Alissa Burger
In the slasher tradition, there is usually a singular Final Girl, who is traumatized by the deaths of her friends and survives her own showdown with the killer, emerging battered and bloody but unbroken. But what happens after the credits roll? Who does this Final Girl become when she is on her own, with, at best, only a few fellow survivors to help her process the horrific memories of her trauma?
While the Final Girl tradition is well established in slasher films, from Laurie Strode (Halloween) to Sidney Prescott (Scream) and beyond, several contemporary novels explore the afterlife of the Final Girl, extending beyond her encounter with the slasher killer and promising the collective strength of a community of similar survivors. Stephen Graham Jones’s The Last Final Girl (2012), Riley Sager’s Final Girls (2017), and Grady Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group (2021) each present readers with a group of Final Girls, telling new stories while self-reflexively negotiating the slasher tradition, drawing on critic Carol J. Clover and a whole video store’s worth of horror films for traditions, inspirations, and allusions. The relationships Jones, Sager, and Hendrix explore in their novels challenge the isolation of the traditional Final Girl, as she becomes connected with others who have endured their own nightmares and survived similar onslaughts. While in some cases there is empathy, understanding, and mutual support among these women, the promise of this collective strength is often untenable, compromised by further violence and betrayal.
As Clover defines the Final Girl trope in Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, “She 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” (35). She is also the one who survives the killer’s rampage, the sole survivor at the end of it all. This survival is not an uncomplicated victory, however, and while the Final Girl has great strength and resilience, she is just as powerfully shaped by “her fear, pain, and vulnerability” (Paszkiewicz and Rusnak 12). Any critical consideration of the Final Girl must take this complexity into account: she has distinguished herself from the slasher’s other victims, but she cannot be read as straightforwardly heroic either, as it is a combination of strength and vulnerability that establishes “the Final Girl’s victim-hero status” (Paszkiewicz and Rusnak 2). The Final Girl is fundamentally changed by what she has endured, though the viewer rarely gets the chance to see the effects of this transformation or what her life may look like as she heals in the days after—or at least not until the sequel, when she is often attacked, assaulted, and traumatized all over again.
Jones’s, Sager’s, and Hendrix’s novels continue the stories of their respective Final Girls, exploring the lives they go on to live after they have survived these attacks. In addition to considering the question of what is next for these Final Girls and what their lives look like beyond the scope of the violent slasher/Final Girl dynamic, these novels also provide readers with more time and space to get to know their protagonists, which allows for an interiority and complexity that few films offer. These Final Girls are complicated: they are brave and terrified, they feel both grateful for and guilty about their survival, they yearn for connection but struggle to trust anyone. They are tired, angry, and heartbroken, but often cling to a shred of cautious optimism. In shifting consideration of the Final Girl from slasher film to novel, Jones, Sager, and Hendrix are able to dig into these complexities, embrace the messiness, and present a side of these Final Girls we have not seen before.
Stephen Graham Jones’s The Last Final Girl is an experimental narrative, written in a format that synthesizes the structure of a traditional script with direct address of the reader as a seasoned horror film viewer. The Last Final Girl begins at what is usually the end of the slasher narrative: the Final Girl’s showdown with the monster who has killed all her friends. The Last Final Girl jumps abruptly from scene to scene, mimicking the cuts between scenes in slasher films as Jones’s Final Girl, Lindsay Baker, tells her story in voiceover from her hospital bed. While Lindsay is a shoe-in for homecoming queen—both because she is now an acknowledged hero and because the rest of the homecoming court was slaughtered—she selects her own, new homecoming court. Lindsay draws her royalty from among her outcast and marginalized female peers, each of whom has her own backstory of trauma and survival, ranging from Crystal Blake surviving a slasher who attacked her older sister and her friends to Izzy Stratford, whose brother was killed in a childhood boating accident. As these backstories demonstrate, Jones interprets the definition of “Final Girl” broadly here, although slasher aficionados, Izzy and her friend Brittney, embrace the narrative expectations of the genre in which they find themselves, with Brittney arguing that in this homecoming court selection, Lindsay is “setting it up so she’s the final girl of all the final girls … The queen of the final girls” (Jones 109, emphasis in original). While the other girls’ narratives do not adhere strictly to the expected slasher conventions, there seems to be a ring of truth to Brittney’s assessment, as the girls are stalked, tormented, and killed.
This collective of Final Girls is loose and fluid, and while their orbits sometimes overlap, they do not come together as a mutually supportive or close-knit community. The girls do not pull together or keep one another safe and they do not have a deep emotional investment in one another, with the exception of Izzy’s friendship with Brittney, who isn’t a Final Girl but becomes another of the slasher’s victims. In the end, Final Girl and slasher become one and the same, with Lindsay herself revealed as the monster, ready to take on and take out the other Final Girls until she is the last one standing. However, when the final showdown is complete, Izzy is revealed as the true Final Girl, a victorious survivor despite the ways in which her Final Girl status has been contested throughout the novel. In The Last Final Girl, then, Izzy finds her collective of survivors, only to have that solidarity and support destroyed through murder and betrayal.
While Izzy finds herself pulled into the court of Final Girls whether she likes it or not, in Riley Sager’s Final Girls, the building of community is more hesitant, complicated, and self-aware. Quincy Carpenter, Lisa Milner, and Samantha Boyd are all Final Girls, each the sole survivor of a mass murder. They each cope with and process their trauma in their own ways: Quincy represses what happened, burying her nightmare under the shiny veneer of her literally sugar-coated life as a baking blogger; Lisa channels her pain and energy into helping others with a self-help book and survivor outreach; and Sam engages in risky, self-destructive, and occasionally illegal behavior. Quincy is the central protagonist, and Sager’s narrative is complicated by the fact that Quincy has blocked out the events of the night at Pine Cottage. As one reviewer put it, “Sager weaves scenes from the night Quincy’s friends were slaughtered into the narrative … [giving] readers information that Quincy can’t access even as it invites readers to question her claims of memory loss” (“Final Girls”).
Even though Final Girls is positioned as the aftermath of a slasher narrative—or more accurately, the overlapping aftermaths at the nexus of a series of slasher narratives—some of the same conventions apply, and Quincy discovers that she doesn’t know whom she can trust and that no one is quite who they seem. Every question leads Quincy back to the beginning, to the horrific night in the woods that transformed her into a Final Girl. While the simplified, media-friendly narrative of Quincy’s survival sands off the rough edges of the story and curtails any inconvenient questions, Quincy discovers that even when she remembers what happened in Pine Cottage, she still doesn’t know the whole story. Sam has helped Quincy tap into rage she has been repressing since the slaughter, and while Quincy has found unexpected comfort in her camaraderie with another Final Girl, it turns out that Sam is not a Final Girl at all. Instead, she is a young woman named Tina Stone, who knew and loved Quincy’s vanquished slasher killer—who also turns out to be not quite who or what Quincy recalls from her nightmares—and who murdered both Lisa and the real Sam to get to Quincy, obsessed with making Quincy recover her memories and uncover the truth of what happened that night. Tina is a survivor too, having endured plenty of abuse and trauma of her own, and her and Quincy’s traumas synthesize and ignite when Tina forces Quincy back to Pine Cottage to relive her worst nightmare. While Quincy is largely on her own again as a singular Final Girl at the end of Sager’s novel, this will not be the case for long, as she sees the news report of another massacre and a new Final Girl. Quincy heads to this young woman’s side to take on the mantle of Final Girl mentorship, preparing to build a community of her own.
After the failed collectives imagined by Jones and Sager, Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group provides the most authentically supportive group of Final Girls. The novel centers a group of survivors who regularly come together as part of a therapeutic community of women who have undergone similar traumas and who can relate to the complex combination of relief, guilt, and fear that come with being a Final Girl. Together, they demonstrate “a kind of solidarity among women who despite their differences can unite toward common goals” (Karlyn). Lynette Tarkington is the central protagonist of The Final Girl Support Group, though she is also frequently identified as “a not-quite-final-girl” (Hendrix 163) because she survived by playing dead rather than fighting against or escaping from her would-be murderer. Just as The Last Final Girl and Final Girls draw on slasher tropes, negotiating genre conventions and narrative formats, The Final Girl Support Group is similarly complex, as Hendrix’s novel “is interspersed with fictional quotes from horror magazines, VHS box covers and academic journals” (VanDenburgh), grounding Hendrix’s story in familiar discourses of both slasher films and the real world.
Like the women of Final Girls, the survivors in Hendrix’s novel each have their own way of coping with the traumas they have experienced and, in most cases, are still working to process, ranging from pastoral care with trauma survivors to addiction, paranoia, and isolationism. When someone begins targeting and killing these survivors, the women come together to care for and protect one another, though that collective strength is compromised by deception and betrayal, particularly when the other women find out that Lynette has written a tell-all-style book with scathing criticisms of each of them. While the group dynamics of The Final Girl Support Group are complex and often contentious, the women’s solidarity and support of one another are real, as they endure a wide range of challenges, betrayals, and attacks, both from within the group and from the larger outside world. Much like Quincy in the closing pages of Final Girls, Lynette finds new purpose in mentoring and caring for a newly-minted Final Girl, Stephanie Fugate.
Finally, just as in The Last Final Girl and Final Girls, not everyone is who they appear to be, with Stephanie betraying her fellow Final Girls—a secret slasher disguised as a victim. Stephanie is working alongside Skye Elliott, the son of the therapist who facilitates the Final Girl Support Group, and whose toxic masculinity includes both resentment of his mother and his belief that the surviving Final Girls should have died long ago or, having survived, at least have the good grace to stay silent and disappear. Once they have all survived (yet another) attack and the slashers have been stopped, the surviving Final Girls move their support group meetings to the prison where Stephanie is incarcerated, evincing a collective strength and camaraderie that not even the violence of one of their own can destroy.
The Last Final Girl, Final Girls, and The Final Girl Support Group all offer a collective group of survivors, a plurality of Final Girls rather than the singular, isolated young woman who is left to wash off the blood and face her trauma alone. While there is camaraderie in Jones’s homecoming court of survivors, and an intense, boundary-pushing friendship in Sager’s depiction of Quincy and Sam, in both cases, that collective strength is compromised, revealed to be nothing more than a deception enabling further violence. These Final Girls are alone, and just when they think they have found someone who understands what they have been through and who they can trust, they find that they are actually still alone, shouldering even more trauma, mistrust, and betrayal. Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group is more hopeful, featuring a collective group of women who authentically care about and look out for each other. Even when this ethos of care opens them up to further violence, they remain committed and are there for Stephanie whether she wants them to be or not.
There is, in short, a burgeoning sense of collective survival in recent literary iterations of the slasher tradition and its Final Girl, and while some of this apparent mutual support may be actually further violence in disguise (as in Jones’s The Last Final Girl and Sager’s Final Girls), the future has potential. As Final Girls’ Quincy sets out to connect with and protect a fellow survivor, and the women of Hendrix’s The Final Girls Support Group reaffirm their commitment to one another, they are actively taking control of their own narratives, refusing isolation and media-sensationalized marginalization or objectification in favor of a sisterhood of survivors.
Works Cited
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Press, 1992.
“Final Girls.” Kirkus Reviews, 18 Apr. 2017.
Hendrix, Grady. The Final Girl Support Group. Berkley, 2021.
Jones, Stephen Graham. The Last Final Girl. Lazy Fascist Press, 2012.
Karlyn, Kathleen Rowe. “Scream, Popular Culture, and Feminism’s Third Wave: ‘I’m Not My Mother.’” Genders, vol. 38, no. 1, August 2003.
Paszkiewicz, Katarzyna, and Stacy Rusnak. “Introduction: Reimagining the Final Girl in the Twenty-First Century.” Final Girls, Feminism and Popular Culture, edited by Katarzyna Paszkiewicz and Stacy Rusnak, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 1-37.
Sager, Riley. Final Girls. Dutton, 2018.
VanDenburgh, Barbara. “‘The Final Girl Support Group’ Is a Savvy Summer Slasher from Horror Hound Grady Hendrix.” USA Today, 13 July 2021.
