Examining Sleepaway Camp by Gardner Troy

Author:Gardner, Troy [Gardner, Troy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

Hidden and Dueling Final Girls

The slasher sub-genre follows certain rules and conventions. Take for example the following film: a pretty blonde with a character flaw is brutally stabbed to death. Her acquaintances search for her while a second victim is also murdered. The brunette falls for the handsome guy (who happens to be poorly acted) helping her investigate while the killer’s twisted history is slowly unravelled. Finally there’s a showdown at the end and some screaming and an eerie final shot that leaves room for a sequel or three. Sounds like some clichéd B or C midnight movie? Actually, it’s one of the founding fathers of the slasher genre, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho.

These conventions work because they are ingrained in the horror subconscious. We want Freddy Krueger to kill Tina just as Norman Bates killed Marion and Ghostface butchered Casey Becker. Because the killer quickly dispatches a sweet character, we are fearful for the next heroine to come across his dangerous path. Typically this heroine will become the Final Girl. This is a trope first identified publicly in Carol J. Clover’s 1992 book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.

Clover classifies this character as the Final Girl, and she is a bit of a stock character, like the fool or the lovers or the devil. Considered the main character or protagonist, she is the nice girl the audience is meant to root for and identify with. She’s the babysitter or high school regular girl—not too popular or too smart or too athletic to be defined by those traits. Just look at Friday the 13th where Alice isn’t off partying with the other counselors like Kevin Bacon or the “funny guy” or “slutty girl.” Instead, Alice is a bit more of a loner, but we appreciate her independence and her responsibility.

A great example of this is in Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel Ten Little Niggers (which has been renamed Ten Little Indians and finally And Then There Were None for obvious reasons of cultural sensitivity), which can be considered one of the most influential precursors to the horror genre, especially the locked room mystery. This story has been adapted to radio, stage, and film, and is one of the best selling novels of all time, selling over one hundred million copies world wide (Grabianowski). Ten people are trapped on an island and are murdered one at a time in creative manners. Nora, an ex-nanny, is the Final Girl, in that she is the last one left standing to face the killer’s wrath. In a similar fashion, Laurie Strode from Halloween goes about her business while her friends are killed until she must face Michael Myers. Sally goes through the same process in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, leaving her alone to square off against Leatherface and his brood.

Classically, the Final Girl is a virgin, but this is not a necessity of more modern films. The Cabin in the Woods equates the virgin with the Final Girl in that “The virgin’s death is optional as long as it’s last.

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