomy to remain true, the Final Girl cannot have “destroyed,” cannot have killed anyone. And so, even when Lynette discovers who is killing Final Girls, she vows “no one else dies today” (323) and stops fellow Final Girl Heather from killing the monster.
The Final Girl is thereby reimagined from a deadly, masculine warrior to a passive, female pacifist. But does this shift make the Final Girl figure more or less feminist? In other words, is turning the other cheek in order to save lives a marker of strength or weakness? In most slasher films, not delivering a final death blow to the killer can be a deadly mistake and usually means that not only will he come back but he will come back stronger than ever. On the other hand, death belongs squarely to the realm of the masculine killer and so a refusal to kill is, by comparison, the feminine alternative. This alternative, however, is also quite essentializing as not all women can bring life into the world, or more importantly see that as an integral part of their identity as female.
Hendrix’s novel attempts to salvage the essential femininity of the Final Girl figure by refusing her turn to masculinized destruction and death. By so doing, however, she is not only left defenseless—indeed her only defense strategy is to “play possum” (323) until the danger passes—but also reduced to a single biological attribute of the female sex. The novel tries to turn her inaction into action by making her decision to save the monster a conscious one (at least this time). This minimal agency is undermined, though, by the fact that even when her own or someone else’s life is at stake, she either runs or plays dead. Thus, her “decision” reads more like cowardice than nobility or bravery. While a blooded Final Girl may be masculinized, she is still a hero while Lynette is just an unfinished victim. The Final Girl Support Group attempts to rework the gender politics of the slasher, but instead merely succeeds in doubling down on the male/female dichotomy that is at the heart of the genre. By accepting the dichotomy as is, with male as an actively destructive force and female as a passively creative force, the novel is doomed from the start to recreate similar anti-feminist politics as its film predecessors.
Notes
[1] See especially Isabel Cristina Pinedo’s Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing, as well as Linda Williams’s “When the Woman Looks.”
Works Cited
Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Press, 1992.
Hendrix, Grady. The Final Girl Support Group. Berkley, 2021.
Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. State University of New York Press, 1997.
Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks.” Horror, The Film Reader, edited by Mark Jancovich, Routledge, 2001, pp. 61-66.
