horror is a love story
on the 'final girl,' gender unease, and film
Horror is an excuse to touch, a reason to reach for someone’s hand, a fear-swept softening that reveals our most afraid and flushed selves. Horror is a genre, yes, deeply flawed and cursed in its own infinite ways, but it’s also a way to synthesize and process and subvert and re-enter the violence of the everyday, the monstrous qualities bubbling under the surfaces of the mundane, the creaking floorboards and possessed houses of trauma, the bloodied hand surging out of cemetery dirt. When we watch these films, bundled together, or even alone in our rooms, we are encountering every way we have gone unloved, unprotected, unheard—in a contained environment. I mean that we become temporary witnesses and victims and monsters, simultaneously, but we know that at the end of two hours we can turn off the film and return to daylight, to a warmer reality. There is an exit route. There is, finally, breathlessly, a way out.
The Final Girl—that now widely familiar trope, what we call the girl in the horror movie who emerges as the sole survivor, who makes it out alive but only after total ruin and all her loved ones are dead; she who escapes but only momentarily, blood-soaked and bruised—lives rent-free in the back of my brain, a trope reconfigured into a ghost, into a looping love-song I can’t unhear. Scream’s (super-queer-coded, and I stand by that) Sidney Prescott, Ready or Not’s Grace, Us’s Adelaide, Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Sally Hardesty—the list goes on, but these girls overpopulate my psyche like crooked, glimmering muscles, displaced from my own bodily knowledge and yet over-familiar all the same, as if we’re somehow interchangeable or intertwined or, maybe, more accurately, unmade in the same ways, by the same larger system of power and cruelty. What magnetizes me to the Final Girl is the inherent hyperbole of the trope: to inhabit anything like an archetype, voluntarily, can become a coping mechanism, a comfort-tool, a room to finally make sense of your own incoherent pain within. What other victim of patriarchy and misogyny receives the same species of deification, lore, tenderness, sympathy, and attention as the Final Girl?
I know better; I know that, above all, the Final Girl is a problem, is a symptom of a culture that refuses to perceive girls and women as fully-fledged, complicated people, is actually often the male gaze’s response to the damage wrought by men: to sexualize it, make it pitiful and/or “empowered,” to reduce the girl to her most uncomplicated form. But I also must admit the ways in which such a trope can feel like a salve, like a mechanism for healing and digesting and unraveling—because the final girl’s pain is always legitimate. She is often object of a male/white/hetero/cis-normative gaze, yes, but, read differently, can absorb the gaze and reflect it unto the viewer, registering the seedy, rancid material of horror in a far different way.
I like to joke and say that my gender identity can be reduced to Final Girl, that this is a gender experience unto itself, and yes, I’m mostly being sarcastic/evading answering the most unknowable question ever, but also, I think there’s some truth to it. She inhabits a space that isn’t quite girl, isn’t quite woman, but is somewhere intrinsically liminal, and thus, though she is often punished for her subversion of gender norms, she is also continuously defiant. She occupies that periphery I so cling to; the marginalia of gender, of being incessantly and often violently gendered but not necessarily always feeling like that supposed gender is real or felt at all. I am, in my own everyday life, usually legible most immediately and reflexively as a girl or woman. I am “she-d” constantly whether I like or not—and I really don’t. I prefer using they/them pronouns and my gender lives somewhere in the ocean of nonbinary-ness but, like a lot of people, I have an unease with almost any term ascribed to it.
The Final Girl, as problematic and symptomatic as she may be, feels accurate. She feels like an expression of an open wound I can’t heal, cannot smoke-signal or rewrite my way out of. Often, she still is forcibly ascribing to normative constructions of femininity, and what performances of it constitute a sympathy-worthy character: she is often white, slender, able-bodied, and heterosexual. She’s usually a specimen of normative, whitewashed prescriptions of womanhood, of femininity, of girl, and yet.
And yet she also usually is just a little bit off-the-mark. She’s a bit sideways. She’s not quite performing her gender the way she ought, according to the guidelines of her culture. She’s a little too “boyish.” A little too assertive. A little too rough around the edges. She’s visibly, just slightly estranged from the performance, that hell-dance she’s supposed to do every moment of every day, wisps of hair falling in her face, lips unglossed (UNACCEPTABLE!!), gaze empty as she smiles at her doting boyfriend or her group of popular friends. She’s going through every motion, doing all the things she’s taught to—but it’s not quite working; she’s got impostor syndrome, but the kind that makes you feel inept or unmarried to your gender identity. She’s quiet and polite and smart but not threateningly so, but sometimes something slips out. Sometimes there’s a strange moment of clear exhaustion or discomfort or irritation; sometimes she’s too smart, too gutsy, too curt, too independent. Sometimes the hidden girl pokes through the surface.
She’s trying, and yet. And yet.
I wonder what it would mean to be a different type of final girl—not white, not skinny, not having a normative body or gender expression, to be a hungry, bitchy, crass, loud, eye-rolling final girl, or one who isn’t interested in boyfriends or Being Perfect or the one whose trauma is the least interesting thing about her.
I suspect that my own attachment to the Final Girl of films past mirrors my own attachment to gender itself. I was always reluctantly female. Meaning that I felt like I was a fraud, a freak wearing a body and a face and clothing that signified “girl” and yet I couldn’t quite hack it, couldn’t quite commit to the bit, as they say. I was a “girl” but I felt like I was pretending to be one. Like I was faking it. I did not ever feel as if I were a boy. I did not even feel necessarily like anything; I just always felt like my expression of girlness was inadequate, forced, weird, too-much, not-enough, see-through in its transparent desperation and scream of lovemelovemeloveme. To be seen, really seen, was to be made aware of my inability to play the part right.
If horror is really a love story—or, rather, a collision course of many different love stories masked and costumed in fear, which is, at its pulse, indistinguishable from love for me at its most intense—is the Final Girl the one who must try to carry love out of the terror, into the night? What does it mean to love, after your friends have been slaughtered one by one, after the killer pulls their mask off and reveals themselves to be your boyfriend who you thought “loved” you very much? What if horror is an undressing, a breaking-open of the pseudo-love-stories we’ve ingested from culture, of men being good and tender, of our lives under patriarchy being safe and normal? What if, in the Final Girl’s lonely survival, she is showing us that gender, that “girl,” that heteronormative and constricted "love” attached to its frame, is not so safe, not so happy, not so lovely after all? That to come through the violence of girlhood unscathed is basically impossible, but it is possible to come through nonetheless. But that there is a cost to the stories we tell ourselves about who we can trust and who we can love. Gender is not trustworthy; the Final Girl can do everything right and still her life will come to pieces at the hands of some deranged killer or vengeful spirit. Her performance has been unnatural, staged, unreliable all along. Love is more complicated. Heterosexuality is not trustworthy for the Final Girl—she’s almost always made to be hetero-identifying, even if (often!) queer-coded—because cis men aren’t trustworthy, duh, but also because it was an unstable, liquid ruin to begin with.
The itchiness of this juxtaposition, of feeling like horror can be a route to tenderness, of hands clutching each other and faces, eyes closed, buried into necks, of comfort received and offered silently, and, at the same time, knowing horror—particularly its most canonized, oldest tropes and narratives—to be a campy, outsized, blown-up depiction of how very fucking cruel, and unreliable, and tenuous and uncanny love—or what looks like it, what we’re taught to identify as it—can be—well. This juxtaposition is the element of horror I cannot get over, cannot solve. But I stay up watching 80s slashers and 70s folk horror and all manner of weird, hilarious, garish, nauseating, brutal, disturbing, gory shit because I’m clearly infatuated with the question. I want to know how she survives even if it means becoming complicit in her own dissolving, in her own narrative loneliness. I want to know how love can enter somehow anyways. How she makes it home when no one is left but her. How she summons the desire to continue living this burnt life, but alone.