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Posted on February 2, 2016

Short Cut: Carrie’s Final Girl and the Precariousness of Survival

Dawn Keetley

Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) is the quintessential horror film, opening with a scene that showcases one of its central themes: what is repressed inevitably gets unleashed.

The opening famously features Carrie (Sissy Spacek) getting her first period in the shower at gym (yes, we’re in the terrain of real horror here!). The other girls (of course) mock her, throwing pads and tampons and screaming at her to “Plug it up.” Carrie does “plug it up”—in all kinds of ways—and what she plugs up gets spectacularly released in blood and death on prom night.

The most compassionate of Carrie’s high school acquaintances, Sue (Amy Irving), survives the blood bath, however (perhaps because of her kindness)—becoming one of the first Final Girls of horror (arguably preceded only by Lila from Psycho [1960], Sally from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre [1974], and Jess from Black Christmas [1974]).

Posted on January 31, 2016

The Final Girl, Part 1

Dawn Keetley

Horror Homeroom is running a series on the “Final Girl” for Women in Horror Month. We’ll be tweeting Final Girls daily and offering posts throughout the month about how people have conceptualized the Final Girl and how she’s evolved in horror film from about 1960 until now.

For this first post, I simply want to lay out how Carol J. Clover, the critic who coined the term, described the Final Girl, and to point out (very briefly) what came before—and thus how revolutionary the Final Girl was when she burst onto the scene.

At the risk of being reductive, prior to about 1960, women in the horror film were either powerful and (then) dead, or they survived only because they were rescued by men.

My favorite classic horror films, Thirteen Woman (David Archainbaud, 1932), Dracula’s Daughter (Lambert Hillyer, 1936), and Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942), all feature powerful, hypnotic women who have few qualms about leaving a trail of bodies in their wake—and who all wield their gaze (always a mark of power in film) with devastating effect.

Posted on March 23, 2015

Empowerment of the Traditional in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978)

Elizabeth Erwin

Released in 1978, John Carpenter’s Halloween not only gave Jamie Lee Curtis her definitive Scream Queen role but it also gave audiences one of the best known horror film villains of all time in Michael Meyers. On its face, the story is a simple one. On Halloween night, six-year-old Michael murders his sister and is placed in a psychiatric hospital. On the fifteenth anniversary of his incarceration, he breaks out intent on exacting revenge.

One of the reasons I keep coming back to this film is because of how effectively it uses cultural norms to elevate the horror.