Tag Archives: Slashers

10 Final Girls Who Don’t Get Enough Credit

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So lately, I’ve been digging into the trope of the Final Girl. One reason for this is that I recently guested on the great podcast, Random Number Generator Horror Podcast No. 9, and the film we discussed was the 2015 eighties-summer-camp-slasher set dramatic comedy, The Final Girls. It was a really fun discussion, and I invite you to give it a listen. As an avid listener of horror-podcasts for years, it was an absolute treat to be on a really good one and I thank Jeffrey and Cecil for the opportunity!

And inspired by the movie under discussion (which I really like, but won’t detail here – check out the podcast for that!), I wanted to throw together a list of ten great final girls. So I started checking out what was already out there, and a quick google search yields loads of lists of the “best Final Girls,” but I noticed that I was seeing the same names over and over on list after list, and for good reason. Ginny from Friday the 13th, Part 2 is great (maybe my favorite), with her empathy, resilience, and no-nonsense demeanor. Nancy from Nightmare on Elm Street is awesome (also maybe my favorite) with her book on booby traps and being so “into survival.” Ripley in Alien (a stretch to call it a slasher exactly, but she is certainly a final girl) is aspirationally tough and sensible (if they’d only listened to her and followed quarantine rules, it wouldn’t have even been a horror movie). And so many, many more.

But I felt I wouldn’t really be contributing much if I just listed famous movies that everyone, whether they watch horror or not, has heard of, if not seen. So I tried to dig a bit deeper to shine a light on final girls who don’t always get so much attention. I can’t guarantee that none of them feature on any other list (the internet is a big place), but these are at least somewhat deeper cuts – also, I can’t promise that all of their movies are exactly “good,” but each does have something to recommend it.

That said, I am no slasher expert. There are so many and I’ve but scratched the surface. Out of more than 200 that came out between 1978, when Halloween’s success kicked off the first cycle (between 1980-1982 alone, there were at least 72) until 1989 (because I have to choose an end-point eventually, and horror took a dip in the early 90s), I’ve seen maybe 30% – the most famous and then the fairly well known, with a small spattering of more obscure titles. So please accept this list with that caveat.

And now, without further ado, here is my list, in order of appearance, of great Final Girls who don’t get enough credit:

Courtney – Final Exam (1981) Cecile Bagdadi

Most of this film seems more like Animal House or Revenge of the Nerds, but with a killer on the loose (whose story we never learn). A bunch of frat guys are trying to ride out the year without doing any work by putting a lot of effort into elaborate pranks to help them cheat (one of which, featuring a fake mass shooting, is quite disturbing through contemporary eyes). In a world of rich, entitled brats who don’t take anything seriously, Courtney stands out as the only person actually studying for her “final exam.” She isn’t a prude (if anything, she’s trying to get a particular boy to notice her) but she has more consequential things on her mind. The boy is nice enough (though his obsession with mass shooters and serial killers seems like a red flag), and it’s a shame when he doesn’t make it as they’ve just had a sweet moment. It all builds to a solid chase where she acquits herself well, but in the final shot of the film she seems so traumatized by the experience. While this is a common image, it is still quite effective here. Courtney grounds the horror of these killings and her own survived ordeal in a way that the other victims in their frivolity could not.

Anne – Graduation Day (1981) Patch MacKenzie

Anne has a different vibe from the very beginning. She’s an active military member, coming home to honor her dead sister at what would have been her high school graduation, only to find everyone else on her late sister’s track team getting murdered. We first meet Anne in a truck where she’s hitched a ride and she capably and aggressively fends off the lecherous approaches of the driver, instantly endearing her to us. She starts as a tougher final girl than many, and that self-confidence is fun, but in the final reel, she still has to go through it, fighting to overcome this particular psycho. I think what prevents her from ranking higher on many lists is the fact that we lose her in the middle stretch of the film when she is one of countless red herrings (everyone in this town owns a grey sweat suit and black leather gloves – what we see the killer wearing). In one scene, she is even made out to seem crazy and threatening to a potential (and eventual) victim, distancing us from her even more. But by the end, when the killer is revealed, it is satisfying to return to this level-headed, tough-minded final girl to take him out. Plus, the film is fun and the rest of the cast is solid.

Pam – The Prowler (1981) Vicky Dawson

Pam is great. It seems like she’s studying journalism – at the top of the movie, she’s just published an article about the killing that happened 35 years ago which is why this college stopped having the annual graduation dance (isn’t that more of a high school thing? Anyway…). Thus, when she has to go back to her room to change and narrowly escapes the returned killer, who is dressed as a masked WWII soldier and carrying a pitchfork for some reason (in an exciting sequence that had me wondering if she was in fact going to survive to be the final girl), she can’t not investigate and see this through to the end. There’s a fantastic moment when her boyfriend, the local deputy left in charge for the weekend, tries to drop her off back at the dance so she can be safe. She is just not having it – the resolve with which she threatens him and then gets back in the car foreshadows the strength of character that will help her turn the killer’s own pitchfork on him before blowing his head clean off. Also, just in a connection to another great final girl, Pam finds herself hiding under a bed with a rat, just like Ginny in Friday the 13th Part 2, but at least this one didn’t pee (they were basically filmed at the same time though, so I think it’s a coincidence). In addition, while some elements really don’t make sense, this is one of the better slashers on this list – it’s tense, the killer’s costume looks cool and scary, some scenes are genuinely exciting, and the gore effects might be the best work that Tom Savini ever produced – really effectively grisly and horrifically realistic.

Constance – Just Before Dawn (1981) Deborah Benson

I’ve written at greater length about this backwoods slasher before. Constance stands out as both exemplifying and subverting the still developing tropes of the final girl. Filmed in the summer of 1980, she really offers a different spin on the role. At the beginning of the film, she seems like a typical final girl – reasonable, capable, the only person appropriately dressed for hiking a difficult trail. But she feels that she’s too mousy, inadequate compared with her friends who are bolder than her, braver. And so, as the film progresses and things get progressively more difficult, so does she, changing her physical appearance in the process. In an inversion of the trope, she becomes more outwardly feminine and sexual, donning shorter shorts, showing more flesh, putting on makeup, letting down her hair. And she is more sexually aggressive with her boyfriend. In a way, it’s like she’s putting on the mask of a different role, one you might expect to get killed much earlier in a film like this. However, wearing her mask, she is freed – she can be the wild, primal figure she needs to be to take down this hulking killer in what might be the most satisfying moment of a final girl killing a slasher on film. You may see many final girls rise in violence to take down the killer, but no one quite does what Constance does – just watch it – I don’t want to spoil the fun. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the “Final Girl’s” will to life, her stubborn, desperate determination not to be erased. And the film itself, while a bit slow in the middle, is a pretty enjoyable watch as well.

Sandy – Humongous (1982) Janet Julian

I can’t really say this is my favorite of the bunch, but Sandy rises to the occasion in the final reel. The film starts strong (though quite disturbingly) and then falls into a long stretch of poorly lit muddling along on an island where some kids have been stranded with a killer. For a while I was wondering who the final girl would be – as it seemed that the one unattached girl with glasses was the first to open a photo album and start piecing together the back story, but she snapped under the pressure of it all and Sandy, evidently the most stable of the bunch, finally figures things out.  When things kick into gear in the last 15-20 minutes, Sandy leads a great chase, seems to rip off (not sure when it was filmed, but it was released more than a year after Friday 2) Ginny’s idea of playing the killer’s mother, races to the boat house where she traps him with fire and blows him up before finally staking him. Still, having learned his sad story, she feels sympathy for this poor, burned, deformed creature (no action or words, but there’s something in her eyes). He may have killed all her friends, but she can still pity him. In this, she balances all of the investigativeness, proactivity, ability to violently do what needs doing, and heart of a classic final girl, even if her movie is…just alright.

Valerie, Courtney, & Trish – The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Robin Stille, Jennifer Meyers, & Michelle Michaels

Is this the first “meta” slasher? I mean, no, but it is so self-aware – written as a parody, but filmed more or less straight, it subverts the tropes that by 1982 had already calcified, delivering in my opinion, a subversive, hilarious, effectively scary, feminist slasher classic. One twist here is that three girls survive by fighting back together: Trish, who had thrown the party to have one last hurrah with her childhood friends before adulthood pulls them apart (sadly none of those friends make it to the end), Valerie, a new girl who, for all of her beauty, brains, and athletic skill, is still an outsider, and Courtney, Valerie’s little sister, a boy-obsessed teen eager for more adult thrills than she is yet allowed. Each of them is granted personality and real feeling. Trish starts the film throwing away childhood toys and looking to the future, a future which, by the end of the day, she will have been thrust into too soon, too harshly. Valerie feels the most like a classic final girl, the responsible one, staying home to look after her sister instead of going to the party (until she has to). Courtney is a firecracker, funny, impulsive, insistent. And all of the other girls (or boys) who are murdered by the nameless killer with an improbably long bit on his cordless drill (what kind of battery does he have?) are also people whom we can like and root for. This is a fun movie, with sly, knowing shots taken at its genre and possibly its audience, but it has emotional weight. By the time the girls finally symbolically castrate and dispatch the killer, they are deeply traumatized by the horrific events – there’s been so much death, so many friends lost, so much horror. They’ve done what they had to do to live, but their lives won’t be the same after this. The degree to which they get to mourn, cry, be broken at the end makes this often funny, light slasher land harder than expected.

Joan – Silent Madness (1984) Belinda Montgomery

Joan is great, a breath of fresh air – something really different – and she’s surely the most highly credentialed final girl on the list. A doctor at a psychiatric hospital which has accidentally released a psycho killer because of a computer error, Joan is surrounded by men who just refuse to do their damn jobs, (other doctors, administrators, the sheriff, even her reporter love interest). Either no one believes her as she investigates this major screw up which is getting kids killed at the college where the psycho was long ago arrested for a massacre, or they are all just covering their butts, hoping that if no one talks about it, no one will notice the pile of dead sorority sisters. Either way, Joan has to take care of everything all on her own, both hunting after the killer, navigating bureaucracy, and avoiding the murderous orderlies from her hospital, hot on her trail to shut her up.  Along the way, she uncovers buried truths, tries (and generally fails) to protect the sorority girls in question, and finally takes out the ‘bad guy,’ only to then discover a deeper cover-up. She is a self-assured, mature adult, bringing the final girl’s typical responsibility, but with full confidence from the beginning. However, while she is a self-assured professional, she is not some kind of fighter, so exploring creepy basements where a killer lurks is still effectively terrifying for her. This was a really fun watch and she rises above the crowd.

Allison – Chopping Mall (1986) Kelli Maroney

This may not be a slasher, but Allison is a great final girl. And though the threat in this case consists of a set of killer robot security guards in a mall, the film follows the classic slasher pattern of a group of kids partying somewhere and getting picked off until only one girl remains (who knows if she’s ‘virginal,’ but she’s the only one who doesn’t have sex that night) – who overcomes adversity and triumphs. Played by Kelli Maroney, a mainstay of 80s B-movies, Allison balances being really sweet with also being a tough cookie who’s a crack shot with a firearm (apparently because her dad is a marine). The set-up is that a group of young people, some of whom work at a mall, stay after hours to party in the furniture store where one of them works (and try out the beds). There are two couples (one of which is married, which is a rarity in this kind of thing) and then Allison has been set up with a nice, dorky boy with whom she actually hits it off (the two of them bond while watching old horror movies while everyone else fools around). They are really cute together and it’s easy to root for them. The film can be silly and fun, and also exciting, but by the end, it of course comes down to Allison and the final killbot. By this point, she’s in full trap-setting, robot-exploding, badass, final girl mode and she even gets to blow up the last bot with an action star quip. Otherwise, the film is just a blast: a great cast (including Barbara Crampton and Dick Miller), a really cool score, and a bunch of killer robots.

Kit – April Fool’s Day (1986) Amy Steel

This is a really fun, different spin on the whodunit-slasher (though its twist may be the most famous thing about it – if you can go in cold, it’s worth it) – spring break happens to fall on April first and Muffy invites all her friends, about to graduate college and with no idea what to do next, to her island mansion for the week. Being April Fool’s, she’s got a lot of pranks in store, but soon the practical jokes become a series of murders and we’re off to the races. Everyone is so well played that it took me a while to peg who the final girl would be, but it should have been obvious that it would be the one played by Amy Steel. Her Kit is a solid, investigative final girl who solves the mystery of the killings (though still having one big surprise in store), and who also really cares about her friends, even if some of them are kinda jerks. There’s one moment when she could get away, but she has to go back cause she can’t leave Muffy behind (even though it’s been implied that Muffy might be the killer). Amy Steel brings a similarly grounded, clear headed, empathetic quality that she did to Friday part 2 – which helps the terror land, and it gets exciting when she’s put through the paces in the final act.

Stretch – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) Caroline Williams

This is also not a slasher, but it’s a sequel to one of the most influential proto-slashers, and Stretch undergoes a true final girl experience, just without much of a body count. (Also Clover referenced her when defining the role, so she surely counts). A tough talkin’ Texas rock DJ who is pulled into the Sawyer family’s shenanigans after fielding a call from some kids getting chainsawed on her radio show, Stretch is just cool. She really doesn’t fall into any kind of bookish, innocent little “virgin” role – rather, she is an adult woman who wears short shorts, navigates a world of pushy, aggressive men, brings the rock ‘n roll, and chooses to court danger in order to get the story, to do something important. As a result, she almost literally goes through hell, suffering in a similar fashion as Sally before her, experiencing debilitating terror, seeing a friend’s face skinned off before having it draped on her own and being made to dance in order to pacify a chainsaw wielding man-child before climbing out, grabbing a chainsaw of her own and eviscerating the man who’s chasing her, and subsequently dancing around crazily with her chainsaw in the air, mirroring Leatherface at the end of the first film. The fact that Stretch starts the film so together and tough means that her descent into violent, triumphant madness is all the more intense. It’s a weird movie – funnier than the first, but that comedy brings its own horror. Plus, it features Dennis Hopper, fresh out of rehab, screaming maniacally and running around with a chainsaw in each hand. What’s not to love?

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And so, there we have it, ten final girls that don’t always get mentioned.  As I said at the beginning, I’ve only seen about a third of what’s out there, so I’m sure there are many others worthy of inclusion who I am overlooking, but perhaps that’s fuel for a future list.

And for a fun discussion of a funny film which revolves around the concept of the final girl, check out the podcast here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A Final Girl Feedback Loop

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So, I sometimes wonder when the term “final girl,” first coined by Carol Clover in 1987 in her essay, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” later collected and expanded on in her influential book, “Men, Women, and Chainsaws,” entered common parlance. The idea was certainly not new when she detailed it, based on her observations of gender-genre tropes in slasher films (primarily of the late 70s and 80s), but rather, she put her finger on something that had arisen naturally out of a confluence of storytelling trends and business assumptions. And it is successful coinage – when someone sees the phrase for the first time, they immediately get to what/whom it refers: the last girl standing in a body count film, who probably didn’t party as hard as all of her friends and is more clear headed and responsible, who we probably haven’t seen have sex, who possibly has been investigating the odd things going on and has thus had to discover the bodies of people she knew, who probably isn’t blonde and might have a gender neutral name such as “Stretch,” “Jess,” “Ripley,” or “Chris,” who has had to run and hide and scream and survive until finally she turns and finds the strength to fight back and kill the killer, though she may end up a broken, traumatized husk by the end of it all – the name carries a lot.

Now, in discussing the trope, I always feel it’s obligatory to point out that Clover had a focus other than just describing a trend in horror, and she certainly wasn’t trying to prescribe how people should be making movies. In short, in my understanding of her text, she questioned why this female character, this recurring role was so foregrounded in a genre conventionally understood to be targeted at young males, a genre often thought to be misogynistic, offering the vicarious thrill of looking through a masculine coded killer’s eyes as he stalks and murders young women (again, this is the common perception, and the data doesn’t support the characterization – men die about as much as women in these flicks). The theory she offered was a case of cross-gender identification, wherein the femaleness of the role allowed it to exhibit traits of vulnerability and fear which would have been uncomfortable for the audience in a male figure, or even rejected and mocked (a supporting example might be Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 2, which features a final boy (Jesse, played by Mark Patton) and which was not well received, Patton being outed and ridiculed for his portrayal). This enables the (male) viewer to masochistically enjoy being terrorized, just as by identifying with the killer, (he) can sadistically enjoy terrorizing. The final girl abstaining from sex meant that the young male audience didn’t have to take the leap of watching their viewpoint character be penetrated before them. Quite the opposite, by the end of the film, she would take the weapon (his symbolic, penetrating phallus) from the killer and be the one doing the penetrating, in her rise to action, to wielding the investigative gaze, to violence, to rage, taking on more and more “male-coded” traits.

Now, this reading of the trope is not without critics. Isabel Pinendo, in her “Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing” from 1997, criticized how in reducing femaleness to traits like terror and victimhood, and ascribing traits like aggression and violence exclusively to maleness, this paradigm results in “nothing less than the impossibility of female agency,” herself seeking to discuss what pleasure experience female viewers can find in this material (which can also take on a sadomasochistic flavor – as Clover had theorized for young males), without having to accept the relegation of all power to the boys. Beyond that, it has been pointed out how some of the elements that make up the “final girl” are not so set in stone. There are many examples (going back to Laurie Strode, the ur-final girl) who drink or do drugs. There are many who are at least in long term relationships and even if it’s not explicitly shown, one can assume aren’t ‘virgins.’ There are many who don’t initially have any hint of coded-male qualities, but just happen to be the last one left – are just lucky to have enough plot-armor to survive to the final showdown.

But the trope does exist (if anything, over the years, the more known the trope is in popular culture, the more fully it has come to embody Clover’s description, even when a given film is purportedly ‘subverting’ the concept), and this brings me back to my initial question. When did horror film makers become consciously aware of the role as such? When did they become aware of Clover’s reading? When did descriptive analysis become inadvertent, prescriptive instruction? I wish I had some data here – I can only guess at people’s intentions and influences.

I assume that in the beginning, it was merely a case of financially motivated imitation. Halloween turned an impressive profit (more than 70 million on a budget of about 320 thousand) and everyone wanted to repeat that success (another obligatory note that Halloween wasn’t really the first of the genre, but it’s success did kick off the first big slasher cycle, running until 1982), launching what might be the most formulaic of horror genres – whereas a ‘vampire movie’ features a vampire and a ‘ghost story’ features a ghost, a ‘slasher’ doesn’t even have to include a slasher killer – but it’s got to stick to the formula: a group of (probably young) people, wanting to party and getting killed off one by one until one girl (probably a girl) is the only one left, who then uncovers what has been going on and dispatches the killer.  In the beginning, I think a lot of people were just seeing that something was selling and they repeated it. Of course, there were variations, and from early on, there were attempts to surprise by disrupting the pattern (for example, the feminist satire of Slumber Party Massacre (1982) or the Scary Movie-esque parody of Student Bodies (1981)), but those disruptions also served to make the pattern more clear (by attempting to wrong foot the audience by not perfectly enacting a formula, it makes the audience think all the more about what that formula would have been, what their expectations are).

And audiences came. Not everything made money like Halloween (and it must be said that most were nowhere near as good as Halloween), but they made money. The more the pattern paid off, the more it was reenacted, and the more audiences came to look forward to certain elements. And sooner or later, academics noticed this and wondered what was going on. Why were filmmakers telling this story in this way? Why was it satisfying enough for a paying public that they kept coming back? Some theories were put forth, perhaps making undue assumptions about who the viewers actually were, and ignoring the potential experiences of viewers who were thus unconsidered. But even if incomplete, this scholarly work helped to illuminate the depth of potential meaning of a genre considered no more than trashy exploitation.

At some point, the academic notion of the “final girl” was folded into the creative process. I don’t know if Kevin Willamson read Clover before writing Scream, but it sure feels like he did, and even if he didn’t, by 1996, Clover’s reading of the ‘final girl’ could have just filtered into the zeitgeist enough to influence the text (and practically everything that came after it in the 90s teen slasher cycle and every post-modern, self-aware slasher/slasher parody that came in its wake). With its explicit presentation of “the rules” of surviving a horror movie, Scream seemed to help make the ‘final girl’ a much more known role (including to a general public who weren’t necessarily horror fans, but who saw this hit movie), even if that name was not applied, was still not in regular use (but I’m not sure the term wasn’t used in any of the sequels – Scream characters are so horror-literate that you’d expect it to come up). For one example of use, I know the term surfaced at least briefly in one of the Scary Movie parodies (released between 2000-2006) as Stacie Ponder, a blogger I’ve been reading for the last decade, uses this image for her blog, Final Girl.

For an example of the conspicuous lack of the term, I recently saw an interview with prolific horror B-movie actress Linnea Quigley from 1999 where she described her professional trajectory moving from being the victim who takes her top off (much of her career) to being the girl who lives to the end. Nowhere in the discussion is the term “final girl” used (and, as mentioned above, it is such a clear term, that once people know it, they tend to use it – it really cuts to the chase).

Or, for a later example, the 2006 film, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, a mockumentary following a slasher in training, is utterly focused on the concept of the final girl, with the killer so certain of her mythic importance to him, knowing they are two sides of the same coin, and manipulating conditions to draw her out, calling on her to become herself so that he can become himself. But he never says “final girl.” In the film, she is always the “survivor girl.” Now was this a conscious decision to avoid an already popularized term, or had it somehow not yet achieved cultural saturation?

The Cabin in the Woods (released in 2011, but filmed in 2009, for the sake of tracking chronology) also leans hard into the concept of certain essential roles (the whore, the fool, the athlete, the scholar, for example) who all must be sacrificed before finally “the virgin” is all that remains. In this case, the people running the show manipulate the players to take on these roles even if they would otherwise be against type, but the ritual of playing out this formula in this way, with the virgin as the only one to see the end, must be faithfully enacted. But still no “final girl,” per se.

However, at some point something changed: in recent years, there have been many fictional works which revolve around both the role and the term (many of which I hope to write about in the coming weeks): Grady Hendrix’s the Final Girls’ Support Group, Stephen Graham Jones’s My Heart is a Chainsaw, and from 2015 alone, two films: The Final Girl and The Final Girls. All of these, and many others, focus on the significance of the role – how inspiring and important it can be for some people, how one can live in constant comparison with its ideal. Even if Clover was more interested in why men would identify with this female character, the resilient, heroic final girl has become aspirational for generations.

For my part, I find a couple of things both effective and interesting. On one basic level, something that works for me is that vulnerability, but I wonder if it’s an issue of what (male) audiences (myself included) will watch and respond to, or if it’s an issue of how writers, directors, and producers expect they will react. I cannot honestly imagine that were I to find myself in some terrible, dangerous situation, I would be John McClaning it barefoot through the air ducts, taking out a building full of terrorists. I would probably be cowering terrified in a corner someplace. It is much easier to identify (outside of hero-wish fulfillment, and don’t get me wrong, Die Hard is a blast!) with a “normal” person who is duly scared of scary things, but through whom we get to vicariously rise to the challenge of facing that fear and vanquishing that horror, even if we have to run around screaming a lot first, even if we drop our knife when we shouldn’t and don’t check to make sure he’s really, really dead before we start running away – it’s easy to yell at the screen and claim that we wouldn’t make such mistakes, but I bet most of us would. When we go on this journey with this fragile, very human character, the heroic thrill of overcoming the threat is all the more exciting.

On another level, I find it fascinating how the trope has been so culturally reproduced as to become truly mythic. The first slasher cycle is largely characterized by non-magical assailants – just a crazy guy with a knife, or a pitchfork, or a drill, or a, you get the picture… (later, especially in the second half of the 80s, following the success of Freddy Krueger, and trying to do something new, there were many more supernatural killers). But somehow, the repetition of this simple structure – kids, party, killer, girl-who-lives – has resulted in a significant archetypal figure, one who resonates in people’s imagination – this is perhaps how myths get born.

She was born out of the lust of storytelling and business. She was named by academia, and once identified, the art form in which she lived came to better know itself, becoming more reflexive. She has subverted gendered expectations and she has been used to reify puritanical norms. She has grown into a full-out action hero and she has been fleshed out as a person, allowed to grieve and to grow. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter why a group of film makers first settled on a pattern – now she exists and carries (sometimes contradictory) meaning. She is an inspiring feminist icon. She is a harmful reduction of femaleness – not even female, so much as a man in narrative drag. She is a calculated attempt to sell women’s empowerment to make a buck. She is a re-gendered ‘everyman’ with whom all can identify, with whom all can vicariously journey through hell and return, tempered by the experience.

All of this is to say that as I just spent a couple weeks focused on one sub-genre (the Lesbian Vampire movie), I’m about to spend a bit of time with Slashers and the Final Girl. Check in weekly for more.

Roots of a Genre – and Questioning Genre

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Happy Friday the 13th! (At least, that’s the date as I sit down to start writing – we’ll see what day I actually post – ok, now it’s Sunday) Whether or not one is a fan of that particular series, this always seems like a little horror holiday, worthy of some manner of observation.  Furthermore, these days summer is coming on, everything is in bloom, and there is this atmosphere redolent of the end of school, of vacation, of coming freedom. And so, I think it is appropriate to take a filmic holiday to a beautiful wooded hideaway, next to a serene body of water, where thirteen people happen to get skewered, hanged, speared, decapitated, burned, and just generally knocked off in all manner of gruesome ways. But today we’re not actually going to Crystal Lake (I’ve already covered my favorite of the F13 movies, part II); let’s take a little trip to Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood. Warning – there are many twists that could be spoiled, so enter with care.

I imagine that this will also be a jumping off point for a few other things I’ve been thinking about, so please bear with me.

A Bay of Blood (1971)

Bava’s film was also released as Carnage, Ecology of Crime, Chain Reaction, Blood Bath, The New House on the Left, and the most excellently titled Twitch of the Death Nerve. Quite shocking at its time, I think its violence holds up pretty well today and can still elicit some real gasps from a viewer. Solidly within the giallo tradition, it also went on to deeply influence what would become the American slasher, most notably the first two Friday the 13th movies (which draw on its location and atmosphere, and even directly recreate a couple of its kills), and subsequently, their imitators. There had certainly been juxtapositions of the beauty of nature with human violence before, and I can’t say for sure that it’s the first “body count film,” but Bava does it so well here as to effectively codify many of what would go on to become the slasher tropes, just as Carpenter would further do seven years later with Halloween.

But it is a bit of an odd duck. At only 84 minutes, it is a tight little thriller that races along at a clip, but it’s also sometimes languid and pastoral. It is quite bare bones, more interested in setting up murder set pieces than fleshing out any of its characters, but it is also surprisingly complex, requiring the viewer to really pay close attention (there are at least six different killers, each working separately and at cross purposes). It relishes in mutilation and gore, but it is also beautifully filmed and artfully composed. The acting is stilted, the writing is strange, the dubbing is terrible (typical for Italian films of the era), but it is also captivating and exciting, and it still somehow comes off as a kind of masterpiece, superior to many of the copycats that would follow in its bloody wake.

The story, while riddled with double crosses, reversals, and shocking revelations, focuses on a simple MacGuffin: the property around a bay which could be developed at a profit, or preserved in its natural beauty (an interesting note on the nature – the filming location had only a couple of trees and they needed a forest, so Bava reportedly just bought some branches at a garden store and had them held in front of and behind the actors – and it’s totally effective – you’d never know it from what’s on screen). The film starts with the old woman, the owner of the land in question, being killed and her suicide faked, and then it’s off to the races with everybody and their surprise step brother killing each other to acquire the inheritance.  In fact, as soon as this matriarch is dead, the film delivers its first big twist. You might expect that, having seen the black gloved hands leave the fake note, that killer would slink back into the shadows so we might wonder at his or her identity for the rest of the film. You’d be wrong. We pan up, see his face, and then immediately see him stabbed in the back.  All apparent rules are out the window – anything can happen – anyone can die, and almost all of them (13 out of the 15 people that appear on screen) do.

While story is decentered, the rest of the filmmaking is creative, propulsive, and endlessly stylish, circling a visual theme of pristine nature balanced against avaricious humanity, corrupt and murderous. People don’t come off well here at all. If they aren’t egoistic killers, they are generally ineffectual, shrill, greedy specimens who will go wholly unmourned, the only exception being some young people who have the misfortune of happening upon the property and getting killed on the off chance that they might stumble onto some kind of evidence (but even there, just the two girls seem kinda decent – the guys, not so much). This pessimistic view of humanity is nicely encapsulated in a dialogue between Paolo, who collects and studies insects and Simon, who criticizes his hobby:

Simon: I don’t kill as a hobby like you do.

Paolo: Good lord, Simon. You make me feel like a murderer.

Simon: I’m not saying that, Mr. Fossati, but if you kill for killing’s sake, you become a monster.

Paolo: But, man isn’t an insect, my dear Simon. We have centuries of civilization behind us, you know.

Simon: No, I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

In all fairness though, I’m pretty sure that Paolo kills no human beings in the film and Simon is responsible for at least 5 deaths (maybe 6), so his moral superiority comes with a grain of salt. Regardless, neither of them are particularly nice guys. It is to Bava’s credit that the film can hold attention so well in spite of being peopled almost exclusively with unpleasant characters.

Perhaps this is the origin of horror films filling their dramatis personae with irritating, disposable youngsters who only exist to satisfyingly die (a trait I’m rarely a fan of – I rather appreciate when they avoid this very thing, but it works here). An effect of this is that the murders don’t horrify so much as thrill – they startle, they impress with their ingenuity, they attain a visceral quality, but it’s all in good fun and there is a streak of black humor running through the whole affair up to, and particularly including, the very last moment before the credits roll.

This is but one of the many links between this influential giallo and what would later become the slasher. We also have the degree to which it structures itself specifically around the kills, then showcasing the gore to the best of the effects artist’s abilities (sometimes with more success than others). Bava even has a group of young people with absolutely no connection to the plot show up just so that someone will go skinny dipping and the body count will be that much higher (and it’s their deaths that get directly borrowed in the first two Friday movies, notably the couple speared together while in flagrante). We even have the scene in the final act when a girl walks into a room only to find all of the people who had been murdered earlier horrifically arranged. This is all extremely familiar but is housed within the work of a giallo director working in high cinematic style.

For a fan of the genre, it’s really worth giving it a view. So much is clearly in its debt.

A Crisis of Genre

This preoccupation with genre (horror – thriller – giallo – slasher) brings me to a topic that’s been on my mind of late. I haven’t personally had a chance yet to see the new Dr. Strange movie, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but I would like to. I enjoyed the first one and hey, Sam Raimi is directing (of Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, Darkman, The Gift, and the first three Spider-Man movies, among many others). In the lead up to its release, it was promoted in some circles as being Marvel’s first foray into horror. Tellingly, in other circles, it was not. And now that it’s out, it is being met with a) mixed reviews (too bad, but not what I’m interested in here), and b) a small crisis of genre classification.

I’ve seen a fair amount of headlines questioning whether it is horror or not and whether it’s too scary. Not having actually seen it, I don’t exactly have an opinion of my own, but I think the debate is interesting in terms of who makes which case and what their stake is in the matter. I think Disney is trying to both have and eat cake here. Before release, this was going to be a horror movie – the novelty was a selling point; after release, and being criticized, of course this isn’t a horror movie – you can bring your kids, fun for the whole family! There are plenty in the horror sphere making the distinction of ‘containing horror elements, but not being classifiable as a horror movie.’ Possibly when I finally see it, I may fall in this camp, but in such things, I always hesitate for fear of falling into a kind of snooty gatekeeping. Personally, Silence of the Lambs, a movie I really like and respect, doesn’t really feel like horror to me (as I wrote about here), but who am I to tell someone who considers it their favorite horror movie that they’re doing it wrong?

Most tellingly for me, a kid that I teach (English as a foreign language) saw it a few days ago and was fuming to me about it afterwards, during our class. He did not appreciate the horror of it. He had gone to a comic book movie and was angry at having been scared. He didn’t want to watch a horror flick and was offended at the intrusion of a genre he doesn’t like into “a cartoon for kids.” I’m not going to venture into whether it’s too scary or not (again – haven’t seen it) and I remember plenty of pretty horrific stuff from PG movies that I loved when I was little and really not into horror (the face melting in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first ghost in the library in Ghostbusters, all of Gremlins, a movie that I LOVED). But it seems to me that if he and other young viewers receive it as horror, that’s what it is. Dismissing their experience seems inexcusably presumptuous. In a similar vein, a podcast I follow, Horror Queers, just did an episode on Who Framed Roger Rabbit – when I first saw that, I was puzzled, but both hosts remembered being disturbed by it when they were little in a way that felt just like a horror film – both by the rather intense and gruesome content of its climax (when the judge is slowly crushed by a steam roller, screaming till the end) and its simple, inherently uncanny mix of animation and live action.

Horror is a tricky thing to pin down. Is it about a set of featured tropes? Which tropes? How many? The net will inevitably be cast too wide or too narrow. Is it just about being horrified? That doesn’t work – a holocaust drama probably shouldn’t be thus classified. To be a comedy, it’s easy; a movie just has to make you laugh. With horror, we might not be able to do better than Justice Stewart’s definition of obscenity (“I know it when I see it”).

To a large extent, genre is just a marketing tool allowing producers to target sales of a product to the consumers who will most want to buy it. For academics, it can be an important tool for focusing a subject of inquiry, contextualizing it in terms of the history and features of similar works. For the rest of us, why is it at all important how we classify Doctor Strange or Silence of the Lambs or anything else? Are we just hungry for categorization? Is it an aspect of how we form our identity? I am the kind of person who likes these things and doesn’t like those things. I am different than the person who likes those and doesn’t like these. If I don’t know what kind of thing this is, if it can’t be clearly labeled, how can I use it to understand and thus, enact the kind of thing that I am?

This may be overreaching – I doubt that loads of people are thrust into existential crisis because they don’t know if Marvel just released a horror movie or not, but the fact that there is any controversy at all over something so seemingly trivial seems to reveal an investment in the matter that may speak to deeper significance.

But people are somehow still arguing about which two colors that dress was – so who knows?

Not Accepting a Life You Don’t Deserve – X

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So, starting this blog, it wasn’t my intention to be a ‘journalist,’ staying abreast of and giving my opinions on the most current developments in the genre, and thus I’ve focused on older movies which I’ve found interesting, or which I’ve felt deserve some more attention. But today, for the first time, I’d like to write about something relatively new, something still in cinemas (it actually just opened a week ago where I live), something I just got to see and loved: Ti West’s X. Now, I’m aware that I’m late to the party – it opened about 6 weeks ago in the States and a lot of ink has already been spilled on it, but I really liked it and I’ve successfully avoided reading any reviews so I could give my thoughts untainted by other opinions. I can’t promise, therefore, that those thoughts are novel, but if its characters can be so insistent on getting what they want, I can excuse myself for devoting some bandwidth to this today.

X (2022)

Especially given the fact that this is still a new release, be forewarned that herein lie spoilers.

In short, the film follows a group of young, aspiring pornographers into rural Texas circa 1979, where unbeknownst to the elderly couple from whom they’re renting a farmhouse, they plan to make a “really good dirty movie,” thus kicking off their respective futures of wealth, comfort, indie cinema, and fame. However, of course, this being a horror movie, they’ve come to the wrong farmhouse, and said elderly couple, driven by a resentment of the young flaunting what they feel age has unfairly stripped away, set upon them in pretty brutal fashion. It is a playful, gory, sexy, and surprisingly emotional outing, and it is also a satisfyingly cohesive piece, held together by the confluence of hopes, dreams, and flesh.

I think comparisons to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Boogie Nights are inevitable, justified, and limiting. It’s probably impossible to hack up young people in such gorgeous southern heat without bringing Hooper’s film to mind (and at least one sequence, in which Maxine is filmed looking through the screen door of the house from deep down the dark interior hallway before tentatively venturing inside, seems to be a direct visual nod to Pam in Chainsaw doing the same). That said, X has a totally different character than the earlier film. Whereas Tobe Hooper’s classic presents America as a pessimistic nightmare, West offers, in spite of the plentiful blood and guts, a disarmingly hopeful tone. This is a film explicitly about the American dream, and it is peopled with dreamers, chasing their own respective stars. Some have been soured by dreams that didn’t come true, and have thus, bitterly, turned to violent cruelty, but the film as a whole retains a rare and sincere optimism. And even the villains of the piece, who do some awful things, are sympathetic in their way.

This essentially humanist take on a group of young people, enjoying their own and each other’s bodies, unconcerned with society’s judgment, chasing success, does bring to mind Anderson’s opus of the porn industry at the turn of the 70s and the 80s, particularly in terms of both films’ central characters’ pursuit of stardom and their tendency to tell themselves in the mirror just how much of a star they are. But Boogie Nights doesn’t feature any eyes being stabbed out, nails through unshod feet, heads being chomped by swamp gators, arterial spurts (though it doesn’t lack blood – anytime a character is wearing all white, it just seems like something bad is destined to happen), pitchforkings, axings, or crushed heads, so that’s something different. Still, another similarity of the two films is their bravura cinematic style and their use of an ill-respected genre (adult film) to lovingly showcase independent filmmaking behind the scenes.

In further contrast to Chainsaw, which moves from a place of sinking dread to a point of sustained, shrill insanity, truly horrific to endure, X is perhaps closer to an 80s slasher, full of sex and violence, but ultimately made to entertain in a way Chainsaw seems unconcerned with. X can startle sometimes with some fun jump scares, builds suspense well and is playful with setting up and denying expectations, has great gory practical effect work, and is exciting, engaging, and even occasionally scary, but while it has thrills aplenty, it doesn’t exactly horrify (and I don’t think this is a failing – like the filmmakers within the movie, I think West really just wants to show you a good time). But neither, really, (in my opinion) did any of the Friday the 13th movies and that doesn’t mean they aren’t a hoot. Also, like an 80s slasher, it is preoccupied with sex, even featuring killers hunting the young explicitly for their sexuality (an easy read of many Reagan era “bodycount films”) but here there is a significant difference.

While films such as Pieces (1982), Blood Rage (1987), or Nail Gun Massacre (1985) may feature gratuitous nudity and a killer somehow obsessed with or haunted by sex (and can be fun in their unapologetically exploitative fashion – I certainly don’t mean to disparage them by comparison), X is actually about sex in a way they are not and, therefore, nothing here is gratuitous. Rather, it is essential to the story, to the thematic, to the emotional arcs of the characters. It is certainly at the core of The Farmer’s Daughters, the film within a film that has brought them to this ill-fated farm.

As experienced sexual performers, Maxine (Mia Goth) and Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), both of whom presumably have been working as strippers for some time but have never made a film before, are defiant in their sexuality, in embracing and enjoying it and the work they do, unashamedly and proudly. Jackson (Kid Cudi), having filmed his first scene, feels he’s found his calling, standing before the window, naked and beaming. Finally, Lorraine (Jenny Ortega), the sound technician and girlfriend of RJ (Owen Campbell), the director of the Farmer’s Daughters, initially uncomfortable in this company, finds herself called to participate, allured by the inspiring sexual freedom, the infectious positivity, and the sense that they are, in fact, making something good that she wants to be a part of. This leads to a telling point of conflict with RJ, who does not want her in the movie, casting doubt on the possibility of actually being so free of hang ups as the group claims.

On the other side of things, Pearl (also Mia Goth, in heavy old-age makeup) and Howard (Stephen Ure), the old couple who are unknowingly providing the setting for this on-location shoot, have their own sexual hang ups to wrestle with. Their relationship is loving, but physically distant, and that distance takes a heavy toll on Pearl. Due to his heart condition, Howard is unwilling to approach intimacy, though he is apparently willing to occasionally chain up attractive young drifters in the basement to satisfy Pearl’s needs, or blow interlopers away with his shotgun. Pearl is pitiable in her physical loneliness, frail and desperate for affection, for touch, to be seen and wanted. It is creepy and invasive when she takes an opportunity to brush against Maxine’s uncovered ribs, even more so, when she strips down and climbs into bed with her as she sleeps; and the whole naked dead guy locked up in the cellar is certainly not ok – but she is really not unsympathetic and the film does not demonize her or present her as horrific merely by virtue of her age or the fact that she still has sexual desire.

The whole film turns on Maxine’s determination to parley her youth and beauty and sex into the life she dreams of and Pearl’s assurance that, “It’ll all be taken from you. Just like it was from me.” There is a bitterness turned violent in Pearl’s assertions, but also a wistful sadness that seems rooted in a life hard lived, in countless tragedies, failures, and disappointments that have atrophied the spirit. There is really nothing left for Pearl to lose and if she can find some satisfaction in the visceral execution of the young, in the physical satisfaction of bloodlust, if, covered in blood, she can finally dance again, following the ever present TV preacher, why should she accept a life she does not deserve?

Maxine (who, in a coda, we learn has a strong tie to said preacher), delivers the same line. She is young now, and strong, certain in the righteousness of her desire, the drive of her body. When she makes it through the night, doing what she has to do to survive, ultimately ruthless in overcoming her octogenarian assailants, her bloody victory inspires. Two dreams clashed and in the end, the one that has not yet gone sour triumphs. Maxine driving off into a glorious sunrise, followed by the comic epilogue of police investigating the blood drenched scene the next day, cements the hopefulness of the ending. For a very, very bloody flick, featuring killer alligators, broken dreams, and, one assumes, sex crimes in the basement, it is a really upbeat note to end on.

And past that, the whole film is just fun. Good editing is often invisible, but West fills his film with really showy cuts and absolutely beautiful shots, relishing the vibrancy of youth, nature, sun, sweat, and enticing danger (an overhead shot of an alligator effortlessly floating towards an unsuspecting skinny dipper typifies the balance of beauty and threat on display here – such a balance bringing us right back to Chainsaw – it’s really hard to escape).

From moment to moment, the film delivers. The comedy lands. The scenes filmed for the Farmer’s Daughters, though they play on a stereotype of cheesy porn dialogue, are coyly seductive with a real, tactile sensuality. And it does have some scares that work, all adding up to a tremendously satisfying, entertaining, and even touching bit of horror cinema. At the end of the day, it is a fun body count film, but one not without heart, and not without a mind at work.