Elizabeth Erwin
A potent hybrid of self-referential humor with a surprisingly high body count, Todd Strauss-Schulson’s The Final Girls (2015) initially reads as the prototypical post-Scream slasher film with all the expected quirks of a neo-slasher. There is the cast of actors whose television work is already familiar to a large swathe of the audience, the socially awkward horror film nerd whose awareness of the genre’s conventions instantly catches the other characters up to speed on the events occurring, and the deliberate inclusions of an “excess of stylistic imagery” designed to move the story out of the shadows (Adams 93). And, as the title of the film would position as its most important element, there is also a Final Girl. But this interpretation is not so much a reflection of previous incarnations of the trope, as it is a deliberate expansion of its narrative possibilities.
As posited by Carol J. Clover, the Final Girl was primarily a means by which to move the audience’s identification away from the killer and toward the heroine (“Her body, himself,” 191-192). She is the last remaining survivor of the film who must confront the monster directly. While Clover’s Final Girl of 1980s horror survived most notably due to her perceived “goodness” as represented by her virginal status, subsequent Final Girls challenged this patriarchal notion of purity. As horror films moved into self-referential territory, Final Girls such as Sydney Prescott, Erin Harson, and Tree Gelbman were able to survive until the ending credits and be sexually active. And yet, despite the evolution of sexual agency in relation to the Final Girl, there does exist one aspect to the trope that has remained relatively unchanged over the years: she must exhibit, according to Clover, “abject terror” in the face of the monster (Men, Women, and Chain Saws, 51-53; 60). It is here that the film most specifically departs from audience expectation and in doing so, leverages the conventions of the Final Girl archetype to offer a surprisingly effective meditation on the complexities of grief.
The film revolves around Max (Taissa Farmiga), who’s recently deceased actress mother, Amanda (Malin Ackerman), was a slasher film cult star. When a series of events pulls Max and her friends into the fictional world of the cult film, the teens must figure out how to avoid the knife-wielding killer. It is a predictable slasher film setup that plays to the audience’s expectations before carefully deconstructing them. Max may look like the quintessential Final Girl but her motivation throughout the film is not so much tied to terror as it is soul-crushing sadness. Ultimately, the real monster in The Final Girls is not the knife-wielding psychotic wearing a hockey mask, but the unrelenting weight of grief and the impact of that has significant Final Girl reverberations.
Innocence Reimagined
To understand how the film reimagines the Final Girl to be an oppositional force of grief, we must first grapple with how the film pushes back on the genre’s traditional renderings of innocence. Within the slasher sub-genre, innocence is usually tied to conservative attitudes of behavior. Characters who engage in “immoral” behavior such as drug and alcohol use, challenging gender norms, and premarital sex often meet a grisly end. Even in neo-slashers which we’ve noted have more relaxed attitudes toward sexuality, there still exist elements of restricted female agency. For instance, a female character can have sex, but it must be within the confines of a monogamous relationship and not simply for gratification. Similarly, for a character to have sex and survive, she must not trespass too boldly against conservative constructions of femininity. It is why in Scream Sydney, the quiet, more passive teen survives, while the boisterous and mouthy Tatum does not.
Max is a hybrid of past and presents Final Girl renderings. In a nod to Clover, she has a unisex name and is a virgin. But she is also world-weary in ways not typically associated with virginal innocence. Max may be innocent in terms of explicit vices but the film is careful to differentiate that from being sheltered. The opening scenes establish that the relationship between mother and daughter is founded on an inverted child/parent dynamic. While Max worries about paying the bills and plays cheerleader to her depressed mother, Amanda impulsively throws the bills out the window and engages in distracted driving while trying to get her daughter to sing along to their favorite song. Their interaction here contrasts Max from previous Final Girls in that she is sweet and virginal but she also begins the film knowing how to ensure survival for both herself and her mother. Her knowledge base, however, is not like that of other prepared Finals Girls who begin their films already knowing how to survive. Unlike Erin Harson in You’re Next (2011) who was raised in a prepper compound or Laurie Strode in Halloween (2018) whose devotion to being prepared for battle stems from past trauma, Max’s survival skills of navigating financial instability and supporting the emotional wellbeing of her mother do not obviously lend themselves to defeating a homicidal killer in battle. Max’s innocence is tempered by a skillset that is utterly common and it is this distinction that sets up how Max will ultimately battle and potentially defeat the monster.
Max’s relationship with innocence is also troubled by Amanda’s death at the beginning of the film. While not the norm, Max is not the only Final Girl who begins her film having lost a parent. But she is the only one that the film takes great pains to show is still in an active space of grief. There is no doubt that Max has not yet fully processed the death of her mother. Her inability to let her mother go is evident in the photos that adorn her dresser and in how she keeps old home movies of the two of them cued up to watch. While the film notes via a title card that it has been three years since the accident, the intervening time has done little to soften the edges of Max’s heartbreak; a state that is exacerbated by repeat showings of Camp Bloodbath at the local cineplex. Max is not the wide-eyed innocent who has her optimism shattered courtesy of a homicidal killer but is simply a good kid who had to grow up too early. Her “Terrible Place” is not a decrepit house or musty tunnel, but something much darker and identifiable. It is a world without her mother. And is there any place worse than that space of mourning?
Potential Lost
Although not a part of Clover’s original analysis, PTSD has always been baked into The Final Girl archetype. As the lone survivor traumatized by watching those around her be murdered in bloody spectacle, she ends the movie alive but profoundly damaged. The Final Girls takes this presence of survivor’s guilt and front-loads it by making it a core component of Max’s story. Since we know that the car accident that killed her mother occurred after Max accidentally distracted her, there is an additional weight to Max’s grief. And this contributes to how she battles against Billy. Unlike other slasher film Final Girls, Max isn’t so invested in saving herself as she is in saving Nancy (Malin Akerman), the character her mother played in Camp Bloodbath. In her mind, the only way to slay the grief that plagues her is to ensure Nancy’s survival so that she can live out all of the dreams that were cut short for Amanda.
But because this is a slasher film, Max is not presented with an adult version of her mother to save but a teenage one. This is important for two reasons: it deconstructs slasher character archetypes to expose the tragedy that resides within them and it allows for Max to have closure. In the film-within-a-film, archetypal characters representative of 80s horror abound. There is Kurt (Adam DeVine), the big talking jock, Tina (Angela Trimburthey), the promiscuous ditz, Blake (Tory N. Thompson), the nerdy good guy, Paula (Chloe Bridges), the bad girl with attitude, and Nancy (Malin Akerman), the guitar-playing virgin. Similarly, the teens thrust into the fictitious world of Camp Bloodbath read as explicitly neo-slasher archetypes. In addition to Max, the motherless and romantically awkward good girl, there is Duncan (Thomas Middleditch), a horror aficionado who spends the film pointing out slasher genre conventions, Gertie, the sarcastic best friend of Max, Vickie (Nina Dobrev), the mean girl, and Chris (Alexander Ludwig), the good guy and Max’s potential love interest. The film derives much of its humor from these characterizations but when Nancy tearfully lists all of the things she’ll never get to experience by reaching adulthood, the laughter the audience directs toward these characters morphs into empathy because we realize that, like Nancy, these characters will never have the chance to become something more than their adolescent insecurities and vices.
But for Max, the framing of her mother as a peer is far more personal. Given that she was cast as the adult in their relationship, there isn’t much of a shift in how she relates to Nancy. Whether warning her off sex with Kurt or prioritizing her survival as they flee the killer, Max easily steps back into the pseudo-parent role with Nancy because it’s all she knows. But when Nancy opts to sacrifice herself so that Max can be the Final Girl, she is also shifting their mother/daughter dynamic. By taking control as a parent, Nancy enables a type of catharsis for Max because she is finally able to say goodbye to her mother and have that closure. Max is finally ready to battle Billy, the manifestation of her grief, only once she lets go of the fantasy that she will be able to save Nancy.
Grief as Monster
It would be easy to identify the monster of the film as Billy Murphy (Daniel Norris). After all, not only is he a menacing, masked figure hell-bent on picking off the characters one by one, but he is also given the obligatory origin story to explain his reign of violence. But despite these genre-specific markers, Billy is never the film’s real monster. That honor belongs to something far more nebulous: grief. At no point in the film does the audience ever identify with Billy. This is important because, as Clover argues, one function of the Final Girl is to force the realignment of the audience’s identification away from the monster and on to the survivor. But our understanding of the grief Max feels at the loss of her mother positions the audience to identify with her struggle from the beginning; Billy is essentially irrelevant in this respect.
Instead, it is grief, coded through an array of horror conventions, that emerges as The Final Girls’ greatest monster. Fans know that the first kill before the title card typically sets the stage for the mayhem to follow. Here, the film opens with a trailer for Camp Bloodbath but we never actually see any deaths depicted. Instead, Max’s reaction to watching the trailer on her phone positions the film, as well as its killer, as a bit of silly fun. The actual first death occurs a few minutes later when Max accidentally distracts her mother leading to a fatal car accident.
Following that event, the film jumps forward three years where it is noted that the day marks the anniversary of Amanda’s death. In slasher films, such anniversaries are a big deal because they usually suggest that history is about to repeat itself. Consider Ghostface’s murder spree as a response to mark the first anniversary of Maureen Prescott’s death in Scream or Billy’s carnage that is triggered by the Christmas holiday in Silent Night, Bloody Night. And in a way, history IS repeating itself in The Final Girls as Max is about to be forced into a situation in which she will be forced to reckon with grief. But the biggest clue that the film is positioning grief as its Big Baddie comes in the quiet moments before Max enters the cineplex to watch Camp Bloodbath with her friends. Alone on the darkened street, Max stares at the cineplex while the music cues the presence of something nefarious. Even for non-fans of the genre, the “ki ki ki ma ma ma” that signals Jason Voorhees or the scraping sound that indicates the arrival of Freddy Krueger is so well known that audiences now instinctively equate a few menacing musical cues in a horror flick with the presence of something dangerous. This connection is further solidified for the audience when our dread turns to relief with the appearance of Max’s best friend, Gertie (Alia Shawkat), in what is a quintessential slasher jump scare. It is also a reminder that Max is already being stalked by something far more omnipresent than Billy Murphy: her grief. And while that alone is not wholly unique in the annals of horror, what is unusual is its presence in a teen slasher and what that does to the expected Final Girl arc.
Positioning grief as the monster deconstructs the Final Girl trope by pitting her against a foe no longer imbued with elements of masculinity. While what is culturally acceptable in the performance of grief is certainly gendered, the emotion itself is universal. The suffering endured by the Final Girl has nothing to do with trespassing against social norms and everything to do with the experience of simply being human. Grief is inescapable and the battle against it isn’t a question of if the monster will appear but when. This framing is a bold one that opens up new narrative spaces within horror that centers the innateness of female agency and not just as a counter position to masculinity.
Works Cited
Adams, Mark Richard. “Roses Are Red, Violence Is Too: Exploring Stylistic Excess in Valentine.” Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film, edited by Wickham Clayton, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 92-105.
Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher film.” Representations 20 (1987): 187-228.
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film – Updated Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvc7776m.
