Final Girls and Intersectional Feminism
by Izzy Peroni
Across subgenres of horror, there is a character consistency that finds its place in movies of all decades: the Final Girl. She is softly gorgeous, but modest, and within the raucous group of young adults she travels with through rural 70s Texas or to a cabin in the middle of an alarming wood, she is the one with the most common sense, and often a romantically troubled mind. She is virginal, but appealing, and the parts of her character arc that don’t involve running from whatever is trying to kill her usually involve a lukewarm romance and dealing with her vapid best friend. She pouts, she scolds, she screams, she solves problems, but most importantly, she lives. Her boyfriend, her best friend, her best friend’s boyfriend, the blonde one, the black guy, the nerd, the jock, the stoner: they all get picked off one by one by two by three, getting shredded and slashed up and swallowed by gaping, bleeding holes in their beds, leaving our heroine alone to find victory against the violent entity, or at the very least, to escape. All others are merely tragic fodder for her character development.
The character trend is omnipresent in the slasher subgenre of horror, especially movies from the 70s and 80s; Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street, Laurie Strode from Halloween, and Sally from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre all spring to mind immediately. These young ladies fit the bill almost perfectly, as their traits make up the Final Girl trope that we understand and build upon today; Nancy is paranoid but for good reason, and fights back as much as she is hunted; Laurie is also a fighter against Michael Myers, but before his interruption into her life, she is modest and bookish; Sally spends most of her individual screen time screaming her head off and narrowly avoiding death. Slasher movies emerging in the mid-2000 to the 2010s continue with the Final Girls trend, but often with a harder edge; in the 2013 remake of Evil Dead, the iconic Ash Williams is replaced with Final Girl Mia, who resolves the movie dramatically with a shower of blood and a chainsaw. In more recent years, a highly debated final girl is Dani of Midsommar, who seems to find a twisted kind of emotional healing while her friends get picked off by a white supremacist cult.
Moving tangentially from white supremacy; notice anything about the female characters I’ve listed off? You probably don’t even have to Google them to guess what I’m referring to.
Yes: they are all white.
According to tradition, the defining characteristics of the Final Girl can be summed up as smart, chaste, paranoid, and white. A Final Girl is instinctively expected to be a cishet white woman, and even if the rest of the cast is somehow diverse, those other characters will be killed in order to follow the formula. In recent years, diversity in movies has become a significantly broadened discussion, but if a movie still has a cishet white lead, the sacrifices made by and of the other characters nulls the attempt at a diversity. While horror is not a monolithic genre by any means, the majority remains white-centered, even when a powerful woman is at that center.
So what does this say for those who believe that the Final Girls of the modern horror genre are pillars of girl power? It’s true that many of these women manage to actively turn the tides of their story through asserting power and cleverness to survive, but why wasn’t that writing given to anyone else? Josh from Midsommar is a genius, genuinely respectful of the culture he is invited into, and sufficiently cautious; are we to believe that his vital character flaw was being a black man in a movie about a white woman? How do we, as an audience, digest the fact that black women are almost never involved in such a massive genre? And how best can we approach these problems— by remaking classic movies but with a diverse cast that somehow doesn’t kill all of it’s non-white characters; or, taking a page out of Jordan Peele’s book, creating fresh new narratives starring black actors, either decentering race, like is Us, or directly calling out the sort of faux woke ideologies that put black characters on the chopping block behind white leads, like in Get Out?
As a horror fan, I have my own opinions, but I’d like to hear others as well. Please comment down below, and we can discuss! And happy Halloween!!
