Let’s All Be Final Girls

September 1, 2021 2:15 PM

The slasher story isn’t necessarily pleasant to process through, no, but the final girl is a model for us to follow. We should all fight so hard against injustice. At some point in our struggles, we should all turn around, face down our bullies, and then, like Nancy, turn our back on them. That's from Stephen Graham Jones who, promoting a new novel, revisits the "final girl" trope found in many slasher films and which has been explained, discussed, made into a movie, and into another movie, as well as providing the focus of another novel and even an LP. [Slasher film beanplating previously] [CW: slasher films and all they entail, theory, TV tropes]
posted by chavenet (15 comments total)

CHVRCHES - Final Girl deals with this trope.
posted by signal at 3:06 PM on September 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

I just got the Grady Hendrix book from the library and I look forward to reading it.
posted by Kitteh at 3:15 PM on September 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

I just read the Grady Hendrix novel (The Final Girl Support Group)! Enjoyed it a lot but it’s not a genre I’m familiar with and some people in my book club more into the genre didn’t enjoy it as much. But it seemed that was more due to plot than handling of horror elements, I just didn’t notice plot problems because I was so on edge the whole time. I’ve also never seen any of the referenced movies so no idea how well that was incorporated.
posted by brook horse at 3:27 PM on September 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

We should all emulate any hollywood movie trope: NOT.
posted by sammyo at 3:27 PM on September 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

Grady Hendrix's _We Sold Our Souls_ (punk rock, horror, conspiracy) is excellent.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 3:39 PM on September 1, 2021 [6 favorites]

My husband pointed that all the protagonists in Hendrix's novels are female, which is interesting. (His wife is Amanda Cohen, owner of Dirt Candy in NYC.)

His is very distinctive style and tone to me, one that I enjoy, and sometimes am a little envious of. (I wanted to be a horror writer for most of my adolescence and 20s.)
posted by Kitteh at 3:54 PM on September 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

Daryl Gregory’s “We Are All Completely Fine” is also about a horror survivors support group. Not necessarily Final Girl, but in the same vein.

Yes, I see what I did there.
posted by RakDaddy at 4:42 PM on September 1, 2021 [4 favorites]

Where is the quote actually from?
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:02 PM on September 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

I've just started My Heart is a Chainsaw because I am more of a fan of Stephen Graham Jones than I am of Grady Hendrix. I've read a couple of Hendrix's books, and I didn't HATE them.

But I love SGJ's books even when they unsettle me. I'm a little worried about starting a horror novel now when there's so much real-life horror going on, but I figure I can take it in bits nd piece. And I can always re-read a Murderbot novel/novella or a Pratchett novel for comfort if I get too weirded out.

Yes, Murderbot is comfort reading.
posted by Archer25 at 5:25 PM on September 1, 2021 [5 favorites]

SGJ is great. It’s hard to go into his books and not find slashers lurking somewhere in the woods, but big props to The Last Final Girl, which prefigured My Heart Is a Chainsaw in many ways. His recent The Only Good Indians is not slasher, but it’s winning awards left and right because it is amaaaaazing.
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:08 PM on September 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

Over the last ten years or so, I've really fallen away from reading, going from reading a book or two a week in high school and college to, well, none in a year for several years, spending most of my time reading blogs or stuff like Metafilter (I learned it from watching you.gif), but since last year, I've been trying to read more, to put an emphasis on that. One thing about such a long break, it's hard to know where to start. One book kept popping up, and that was SGJ's The Only Good Indians, and holy hell, it was unsettling. It was incredibly readable, yet in parts, so much that I had to put it down and take breaks from it. It's easily one of the better books I've read since I made the decision to read more, and I'm thrilled to check out My Heart is a Chainsaw.

Seriously, though, The Only Good Indians is fantastic, but I found it (I don't have a better word for this) deeply unsettling in parts. If you like horror, definitely give it a go.
posted by Ghidorah at 8:55 PM on September 1, 2021 [5 favorites]

Final Girls 2015 is one of the funniest, most fun horror movie parodies out there. It's also surprisingly touching and sad in bits. Just an excellent piece of filmmaking, clever but with a ton of heart. That review OP linked to does it incredibly dirty. Everyone should see it.
posted by skullhead at 6:03 AM on September 2, 2021 [3 favorites]

The name "Nancy" in the FPP blurb made me at first think of Nancy Wheeler (from Stranger Things) which then made me realize how much the Nancy/Barb dichotomy (and all the passion-bordering-on-vitriol surrounding "Justice for Barb") comes down to a subversion of the original "final girl" trope as it was first embodied in Halloween and then screwed up by the likes of Friday the 13th and other lesser imitators. I'm paraphrasing someone, I think Ebert here, but maybe Robert McKee, who said that Laurie Strode survived because she was responsible, resourceful, and tenacious, qualities which fit into a hard-working, studious character who was incidentally mocked by her friends for being a virgin, and that the imitators then decided that the key was to make slasher movies into slut-shaming morality plays where the virgin survives as a result of her purity.

In Stranger Things, that character would be Barb, who dies not because of any fault but because that shit happens and nobody understood anything about the Demogorgon yet. And Nancy, who incidentally wasn't there for Barb because she was upstairs having sex, but who almost certainly would have been killed if she were, finds her reserves of resourcefulness, responsibility, and tenacity that make her into a Genuine Badass.

But in the 70s and, particularly, the 80s, Nancy would be dead and Barb alive as a matter of course. I like to see these things evolve.
posted by Navelgazer at 6:57 AM on September 2, 2021 [4 favorites]

There's a thing he missed about final girls. No one believes them. Nancy tries to tell people what's going on and no one listens. Sidney even gets the bumbling police involved and it doesn't work. It's yet another moment where young women learn, you can be strong, you can fight back, hell, you can even win. But you'll still end up in a mental institution in the second movie because nobody listens to victims.
posted by teleri025 at 9:34 AM on September 2, 2021 [11 favorites]

i feel like a dick for saying this but…

i just finished this book yesterday. LOVE the premise but i just kept thinking it would have been a better book if it had been written by a woman.
posted by missjenny at 6:05 AM on September 4, 2021 [1 favorite]