I feel that in the last few years, the trope of the “Final Girl” has really been having a moment. Of course, the character has been around since at least the mid-70s, and has been very present in horror cinema ever since, but lately, there’ve been a lot of works which really use her name, or which are directly about the idea of the character. Behind the Mask (2006), The Cabin in the Woods (2011), Final Girl (2015), and The Final Girls (2015) all revolve around positioning the main character to explicitly take on the role (even if not all of them use the term). Recent spins on the Slasher formula have played with the role, with Happy Death Day (2017) starting with a ‘mean girl’ caught in a Slasher time loop who must be all of the other victims before she can finally grow as a person to become the final girl, defeat the killer, and leave the loop, and Freaky (2020) doing a body swap with the final girl and the slasher-killer (the original title being “Freaky Friday the 13th), such that her experience of both inhabiting this strong, violent male body and observing the killer in her own is instructive, helping her, once more in her own skin, find the chutzpah to finish him off. Furthermore, “legacy sequels” such as Halloween (2018), Scream (2022), or Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) all circle back to their original final girl (though Sydney was never absent from her franchise and Laurie did this before in Halloween: H20), picking up with her many years later to see how the trauma she endured has affected her life, shaped her character, before thrusting her back onto the killing floor.
And this final girl renaissance hasn’t only been on screen. In 2017, Riley Sager published his thriller, Final Girls (which I’ve not yet read), and in 2021, two authors who I have previously written about here (Grady Hendrix and Stephen Graham Jones), both published Final Girl themed books: Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group and Graham Jones’s My Heart is a Chainsaw. Both of them are about characters who are not only final girls, but for whom the concept of the “Final Girl” is a significant, psychologically organizing principle, a mirror which they hold themselves up to and in which they find themselves lacking, but it’s a role they are thrust into nevertheless.
I’ve been wanting to write about both and since I’ve been on a final girl kick these last few weeks (see here and here, and also check out my guest spot on a podcast here, discussing the 2015 The Final Girls), I thought this was a good time to reread both novels and share some thoughts on them. I’ll endeavor to avoid spoilers in this discussion, so these might be shorter reviews, but I really recommend both books very highly.
The Final Girl Support Group (2021)
In his very entertaining, thrilling, and sometimes quite touching novel, Hendrix posits a world where the slasher killings of 80s films all actually happened (before then being made into films), and in which the young women who had survived these massacres later came together in group therapy, periodically meeting through the decades, to help one another continue to live, carrying the weight of what had happened to them, of what they’d had to do to survive. The main character, Lynnette Tarkington (based on Linnea Quigley’s character from Silent Night, Deadly Night who gets impaled, topless, on deer antlers), a core member of the group, has always felt distanced. She survived a massacre, but she wasn’t really a “final girl,” so much as a victim left for dead, who didn’t die. She never killed her killer, but she has been shaped by the nightmare that she lived through just as the “actual” final girls in the group have (each of whom is modeled on a classic final girl and generally has a name implying the actress who played her).
Thirty years later, she lives an isolated life, focused solely on survival: her apartment is a fortress, she has trained endlessly in self-defense, she is always armed, and she follows compulsive routines to ensure that no one can ever follow her home to her sanctuary. The only regular contact she has with others is with her plant and the group and so, when it seems that some person or group is targeting final girls, her carefully maintained world starts to collapse. At first, no one believes her as she starts to see the signs of a coordinated attack upon her ranks – all of the members of her group have their psychological quirks and she is no exception, coming off as an over-reacting survivalist-conspiracy theorist, and she is on her own to uncover what is happening and why, and to somehow stop it.
The book is just a treat – a quick, exciting read, full of twists and turns and endless references and Easter eggs to tickle a horror fan (just tracing the names and influences of the different characters is fun), but also, as is generally true for Hendrix, there is real emotional depth. Lynnette is an interesting character to follow – we don’t know (and neither, really, does she) how much her perceptions reflect reality and how much they are the paranoid fantasies of someone who lived through hell and has been forever scarred by the experience. The mystery is engaging, some sequences of threat or violence have an edge of horror, and there’s plenty of comic life to the proceedings, but at the end of the day, the heart of the book is the resilience of this woman who has suffered so much and keeps going, the friendships (however strained) between these women who have shared such terrors, and the way a role, a concept can haunt a person, shape a person, make demands on a person. All the women of the story carry a complex relationship with the idea of being “a final girl,” though we most experience Lynnette’s – and this exploration of the tensions between the ideal and reality, between being a free person with her own agency and being a figure in a set, self-perpetuating narrative, between the isolating impulse to survive and the responsibilities we take on for those we open ourselves to is what it is really about. And it is a rich theme to delve into.
Beyond that, Hendrix just makes fun books. Each chapter title is another horror sequel reference. Between each chapter, there is always an interstitial text – some document from the world of the characters – a letter, a newspaper clipping, text from a card left at a memorial for victims of a massacre – it all makes the novel an interesting space to inhabit. Sometimes these documents offer clues to what is actually happening, but often they simply give the world heightened specificity, offering intriguing glimpses into the lived-in space of the various characters. All in all, it is a compulsive, rewarding read, and I will continue to pick up whatever Hendrix puts out.
My Heart is a Chainsaw (2021)
Stephen Graham Jones offers a main character with a very different background, but one whose sense of self is just as tied up in the concept of the “Final Girl.” Jade is a Blackfeet high school senior in Proofrock, a small Idaho town on Indian Lake. Ostracized from her peers, and with a troubled home life, she is an intense, encyclopedic horror fan, particularly into Slashers, in which she finds the comfort of a familiar formula, the mythic resonance of ritual played out again and again, the vicarious power trip of the faceless killer, safe behind a mask, and the inspiration of the willful, transformed, victorious final girl. But for reasons which eventually become clear (which are at the heart of her troubled character), while she dreams of living out the fantasy of the slasher narrative, she never sees herself as a candidate for filling that beloved role.
And so, when she starts to see the signs of a slasher cycle beginning in her small lakeside town, she starts casting about to find one who could, and finds her in Letha Mondragon, a new girl who has joined her graduating class shortly before the end of the year. Letha’s just moved to town as her father is a member of a coterie of wealthy types moving in and developing the former National Park land across the lake, and in Jade’s eyes, she’s perfect: athletic, beautiful, serious, investigative, and most of all, pure – she is everything Jade feels she is not, and so she takes it upon herself to introduce Letha to the ways of the slasher film, hoping to prepare her to rise to the challenge when her time inevitably comes. Of course, everyone thinks she’s crazy.
Thus, Jade is generally on her own, and often in trouble with her parents, her school, her job, and the law as she investigates the series of strange deaths which are plaguing her town, all the while trying to convince Letha of the role she has to play, blind to how she is growing into it herself, incapable of seeing her own strength, her own resolve, convinced that because of who and what she is, because of what she has lived, she could not be more than an observer, an early victim, at best a “Randy” (who in Scream tells the others the ‘rules’ of surviving a horror film). She is a fan – not a hero.
Without going into any details, as this book is full of them, and there are loads of false starts and red herrings along the way before arriving at an incredibly brutal explosion of strange and vengeful violence, I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that in climbing through the blood and gristle of this sometimes gory tale, Jade is thrust into a confrontation with her own story, her own past, her own identity, both changed by the process and becoming more truly herself.
This emotional arc weaves through a sometimes twisty narrative where we are never sure what is really happening. There are so many possible clues, and Jade’s many working theories and assumptions are often mistaken. All of this serves to deliver a fun mystery to unravel, both of who is killing all these people, in these very varied ways, and what Jade’s deal is under her tough horror-kid façade. It pays off both in excitement and mystery, deeply felt rage and vengeance, and ultimately a kind of promise of a life Jade hasn’t known. It’s a ride.
What a Coincidence
The two books share some core structural elements. Both feature a central character who everyone discounts, a Cassandra who alone sees a rising threat, both of whom compare themselves unfavorably with the ideal of the ‘Final Girl,’ and yet are sustained on the concept of the indomitable survivor who, as Graham Jones writes, “is finally turning around to fight, is insisting on her own life, is refusing to die, isn’t going to take even one more moment of abuse.” Both books name each chapter with a reference to some Slasher film. And both include additional texts between the chapters, My Heart is a Chainsaw presenting a series of extra-credit papers that Jade wrote for her very patient history teacher over the years in which she expounds on Slasher film history, tropes, themes, and analysis. On one level, these are often fun love letters to the genre, but Graham Jones also weaves through them significant insights into Jade’s character (one of these becomes a significant plot point when these collected texts are given to Letha, intended as a kind of textbook to prepare her for the coming storm).
What is it in the zeitgeist that led both of these authors, contemporaries in current horror fiction, to engage with these particular themes at exactly this time? Though the stories are quite different, the parallels in what both texts circle around are striking. In both cases, we deal not only with this particular horror film trope, but with what it means to survive a kind of trauma, and how a person can define themselves in terms of, or in opposition to that experience. And both do this in relation to this storytelling device – a character type who has come to particular prominence of late. Is it related to the #metoo moment, assaults on abortion rights in the US and around the world, a growing sense of the way women have continued to be targeted as victims even as society pats itself on the back for being more equitable? Or is it maybe not so gendered – is the ‘girlness’ of the final girl a red herring?
Could it be that we live in an era of constant existential threat? Climate change, pandemics, domestic terrorism, global conflicts, constant mass shootings, police violence and the subsequent civil unrest, intractable political divisions that make it feel like society is on the cusp of absolute collapse…do we feel so under assault that “the one who survives, the one who finds a way to fight back against impossible odds, the one who has suffered like no one else, but nevertheless persists, the one who refuses death” is just more appealing than ever before? I don’t know – we used to live in fear of a nuclear holocaust, hell – there was The Holocaust, and as I understand the statistics, as you go further back in time, humans were more and more likely to die due to violence than they are now. But somehow that feeling of constant threat has just grown. Maybe for that, the media is to blame – or the ugly echo chambers of social media – or maybe it’s just the cumulative fatiguing effect of living with stress.
But maybe it’s all just coincidental – a story and the character at its heart has just grown more popular – we are more aware of it, and thus, we grab hold of it as a useful metaphor – as we have always done, especially with horror.
Anyway, they’re both really good books. I liked them. You should read them.