Where Slasher Cliches Go to Sacrifice: The Final Girls (2015)

Welcome to Mockingbird’s Spooky Summer series, where for the next few weeks your favorite ghoulunatic roundtable of Blaine Grimes, Blake Collier, Caleb Stallings, and yours truly will discuss five hand-selected horror films that speak summer’s dialect and help us survive the season’s swelter. Horror is always theological and frequently surprises the receptive viewer with grace. And we, who have reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder, sure do need it and maybe — just maybe — you do too! So pull up a folding chair around the bonfire, and let’s toast some marshmallows while we watch on the projection screen we set up out back.

We begin with Blake’s pick, The Final Girls, a flick from 2015 that pays homage to classic slasher franchises but shows loss, disappointment, and fractured relationships made whole by sacrifice.

Ian: Blake, what drew you to this movie originally?

Blake: It’s a little strange considering this, honestly, as I first saw this at the height of what I consider to be my most progressive phase. You can read many of my articles around that time; they are very preachy and they really shoehorned in progressive platitudes to appease the crowd I was trying to ingratiate myself toward — not always consciously. And so my original write-up was really up on the feminist elements in the films, like the mom and daughter being the heroes of the film, though I still think this aspect is healthy because girls don’t need to be fully codependent on “their prince” to save them.

That being said, I was a little reluctant to revisit it in some ways, because I wondered if the progressive high really bolstered my enjoyment of the film at the time. But I am pleased to report that it still worked in spades in every way. I still love the mother/daughter storyline and the self-sacrifice inherent in it. But I was also deeply moved by the broken friendship between Max and Vicki. I think this was a deeply compassionate and effective meditation on the love between women in families and friendships.

Ian: That was charming, Blake. I’m really happy the film held up and wasn’t just a stand-in for an attitude you had at one point in time. Because I agree, this was so much stronger than I had anticipated.

Blake: I think there is a powerful throughline dealing with how death introduces more death into the world, not necessarily physical but emotional, relational, and psychological death. Not only did Max lose her mom, but that death loosened the bindings with her friends as well.

Ian: It was satisfying to me that the clichés we tend to bemoan about horror movies were guides that our subjects were attentive to. They actually attended to these clichés and recognized, “I’m not being a real person, I’m The Mean Girl.” So it wasn’t just that this movie didn’t ironically clobber this genre, it’s that even clichés were redeemed when they served as wake-up calls. I was deeply surprised not only by how much I enjoyed this but also by how much it really thought about what it was doing.

Caleb: In terms of tropes, I think there were a lot of fun reversals in this. Like how, in some sense, Max parents her actual mother, Amanda, who is still trying to book acting roles and survive on fast food and also throwing her bills from a moving car. And then Max parents Nancy, Amanda’s movie character, who is just as naïve, except now about relationships with lusting boys and friendships with troubled girls.

Ian: Yes! That’s such a great point, Caleb, that she serves as mother to her mother and to her fictional counterpart. And how that love shown to her awakens her as a moral subject. The wise daughter who serves as the mother we all need (perhaps?) also reveals the slasher clichés regarding sex and drugs as wisdom rather than artificial patriarchal impositions.

Caleb: I also like how Duncan, who knows the most about these movies and their tropes, and who helps orient the group to the surreal dreamworld they’re experiencing, is also the first to succumb to it. Maybe that’s a comment on how there’s more to enjoying these movies than knowing a lot about the technical aspects of the genre. Maybe what’s actually important about them are the outside relationships we form around them.

Blake: I guffaw when he gets hit by the car — great sight gag.

Caleb: My wife loves when he jumps over the stanchion in the movie theater and gets his feet tangled up and falls flat on his face. Thomas Middleditch adds some terrific physical comedy to it.

Ian: It was just a gag for me at first, but I think the fact that he’s the slasher buff organizing this screening who knows “everything” about it and the genre gives a lot of credence to this idea, that it’s an intentional plank in the structure of this film’s heart. Again — I probably can’t emphasize this enough — I was very surprised by how heartfelt The Final Girls was.

Blaine: Me too!

Caleb: Slashers do lend themselves to generational nostalgia. “My dad liked these movies,” or “I watched them with my mom.” Rite of passage films.

Ian: But what surprised me was that it worked. It was sincere. And even riffing on clichés wasn’t mean-spirited.

Blaine: Exactly. I started watching bracing myself for a cynical spirit that never manifested.

Blake: The ending with “Bette Davis Eyes” still gets me.

Ian: I thought it would be a cheesy, artificially sentimental callback to the “Oh hey, our song’s playing on the radio!” moment from the beginning when it was reprised during the climax. But paired with her self-sacrifice, man — I was kinda moved!

Caleb: I have to admit, the song is a bit blunted for me since JoJo Siwa’s, um, questionable rendition.

Blake: I also thought it would be cheesy because I forgot they do the bit with it at the beginning of the movie … but nope, I still got weepy at the end.

Ian: I once again cannot adequately convey how shocked I was that this worked as well as it did.

Blake: *bows*

Caleb: Where do y’all think the proper place of nostalgia is, if any, in a story like this? Is it a valid emotion to ruminate on or just a lazy attempt to dodge any real reflection?

Ian: It can be either, but for the most part, it’s a vehicle for the latter.

Blake: I used to be pretty staunchly on the side of the latter … but I read The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia by Grafton Tanner, and it gave me a new lens. I have come to the conclusion that, if used well, it can disarm the viewer/reader/listener in order to move past itself. But it is rare when this happens even then. I’ve just come around to the concept that it is possible.

Ian: There’s nostalgia as dodge, pretending things were once one way, but there’s also a nostalgia that recollects for the good of the subject and the episode being recollected.

Blake: It comes down to what the reflection points to.

Ian: Well, and what you do with the reflection. What does it fund? And applying that question here to this film’s unexpected approach, cynical bashing of horror clichés does nothing except position you as O so enlightened and above schmaltz. And I see most nostalgia criticism as a means to foster that image.

Blaine: Ain’t no nostalgia like Tarkovsky’s nostalgia.

Ian: I’m hung up on this point precisely because critical theorists routinely reject nostalgia in all its forms, and I think nostalgia’s cynical, manipulative turns give that rejection the credence it needs. But I’m heartened you now think it’s possible, Blake, because at the end of the day, I think that rejection is an evasion of the fearful possibility of feeling something, and of being indebted to the source of that feeling. Because it bears witness that I am not what I am apart from this: I am not self-made. Indeed, I am radically vulnerable, such that even a scent from that time threatens to unravel me.

Blake: And I think surprisingly this movie largely achieves a meaningful reflection on the role of self-sacrifice in relationships. Not only her giving herself over to the slasher, but even in her mother’s willingness to keep and love her daughter to the detriment of her film career. The ending specifically points back to that element. Which is my problem with the Scream franchise and all the meta horror that came after.

Ian: That and it sucks.

Blake: I will always respect Scream because of Wes Craven, but it’s not the darling many make it out to be. New Nightmare was a better version even before Scream.

Caleb: I think Christian nostalgia could be very much forward-facing too. This evil world will be redeemed, so even small moments of past joy are profoundly meaningful. And I think this matters, if you read the film as in the mind of the daughter — how her mother loves her through life and death is projected onto the persona of her in the movie character.

I was kind of taken aback when Amanda was willing to die for Max. I couldn’t wrap my mind around her making that decision for someone she doesn’t actually know. Because — scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. Slasher tropes hardened me toward that kind of love, I guess.

Ian: I know what you’re saying here, but it succeeded for me because it was such an apocalyptic disruption Amanda had experienced, an entity from without entering her story and saying, “This can be different. I love you and will help make it different.”

Caleb: I totally agree with this. If anything, it just unveils my own unrighteously jaded mind.

Ian: Praise God!

Blaine: Yes, the “tearing of the veil” scene in the burning theater really emphasizes this. Where so many of these meta-films are content to interact with genres, tropes, etc. from arm’s length, here the characters literally enter into the film’s world.

Blake: And the aesthetics of this entering the veil were so well done, like the titles, the slow motion, etc. This time around more than the last, I was really taken by how the film presents as thoughtfully conceived and executed. It allows itself to show the language of the subgenre instead of speak the language of it like Scream does.

Blaine: That slo-mo was so good that I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Zack Snyders suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Blake: This may be too academic, but I’m curious if this film negates the Carol Clover thesis that reframed slashers within a feminist lens. She claims that for the final girl to defeat the slasher, all the other girls must willingly give themselves over to la petite mort and then la grande mort for her to take her rightful place. In this way, it seems that Clover’s thesis relies on the self-sacrifice of women to the male gaze/slasher in order for the final girl to reign victorious. This then reaffirms the previously conservative-coded virgin stereotype to some kind of moral distinction as an archetype that is worth sacrificing for.

Ian: I’m suspicious of these kinds of readings — they try to prove too much at the expense of concealing counterevidence, and usually to argue that we have more or better agency than we actually do or we are not culpable for our folly. Because I ask, what about the men who pay the price for sex and drinking and drugs?

Blake: Oh, for sure. I was only looking at it from the classic Clover theory, which still holds primacy in academic horror studies.

Ian: Right, I just think it’s bollocks. And this barely financed movie from ten years ago gives the lie to it.

Fellas, what would y’all say is the thing The Final Girls most makes you feel?

Blake: Horny.

Ian: *hides face in hands*

Blaine: Surprised that Blake picked something so earnest.

Ian: In tandem with Blaine’s gut reaction…

Blake: In all seriousness, I admit I got weepy about the familial picture that the film forcefully illuminates for the audience: it’s very apparent that this picture/relationship is at the heart of this film.

Caleb: Gratitude, I think. For the people in my life that I love and the things I get to share with them.

Ian: Aw, shucks…

Thanks for hanging out with us for this first round of Mockingbird’s Spooky Summer! We hope you will join us next when we discuss Nope (2022). See you then!