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.
The great Ernest Dickerson turns seventy-five years old this month, so we’re looking back at his most memorable contribution to the horror genre – 1995’s Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight!
The film hit screens while the Tales from the Crypt series was winding down its run on television, and it stands apart with a story that feels a step or two removed from the franchise norm. That was the smart play, though, as the show’s stories – and those from the original EC comics – work best in short bites. The result is a film that holds up beautifully as a gory good time.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995)
Commentator: Ernest Dickerson (director), Michael Felsher (moderator)
1. Dickerson was in post-production on Surviving the Game when he got a call from his agent saying that producer Gil Adler wanted to meet about a Tales from the Crypt feature film. It went well, so Dickerson met with Joel Silver next and secured the job.
2. The original screenplay for the film came to the producers as a spec script wholly detached from the Tales from the Crypt brand. They added the Crypt Keeper (voiced by John Kassir) bookends to make it fit.
3. Dickerson was more familiar with the original EC comic books having read them as a kid, but he had watched a few episodes of the HBO series, so he knew what the current vibe was for the project.
4. Adler directed the film’s wraparound segments, meaning Dickerson never actually got to work with the creepy puppet. “Gil and the Crypt Keeper had a great relationship,” he adds, “they worked together for years.”
5. While he was new to the Tales from the Crypt family, Dickerson had previously worked as a director of photography on the Tales from the Darkside anthology series. That show is underappreciated in my humble opinion, and I will go to bat for both it and the equally underloved Monsters.
6. A big appeal of the horror genre for Dickerson is the idea of dark mysteries that challenge our imagination. For this film, that came down to the mythology being created between the characters.
7. Five executive producers are listed in the opening credits, but Dickerson says the only two he had dealings with were Silver and Richard Donner. The other three were Walter Hill, Robert Zemeckis, and David Giler.
8. Dickerson had only ever seen Billy Zane in movies with a full head of hair, so he was surprised when Zane showed up on the first day with a bald head. “He had this case, and he opened up the case that he had all these hair pieces in, and he says, ‘So which one of these do you think I should use?’” Dickerson looked at him and suggested he just go bald for the character.
9. While the bulk of the opening exteriors were filmed in a desert just outside Los Angeles, the shot of the old church at 11:26 was created on a warehouse hangar soundstage where the film’s interiors were shot.
10. When he had read the script, Dickerson pictured the character of Jeryline (Jada Pinkett Smith) “as a little, tough lady.” He had recently seen Smith in Menace II Society, and while the producers had someone else in mind for the role, he fought to get her instead.
11. Just as Zane surprised Dickerson with his hair (or lack thereof), Smith arrived on the first day with her hair dyed platinum white. He “liked the idea” but asked her to please get it tweaked so it looked more yellowish blond. “It’s definitely a statement.”
12. He had seen Brenda Bakke in the 1989 sci-fi/action film from Japan, Gunhed, and thought she’d be great here as Cordelia. The rest of us might recognize her from Death Spa or Trucks.
13. Felsher comments that the film’s setup does a good job not telegraphing who’s going to live or die, and he uses the “nice guy” (Charles Fleischer) and “the kid” (Ryan O’Donohue) as examples. “You don’t play by those rules here,” he says, and Dickerson replies that he wanted to subvert those rules. That extends to Smith as well because she’s Black, “and usually in movies like this they’re the first folks to die.”
14. Dickerson says they had forty days of filming, “which, the way I’m used to working, was a very generous schedule.” It was budgeted at around $10 million.
15. This probably won’t surprise you, but Zane improvised the bit at 26:25 after he jumps out the window and says, “Fuck this cowboy shit! You fuckin’, hodunk Podunk, well, then, motherfuckers!”
16. In the original script, the demons that The Collector (Zane) raises from the dirt actually looked more like the people they used to be. “They were more human,” but the very smart decision was made in pre-production to make them look far more unique instead.
17. The demons are killed by shooting their eyes, but Dickerson felt there should be one more element to it. “Shoot out their eyes, you gotta duck because the souls come shooting out, and if it hits ya, boom, it can kill ya.” This is a fun touch.
18. He’s been asked more than once if these demons are where Peter Jackson got the idea for how the orcs would look in his Lord of the Rings movies. “They do look like orcs.”
19. He recalls having seen Ronny Yu’s The Bride with White Hair shortly before going to work on Demon Knight, and he hoped to bring some of that staged style into his own film. An example of that in practice is Brayker’s (William Sadler) brief flashbacks to Christ on the cross.
20. Character deaths were mostly based on the idea that “each person’s downfall was going to be predicated by their weakness.” The Collector discovers someone’s weakness and then uses it against them. Cordelia wants to be loved, Jeryline wants to travel, Uncle Willy (Dick Miller) is a horndog for both liquor and ladies, Danny loves horror comics, etc.
21. Dickerson says that plenty of genre classics were in the back of his head while making the film, including Assault on Precinct 13, Alien, Aliens, and more.
22. Cordelia is possessed into a demonic form, and Dickerson’s idea for how she’d look was originally a bit different. “Since Cordelia was a prostitute, I thought that her mouth should actually be a vertical slit that was in her stomach… which would open up with teeth and a tongue.” It was nixed, he says, when “the wife of one of the producers read that and said ‘no way you’re putting that in the movie.’”
23. The key makes an appearance in the followup, Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood, but it wasn’t originally meant to. Apparently, early test audiences expected it to be a more connected sequel to Demon Knight, so the filmmakers added it in to appease them. This is where I go on record saying that Bordello of Blood is a fun time. Can’t touch Demon Knight, obviously, but it’s more entertaining than its reputation suggests.
24. They had to film Uncle Willy’s bar scene “dream” twice, once with the women topless and once with them in bikinis, to have versions for both theaters and television broadcast. “Dick’s a pro.” (To be fair, Dickerson says this in regard to Miller having to endure the makeup application, but the sentiment fits both situations, so…)
25. Dickerson says he’s “always amazed at the love that people show this film,” and adds that fans bring it up to him incredibly often. This is great to hear, as we should always be telling artists how much their work means to us while they’re still alive and able to hear it.
26. Zane also suggested the gag at 1:08:21 with the sponge coming out of his mouth. The beat reminds Dickerson to praise the actor even more, adding that he was an “ally” to the director when “bad ideas” came down from the studio suits.
27. He didn’t get any pushback on killing little Danny. He did insist on one added element, though, as he wanted to immediately follow the boy exploding in the air with a shot of his bloody and torn sneaker hitting the ground below. “And the sneaker had to be a hightop.”
28. Dickerson says there’s “something kinky sexy about” Smith being covered in blood, and then the two commentators go quiet for almost two minutes out of respect for the scene. It’s a good opportunity to reflect on how Dickerson had previously mentioned Alien and Aliens as films being in the back of his head during filming, and how two scenes here reflect that – Jeryline stripping down to her underwear for the final confrontation feels like a nod to Ridley Scott’s film, while an earlier scene with Irene (CCH Pounder) and Dep. Bob (Gary Farmer) realizing they’re surrounded and choosing to blow themselves up alongside some of the demons is something of a callback to the air vent sacrifice in James Cameron’s film.
29. Asked about the film’s critical reception at the time of release, Dickerson says it received good reviews from horror-loving critics and then talks about the importance of horror in general. “Horror has always been a great way of putting out ideas, of talking about some of the things that affect us as people. Some of the best horror, like the best science fiction, talks about what it’s like to be human. Some of the best horror gets very political.”
30. The original ending would have featured The Collector showing “his true self, which is a demon made of fire.” They spent a lot of time trying to make it work, but it was “extremely difficult… back in the day of analog effects.” It was rewritten into the faceoff between him and Jeryline featuring the dancing, the crotch fire, Zane’s attempts at saying “love,” and his eventual demise from her bloody spit.
31. They both agree that a direct sequel to Demon Knight could be a lot of fun, but Dickerson says he’s unaware of any talk on the possibility.
32. Dickerson was super excited about this new Scream Factory Blu-ray in 2015, and he mentions that before its release, he had imported a Blu-ray from Germany presumably to enjoy the film in HD. He’s just like us! (Or am I the only one here who’s imported a German Blu-ray of the much maligned werewolf flick Big Bad Wolf…)
Quotes Without Context
“I was so happy to get Dick Miller for this movie.”
“There was a time when guys used to put ketchup on everything.”
“I’m a big student of Hitchcock, and the best way to make a moment of horror work is to lull the audience into a false sense of security.”
“A villain should always be the most interesting person in a movie.”
“They were a really great bunch of performers who were performing on these little leg-extension stilts wearing a diaper that had a radio-controlled tail that was being manipulated by a special effects tech right out of the frame.”
“It’s hard to direct air; it doesn’t do what you want.”
“The only censorship problem came from the producer’s wife, who didn’t want the vagina dentalis [sic] in the movie.”
“One of the executives wanted to know why the devil didn’t try to have sex with Jada.”
“It always starts with the script.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.
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