Editorials
10 Modern Final Girls Who Changed the Slasher Formula
The final girl is ubiquitous in horror, usually slashers, and is a common trope that refers to the last female character left alive to face and defeat the killer. The term was initially coined by film studies professor and critic Carol J. Clover, who in her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, noticed that these surviving female characters shared similar characteristics – they were all virginal or sexually unavailable, and avoided the vices (like drug use) that would typically lead to distraction and subsequent death for other characters.
The final girl would exhibit traits like vigilance and intelligence, and would ultimately wield a weapon like a knife or chainsaw to defeat the killer. But horror is a genre that’s always evolving, and the old definition of the final girl trope is growing further removed from its origin. Audiences are smarter than they’ve ever been, and the common tropes are being tested and altered as a result.
So, too, is the final girl. These final girls changed the formula, shattering the preconceived notion of what it means to survive a horror film.
Sidney Prescott – Scream
Wes Craven’s Scream reinvigorated the slasher with its sly subversion and deconstruction of tropes, which naturally made for a final girl that broke the mold. Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) begins the movie as a typical, virginal good girl ripe for final girl status, though her choice to abstain from sex stems from her mother’s promiscuous reputation prior to her murder. Sidney proved to be a fighter from her first encounter with Ghostface, only growing tougher every time, but the biggest update to this modern take on the final girl? She finally gives in to her boyfriend’s desire for a more rated-R relationship. Just before he reveals himself to be one of the killers, that is. Up to this point, genre rules dictated that Sidney having sex meant she wouldn’t survive to the end credits. Not this final girl.
Taylor Gentry – Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Scott Glosserman’s mockumentary style take on the slasher also lovingly poked fun at the familiar clichés and tropes of the subgenre. Budding serial killer Leslie Vernon allows journalist Taylor Gentry (Angela Goethals) and her two cameramen to accompany him on his rise to slasher infamy, walking them through the entire planning stage and the fateful night of slaughter. This includes the selection and subsequent stalking of his chosen final girl Kelly, who he intends to have an epic battle for survival with after dispatching her friends. Except, Kelly is eventually revealed to contain zero final girl qualities. It’s a bait and switch. Kelly was never the intended final girl – the virginal Taylor was always Leslie’s chosen survivor. Leslie had been grooming her for their showdown the entire movie, but she (nor we) just didn’t know it yet.
Arkin – The Collector
This one is so obvious that it doesn’t need any explaining; this final girl is a final guy. Unheard of in the realm of slashers, which is precisely why it’s a complete deviation of the archetype. Even if Arkin (Josh Stewart) had been cast as female, the very reason Arkin gets caught in the Collector’s brutal crosshairs is atypical of the tried and true final girl persona; Arkin is an ex-con plotting a heist at his rich employer’s home so he can pay off his ex-wife. It just so happens that the Collector also targeted the same family, rigging their home with deadly traps. Of course, everything about this horror film is atypical and a little harder to categorize, as it was once shopped as a Saw sequel.
Erin – You’re Next
What’s set up to be a normal home invasion horror film becomes anything but thanks to director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett’s sharp sense of humor. For the three animal-masked assailants who’ve come to slaughter the Davison family, they soon find themselves the victims thanks to final girl Erin (Sharni Vinson). She had a rather unusual upbringing in a survivalist compound, which made her a worthy opponent in combat, building traps, and remaining cool and levelheaded in extreme situations. In other words, this is one final girl no masked killer would want to have in their movie.
Max Cartwright – The Final Girls
Being the daughter of a famous scream queen, Max (Taissa Farmiga) is familiar with the slasher formula. On the anniversary of her mother’s death, Max is convinced by friends to attend a special screening of her mother’s most famous slasher movies, Camp Bloodbath. But when the group gets sucked into the film due to a theater fire, Max and her friends find that their presence alters the fate of the film’s characters, including that of the film’s final girl, Paula. The more Max and her friends attempt to save everyone using their working knowledge of the films, the more the definition of what exactly a final girl is supposed to be become blurred. That Max has an emotional attachment to one of Camp Bloodbath’s doomed characters complicates things even more.
Maddie – Hush
Like most heroines, Maddie (Kate Siegel) proves herself to be a resourceful fighter when a masked killer shows up to her isolated home in the woods. What sets her apart isn’t so much that she’s deaf and mute, but that she’s given full agency of her story from the get-go. She’s a fully independent novelist with close relationships with her sister and friendly neighbors. Her career plays a major factor into her decision-making when the tense cat and mouse chase ensues. All of this to say that when most final girls are defined by their crisis, finding inner strength they didn’t know they had to defeat their masked assailants, Maddie had it all along. No stranger to adversity, this is just one more obstacle for her to get past. Albeit one deadly obstacle.
Mia – Evil Dead
A flawed character deep in the throes of drug addiction isn’t usually a candidate for final girl status. Neither is one that’s the first to fall victim to possession once incantations from a certain book of the dead are read aloud. But that’s precisely what Mia (Jane Levy) becomes by movie’s end. Granted her brother David did cleanse her of the demon inhabiting her body, giving her the assistance that she needed to propel her into the final battle with the Abomination. But she also was the first to notice something was very wrong with that cabin, and she never actually killed anyone while possessed. Mia’s battle with her inner demons is a metaphor for drug addiction made literal, with her finally learning to stand on her own by the time the blood-soaked showdown comes around. Because of this, her journey to final girl resembles nothing that came before.
Sadie and McKayla – Tragedy Girls
High school seniors Sadie (Brianna Hildebrand) and McKayla (Alexandra Shipp) are lifelong best friends with a sweet demeanor and driving need for more social media followers. They’re highly intelligent, too, especially compared to lumbering serial killer Lowell Orson Lehmann on the loose. When the body count starts piling up around them, you can count on Sadie and McKayla to outlast them all, and with style. What sets these two apart from most heroines in slashers, though, is that they’re only final girls on the surface. Beneath they’re actually conniving killers masterminding Lowell’s, and their own, killing spree for the sake of achieving fame. Sadie and McKayla are both final girls and killer, rolled into one bright bubbly package.
Tree Gelbman – Happy Death Day
Tree Gelman (Jessica Rothe) begins Happy Death Day as a ruthless sorority sister with a long list of enemies, making it difficult to assess just which one slipped past their breaking point to murder her. She’s the precise type of mean girl that’s guaranteed to die horribly in a slasher film, and she does, over and over again as her birthday resets with each death. As her own death count rises, she learns from them. Motivated by solving the mystery behind her killer, Tree evolves into a final girl worth rooting for. It removes the clearly defined boundaries between slasher archetypes, giving us something completely new and complex in Tree.
Laurie Strode – Halloween (2018)
Fitting that the very heroine that inspired the final girl trope would turn it on its head 40 years later. Ignoring all other sequels, Halloween fills in the gap of what happens after the final girl has survived her harrowing encounter. In the case of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), it’s been decades of struggling to cope with the trauma of that fateful Halloween night, which in turn instigated decades of survival prepping for one more encounter with Michael Myers. When most final girls pick up knives, machetes, or chainsaws to use against their killer, this version of Laurie relies on guns. In another reversal, it becomes clear that while Laurie spent 40 years thinking about her attacker, her attacker hadn’t thought about her at all. Laurie Strode’s first battle with Michael Myers inspired a wave of copycats. Her second evolved the idea of what it means to be the one left standing, and its aftermath.
Editorials
Not Another ‘Scary Movie’: Revisiting Forgotten Parody ‘Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th’
After Scream (1996) made a killing at the box office, as well as won over critics and audiences, a lot of folks in the movie biz thought they could do the same thing (and yield similar results). That thing, of course, being a slasher. Most of these opportunists wound up being pretty straightforward; they were low on humor or commentary. Yet others, like Scary Movie (2000), saw the potential for spoofing Scream, and acted on that impulse with both haste and excitement.
A few months after the Wayans’ comedy first hit theaters, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th landed on the USA Network, as part of the channel’s “Shriek Week” programming. That straight-to-cable (then home video) destination is possibly why many people still don’t know about this one. Or they simply chose to forget. Whatever the reason, only one of these two horror parodies came out on top—and it’s certainly not the movie where Coolio channeled Prince, and Tom Arnold saved the day.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th previously went by the name of I Know What You Screamed Last Semester. That Trimark acquisition then settled on a wordier title, just so it could avoid the litigious wrath of Miramax Films. Folks may or may not remember that Columbia Pictures was sued over the “implied connection” between I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Scream. So, yeah, there was no way that this competing Scream parody wasn’t going to be kept on a tight rein.
A Heavy Reliance on Late ’90s TV References
Simon Rex, Julie Benz, Majandra Delfino, Harley Cross, Danny Strong, Tom Arnold and Tiffani-Amber Thiesen in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Naturally, there would be similarities between Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th and Scary Movie—their scripts are built on the backs of the same two movies. It goes without saying that the other big slasher of the 1990s, I Know What You Did Last Summer, was as much of a target as Scream. However,the film pads itself with more TV references than Scary Movie did.
Half the cast coming off of (and in some cases, returning to) a WB show could be a reason why. Dawson’s Creek is particularly zeroed in on, based on how there’s a central character named “Dawson Deery“, and how the teen drama’s teacher-student affair plotline is satirized to the nth degree. As if there weren’t enough nods to television, Baywatch, VH1’s Pop Up Video, and even those cheesy Mentos commercials all serve as joke prompts.
Shriek director John Blanchard and writers Sue Bailey and Joe Nelms all hailed from television, so it’s understandable that they would stick close to home. The movie’s humor in general makes more sense, in light of learning that Blanchard worked on SCTV, Kids in the Hall, and MADtv. The writers, on the other hand, were each fairly green, with Bailey being the most experienced of the two; she wrote and produced the game show BattleBots. Nevertheless, they, plus Blanchard, churned out a passable, joke-a-minute movie. The whole thing is staggeringly of its time, but no one here was aiming for longevity.
Having seen enough of these kinds of movies, we know to expect jokes of the low-hanging fruit variety. That’s the parody’s whole prime directive. From the characters having names like “Screw Frombehind” and “Doughy Primesuspect”, to stereotyping that feels taboo nowadays, this is a movie from a different era of comedy. Its coarse, corny, and unapologetic sense of humor won’t sit well with everyone in these more enlightened times. In which case, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th can be treated as a time capsule.
Does Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th Humor Still Hold Up Today?
“You may already be a victim”—Someone receives a most peculiar threatening piece of mail in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Although Shriek doesn’t live up to its own claims of being so funny that you’ll die of laughter, its bawdier parts could still lead to some nervous laughter. For instance, after this movie’s parallel to Drew Barrymore’s Scream character is done in—not by the killer but by a bug zapper—the movie throws a newspaper next to the victim’s fresh corpse. The headline? “Popular slut killed! Football team mourns”.
We then move on to the wacky and inappropriate goings-on at Bulimia Falls High School, home of the Hurlers. At this nexus of constant absurdity, indecency, and surrealism, students are seen fornicating on the lawn, cheerleading squad applicants are advised to be comfortable with partial nudity, and terrorists openly prepare for an anthrax attack. It can be a tad jarring to watch, especially if you didn’t grow up witnessing this style of comedy firsthand. Hell, even if you did, you may still have a “what the hell were they thinking?” reaction.
It’s not just the aggressively edgy humor here that can make you chuckle—the slapstick, the sight gags, and the ribaldry all have a decent chance of landing. The movie’s own villain, whose hockey mask was instantly transformed into a crudely Ghostface-esque one after coming in contact with an open flame, commits more cheap laughs than kills. His and his victims’ chase sequences, most of which are cartoonish in nature, left this writer grinning. The Scooby-Doo fan in me also totally ate up that clever unmasking joke.
Final Thoughts on This Forgotten Horror Parody
Shriek If You Know What Did Last Friday the 13th
Now, the jury is still out on whether these comedies are to blame for the death of the first slasher revival. There is more to consider than some parodies. At the very least, the likes of Scary Movie didn’t exactly encourage big studios to put their money on a trend that was being derided to death (and not as profitable as the spoofs). These sorts of movies also felt unnecessary at the time, given how their principal inspiration is already a deconstruction of the genre. But like anything else that quickly becomes popular, mockery is unavoidable.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is indeed a movie nobody asked for, much less needed. As a sample of pre-millennium humor and cultural attitudes, it’s not always precise. But as I’ve laid out, your mileage may vary. Horror parodies typically don’t have the best track record, so managing one’s own expectations here is recommended.
Upon rewatching, I for one laughed a bit more than I did back then. Only this time, I responded to the jokes that my younger self didn’t notice or find all that amusing. So it just goes to show that the movies don’t change—we do.
Harley Cross and Majandra Delfino must unmask the killer a number of times in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th before learning their true identity.
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