The Final Girl: Aesthetic or Sexist?

W RITTEN BY BEKAH BOSTICK PHOTOS BY KENADI SOURS

From the 1970s slasher films to real life, violence against women is nothing new and horror as a genre helps sustain harmful stereotypes. Clare Waldrop, a sophomore studying English, has done research into the ‘final girl’ trope and how it perpetuates patriarchal ideals in more ways than one.

QCan you explain what the ‘final girl’ trope is?

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The ‘final girl’ is a term coined by Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. It’s this assertion that the final girl in a slasher film is the last remaining girl out of this cast of characters, which is most often a friend group. She survives because she has superior morals to her friends that often reflect patriarchal and puritanical values … Now, this girl is typically established as kinder than her friends. She doesn’t drink or party. She’s a virgin or if she’s not a virgin, she’s in a monogamous relationship … She’s smarter. She’s normally the first to sense the danger that there’s something lurking nearby. So all these different things that we might consider make her superior to the other people around her. The killer is kind of serving as a cultural body because it means the killer is a representation of our culture that is often puritanical and patriarchal and so the final girl reflects the traits that the killer is trying to enforce amongst other people. So therefore, she cannot die because she can’t be punished by the killer because she’s already doing what he wants.

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QWhat made you interested in this topic?

I love horror movies and my research actually leads me to believe this might be highly problematic, but I’ve always loved horror movies. My mom got me started really young. I remember I was in middle school and we would watch them together and they would really freak me out. I actually thought for a long time, I didn’t like horror. Then I took a film class in high school and I was like, “Oh, the horror is not as bad as I remember it.” I found that horror was really fun to analyze and sort of break down and I was really interested in the way that the film’s work to do different things.

QDo you have a favorite horror movie?

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Candyman has a special place in my heart … The history behind the film is very interesting. There’s a lot of racial commentary within that film. It was actually a collaboration between the gangs of Chicago and these movie producers. They called

Do you think there is any way that the final girl could be used in movies without it being patriarchal?

I think it depends on how the film is structured. It depends on what we’re doing … I think there are a ton of ways we can do that; but then we have to change our reasons for why are we killing. What’s the difference here? I think the answer doesn’t lie in changing the final girl … I think it lies in changing the killer. Even when we have female killers, they are often acting upon these sort of patriarchal kind of notes, like Pamela Vorhees in Friday the 13th … She’s a woman, which is different than the typical killer because the killer is typically male, but she’s still enforcing patriarchal values. Her killing is coming from a place of her motherhood and her enacting male vengeance ... I think this is more where we get into like some of the puritanical values that sneak in and patriarchal and puritanical those values are so often kind of interwound.

Q AWhat did you find the most interesting in your research?

When I was reading Carol J. Glover’s book, Men,Women, and Chainsaws: Genders in the Modern Horror Film, one interesting thing that I found out was that a lot of the cinematography used in horror films is borrowed from pornography. There’s always that scene where the girl’s running from the killer and somehow she falls but she lands on her back. The killer is over her and he’s stabbing but for some reason it doesn’t look like the knife is going into her heart, it looks like it’s going lower on her body. They’re playing the squeals, gasps and moans of pain as she’s being stabbed but they’re not framing it as this brutal murder, they’re framing it as very sexually explicit. I thought that was really really interesting how these films are working to portray horror as these various sexual acts and a lot of psychologists argue that murder is a sexual act; it’s actually fulfilling for the murderer to do that. I think it’s interesting how we’re representing that on screen. We even get that with one of the first big horror movies, Hitchcock’s Psycho. One of the most iconic murder scenes of all time is he’s stabbing through that shower curtain. Why is she in the shower? … But in Friday the 13th she is taking a shower after she had sex with this dude and she gets killed in the shower because she had sex with him. Why are we wanting to kill women in these vulnerable positions that oftentimes they did not choose to put themselves in? They’re acting on the desires of other characters … I think that’s a great example of just how impossible it is to survive the horror film in the face of gendered violence. At the end of the day, they’re characters … yet the things happening to them are highly reflective of what’s happening in our society … and the ways in which we respond and interact with violence and patriarchal ideals.