October 20, 2015 • 53 mins
The "final girl" trope has become a standard horror cinema convention, in which a single strong female character outruns, outsmarts and outstabs her murderous pursuer to stand victorious amid the slain. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian explore the film roots, cultural resonance and symbolic power of the final girl.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
works dot com. The film which you are about to
see is an account of the murder and tragedy surrounding
one idyllic weekend at Failing Hope Summer Camp. In a
series of traumatic events escalating with the appearance of a
(00:26):
masked psychopathic killer and the deaths of fifteen victims during
a single night's madness of the campus and staff. Only
one female campus survived. This is the story of her
nightmarish ascension from innocent girl next door to bloodcake survivor.
The events of this weekend were to lead to a
(00:46):
legacy of summer camp blood bats and sleep over tragedies.
It seems to have no end. Hey, welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Christian Sager. Hey, just as a reminder, this is
one of our October episodes where we are trying to
(01:11):
incorporate all things scary and spooky and October and Halloween
themed into the show. That includes Monster Science, which is
our video series that will have a new season at
the end of the month. Beginning on October, We'll have
four new episodes of Monster Science. That's right, VHS late
(01:32):
in daytime horror host inspired explorations of the real science
that potentially underlies some of the more interesting monstrous specimens
from our horror cinema. Yeah, and I should point out
to to clarify that these videos are going to be available. Uh,
you'll be able to watch them on how Stuff Works
(01:52):
dot com. They will share them on our social media
sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler, and they'll also be
on the how Stuff Works YouTube channel. I believe, yes,
So check them out there. And another thing that we're
going to be doing that's brand new in October is
we're going to be trying out periscope. We've just had
so much listener mail lately and we want to take
(02:14):
an opportunity to respond to it that we decided instead
of doing a listener mail episode, let's try periscope out.
We'll do a few listener mails, we'll see how it goes,
and we'll interact with you out there who are tuning in.
So my understanding is that you can talk in real
time via like text I think on periscope. So Joe,
Robert and I are going to be doing that at
(02:34):
the end of the month. Keep an eye out for
more information about when we'll be doing it, so you
can tune in. Alright, So, as are hopefully entertaining little
bit at the beginning of this episode illustrates we're talking
about a familiar trope in the world of horror cinema.
We're talking about final girls and how that plays into
(02:55):
our culture, our perception of gender, into feminist theory and
to film critiquing, and to basically the symbology that informs
our lives. Yeah, and so if you're not familiar with
this trope, the basic idea of a final girl is
that in horror movies, mainly slasher horror movies, the survivor,
(03:16):
the final survivor is usually a young woman who has
somehow outsmarted the slasher killer uh and is the only
one that survives. And and oftentimes it's because uh, she's
outsmarted them, or she's you know, somehow engaged in a
(03:37):
way that the victims were not right, Yeah, or she
finds this hidden strength to finally fight back against her
adversary and and stabbed the heck out of him for
a change. Yeah, And that evolves over the course of well,
I guess like we could say that this may be
started in the sixties uh and leading up to present
day slasher films, and there's a there's a whole host
(03:59):
of accade emic literature that looks into this one particular trope. So, yeah,
this is not um particularly quantitatively heavy science episode, but
we felt like it was really important, both because it
fits into our theme for the month and because we're
all horror fans here, but also because horror stories are
(04:19):
just a really important way that we as human beings
try to make sense of our world. They're the scary
stories that we used to tell around the fire. Uh.
And they also are important cultural texts that have popularity
to them, you know. And these movies in particular especially
popular with adolescence. Uh. And they're also considered outsider cinema
(04:41):
to a certain extent, even though they make a lot
of money. Uh. Slasher films in particular are just on
the outside of mainstream acceptance. Right, So there's something interesting
going on there about how it fits in and doesn't
fit into our mainstream culture. I also want to quote
a study by a guy named Mark Edmondson here at
the Getting where he says that the horror film gathers
(05:03):
up all of our free floating anxieties, binds them to
a narrative and brings that anxiety under temporary controls. So
if you step back from the gore and the kind
of silliness of slasher films, there's something deeper going on
there that you can look at and kind of try to,
I guess decrypt as to what's going on in society,
(05:24):
what's happening within our culture right now, and what that
says about us. Yeah, and plus when you look at
horror films in particular, but also various exploitation films and
outsider films as well, like these are often the first
filters that we run our cultural anxieties through way before.
You know, some Oscar nominated picture cackles it maybe a
(05:44):
more nuanced and tasteful way. You know, it's a good
example of that. What's in this case Silence of the Lambs.
Oh yeah, So we had like a good twenty maybe
thirty years of slasher films before Silence of the Lambs
was That's right, innsidered a class and it wins the Oscar.
Yeah yeah, but yeah, so some films like that will
eventually come along and pick up some of these vibes
and some of these cultural anxieties, but the horror film,
(06:07):
like the the early horror exploitation film, that's where you'll
see us grappling with it for the first time. Yeah. Absolutely,
and and and so let's start by, uh, sort of
giving you some examples here. So my favorite final girl
has got to be Ellen Ripley Alien. Uh. And that's
not necessarily a slasher movie, although I guess an argument
(06:28):
could be made that the Alien is sort of a slasher, right.
I think it functions the same way as a slasher movie.
For sure. It's a very masculine, phallic entity, a lot
of sexuality bound up in it. And then really, Scott
is the first to admit that it's essentially a haunted
house picture in space. Yeah. But so you know, if
(06:49):
you need some other examples, the classics are Laurie Strode,
the Jimmy Lee Curtis character in the first two Halloween movies.
Pretty Much every Friday the Thirteenth movie, right, has a
final girl in it. I can think of a single
one that ends with a guy living instead of I
think they have granted my all. My Friday the Thirteenth
(07:10):
feeling took place like on a late night US network. Frankly,
they all kind of blend together after a while. Last year,
my wife and I tried to watch I think, like
all of them in a row, and they just even
watching them all in a row in like a week
or two, it just turned into one morphous mess. But
you got Sally in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nancy from
(07:31):
the original Nightmare in Elm Street, and then of course
the Nev Campbell character Sydney, and the Screen Movies, which
I think the Screen Movies tried to do a little.
They tried to do kind of a postmodern e thing
with final Girls in horror genre expectations, but but ultimately
it fulfills the Final Girl troupe. There's some recent ones
to like, uh, that movie Your Next, the Home Invasion
(07:56):
movie with the guys with the animal masks, the Final
Girl in that was particularly adventurous. I guess I would
say like I was really surprised at how like physically
competent she was. I think like the gimmick of that
movie is like it turns out that like she's not
this helpless on jinue and that like it turns out
she's like from the Australian Outback or something like that
(08:18):
and has all these skills that enable her to just
utterly decimate these these guys invading the home that she's in.
And then there's the remake of Evil Dead does a
really good job of this by replacing the Ash character
with this character Mia, who ultimately ends up saving the day. Yeah.
I really enjoyed that remake. I don't know a lot
(08:38):
of people were mixed on that, but I I loved it.
I thought it was beautifully shot, it and it was
it felt dangerous. It felt like a dangerous horror film
that I did. I had no idea where things we're
gonna go, which is especially potent when you're considering that
it's a reboot and a remake. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean
I was also a wary of it, and I thought
that the creator, I can't remember his name right now,
(09:00):
but just did an excellent job really kind of injecting
new life into that series but also making like a
really yeah, beautiful, beautifully shot and also just terrifying movie.
I mean there is stuff in that movie. I consume
a lot of horror fiction in all kinds of different media,
(09:20):
and Yeah, that that movie definitely uh raised my my
goose bumps. Another recent film, J out of character j
in it It follows, which is when I really loved
And It Follows is especially interesting to look at the
Final Girl Trope as well, because it's all about uh
(09:41):
sexuality and the repercussions of sex in a way that
the Final Girl Trope has revolved around for decades. Yeah,
accepted deals with it in a in a more reserved way,
I feel, more intelligent way, because you could have easily
made a very sleazy eighties film with the same premise,
but it goes in a more thoughtful indie direction. Another
(10:03):
beautiful horror movie. I love the way that Oh yeah,
beautiful soundtrack, beautiful shot um. Sarah in The Descent one
of my favorites. That's a complicated one though. I mean,
I don't want to spoil that movie at all, but
Sarah does some stuff that is morally ambiguous in order
to make it to the end. It is that there's
one's definitely complicated, the two lead and another complicated one
(10:24):
or the two leads in the French horror film High Tension.
We were telling me about this earlier. I haven't seen
this movie. Yeah, a lot of it hinges on some
big spoilers, so I'm gonna refrain, But if you haven't
seen it, that one's a real nail biter. You already
mentioned Sally Hartessy from the first Texas Chainsaw Master Movie movie,
but also Stretch in the second one is also a
(10:46):
very strong example and one that's often cited in some
of the texts about Final Girls because she that's a
mixed picture with a lot of weird elements, but the
ending is pretty pretty stellar. And as we'll talk about
in a moment, throughout the history of this Final Girl
trope and sort of how it reflects our cultural treatment
(11:06):
of gender and also of our anxieties, there's an interesting
thing that you you can sort of trace throughout the history,
and Sally is a good marker point for that, although
I'd also argue that Psycho is as well, where that
the Final Girls end up going from being fairly passive
and not really having agency and their survival too, where
(11:27):
we've got that year next version where like you know,
the the Final Girl has these just amazing survival skills
that allow her to just constantly out with the enemy. Yeah,
you see this cultural evolution really right, because your earliest
examples even like pre not even horror film, but you
have your damsel in distress, right, you look at old
monster moving, it's and it's just when's the guy gonna
(11:48):
come and shoot the monster and save the screaming girl.
The girl can hardly run from the monster because she
faints fase screaming. She's that helpless, right. Yeah, I just
rewatched The Shining last night on on the big screen.
They played it here at the Plaza Theater in Atlanta,
and I love that is my favorite movie of all time.
I love that movie. But yes, there are multiple scenes
(12:08):
in that and that's but where the female lead and
that is just constantly like falling down all over herself
and screaming and crying and barely able to make it
away from from her maniac husband. So like your early examples,
are that right, that the final girl survives just by
out running the horror and it's maybe it's just even
(12:31):
pure dumblock. It has nothing to do with any strength
of character or survival skills. But then it begins to
evolve into something else. So we see this kind of transition, right,
And there's two different ways to look at it too.
In the seventies, there's this brief sort of renaissance and
horror where you know, horror movies are sort of progressive,
(12:51):
they're challenging norms, especially the depictions of female subjectivity. But
then in the eighties, there's this idea that they're done
eyeing that status, right, Yeah, that they get may be
a little more exploitative and schlocky and kind of the
trend setting that takes place in the genre in the
seventies then be kind of comes the cruising standard. But
then there's also sort of an argument to be made
(13:13):
and the and the woman who actually created the term
final girl, uh makes this point that there there's also
a reversal from the passive final girl in the seventies
movies leading up to the eighties or I guess late
seventies early eighties, that even though those movies are more
exploitative and less narratively interesting, maybe that uh that at
(13:38):
least those final girls have like a certain amount of
agency to them. Yeah, they began to to to fight back,
to to outfight and outthink their opponents. Oh and you know,
like before we get into this, I should mention to like,
like we're not the only ones who are sort of
fascinated by this subject. In fact, there was a movie
that came out I think two years ago that was
called Final Girl, that was all about sort of subverting
(13:59):
the trope of the Final Girl. And then there's another
movie coming out I think in like two or three
months called Final Girls that looks like it's sort of
like a meta horror comedy kind of deconstructing the whole
Final Girl troupe. Yeah, Cavin in the Woods of course also, yeah, yeah,
very much. So. Alright, so let's before we get into
(14:20):
to the Final Girl um scenario more, let's let's back
up and just talk about one of the key primary
criticisms that are often that's often leveled at horror by
serious commentators, and that's that horror films are essentially about
the destruction of women. Um. They're hunted, they're tormented, they're killed,
they scream, they faint. The male monsters often get to
(14:42):
observe their nudity or a carnal act before they then
pounce out, you know, they get to observe the female
sexual power, ultimately the reproductive power of females, and then
they punish them for They punish them for their sexuality
repressed that they're dangerous, power of report auction, slicing, the
feminine power of reproduction with the male power of death.
(15:04):
And this is a stance that you will find you
probably will find still today. And a lot of sort
of you know, critical looks at horror, but definitely in
like academia the eighties and nineties, when it was really
starting to look at horror cinema, there was a this
sort of stance that well, of course this is you know,
abject and terrible towards women. Uh. There were studies that
(15:27):
like did some analysis interviewing male horror viewers and finding
out that they reported that they enjoyed slasher films significantly
more than their female counterparts did, and that their enjoyment
it was heightened by the company of a distressed woman.
So there's something about watching a horror movie that that
(15:48):
excited men when their you know, girlfriend or wife or
whatever was with them and and scared. Uh. And then
on the other side, there was a study that was
done by two guys Nolan and Ryan these are their
last names, uh, and they did like a gender association
with words about the movies, and they found that all
genders associated the words disturbing, horror, girls, evil, scary, killer,
(16:15):
and young with horror movies. Now you just go to men.
Men associate the words shocked, angry, helpless, agitated, and frustrated,
while women associate with fear, nervousness, vulnerability, horrified, exposure, and betrayal.
(16:35):
So they make a case, basically by doing this word analysis,
that female viewers were not being empowered by watching horror movies,
as some you know, we'll get into, as some academics argued,
no matter who gets to live at the end, whether
it's a male character or female character, they didn't feel
empowered and instead they were identifying with the unlucky victims.
(16:57):
You know, this reminds me a bit of a Kamio
non job any bits and stand up talking about the
fear that there was somebody in the attic or ghost
in the attic, and talking about like the scenario in
which what he goes up there with like a path
pot on his head and a knife in his hand
and he said, well, what happens if I come back
down and I say, oh it's okay, everything's fine. I
murdered somebody. You know, because even these these scenarios where
(17:21):
like the woman lives at the end and she's the
triumphant final girl, she's just been through a traumatic life
jarring experience and she probably had to murder somebody, right, Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
the PTSD alone would maybe not be worth it. Yeah,
So I can see where a female or any audience
member who stops to think about it, I would say,
you know, this is not This is still not a
happy ending. It's maybe not the worst ending, but it's
(17:44):
not a happy ending. Well, and that's basically how the
argument goes, right the uh, the generic argument leveled against
her movies. And I say generic, but I should say,
like there is validity to this argument that these films
feature women as victims and they are subsequently harmful to
willing to women. The monster is in fact killing them
(18:05):
for expressing their sexuality, right, like nine times that attend
in these movies. There's something going on with sex or
just femininity that ultimately ends up with the monster killing them. Yeah,
And I you know very so much from picture to picture,
But I feel like all anybody who's watched enough horror
can definitely think of some examples where you're watching the
(18:26):
film and you really think, yourself, come on, this is
not this is just about you, and you're really screwed
up ideas about that necessary. Well that and or just
trying to sell the movie for it's a sexy factor. Yeah,
I mean as as I said before talking about you know, storytelling,
and and certainly with films, you're even if you don't
(18:49):
know what you're doing, and certainly a lot of people,
with a lot of first time filmmakers, they go to
horror because it seems like an easy genre to play in.
Even if you don't know what you're doing, You're playing
with an established pieces, enough established symbols and enough established
storytelling tropes that you can end up compelling, building something,
assembling something that has a compelling potent or perhaps you know,
(19:13):
misleading or dangerous idea that resonates with the viewer. So
you may just be putting together a pictures saying what
kind of horror picture can I make over the course
of a weekend with some friends, and in doing so
makes something that that really seems to portray some horrible
ideas about gender, or if you're lucky, makes something that's
kind of transcendent. Yeah. Yeah, Well, Roger Corman would be
a good argument for that case, right, And like in
(19:35):
some cases, that guy was cranking up films in like
five days or something, and I'm sure a lot of
those were just like the studio being like money, money, money, money, money,
And then in other cases there's some Corman stuff that
people go back and look at his classics. Yeah. As
I I often tell people, I I think I enjoy
bad films with moments of brilliance in them more than
I enjoy like solid, great films, because there's something great
(19:57):
about watching something that's kind of flocky, kind of awful,
and then out of nowhere a great performance or out
of nowhere they hit upon this just brilliant idea or
something that seems to accidentally resonate. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, I
understand what you're saying. And I've actually seen some more
extreme arguments made that that the treatment of females in
horror films it's really kind of a pseudo human sacrifice.
(20:19):
This kind of like primal um right used to subjugate
women under the rule of men, to to to sacrifice
them again to is male power of violence that makes
up for the female power of creation. Yeah, and I
can again like I think that there's a certain amount
of validity to that, But then I also think, like
(20:40):
there are women who watch and enjoy and make horror films. Uh,
and that there you know, are some people like like
I saw one academic study looking into this where one
uh writer made the argument that women who view horror
on a regular basis are ex traders and that they
(21:01):
are perpetuating oppressive norms. Uh. And this is this is
a topic that's perfect for our sister show stuff. Mom
never told you. I'd love to hear their take on this,
But uh, that seems a little extreme to me. I
know lots of women who love the horror genre and
participate in it and work in it, whether as actors
(21:22):
or makeup artists or directors. You know, there's just all
kinds of roles within those and and yes, it's so
those roles have definitely expanded in the last what like
almost twenty years since the original Final Girl article was written. Yeah,
and you see these filmmakers and various people and get
involved in the process. And there's also the opportunity to
(21:42):
play with it and change it and and figure out
what is, uh, you know, what's not working in terms
of the betrayal of women in horror films and tweak
it a little bit. Like one of the more recent
films from the softca sisters, the Twin Canadian collectors their stuff.
I think it's great. Yeah, they they came up a
lot in the research. Yeah. Yeah, they're one of their
(22:04):
more recent films. I think it was Seen No Evil too. Yeah,
I haven't seen that one, but I've seen American Mary. Okay, well,
this one is. This is the one with the wrestlers.
This is Yeah, this is the one with the w
W E is Kane in it, and uh, it's it's
far better than any horror film with Kane that should
be they do. I think they do a pretty knockout
(22:25):
job and have some surprises in it. I think American
Mary is really like if you want to look at
the Final Girl trope, or look less at Final Girls
and more at kind of just how women are treated
in horror cinema. That's a fascinating movie. It's a really
interesting film. Yeah. Yeah. Um. There's an interesting article in
the journal Horizons that actually is just called feminist horror.
(22:47):
Uh and it says it's written by a woman whose
last name is Gilmore, and it says done right. The
horror genre is full of subversive possibility and a female audience,
especially for young female audiences who seem to be hungry
for this promise. Uh So there's this idea there, right,
like that the the process of watching these movies is
(23:10):
in some way cathartic, right, and that it provides an
imaginary space where we can confront our anxieties and work
through the real life trauma. That we have the things
that we're worried about in the real world through these constructions,
through these narratives, which is ultimately, you know, why we
tell stories, just to figure out how the world works
and to have a better understanding of how we exist
(23:32):
within it. And I also want to draw on another
study here that I think helps to illuminate how complex
we can get with some of these pictures. Uh looking
at ourn article titled a Cognitive Approach to the Films
of Dario Argento by Nia Edwards b. And this is
interesting because Dari Rigenta is one of these these filmmakers.
(23:52):
It's easy to to really throw some stones at him
in terms of the treatment of women because he's he
has this kind of reputation. He's kind of infamous for
often playing the hands of the killer himself, and he'll
have these really stylized deaths of his of female victims
in the films, and certainly those stick with you, like
(24:14):
the Deaths and Suspiria particularly so if you, yeah, if
you haven't seen any Darya Agento films, I guess Suspiria
is probably the most famous of them, right, Yeah, that's
definitely the starting point and probably you know, arguably the
stopping point. But maybe he's best known for the sort
of yes, stylistic, colorful uh framing, I would say, of
(24:39):
his sequences, and there's just some really beautiful sets in
those movies as well. The blood in our Genta's movies
looks like some weird kind of like uh, water colored
syrup or something. Yeah. That it's like the weird surreal
aspect here. And you know ultimately what you're getting into
this since something that's really dwelled upon in a lot
(25:02):
of the the academic papers about his work. You're talking
dealing with an aesthetic representation of death um, which is
interesting to think about that because you don't necessarily see
that term thrown around in looking at paintings that have people,
and it's like paints of of martyred saints or paintings,
say the death of Cleopatra, which is a common subject
(25:25):
in older paintings, you know, the show This Beautiful Woman
that is just stuff and new that is just poisoned herself,
you know. Um, But in films, in horror films in particular,
you see it a lot. And what's wrong If you're
gonna have a film in which people were murdered, why
shouldn't it be beautiful? Why can't the cinematography be elegant?
Does it? And then in doing that to what extent
(25:47):
does that warp the message of the picture? Right? And
there's a certain point where I understand, like the form
and the function and the narrative all kind of come
together as one thing. But then when you're analyzing them
or reviewing them in any kind of capacity, it's also
important to separate them out as well. Right. Yeah. One
of the things that the author uh it was be
(26:08):
uh gets into here is that it's it's easy for
a lot of these papers to really just focus on
that aesthetic representation of death, focus on the female death
scenes themselves, as opposed to the many male deaths that
take place in our gentle films, and the fact that
quote his killers are often female or queer and have
only become killers due to a past trauma. Relating to
(26:29):
their position as a non male right. So that actually
connects to another article that I read for this which
is called The Final Girl, A few Thoughts on Feminism
and Horror by a guy named Donato Tataro. Uh and uh.
You can find this on off screen dot com actually,
but basically his argument is that final girls are an
(26:50):
American phenomenon in horror cinema, that it's American female characters
who are murdered because they have sex, whereas in European horror,
which Daria are Gento is very much a part of
those female characters murder because of their carnality, right because
of their femininity, and that they're victims are mainly male.
(27:12):
And not only that, but the male victims are usually
attracted to their female killers, so they're not disavowing their
femininity in a way. That um, some people argue that
The Final Girl is sort of androgynous in a way. Interesting. Yeah,
And his big example, and I have not seen this movie,
was that the same year that Texas Chainsaw Massacre came
out in ur there was a movie that was made
(27:34):
in Europe called The House of Whip Chord. And I'm
really interested in this now, spoilers for Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
I guess, but that movie begins the exact same way
that Texas Chainsaw Massacre ends, with a semi comatose woman
escaping from some kind of a situation that's horrific, and
she's picked up by a truck driver. But in that situation,
(27:55):
it starts from her perspective and then works back through
a flashback, so there's agency there through her. And then
I suspect, you know, not having seen it, I suspect
that Tataro's argument plays out and that the killer and
this is probably a female, and there's you know, a
certain amount of sex involved there. So in either case,
(28:15):
you can just really go into the deep end looking
at just the cultural um roots of any given horror culture. Yeah.
So this leads us to the big one, which is
Carol J. Clover. She's the one who termed the word
or the phrase final girl, and it was in her
(28:35):
book which is called Men Women in Chainsaw, Gender in
the Modern horror film UH. And the basic argument goes
like this that this trope UH flipped the identification of
horror movies so that male and female viewings are a
little bit different than they would be expected to be
subsequently making it more complex. All Right, we're gonna take
(28:59):
a quick and when we come back, we're going to
continue looking into this idea of the final girl with
more specific examples and discussion of its uh it's evolution.
All Right, we're back, and you know I want to
I want to read just a quote here from Carol J.
(29:21):
Cloger's men Women in Chainsaws Gender in the modern horror film,
where she just really sums up sort of the court
thesis here right. The image of the distressed female most
likely to linger in memory is the one who did
not die, the survivor or final girl. She is the
one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and
perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of
(29:43):
her own peril, who has chased, cornered, wounded, whom we
see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is
abject terror personified. If her friends knew they were about
to die only seconds before the event, the final girl
lives with the knowledge for long minutes or hours. She
alone looks death in the face, but she alone also
(30:06):
finds the strength either either to stay the killer long
enough to be rescued ending A, or to kill him
herself ending B. But in either case, from nineteen seventy
four on, the survivor figure has been female. So her
using nineteen seventy four there, she's I think, using Texas
Chainsaw massacre as a starting point. Yes, okay, which makes
(30:31):
sense given the title of her book. Yeah, And so
it's it's interesting looking to these studies of the Final
Girl because as it becomes the trope, you have the
undisputed main character of many films in the genre are female,
and they're enjoying the most potential character development. Granted that
character development doesn't necessarily take place in any in any
(30:53):
notable degree, but the potential is there. She becomes the
central point of viewer identification in the film. Yeah. So
there's another side to this argument. So some people argue
against Clover's stipulations here. So I think it's important as
we go along here to sort of throw in their
two cents and then you know, you, like us, can
sort of make up your own mind about it. The
(31:14):
other side goes like this, that these films are all
made by different creators and yet somehow they consistently all
characterize the heroine as powerful at the end, and that
some somehow she's a figure who questions authority and is
always determining the course of her own life. And in
fact she has agency more than any of the other
characters to other than maybe the killer. Uh. And they,
(31:38):
you know, the final girls are the ones that make
things happen in control events. Uh. And then you know,
often the argument is made that that's within a system
of patriarchy. Right, So if we're really looking at gender
influence in these films, you know, frankly, uh, they're in
patriarchal settings. And then the killers are mostly male, right, Yeah,
they're in a they're in a may dominated world or
(32:01):
very particular that they're often in an adult, male controlled world,
and suddenly they're encountering this masculine horror, this terror that
is often a product of that world. Nobody in the
adult world and the male powered world that are going
to actually help them. They tell them, oh, there's a
killer in the woods, and they go, there's nothing. There's
somebody trying to kill me in my dreams, go to sleep. Right,
(32:23):
it's always the like figures in authority, the sheriff for
the doctor and the mental institution or whatever. Yeah, even
if they try to help, they're going to get knocked out.
So the Final Girls, as Clover presents them, are sort
of known for their courage, their resourcefulness, They've got investigative
abilities that help them save the day. But Clover thinks
(32:44):
that the important thing is this is that as viewers
when we're watching it, we start off watching these movies
by sharing the perspective of the killer. Right, So I
think of it from the Halloween is a perfect example
of this, Like the camera is actually Michael Myer's viewpoint, right,
but we shift part way through the film to the
final Girl. We start identifying with her rather than the killer.
(33:08):
So the Final Girl is always female. But at the
same time, they have kind of a you know, quote
unquote male nous for the audience. So, you know, Clover
argues this isn't necessarily a development, right, that they in
some way are used as a vehicle for male viewers
sort of sata massochistic fantasies. Especially if you're identifying with
(33:30):
the killer, you're looking through the killer's eyes as he
you know, uh saws his way through hordes of women. Yeah,
I mean there's often a very phallic aspect of it.
You know, the killer is stabbing, the killer is impaling,
the killer is is using some sort of weapon that
is some sort of a you know, a phallic uh symbol. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
(33:52):
so she says, male viewers see the Final Girl's traits
is inherently male, which ultimately complicates the gender understanding going
on in these films. So she argues, well, wait a minute,
is the Final Girl somehow hermaphroditic or androgynous? You know,
when she becomes her own savior, she subsequently becomes a hero,
and that the male viewer identifies with heroes as being male. Uh,
(34:18):
And so that's where sometimes this like boyishness gets mixed in.
There's an argument and I don't agree with this, like
some of this, some of the stuff I think also, uh,
you know, let's keep in mind that Clover was writing
in There's me a lot of horror movies that have
been made since then that subvert this. But there's an
argument that that, uh, final girls tend to have gender
(34:40):
ambiguous names, and so like her, examples are Lorie, Terry, Stretch, Will, Joey,
and Max. I don't know where all of those come from.
Laurie's obviously from Halloween and stretches from Texas jamesaw Massacre too.
But lord, I don't think of Laurie necessarily as being
gender ambiguous. And then, you know, I think think of
the classic examples like Ellen, Sarah, Nancy, Sally, those are
(35:05):
all fairly female names. So I don't know that I
I buy into that argument necessarily. But either way, Clover
says that the final girl is de sexualized and that
she's either unavailable or she's reluctant to be in relationships. Right,
So that ties into the she's probably one. She not
one of the ones who has sex which doesn't lead
(35:25):
to her being murdered by the monster. Um. Sometimes their virgins,
sometimes they're celibate. There's an argument to be made here though, too, right,
which is do heterosexual relationships prove a woman's femininity? It
doesn't necessitate that you be female. You can be female
(35:48):
without participating in sex. Right. So there's complicated things in
there going on as well about like our understanding of
sex and what like how femininity can be expressed in
film as well. Yeah, because certainly we have some still
some very culturally mixed up ideas about about the answer
to that question. Yeah, But so Carol's ultimate argument is that, uh,
(36:10):
that it reverses or sorry, Carol Clover, I should just
like you know, Carol Clover's argument is that the function
of the Final Girl is that she reverses the spectator's gaze.
So we originally see through the killer's eyes at the beginning,
like I said, and are even often kind of made
the route for the killer as the killer dispatches representations
(36:32):
of the worst teenagers. Yeah. Absolutely, but then when we
do see the killer, it's through the Final Girl's eyes,
and it's with clarity too, and that increases more and
more towards the end of a film. Right, So if
you think about Halloween, it doesn't like start off right
with you just seeing Michael Myers running around with a
with a hatchet or something like that, Right, It's slowly
(36:54):
builds up to the point where he's he's omnipresent. Um,
and that you know, So there's a question here about like, Okay,
we looked at that study earlier that said that women
identify with the victims. So does that then mean that
the only viewer who's experiencing this gays gender reversal is
(37:14):
the male viewer? Then? And you know that that I'm
going to leave that question hanging out there. I think
Clover leaves it hanging out there too. I don't know,
I don't know what the answer I definitely would love
to hear from for from both male and female horror fans,
but particularly female horror fans, and comes to this, Yeah. Absolutely,
So let's just take a quick walk through some of
the big touchstone moments in the evolution of the Final Girl.
(37:38):
So even before we get the get Final Girl going properly,
we have to mention Psycho, which is just an example
in which the female is obliterated likely and Psycho, I
think maybe I don't know if I would call it
the first slasher film, but it's definitely one of you know,
the classic uh in many years before Texas Chainsaw'm Masaker.
(37:59):
But um, there is an inherent gender fluidity in the
story itself, you know, if you if you don't know Psycho,
the idea of sort of bouncing back and forth between
the identity of male and female as a killer is
part of the story there. But yes, absolutely, like the
(38:20):
women are killed in that and not only does it
obliterate them, but it obliterates sort of the female identity
of who we think the killer is in that movie.
All right, So we've mentioned Sally Hartessy from Texas Chainsaw
maskar alrad In, and she kind of survives just through sheer,
almost like through sheer outrage and sheer care. She just
screams her head off, runs, doesn't really fight back, but
(38:43):
basically just runs and it survives. Sally doesn't do anything
particularly active to lead to her own escape other than
just kind of running and ending up in the right
place at the right time where she jumped in the
back of a truck. But then Laurie Strode and seventy
eight and John Carpenter's Halloween, this is a real turning
point because she does her share of screaming and running,
(39:04):
but she reaches the point where she turns and fights back,
which it actually picks up the knife and wields the
killer's own weapon against him. Yeah, this is the Jamie
Lee Curtis character. I'll always remember that scene where she's
in the closet and she's she she finally attacks back,
you know, with the long knife and cuts Michael Myers. Yeah,
and so according to tow Clover, as as we get
(39:27):
into the eighties, you know, certainly there's that differ quality
that we just discussed earlier, but you see more and
more um situations where the qualities of the character are
enabling her, of all the characters, to survive. Uh she has.
It's something that would otherwise seem unsurvivable. And it's not
just random like, oh, this one happened to survive. No,
this is the one that had the character that would
allow her to survive. And she's even like you see
(39:49):
this kind of transformation. That's it's kind of uh nietzsch
In right that you know from the from life school
of war, what does not kill me makes me stronger.
So they kind of transform into this new survivor person
through the experience. Although there is kind of a weird thing,
especially with the franchises that have so many sequels, like
(40:10):
like Friday the Thirteenth and The Nightmare in Elm Street,
where the final girls of a previous movie will show
up at the beginning of the sequel and somehow be
dispatched relatively quickly. Yeah, but they do in some instances
maybe we'll get to this, they do sort of bestow
their final girl like role upon a new final girl. Yeah, yeah,
(40:31):
they kind of pass it off. The Nightmare movies are
frequently mentioned, um because especially the first one or two,
you know, we see Nancy Thompson going on a journey
of exploration. So it's not just about running from the enemy,
but also understanding it, figuring out how it works, diving
into its world a little bit, in this case, into
the world of dream in order to to to figure
(40:52):
out how to stop this monstrous adversary. Yeah, she really
is like the investigator. She figures out the like secret
history of for a Krueger. That kind of reveals it all, um.
And another example similar to this is that the Hell
Razor films, where you have just a very powerful adversary
in the form of the Centobytes, and uh, final girl
Christie Cotton survives in large part by our wits by
(41:15):
doing a little bargaining and also you know, a little
literal puzzle solving with the limit configuration. Yeah, Hell Razor
is a tough one for me because I don't necessarily
think of Hell Razor as being a slasher film, and
I don't think of Christie as being or Kirstie as
being a final Girl. I guess because I think of
the Cento Bytes as being like gender Listen away like,
(41:39):
I know that they do have gender. I know there
are like there's a female Cento byte and and Pinhead
is very much male. But there is more going on
with them than just like a man chasing people around
with a knight. I would agree, Yeah, there's certainly Clive
Barker was coming from a more fantastic point of view
when he created them. Yeah, yeah, certainly. Now we've already
(42:02):
mentioned Alien, but there that the case it's often made
here is that that Ripley surviving through adaptation, pure survivalism.
So a lot of a lot of situations are thrown
at her, be it an out of controlled android or
this you know, perfect masculine, empowered, phallic organism coming at her,
and she's able to just to roll with it and
do it has to be done to survive. Yeah, and
(42:22):
so one thing that's worth pointing out with that we
were talking about the naming conventions um is that when
the screenplay for Alien was written, none of the roles
had genders assigned to them. So like the name Ripley
wasn't necessarily male or female, but when it was cast,
they ultimately went with Sigourney Weaver. I think that was
(42:43):
with all the Roles. I don't think that that was
necessarily just with the Ripley character, and we were talking
about this before the before recording. I can't remember if
her first name Ellen was applied in Alien or if
that didn't show up until Aliens. Yeah, that's I may
be misremember it, but I think that's how it went. Um. Now,
when we get into the Friday Thirteenth Friday the Thirteenth
(43:06):
franchise um, there's a lot of a lot of room
for discussion there too. It's pointed out by Sarah Trinkansky
in the piece. I believe we already referenced this Final
Girls and Terrible Youth Transgression in nineteen eighties slasher Horror. Yeah,
this is a great piece. It was in the Journal
of Popular Film and Television, and I really liked it
because not only did it apply Clover's theories, but then
(43:31):
it sort of brought them forward and it was almost
like a nice literature review of sort of what had
gone on in these studies up until then, and then
also presenting her own, you know, theoretical application to this. Yeah,
and and Trinkanski does a good job of of just
talking about like the evolution within the Friday the thirteen
franchise alone. Prince is one of the early examples of
(43:52):
Jenny Field, who who I believe that we're using as
the cover art for this episode with a pitchfork and
Friday thirteenth to she impersonates Jason's dead mother in order
to out with the killer and eventually it brandishes a
pitchfork at him. Eventually we get to Friday that thirteenth
Part seven, in which Tina Shepherd uses not only does
(44:15):
she stand up to the the adversary here, she uses
telekinetic powers against the monster. She collapses at the house,
she raises the dead, so ultimately she out supernaturals the
supernatural adversary instead of merely out running or out fighting.
And yeah, I would say that that is probably the
height of Clover's argument of the Final Girl becoming more
(44:36):
and more powerful, right like in that It's been a
long time since I've seen that movie, but I very
you know, specifically, remember it's established that this girl has
these like magical powers right from the beginning to sort
of give Freddy a uh level playing field, I guess
when it comes to the showdown, like I remember her
(44:57):
like telekinetically throwing nails into his face and stuff like that.
Isn't she also like sort of responsible for bringing him
back or something like that, Like I think spoilers for
again another movie that's like maybe thirty years old, but
if I remember correctly, I think like Freddie or no, sorry,
Jason is tied to the bottom of Crystal Lake with
(45:17):
like a boulder or something, and she's trying to bring
back her dad and she accidentally raises Jason Vorhees from
the dead instead, and so she's the reason why he's
able to run him buck again. Huh. That's interesting, and
you know that that I wondered to what extent that
plays into this other point that we've already touched on
a little bit that does Trinkansky uh discusses this at length.
(45:41):
Is that you see this idea that youths in the
horror films are subjugated by an adult world and assaulted
by the very monsters of the adult world creates. And
in this case with with with this psychic Tina Shepherd,
like is she she's kind of accidentally engaging in that
world and creating of problems. Uh? Yeah, it's it. It
(46:03):
becomes kind of complicated. The more layers of franchising mythew
layer over it. For years, I've always said that that
was my favorite of the Friday of the thirteenth. I've
never really unpacked it. Maybe it's because of that. It
was just more interesting because she had so much more
agency than the other Final Girls did. And maybe it's
it's kind you know, you know, you're rooting so much
(46:24):
for the Final Girls, and here's a picture where suddenly
the Final Girl doesn't just have like the minimum number
number of tools to defeat the adversary, but she has
like a war chest of supernatural tools, and still it
takes like the course of the picture for her to
deal with him. So ye. Now, another great point that
Trankanski points out that is that there's a paradox here
(46:46):
with the Final Girls. So the heroine's must recognize this
is a quote here, heroine's must recognize the source of
the monsters to defeat it, identify with the monster, and
on some level accept its rebellion but realized that it
is a product of disciplinary power and must be defeated.
So that kind of gets into this whole exploration of
the monster. Figuring out the monster and to a certain
(47:08):
extent um being able to identify with it. In order
to defeat it. Yeah, and there's also an argument to
be made, you know, going back to Clover's thing that
I keep going to say, clover Field. Going back to
Clover's original argument is that the Final Girls themselves as
they evolve from the seventies into the eighties and then
(47:30):
to where we are today, they don't always show any
kind of special skills, right that ensure their survival. It's
almost like they're picked at random, sometimes from the cast.
Sally is certainly an example of that, right, Like why
would she survive any more than any of the other characters,
But because she's more I don't know, she's more beautiful.
Maybe maybe maybe that was who knows what was going
(47:51):
through Toby Hooper's head. But then you know, uh, you
get to for instance, like the Tina character right of
their teenth then of course she's the one who's her
vibes because she's the one who can throw nails with
her mind. Yeah, whereas the others don't really have that capability.
I would like to see a horror film that that
turns that on its head and has the psychic nail
(48:12):
throwing girls. She ends up like dying, and then the
Final Girls like why why me, I don't have any
of the skills necessary. Um. The woods to a certain
extent played around with that. That's true. That one other
thing I want to touch on here before we get
into some outrow thoughts. UM. Robert J. King, PhD has
that interesting piece on psychology today titled the Damsels Causing Distress,
(48:35):
and he kind of gets into gets into some of
the final girls stuff we've mentioned already, but he draws
in uh this example from a band to mythology in Africa,
where they have this mythological figure called the wise Girl
who regularly saves the day, for for the for the
for the tribespeople from various ogres and monsters um and
(48:59):
uh and he in particular there's one called uh Ginko
am Diema of the Jossah that he says the stars
in a series of quote body scatological and violent tales
with themes of murder and blood, vengeance, sex, birth, and
the balance of power between men and women. So she
sees the danger from the start, and everybody ignores her,
(49:22):
maybe they even ridicul er, but then through courage and resourcefulness,
she defeats the ogre or the monster or what have you.
So she's smart, she investigates the monster, ends up killing
the monster, and provides the point of identification for the audience.
So yeah, I mean, so that just kind of gets
back to our original point that this is not just
(49:43):
a US phenomenon, and that also just like that horror
stories in general and human culture, whether it's here or
in Africa or Europe wherever, that they serve a purpose,
a larger purpose of sort of you know, consolidating the
anxieties of that culture and putting them in a place
that you can confront them. Yeah. Alright, So there you
(50:04):
have it, the final girl in an in essence in
a nutshell. Uh. As is always the case with film
studies that you know, it's important to note that, you know,
we're talking about an entire genre here, and often to
talk about the genre you have to talk about particulars,
and you can really go down the rabbit hole talking
about individual films and maybe lose sight of the larger,
(50:26):
larger picture. Yeah. I think that's true. I mean, as
anybody who has scrolled through Netflix's horror genre selection knows,
there's a small sampling of classic, amazing horror movies and
then there's just like a treasure trove of terrible one
star direct to video horror movies that are for the
(50:47):
most part misogynistic garbage. Yeah, there's plenty of that out there,
to be sure, you know. And and then there are
also people that that charge that just having this trope
with a final girl out there and even having some
of the scholarship up surrounding it, that it gives people
an excuse to engage in cinematics sadism. So it just
(51:08):
goes round and round, right, it becomes a pretty complicated loop.
I'm sure it will be an argument that's uh, you know,
will be around as long as horror stories are probably
around for um. And to tie that in, speaking of which,
I just want to remind our audience that don't forget
about monster science. That's because we have a monster Science
(51:29):
Well I say, we's really uh Robert and our other
our host Dr Anton Jessup have and Tyler Tyler and
our producer Tyler Tyler hand and have an episode on
Jason Vorhees, right, and uh is there Michael Myers. Yeah,
we did Jason Vorhees and we did a Michael Myers.
So there's more to be said about the science of
(51:53):
Slasher films and you can watch those on UH stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com, or we're gonna be
posting them all throughout October on our social media channels Facebook, Twitter,
and tumbler. UH and I would personally like to hear
from our audience on your thoughts about the whole Final
Girl thing. So what do you think. Do you think
(52:13):
Clover was right about, you know, the shifting of the
male gaze turning gender into a more complicated thing in
horror movies or do you think that that's all just
navel gazing and that really that these movies are ultimately
about getting off on hurting women. Yeah, we'd love to
hear from everyone on this, and it's always checks out
(52:33):
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. I'll make sure
that the landing page for this episode includes links out
to some of the references that we've made here, some
of the the related content on the site, as well
as some offside material. So let us know and reach
out to us, and don't forget that you can always
hit us up at the email address blow the Mind
at how stuff works dot com. For more on this
(52:56):
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
Difficult to beat eating groove difficult to beat. The
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
works dot com. The film which you are about to
see is an account of the murder and tragedy surrounding
one idyllic weekend at Failing Hope Summer Camp. In a
series of traumatic events escalating with the appearance of a
(00:26):
masked psychopathic killer and the deaths of fifteen victims during
a single night's madness of the campus and staff. Only
one female campus survived. This is the story of her
nightmarish ascension from innocent girl next door to bloodcake survivor.
The events of this weekend were to lead to a
(00:46):
legacy of summer camp blood bats and sleep over tragedies.
It seems to have no end. Hey, welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Christian Sager. Hey, just as a reminder, this is
one of our October episodes where we are trying to
(01:11):
incorporate all things scary and spooky and October and Halloween
themed into the show. That includes Monster Science, which is
our video series that will have a new season at
the end of the month. Beginning on October, We'll have
four new episodes of Monster Science. That's right, VHS late
(01:32):
in daytime horror host inspired explorations of the real science
that potentially underlies some of the more interesting monstrous specimens
from our horror cinema. Yeah, and I should point out
to to clarify that these videos are going to be available. Uh,
you'll be able to watch them on how Stuff Works
(01:52):
dot com. They will share them on our social media
sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler, and they'll also be
on the how Stuff Works YouTube channel. I believe, yes,
So check them out there. And another thing that we're
going to be doing that's brand new in October is
we're going to be trying out periscope. We've just had
so much listener mail lately and we want to take
(02:14):
an opportunity to respond to it that we decided instead
of doing a listener mail episode, let's try periscope out.
We'll do a few listener mails, we'll see how it goes,
and we'll interact with you out there who are tuning in.
So my understanding is that you can talk in real
time via like text I think on periscope. So Joe,
Robert and I are going to be doing that at
(02:34):
the end of the month. Keep an eye out for
more information about when we'll be doing it, so you
can tune in. Alright, So, as are hopefully entertaining little
bit at the beginning of this episode illustrates we're talking
about a familiar trope in the world of horror cinema.
We're talking about final girls and how that plays into
(02:55):
our culture, our perception of gender, into feminist theory and
to film critiquing, and to basically the symbology that informs
our lives. Yeah, and so if you're not familiar with
this trope, the basic idea of a final girl is
that in horror movies, mainly slasher horror movies, the survivor,
(03:16):
the final survivor is usually a young woman who has
somehow outsmarted the slasher killer uh and is the only
one that survives. And and oftentimes it's because uh, she's
outsmarted them, or she's you know, somehow engaged in a
(03:37):
way that the victims were not right, Yeah, or she
finds this hidden strength to finally fight back against her
adversary and and stabbed the heck out of him for
a change. Yeah, And that evolves over the course of well,
I guess like we could say that this may be
started in the sixties uh and leading up to present
day slasher films, and there's a there's a whole host
(03:59):
of accade emic literature that looks into this one particular trope. So, yeah,
this is not um particularly quantitatively heavy science episode, but
we felt like it was really important, both because it
fits into our theme for the month and because we're
all horror fans here, but also because horror stories are
(04:19):
just a really important way that we as human beings
try to make sense of our world. They're the scary
stories that we used to tell around the fire. Uh.
And they also are important cultural texts that have popularity
to them, you know. And these movies in particular especially
popular with adolescence. Uh. And they're also considered outsider cinema
(04:41):
to a certain extent, even though they make a lot
of money. Uh. Slasher films in particular are just on
the outside of mainstream acceptance. Right, So there's something interesting
going on there about how it fits in and doesn't
fit into our mainstream culture. I also want to quote
a study by a guy named Mark Edmondson here at
the Getting where he says that the horror film gathers
(05:03):
up all of our free floating anxieties, binds them to
a narrative and brings that anxiety under temporary controls. So
if you step back from the gore and the kind
of silliness of slasher films, there's something deeper going on
there that you can look at and kind of try to,
I guess decrypt as to what's going on in society,
(05:24):
what's happening within our culture right now, and what that
says about us. Yeah, and plus when you look at
horror films in particular, but also various exploitation films and
outsider films as well, like these are often the first
filters that we run our cultural anxieties through way before.
You know, some Oscar nominated picture cackles it maybe a
(05:44):
more nuanced and tasteful way. You know, it's a good
example of that. What's in this case Silence of the Lambs.
Oh yeah, So we had like a good twenty maybe
thirty years of slasher films before Silence of the Lambs
was That's right, innsidered a class and it wins the Oscar.
Yeah yeah, but yeah, so some films like that will
eventually come along and pick up some of these vibes
and some of these cultural anxieties, but the horror film,
(06:07):
like the the early horror exploitation film, that's where you'll
see us grappling with it for the first time. Yeah. Absolutely,
and and and so let's start by, uh, sort of
giving you some examples here. So my favorite final girl
has got to be Ellen Ripley Alien. Uh. And that's
not necessarily a slasher movie, although I guess an argument
(06:28):
could be made that the Alien is sort of a slasher, right.
I think it functions the same way as a slasher movie.
For sure. It's a very masculine, phallic entity, a lot
of sexuality bound up in it. And then really, Scott
is the first to admit that it's essentially a haunted
house picture in space. Yeah. But so you know, if
(06:49):
you need some other examples, the classics are Laurie Strode,
the Jimmy Lee Curtis character in the first two Halloween movies.
Pretty Much every Friday the Thirteenth movie, right, has a
final girl in it. I can think of a single
one that ends with a guy living instead of I
think they have granted my all. My Friday the Thirteenth
(07:10):
feeling took place like on a late night US network. Frankly,
they all kind of blend together after a while. Last year,
my wife and I tried to watch I think, like
all of them in a row, and they just even
watching them all in a row in like a week
or two, it just turned into one morphous mess. But
you got Sally in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nancy from
(07:31):
the original Nightmare in Elm Street, and then of course
the Nev Campbell character Sydney, and the Screen Movies, which
I think the Screen Movies tried to do a little.
They tried to do kind of a postmodern e thing
with final Girls in horror genre expectations, but but ultimately
it fulfills the Final Girl troupe. There's some recent ones
to like, uh, that movie Your Next, the Home Invasion
(07:56):
movie with the guys with the animal masks, the Final
Girl in that was particularly adventurous. I guess I would
say like I was really surprised at how like physically
competent she was. I think like the gimmick of that
movie is like it turns out that like she's not
this helpless on jinue and that like it turns out
she's like from the Australian Outback or something like that
(08:18):
and has all these skills that enable her to just
utterly decimate these these guys invading the home that she's in.
And then there's the remake of Evil Dead does a
really good job of this by replacing the Ash character
with this character Mia, who ultimately ends up saving the day. Yeah.
I really enjoyed that remake. I don't know a lot
(08:38):
of people were mixed on that, but I I loved it.
I thought it was beautifully shot, it and it was
it felt dangerous. It felt like a dangerous horror film
that I did. I had no idea where things we're
gonna go, which is especially potent when you're considering that
it's a reboot and a remake. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean
I was also a wary of it, and I thought
that the creator, I can't remember his name right now,
(09:00):
but just did an excellent job really kind of injecting
new life into that series but also making like a
really yeah, beautiful, beautifully shot and also just terrifying movie.
I mean there is stuff in that movie. I consume
a lot of horror fiction in all kinds of different media,
(09:20):
and Yeah, that that movie definitely uh raised my my
goose bumps. Another recent film, J out of character j
in it It follows, which is when I really loved
And It Follows is especially interesting to look at the
Final Girl Trope as well, because it's all about uh
(09:41):
sexuality and the repercussions of sex in a way that
the Final Girl Trope has revolved around for decades. Yeah,
accepted deals with it in a in a more reserved way,
I feel, more intelligent way, because you could have easily
made a very sleazy eighties film with the same premise,
but it goes in a more thoughtful indie direction. Another
(10:03):
beautiful horror movie. I love the way that Oh yeah,
beautiful soundtrack, beautiful shot um. Sarah in The Descent one
of my favorites. That's a complicated one though. I mean,
I don't want to spoil that movie at all, but
Sarah does some stuff that is morally ambiguous in order
to make it to the end. It is that there's
one's definitely complicated, the two lead and another complicated one
(10:24):
or the two leads in the French horror film High Tension.
We were telling me about this earlier. I haven't seen
this movie. Yeah, a lot of it hinges on some
big spoilers, so I'm gonna refrain, But if you haven't
seen it, that one's a real nail biter. You already
mentioned Sally Hartessy from the first Texas Chainsaw Master Movie movie,
but also Stretch in the second one is also a
(10:46):
very strong example and one that's often cited in some
of the texts about Final Girls because she that's a
mixed picture with a lot of weird elements, but the
ending is pretty pretty stellar. And as we'll talk about
in a moment, throughout the history of this Final Girl
trope and sort of how it reflects our cultural treatment
(11:06):
of gender and also of our anxieties, there's an interesting
thing that you you can sort of trace throughout the history,
and Sally is a good marker point for that, although
I'd also argue that Psycho is as well, where that
the Final Girls end up going from being fairly passive
and not really having agency and their survival too, where
(11:27):
we've got that year next version where like you know,
the the Final Girl has these just amazing survival skills
that allow her to just constantly out with the enemy. Yeah,
you see this cultural evolution really right, because your earliest
examples even like pre not even horror film, but you
have your damsel in distress, right, you look at old
monster moving, it's and it's just when's the guy gonna
(11:48):
come and shoot the monster and save the screaming girl.
The girl can hardly run from the monster because she
faints fase screaming. She's that helpless, right. Yeah, I just
rewatched The Shining last night on on the big screen.
They played it here at the Plaza Theater in Atlanta,
and I love that is my favorite movie of all time.
I love that movie. But yes, there are multiple scenes
(12:08):
in that and that's but where the female lead and
that is just constantly like falling down all over herself
and screaming and crying and barely able to make it
away from from her maniac husband. So like your early examples,
are that right, that the final girl survives just by
out running the horror and it's maybe it's just even
(12:31):
pure dumblock. It has nothing to do with any strength
of character or survival skills. But then it begins to
evolve into something else. So we see this kind of transition, right,
And there's two different ways to look at it too.
In the seventies, there's this brief sort of renaissance and
horror where you know, horror movies are sort of progressive,
(12:51):
they're challenging norms, especially the depictions of female subjectivity. But
then in the eighties, there's this idea that they're done
eyeing that status, right, Yeah, that they get may be
a little more exploitative and schlocky and kind of the
trend setting that takes place in the genre in the
seventies then be kind of comes the cruising standard. But
then there's also sort of an argument to be made
(13:13):
and the and the woman who actually created the term
final girl, uh makes this point that there there's also
a reversal from the passive final girl in the seventies
movies leading up to the eighties or I guess late
seventies early eighties, that even though those movies are more
exploitative and less narratively interesting, maybe that uh that at
(13:38):
least those final girls have like a certain amount of
agency to them. Yeah, they began to to to fight back,
to to outfight and outthink their opponents. Oh and you know,
like before we get into this, I should mention to like,
like we're not the only ones who are sort of
fascinated by this subject. In fact, there was a movie
that came out I think two years ago that was
called Final Girl, that was all about sort of subverting
(13:59):
the trope of the Final Girl. And then there's another
movie coming out I think in like two or three
months called Final Girls that looks like it's sort of
like a meta horror comedy kind of deconstructing the whole
Final Girl troupe. Yeah, Cavin in the Woods of course also, yeah, yeah,
very much. So. Alright, so let's before we get into
(14:20):
to the Final Girl um scenario more, let's let's back
up and just talk about one of the key primary
criticisms that are often that's often leveled at horror by
serious commentators, and that's that horror films are essentially about
the destruction of women. Um. They're hunted, they're tormented, they're killed,
they scream, they faint. The male monsters often get to
(14:42):
observe their nudity or a carnal act before they then
pounce out, you know, they get to observe the female
sexual power, ultimately the reproductive power of females, and then
they punish them for They punish them for their sexuality
repressed that they're dangerous, power of report auction, slicing, the
feminine power of reproduction with the male power of death.
(15:04):
And this is a stance that you will find you
probably will find still today. And a lot of sort
of you know, critical looks at horror, but definitely in
like academia the eighties and nineties, when it was really
starting to look at horror cinema, there was a this
sort of stance that well, of course this is you know,
abject and terrible towards women. Uh. There were studies that
(15:27):
like did some analysis interviewing male horror viewers and finding
out that they reported that they enjoyed slasher films significantly
more than their female counterparts did, and that their enjoyment
it was heightened by the company of a distressed woman.
So there's something about watching a horror movie that that
(15:48):
excited men when their you know, girlfriend or wife or
whatever was with them and and scared. Uh. And then
on the other side, there was a study that was
done by two guys Nolan and Ryan these are their
last names, uh, and they did like a gender association
with words about the movies, and they found that all
genders associated the words disturbing, horror, girls, evil, scary, killer,
(16:15):
and young with horror movies. Now you just go to men.
Men associate the words shocked, angry, helpless, agitated, and frustrated,
while women associate with fear, nervousness, vulnerability, horrified, exposure, and betrayal.
(16:35):
So they make a case, basically by doing this word analysis,
that female viewers were not being empowered by watching horror movies,
as some you know, we'll get into, as some academics argued,
no matter who gets to live at the end, whether
it's a male character or female character, they didn't feel
empowered and instead they were identifying with the unlucky victims.
(16:57):
You know, this reminds me a bit of a Kamio
non job any bits and stand up talking about the
fear that there was somebody in the attic or ghost
in the attic, and talking about like the scenario in
which what he goes up there with like a path
pot on his head and a knife in his hand
and he said, well, what happens if I come back
down and I say, oh it's okay, everything's fine. I
murdered somebody. You know, because even these these scenarios where
(17:21):
like the woman lives at the end and she's the
triumphant final girl, she's just been through a traumatic life
jarring experience and she probably had to murder somebody, right, Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
the PTSD alone would maybe not be worth it. Yeah,
So I can see where a female or any audience
member who stops to think about it, I would say,
you know, this is not This is still not a
happy ending. It's maybe not the worst ending, but it's
(17:44):
not a happy ending. Well, and that's basically how the
argument goes, right the uh, the generic argument leveled against
her movies. And I say generic, but I should say,
like there is validity to this argument that these films
feature women as victims and they are subsequently harmful to
willing to women. The monster is in fact killing them
(18:05):
for expressing their sexuality, right, like nine times that attend
in these movies. There's something going on with sex or
just femininity that ultimately ends up with the monster killing them. Yeah,
And I you know very so much from picture to picture,
But I feel like all anybody who's watched enough horror
can definitely think of some examples where you're watching the
(18:26):
film and you really think, yourself, come on, this is
not this is just about you, and you're really screwed
up ideas about that necessary. Well that and or just
trying to sell the movie for it's a sexy factor. Yeah,
I mean as as I said before talking about you know, storytelling,
and and certainly with films, you're even if you don't
(18:49):
know what you're doing, and certainly a lot of people,
with a lot of first time filmmakers, they go to
horror because it seems like an easy genre to play in.
Even if you don't know what you're doing, You're playing
with an established pieces, enough established symbols and enough established
storytelling tropes that you can end up compelling, building something,
assembling something that has a compelling potent or perhaps you know,
(19:13):
misleading or dangerous idea that resonates with the viewer. So
you may just be putting together a pictures saying what
kind of horror picture can I make over the course
of a weekend with some friends, and in doing so
makes something that that really seems to portray some horrible
ideas about gender, or if you're lucky, makes something that's
kind of transcendent. Yeah. Yeah, Well, Roger Corman would be
a good argument for that case, right, And like in
(19:35):
some cases, that guy was cranking up films in like
five days or something, and I'm sure a lot of
those were just like the studio being like money, money, money, money, money,
And then in other cases there's some Corman stuff that
people go back and look at his classics. Yeah. As
I I often tell people, I I think I enjoy
bad films with moments of brilliance in them more than
I enjoy like solid, great films, because there's something great
(19:57):
about watching something that's kind of flocky, kind of awful,
and then out of nowhere a great performance or out
of nowhere they hit upon this just brilliant idea or
something that seems to accidentally resonate. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, I
understand what you're saying. And I've actually seen some more
extreme arguments made that that the treatment of females in
horror films it's really kind of a pseudo human sacrifice.
(20:19):
This kind of like primal um right used to subjugate
women under the rule of men, to to to sacrifice
them again to is male power of violence that makes
up for the female power of creation. Yeah, and I
can again like I think that there's a certain amount
of validity to that, But then I also think, like
(20:40):
there are women who watch and enjoy and make horror films. Uh,
and that there you know, are some people like like
I saw one academic study looking into this where one
uh writer made the argument that women who view horror
on a regular basis are ex traders and that they
(21:01):
are perpetuating oppressive norms. Uh. And this is this is
a topic that's perfect for our sister show stuff. Mom
never told you. I'd love to hear their take on this,
But uh, that seems a little extreme to me. I
know lots of women who love the horror genre and
participate in it and work in it, whether as actors
(21:22):
or makeup artists or directors. You know, there's just all
kinds of roles within those and and yes, it's so
those roles have definitely expanded in the last what like
almost twenty years since the original Final Girl article was written. Yeah,
and you see these filmmakers and various people and get
involved in the process. And there's also the opportunity to
(21:42):
play with it and change it and and figure out
what is, uh, you know, what's not working in terms
of the betrayal of women in horror films and tweak
it a little bit. Like one of the more recent
films from the softca sisters, the Twin Canadian collectors their stuff.
I think it's great. Yeah, they they came up a
lot in the research. Yeah. Yeah, they're one of their
(22:04):
more recent films. I think it was Seen No Evil too. Yeah,
I haven't seen that one, but I've seen American Mary. Okay, well,
this one is. This is the one with the wrestlers.
This is Yeah, this is the one with the w
W E is Kane in it, and uh, it's it's
far better than any horror film with Kane that should
be they do. I think they do a pretty knockout
(22:25):
job and have some surprises in it. I think American
Mary is really like if you want to look at
the Final Girl trope, or look less at Final Girls
and more at kind of just how women are treated
in horror cinema. That's a fascinating movie. It's a really
interesting film. Yeah. Yeah. Um. There's an interesting article in
the journal Horizons that actually is just called feminist horror.
(22:47):
Uh and it says it's written by a woman whose
last name is Gilmore, and it says done right. The
horror genre is full of subversive possibility and a female audience,
especially for young female audiences who seem to be hungry
for this promise. Uh So there's this idea there, right,
like that the the process of watching these movies is
(23:10):
in some way cathartic, right, and that it provides an
imaginary space where we can confront our anxieties and work
through the real life trauma. That we have the things
that we're worried about in the real world through these constructions,
through these narratives, which is ultimately, you know, why we
tell stories, just to figure out how the world works
and to have a better understanding of how we exist
(23:32):
within it. And I also want to draw on another
study here that I think helps to illuminate how complex
we can get with some of these pictures. Uh looking
at ourn article titled a Cognitive Approach to the Films
of Dario Argento by Nia Edwards b. And this is
interesting because Dari Rigenta is one of these these filmmakers.
(23:52):
It's easy to to really throw some stones at him
in terms of the treatment of women because he's he
has this kind of reputation. He's kind of infamous for
often playing the hands of the killer himself, and he'll
have these really stylized deaths of his of female victims
in the films, and certainly those stick with you, like
(24:14):
the Deaths and Suspiria particularly so if you, yeah, if
you haven't seen any Darya Agento films, I guess Suspiria
is probably the most famous of them, right, Yeah, that's
definitely the starting point and probably you know, arguably the
stopping point. But maybe he's best known for the sort
of yes, stylistic, colorful uh framing, I would say, of
(24:39):
his sequences, and there's just some really beautiful sets in
those movies as well. The blood in our Genta's movies
looks like some weird kind of like uh, water colored
syrup or something. Yeah. That it's like the weird surreal
aspect here. And you know ultimately what you're getting into
this since something that's really dwelled upon in a lot
(25:02):
of the the academic papers about his work. You're talking
dealing with an aesthetic representation of death um, which is
interesting to think about that because you don't necessarily see
that term thrown around in looking at paintings that have people,
and it's like paints of of martyred saints or paintings,
say the death of Cleopatra, which is a common subject
(25:25):
in older paintings, you know, the show This Beautiful Woman
that is just stuff and new that is just poisoned herself,
you know. Um, But in films, in horror films in particular,
you see it a lot. And what's wrong If you're
gonna have a film in which people were murdered, why
shouldn't it be beautiful? Why can't the cinematography be elegant?
Does it? And then in doing that to what extent
(25:47):
does that warp the message of the picture? Right? And
there's a certain point where I understand, like the form
and the function and the narrative all kind of come
together as one thing. But then when you're analyzing them
or reviewing them in any kind of capacity, it's also
important to separate them out as well. Right. Yeah. One
of the things that the author uh it was be
(26:08):
uh gets into here is that it's it's easy for
a lot of these papers to really just focus on
that aesthetic representation of death, focus on the female death
scenes themselves, as opposed to the many male deaths that
take place in our gentle films, and the fact that
quote his killers are often female or queer and have
only become killers due to a past trauma. Relating to
(26:29):
their position as a non male right. So that actually
connects to another article that I read for this which
is called The Final Girl, A few Thoughts on Feminism
and Horror by a guy named Donato Tataro. Uh and uh.
You can find this on off screen dot com actually,
but basically his argument is that final girls are an
(26:50):
American phenomenon in horror cinema, that it's American female characters
who are murdered because they have sex, whereas in European horror,
which Daria are Gento is very much a part of
those female characters murder because of their carnality, right because
of their femininity, and that they're victims are mainly male.
(27:12):
And not only that, but the male victims are usually
attracted to their female killers, so they're not disavowing their
femininity in a way. That um, some people argue that
The Final Girl is sort of androgynous in a way. Interesting. Yeah,
And his big example, and I have not seen this movie,
was that the same year that Texas Chainsaw Massacre came
out in ur there was a movie that was made
(27:34):
in Europe called The House of Whip Chord. And I'm
really interested in this now, spoilers for Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
I guess, but that movie begins the exact same way
that Texas Chainsaw Massacre ends, with a semi comatose woman
escaping from some kind of a situation that's horrific, and
she's picked up by a truck driver. But in that situation,
(27:55):
it starts from her perspective and then works back through
a flashback, so there's agency there through her. And then
I suspect, you know, not having seen it, I suspect
that Tataro's argument plays out and that the killer and
this is probably a female, and there's you know, a
certain amount of sex involved there. So in either case,
(28:15):
you can just really go into the deep end looking
at just the cultural um roots of any given horror culture. Yeah.
So this leads us to the big one, which is
Carol J. Clover. She's the one who termed the word
or the phrase final girl, and it was in her
(28:35):
book which is called Men Women in Chainsaw, Gender in
the Modern horror film UH. And the basic argument goes
like this that this trope UH flipped the identification of
horror movies so that male and female viewings are a
little bit different than they would be expected to be
subsequently making it more complex. All Right, we're gonna take
(28:59):
a quick and when we come back, we're going to
continue looking into this idea of the final girl with
more specific examples and discussion of its uh it's evolution.
All Right, we're back, and you know I want to
I want to read just a quote here from Carol J.
(29:21):
Cloger's men Women in Chainsaws Gender in the modern horror film,
where she just really sums up sort of the court
thesis here right. The image of the distressed female most
likely to linger in memory is the one who did
not die, the survivor or final girl. She is the
one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and
perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of
(29:43):
her own peril, who has chased, cornered, wounded, whom we
see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is
abject terror personified. If her friends knew they were about
to die only seconds before the event, the final girl
lives with the knowledge for long minutes or hours. She
alone looks death in the face, but she alone also
(30:06):
finds the strength either either to stay the killer long
enough to be rescued ending A, or to kill him
herself ending B. But in either case, from nineteen seventy
four on, the survivor figure has been female. So her
using nineteen seventy four there, she's I think, using Texas
Chainsaw massacre as a starting point. Yes, okay, which makes
(30:31):
sense given the title of her book. Yeah, And so
it's it's interesting looking to these studies of the Final
Girl because as it becomes the trope, you have the
undisputed main character of many films in the genre are female,
and they're enjoying the most potential character development. Granted that
character development doesn't necessarily take place in any in any
(30:53):
notable degree, but the potential is there. She becomes the
central point of viewer identification in the film. Yeah. So
there's another side to this argument. So some people argue
against Clover's stipulations here. So I think it's important as
we go along here to sort of throw in their
two cents and then you know, you, like us, can
sort of make up your own mind about it. The
(31:14):
other side goes like this, that these films are all
made by different creators and yet somehow they consistently all
characterize the heroine as powerful at the end, and that
some somehow she's a figure who questions authority and is
always determining the course of her own life. And in
fact she has agency more than any of the other
characters to other than maybe the killer. Uh. And they,
(31:38):
you know, the final girls are the ones that make
things happen in control events. Uh. And then you know,
often the argument is made that that's within a system
of patriarchy. Right, So if we're really looking at gender
influence in these films, you know, frankly, uh, they're in
patriarchal settings. And then the killers are mostly male, right, Yeah,
they're in a they're in a may dominated world or
(32:01):
very particular that they're often in an adult, male controlled world,
and suddenly they're encountering this masculine horror, this terror that
is often a product of that world. Nobody in the
adult world and the male powered world that are going
to actually help them. They tell them, oh, there's a
killer in the woods, and they go, there's nothing. There's
somebody trying to kill me in my dreams, go to sleep. Right,
(32:23):
it's always the like figures in authority, the sheriff for
the doctor and the mental institution or whatever. Yeah, even
if they try to help, they're going to get knocked out.
So the Final Girls, as Clover presents them, are sort
of known for their courage, their resourcefulness, They've got investigative
abilities that help them save the day. But Clover thinks
(32:44):
that the important thing is this is that as viewers
when we're watching it, we start off watching these movies
by sharing the perspective of the killer. Right, So I
think of it from the Halloween is a perfect example
of this, Like the camera is actually Michael Myer's viewpoint, right,
but we shift part way through the film to the
final Girl. We start identifying with her rather than the killer.
(33:08):
So the Final Girl is always female. But at the
same time, they have kind of a you know, quote
unquote male nous for the audience. So, you know, Clover
argues this isn't necessarily a development, right, that they in
some way are used as a vehicle for male viewers
sort of sata massochistic fantasies. Especially if you're identifying with
(33:30):
the killer, you're looking through the killer's eyes as he
you know, uh saws his way through hordes of women. Yeah,
I mean there's often a very phallic aspect of it.
You know, the killer is stabbing, the killer is impaling,
the killer is is using some sort of weapon that
is some sort of a you know, a phallic uh symbol. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
(33:52):
so she says, male viewers see the Final Girl's traits
is inherently male, which ultimately complicates the gender understanding going
on in these films. So she argues, well, wait a minute,
is the Final Girl somehow hermaphroditic or androgynous? You know,
when she becomes her own savior, she subsequently becomes a hero,
and that the male viewer identifies with heroes as being male. Uh,
(34:18):
And so that's where sometimes this like boyishness gets mixed in.
There's an argument and I don't agree with this, like
some of this, some of the stuff I think also, uh,
you know, let's keep in mind that Clover was writing
in There's me a lot of horror movies that have
been made since then that subvert this. But there's an
argument that that, uh, final girls tend to have gender
(34:40):
ambiguous names, and so like her, examples are Lorie, Terry, Stretch, Will, Joey,
and Max. I don't know where all of those come from.
Laurie's obviously from Halloween and stretches from Texas jamesaw Massacre too.
But lord, I don't think of Laurie necessarily as being
gender ambiguous. And then, you know, I think think of
the classic examples like Ellen, Sarah, Nancy, Sally, those are
(35:05):
all fairly female names. So I don't know that I
I buy into that argument necessarily. But either way, Clover
says that the final girl is de sexualized and that
she's either unavailable or she's reluctant to be in relationships. Right,
So that ties into the she's probably one. She not
one of the ones who has sex which doesn't lead
(35:25):
to her being murdered by the monster. Um. Sometimes their virgins,
sometimes they're celibate. There's an argument to be made here though, too, right,
which is do heterosexual relationships prove a woman's femininity? It
doesn't necessitate that you be female. You can be female
(35:48):
without participating in sex. Right. So there's complicated things in
there going on as well about like our understanding of
sex and what like how femininity can be expressed in
film as well. Yeah, because certainly we have some still
some very culturally mixed up ideas about about the answer
to that question. Yeah, But so Carol's ultimate argument is that, uh,
(36:10):
that it reverses or sorry, Carol Clover, I should just
like you know, Carol Clover's argument is that the function
of the Final Girl is that she reverses the spectator's gaze.
So we originally see through the killer's eyes at the beginning,
like I said, and are even often kind of made
the route for the killer as the killer dispatches representations
(36:32):
of the worst teenagers. Yeah. Absolutely, but then when we
do see the killer, it's through the Final Girl's eyes,
and it's with clarity too, and that increases more and
more towards the end of a film. Right, So if
you think about Halloween, it doesn't like start off right
with you just seeing Michael Myers running around with a
with a hatchet or something like that, Right, It's slowly
(36:54):
builds up to the point where he's he's omnipresent. Um,
and that you know, So there's a question here about like, Okay,
we looked at that study earlier that said that women
identify with the victims. So does that then mean that
the only viewer who's experiencing this gays gender reversal is
(37:14):
the male viewer? Then? And you know that that I'm
going to leave that question hanging out there. I think
Clover leaves it hanging out there too. I don't know,
I don't know what the answer I definitely would love
to hear from for from both male and female horror fans,
but particularly female horror fans, and comes to this, Yeah. Absolutely,
So let's just take a quick walk through some of
the big touchstone moments in the evolution of the Final Girl.
(37:38):
So even before we get the get Final Girl going properly,
we have to mention Psycho, which is just an example
in which the female is obliterated likely and Psycho, I
think maybe I don't know if I would call it
the first slasher film, but it's definitely one of you know,
the classic uh in many years before Texas Chainsaw'm Masaker.
(37:59):
But um, there is an inherent gender fluidity in the
story itself, you know, if you if you don't know Psycho,
the idea of sort of bouncing back and forth between
the identity of male and female as a killer is
part of the story there. But yes, absolutely, like the
(38:20):
women are killed in that and not only does it
obliterate them, but it obliterates sort of the female identity
of who we think the killer is in that movie.
All right, So we've mentioned Sally Hartessy from Texas Chainsaw
maskar alrad In, and she kind of survives just through sheer,
almost like through sheer outrage and sheer care. She just
screams her head off, runs, doesn't really fight back, but
(38:43):
basically just runs and it survives. Sally doesn't do anything
particularly active to lead to her own escape other than
just kind of running and ending up in the right
place at the right time where she jumped in the
back of a truck. But then Laurie Strode and seventy
eight and John Carpenter's Halloween, this is a real turning
point because she does her share of screaming and running,
(39:04):
but she reaches the point where she turns and fights back,
which it actually picks up the knife and wields the
killer's own weapon against him. Yeah, this is the Jamie
Lee Curtis character. I'll always remember that scene where she's
in the closet and she's she she finally attacks back,
you know, with the long knife and cuts Michael Myers. Yeah,
and so according to tow Clover, as as we get
(39:27):
into the eighties, you know, certainly there's that differ quality
that we just discussed earlier, but you see more and
more um situations where the qualities of the character are
enabling her, of all the characters, to survive. Uh she has.
It's something that would otherwise seem unsurvivable. And it's not
just random like, oh, this one happened to survive. No,
this is the one that had the character that would
allow her to survive. And she's even like you see
(39:49):
this kind of transformation. That's it's kind of uh nietzsch
In right that you know from the from life school
of war, what does not kill me makes me stronger.
So they kind of transform into this new survivor person
through the experience. Although there is kind of a weird thing,
especially with the franchises that have so many sequels, like
(40:10):
like Friday the Thirteenth and The Nightmare in Elm Street,
where the final girls of a previous movie will show
up at the beginning of the sequel and somehow be
dispatched relatively quickly. Yeah, but they do in some instances
maybe we'll get to this, they do sort of bestow
their final girl like role upon a new final girl. Yeah, yeah,
(40:31):
they kind of pass it off. The Nightmare movies are
frequently mentioned, um because especially the first one or two,
you know, we see Nancy Thompson going on a journey
of exploration. So it's not just about running from the enemy,
but also understanding it, figuring out how it works, diving
into its world a little bit, in this case, into
the world of dream in order to to to figure
(40:52):
out how to stop this monstrous adversary. Yeah, she really
is like the investigator. She figures out the like secret
history of for a Krueger. That kind of reveals it all, um.
And another example similar to this is that the Hell
Razor films, where you have just a very powerful adversary
in the form of the Centobytes, and uh, final girl
Christie Cotton survives in large part by our wits by
(41:15):
doing a little bargaining and also you know, a little
literal puzzle solving with the limit configuration. Yeah, Hell Razor
is a tough one for me because I don't necessarily
think of Hell Razor as being a slasher film, and
I don't think of Christie as being or Kirstie as
being a final Girl. I guess because I think of
the Cento Bytes as being like gender Listen away like,
(41:39):
I know that they do have gender. I know there
are like there's a female Cento byte and and Pinhead
is very much male. But there is more going on
with them than just like a man chasing people around
with a knight. I would agree, Yeah, there's certainly Clive
Barker was coming from a more fantastic point of view
when he created them. Yeah, yeah, certainly. Now we've already
(42:02):
mentioned Alien, but there that the case it's often made
here is that that Ripley surviving through adaptation, pure survivalism.
So a lot of a lot of situations are thrown
at her, be it an out of controlled android or
this you know, perfect masculine, empowered, phallic organism coming at her,
and she's able to just to roll with it and
do it has to be done to survive. Yeah, and
(42:22):
so one thing that's worth pointing out with that we
were talking about the naming conventions um is that when
the screenplay for Alien was written, none of the roles
had genders assigned to them. So like the name Ripley
wasn't necessarily male or female, but when it was cast,
they ultimately went with Sigourney Weaver. I think that was
(42:43):
with all the Roles. I don't think that that was
necessarily just with the Ripley character, and we were talking
about this before the before recording. I can't remember if
her first name Ellen was applied in Alien or if
that didn't show up until Aliens. Yeah, that's I may
be misremember it, but I think that's how it went. Um. Now,
when we get into the Friday Thirteenth Friday the Thirteenth
(43:06):
franchise um, there's a lot of a lot of room
for discussion there too. It's pointed out by Sarah Trinkansky
in the piece. I believe we already referenced this Final
Girls and Terrible Youth Transgression in nineteen eighties slasher Horror. Yeah,
this is a great piece. It was in the Journal
of Popular Film and Television, and I really liked it
because not only did it apply Clover's theories, but then
(43:31):
it sort of brought them forward and it was almost
like a nice literature review of sort of what had
gone on in these studies up until then, and then
also presenting her own, you know, theoretical application to this. Yeah,
and and Trinkanski does a good job of of just
talking about like the evolution within the Friday the thirteen
franchise alone. Prince is one of the early examples of
(43:52):
Jenny Field, who who I believe that we're using as
the cover art for this episode with a pitchfork and
Friday thirteenth to she impersonates Jason's dead mother in order
to out with the killer and eventually it brandishes a
pitchfork at him. Eventually we get to Friday that thirteenth
Part seven, in which Tina Shepherd uses not only does
(44:15):
she stand up to the the adversary here, she uses
telekinetic powers against the monster. She collapses at the house,
she raises the dead, so ultimately she out supernaturals the
supernatural adversary instead of merely out running or out fighting.
And yeah, I would say that that is probably the
height of Clover's argument of the Final Girl becoming more
(44:36):
and more powerful, right like in that It's been a
long time since I've seen that movie, but I very
you know, specifically, remember it's established that this girl has
these like magical powers right from the beginning to sort
of give Freddy a uh level playing field, I guess
when it comes to the showdown, like I remember her
(44:57):
like telekinetically throwing nails into his face and stuff like that.
Isn't she also like sort of responsible for bringing him
back or something like that, Like I think spoilers for
again another movie that's like maybe thirty years old, but
if I remember correctly, I think like Freddie or no, sorry,
Jason is tied to the bottom of Crystal Lake with
(45:17):
like a boulder or something, and she's trying to bring
back her dad and she accidentally raises Jason Vorhees from
the dead instead, and so she's the reason why he's
able to run him buck again. Huh. That's interesting, and
you know that that I wondered to what extent that
plays into this other point that we've already touched on
a little bit that does Trinkansky uh discusses this at length.
(45:41):
Is that you see this idea that youths in the
horror films are subjugated by an adult world and assaulted
by the very monsters of the adult world creates. And
in this case with with with this psychic Tina Shepherd,
like is she she's kind of accidentally engaging in that
world and creating of problems. Uh? Yeah, it's it. It
(46:03):
becomes kind of complicated. The more layers of franchising mythew
layer over it. For years, I've always said that that
was my favorite of the Friday of the thirteenth. I've
never really unpacked it. Maybe it's because of that. It
was just more interesting because she had so much more
agency than the other Final Girls did. And maybe it's
it's kind you know, you know, you're rooting so much
(46:24):
for the Final Girls, and here's a picture where suddenly
the Final Girl doesn't just have like the minimum number
number of tools to defeat the adversary, but she has
like a war chest of supernatural tools, and still it
takes like the course of the picture for her to
deal with him. So ye. Now, another great point that
Trankanski points out that is that there's a paradox here
(46:46):
with the Final Girls. So the heroine's must recognize this
is a quote here, heroine's must recognize the source of
the monsters to defeat it, identify with the monster, and
on some level accept its rebellion but realized that it
is a product of disciplinary power and must be defeated.
So that kind of gets into this whole exploration of
the monster. Figuring out the monster and to a certain
(47:08):
extent um being able to identify with it. In order
to defeat it. Yeah, and there's also an argument to
be made, you know, going back to Clover's thing that
I keep going to say, clover Field. Going back to
Clover's original argument is that the Final Girls themselves as
they evolve from the seventies into the eighties and then
(47:30):
to where we are today, they don't always show any
kind of special skills, right that ensure their survival. It's
almost like they're picked at random, sometimes from the cast.
Sally is certainly an example of that, right, Like why
would she survive any more than any of the other characters,
But because she's more I don't know, she's more beautiful.
Maybe maybe maybe that was who knows what was going
(47:51):
through Toby Hooper's head. But then you know, uh, you
get to for instance, like the Tina character right of
their teenth then of course she's the one who's her
vibes because she's the one who can throw nails with
her mind. Yeah, whereas the others don't really have that capability.
I would like to see a horror film that that
turns that on its head and has the psychic nail
(48:12):
throwing girls. She ends up like dying, and then the
Final Girls like why why me, I don't have any
of the skills necessary. Um. The woods to a certain
extent played around with that. That's true. That one other
thing I want to touch on here before we get
into some outrow thoughts. UM. Robert J. King, PhD has
that interesting piece on psychology today titled the Damsels Causing Distress,
(48:35):
and he kind of gets into gets into some of
the final girls stuff we've mentioned already, but he draws
in uh this example from a band to mythology in Africa,
where they have this mythological figure called the wise Girl
who regularly saves the day, for for the for the
for the tribespeople from various ogres and monsters um and
(48:59):
uh and he in particular there's one called uh Ginko
am Diema of the Jossah that he says the stars
in a series of quote body scatological and violent tales
with themes of murder and blood, vengeance, sex, birth, and
the balance of power between men and women. So she
sees the danger from the start, and everybody ignores her,
(49:22):
maybe they even ridicul er, but then through courage and resourcefulness,
she defeats the ogre or the monster or what have you.
So she's smart, she investigates the monster, ends up killing
the monster, and provides the point of identification for the audience.
So yeah, I mean, so that just kind of gets
back to our original point that this is not just
(49:43):
a US phenomenon, and that also just like that horror
stories in general and human culture, whether it's here or
in Africa or Europe wherever, that they serve a purpose,
a larger purpose of sort of you know, consolidating the
anxieties of that culture and putting them in a place
that you can confront them. Yeah. Alright, So there you
(50:04):
have it, the final girl in an in essence in
a nutshell. Uh. As is always the case with film
studies that you know, it's important to note that, you know,
we're talking about an entire genre here, and often to
talk about the genre you have to talk about particulars,
and you can really go down the rabbit hole talking
about individual films and maybe lose sight of the larger,
(50:26):
larger picture. Yeah. I think that's true. I mean, as
anybody who has scrolled through Netflix's horror genre selection knows,
there's a small sampling of classic, amazing horror movies and
then there's just like a treasure trove of terrible one
star direct to video horror movies that are for the
(50:47):
most part misogynistic garbage. Yeah, there's plenty of that out there,
to be sure, you know. And and then there are
also people that that charge that just having this trope
with a final girl out there and even having some
of the scholarship up surrounding it, that it gives people
an excuse to engage in cinematics sadism. So it just
(51:08):
goes round and round, right, it becomes a pretty complicated loop.
I'm sure it will be an argument that's uh, you know,
will be around as long as horror stories are probably
around for um. And to tie that in, speaking of which,
I just want to remind our audience that don't forget
about monster science. That's because we have a monster Science
(51:29):
Well I say, we's really uh Robert and our other
our host Dr Anton Jessup have and Tyler Tyler and
our producer Tyler Tyler hand and have an episode on
Jason Vorhees, right, and uh is there Michael Myers. Yeah,
we did Jason Vorhees and we did a Michael Myers.
So there's more to be said about the science of
(51:53):
Slasher films and you can watch those on UH stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com, or we're gonna be
posting them all throughout October on our social media channels Facebook, Twitter,
and tumbler. UH and I would personally like to hear
from our audience on your thoughts about the whole Final
Girl thing. So what do you think. Do you think
(52:13):
Clover was right about, you know, the shifting of the
male gaze turning gender into a more complicated thing in
horror movies or do you think that that's all just
navel gazing and that really that these movies are ultimately
about getting off on hurting women. Yeah, we'd love to
hear from everyone on this, and it's always checks out
(52:33):
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. I'll make sure
that the landing page for this episode includes links out
to some of the references that we've made here, some
of the the related content on the site, as well
as some offside material. So let us know and reach
out to us, and don't forget that you can always
hit us up at the email address blow the Mind
at how stuff works dot com. For more on this
(52:56):
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
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