Emma Kostopolus
It’s nearly impossible to discuss slashers without discussing Final Girls. From the earliest slashers in the 70s, to the revival of slashers heralded in by Scream (1996), to the 21st-century fare that comprises this issue of Horror Homeroom, Final Girls are nearly as omnipresent as the villains themselves. And with their instantiation as a staple trope of the subgenre, so then came the expected meta-awareness. While the heroines of films like Halloween (1978) and Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) had no means of predicting their fates, the stars of films like Scream and Cabin in the Woods (2011) were savvy about the rules of the movies they were in and used that knowledge to save themselves. But as the horror film scene became saturated with women who didn’t know the obvious rules of the slasher, it also saw an increase in the winks and quips of protagonists who knew so much about horror films that they were essentially breaking the fourth wall every time they spoke. What would be the next iteration of slasher film Final Girls?
The answer is the Fear Street (2021) trilogy. As the theory of the Final Girl herself evolves from the initial work done by Carol J. Clover, Final Girls (or Final Subjects, to use the term coined by Jeremy Maron) have also grown. They’re still savvy genre consumers, but they’re no longer displaying the same overwrought self-awareness of the genre that they were twenty years ago. Instead of foiling the killer with wry fourth-wall breaking, the 21st-century Final Girl takes the fight to the conventions of horror films themselves. And nowhere is this better exemplified than in Fear Street.
But before I can explain how Fear Street upends the already flipped script of the slasher, I need to talk a little bit about what I mean when I talk about Final Girls. “Final Girl” was coined in Carol J. Clover’s essay “Her Body, Himself” in which she pointed out the phenomenon of a specific female archetype (virginal, boyish) always being the one to live to the end of the film, and eventually becoming the one to slay the monster. According to Clover, the Final Girl was intentionally boyish so that the primarily male audiences of horror films could project themselves onto her. This framework, while serviceable, was obviously imperfect, since lots of “Final Girls” were overtly feminine, and sometimes the person inhabiting the Final Girl role wasn’t a girl at all. In response, Jeremy Maron coined the more inclusive term “Final Subject” in his article “When the Final Girl is Not a Girl.”[1] I have elected to use Final Girl instead of Subject because while Subject is more inclusive, Final Girl is still the more culturally relevant and popular term, likely due to the fact that many characters who fit this role are still styled by the actors and film production to present as feminine.
While Clover wrote about Final Girls at the very beginnings of slasher film history, by the late 1990s the horror community felt it was time to re-address this idea. Wes Craven’s Scream heralded a revival of the subgenre that brought with it a re-imagined Final Girl. No longer were these women modest and victims of circumstance. Instead, Sidney and those who followed her were figureheads of the larger “girl power” social and political movement of the time – sexually empowered and able to kick ass. But with the shift in the role of the Final Girl came a shift in the genre of the slasher itself. Whereas before they were considered among the most formulaic of horror subgenres, slashers found new life in characters breaking the barrier between themselves and the audience and in expressing direct knowledge of the rules of horror movies. More people tended to survive in these new slashers because the characters were more able to identify what was and was not a safe choice.
The meta-aware slasher continued until 2011’s Cabin in the Woods, proving that audiences enjoyed this new, smarter cast of characters. But eventually, there are only so many times that the Final Girl can cheekily cock a shotgun and say “you’d never get me to go into the basement alone” with a wink to the audience. The slasher needed, once again, a revival. And as the existence of this special issue attests, the third coming has occurred and is still actively developing. I took a bit of a risk in pitching an essay about Fear Street because when I sent my idea to the editors, the third film had not yet premiered. But I was sure that, whatever the conclusion, it would prove worth a critical eye. And I was right because the Fear Street trilogy artfully combines traditional understandings of slashers and an understanding that the audience is fully meta-aware. In doing so, it creates a smart and genre-savvy horror film that does something with its meta-awareness besides prove that it has it.
Essentially, what Fear Street does is move the goalposts of the smart slasher, from being just about characters who have watched horror films to being about a narrative itself that takes on the culture surrounding enjoyment and fandom of horror films. The most expeditious way to cover this argument is to break down the three films in the Fear Street trilogy chronologically. The first film, Fear Street: 1994, starts off as a traditional slasher whose first killer, donned in a cheap Halloween costume, is a nod to the iconic Ghostface killer of Scream. But as the film goes on, it becomes apparent that it is dedicated to revising the 90s slasher script in innovative ways. The protagonist, Deena, at first seems to fit the bill of a traditional Clover-esque Final Girl: she wears androgynous clothing to fit the grunge style of the time, and she is directly contrasted with her hyperfeminine cheerleader friend Kate and her also-cheerleader ex-girlfriend Sam, who herself becomes something of a Final Girl. The reveal of Deena and Sam’s queerness already breaks many of the traditional slasher rules, since the Final Girl is historically supposed to be “virginal” (though this rule has been bent and broken in more contemporary films). The regressive sexual politics of the slasher, dictating that a woman cannot experience sexual agency, can easily be extrapolated into assuming that queerness is also a transgression. The idea that slasher films are largely politically conservative is not an argument I’ll retread here, but one that I think is important to consider given the legacy of gender/sexuality in this subgenre.
At first, 1994 may trick the viewer into assuming they’re going to be watching a stereotypical slasher, especially given its young adult source material; YA tends to adhere more strictly to genre expectations than its adult counterparts. But the movie soon moves far beyond those expectations, with the fates of the two Final Girls, Deena and Sam, and with the characterization of the antagonist. Deena and Sam have a sexual encounter, but at this point, they are already marked and hunted by the killers – the sex does not precipitate their experiences and thus, no motive can be assigned. Having overtly queer sexuality in a slasher film works to subvert Clover’s original edict that Final Girls must be virginal; this move is both a reflection of how the broader culture’s understanding of sexuality has shifted and a dig at how the fundamentally conservative ethos of slashers has failed to catch up to the rest of the world. Furthermore, Sam defies the role of the Final Girl by actually dying, even though it is only temporary and she is resuscitated. And although the physical forms of the perpetrators of violence in the film are largely male, with the exception of Ruby Lane, the primary antagonist of the film is a woman, the witch Sarah Fier. While female slashers are more common in European horror, the archetypal masculine killer is a staple of American horror in this subgenre, so presenting the central villain as not just a woman, but an overtly feminized witch, trades in some standard slasher tropes for new fare. This also presents an interesting quandary for the audience, who are made in some ways complicit in the demonization of the ultimately innocent Sarah Fier by the men of the Goode family. By being so willing to accept that this overtly feminized figure is evil, the audience does exactly what the Goode family, the real villains, wants them to, and punishes a woman for her perceived transgressions.
The second film, Fear Street 1978, at first seems like a return to form. Not only does the film take place at a summer camp like other notable slashers Friday the 13th (1980) and Sleepaway Camp (1983), but it presents as its heroine the virginal and modest Cindy, who loves but does not sleep with her boyfriend, Tommy. Her sister, Ziggy, is presented as being too transgressive in her attitudes (including sexually, as she pursues a young Nick Goode), and is slated by the rules of the genre to die. The film also presents a very traditional slasher villain: the possessed Tommy, who eventually dons a burlap sack over his face in an act reminiscent of the first big-screen appearance of the ultimate camp slasher villain, Jason Voorhees. Though Tommy is controlled, everyone thinks, by Sarah Fier, he nevertheless demonstrates very traditional slasher aesthetic values. These values, such as an overtly masculine “lumberjack” appearance (wearing flannel and wielding an axe) and aggressive body language that uses his physical size to intimidate and overpower the literally smaller women he is targeting, act as counterbalances to the fact that the hypermasculine Tommy is being controlled by the highly feminized Sarah Fier.
But 1978’s conclusion takes a hard left turn out of genre expectations when it is revealed that the transgressive, surly Ziggy is actually the Final Girl, and not her sister Cindy, who dies. This is a clear reversal of the traditional slasher, where the virginal and modest Final Girl takes up a weapon and dispatches the killer. Here, the seemingly model Final Girl is brutally murdered, and it is the transgressor, who would normally be punished for her difference through death, who survives. Ziggy also does not get even an ambiguously happy ending; she and Nick Goode do not form a relationship after the events at Camp Nightwing, and she lives into adulthood as a paranoid shut-in, constantly afraid of a return of the monsters of her youth.
The trilogy comes to a conclusion with Fear Street: 1666, which transports Deena back in time to see the origin of the witch, Sarah Fier. The viewer learns, along with Deena, that Sarah Fier is not a witch, but a woman unfairly persectuted for spurning the affections of Solomon Goode (Sheriff Nick Goode’s ancestor) in favor of a queer relationship. Solomon Goode, having struck a deal with the devil to correct his own misfortunes, is the real villain of the series, and his descendants through the centuries have been the ones calling the evil forces to possess and murder citizens of the town of Shadyside. The villain, as with a lot of more traditional slasher films, can be broadly construed as hegemonic white patriarchy. But instead of being about a singular, aberrant instance of masculinity, the villain is men doing exactly what society (i.e., other men) has rewarded them for doing for centuries. So, Fear Street is not only taking on ideas of who gets to be considered monstrous and who gets to be the hero in these films, the movie takes a swing at a core societal value of manhood, and says to a large portion of the typical slasher audience, “are you part of the problem here?”
The climactic scene of the trilogy’s arc has a who’s who of maligned slasher victims taking the fight to the villain led by a now adult Ziggy and Deena, both Final Girls, and two black men, Deena’s younger brother and a local sanitation worker who has spent the majority of the trilogy being harassed by Sheriff Nick Goode and framed for crimes he did not commit. POC and especially African Americans inhabit another unfortunate trope in slasher films, of being an assumed tokenized presence who are among the first to die. These two figures, an innocent child and a wrongly accused man, are particularly resonant in the fight against white hegemony personified in a police officer, due to the high incidence of wrongful death for black men and boys at the hands of officers of the law. And while all of the possessed slashers of yore, each of whom represents their own slasher tropes (summer camp axe-murder, skull-faced killer) are present, Deena and her team are not actually engaging with them beyond keeping them contained. Rather, they’re fighting Nick Goode, the successful white man who crafted the story that made them the victims. Nick Goode’s defeat and death isn’t just a win for the characters of the film; it’s symbolic of marginalized genders and races reclaiming space in a genre that has so often used them as fodder and abused them for entertainment ends.
It’s undeniable that the Fear Street trilogy engages with meta-awareness of the genre, but it does so in a fundamentally different way than its meta predecessors. This trilogy goes beyond an understanding of the meta and begins to engage in praxis, through using genre savvy to reclaim horror from the toxicity of some of Carol Clover’s originally identified white, hypermasculine viewers. With a vocal minority complaining that any kind of representation in horror, be it of gender, race, sexuality, or ability, is degrading franchises with “social justice” or making things “woke,” having a story like Fear Street is a radical intervention in the genre. It’s also important in making sure that BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized folks know that horror is for everyone, but also for them explicitly – they aren’t tokens or afterthoughts. They kill monsters.
Notes
[1] Maron distinguishes the “Final Subject” from the “Final Girl” by claiming that the Subject is not limited by the binary gendered relationship between the supposedly masculinized female figure of the Final Girl and the male but ultimately emasculated monster. By opening up the relationship to not be locked into this binary of gender roles, Maron thinks of horror protagonists of this type as a broader concept than a character archetype.
Works Cited
Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations, vol. 20, 1987, pp. 187-228.
Maron, Jeremy. “When the Final Girl is Not a Girl: Reconsidering the Gender Binary in the Slasher Film.” Offscreen, vol. 19, no. 1, 2015.
