Last Girl Standing: Finally, The Last Girl Standing!

I grew up during what some might argue to be the “peak in popularity” of the slasher film, the 1980’s. There was a video rental place around the corner from my childhood house; we would often go there on weekends. Each video had small metal and paper tags on hooks below. You chose the tag for your video to give to the clerk. I used to LOVE the feel of those tags in my hands! My friends and I would dare each other to watch movies from the “scary” section. The scariest film I ever saw as a kid was Child’s Play (1988). I watched it at a sleep-over and I STILL have nightmares about that freaky doll coming down my fireplace at night! (shiver!)

What I love most about horror film is its communal nature. How often do people watch horror films alone? I can’t watch ghost stories or Japanese horror alone at night for fear of seeing hair-covered children creepily standing in every shadow of my house for a week. But, I love to watch these films with friends or at parties where I can share my feelings of fear and/or frustration.

Horror film creates a space where it is publicly and socially acceptable to express exaggerated feelings such as fear, terror, and rage. Isabel Christina Pinedo addresses the implication of this in the introduction to her book Recreational Terror. She remembers growing up with a strict Catholic background where these spaces created “legitimate occasions to overly express terror and rage, feelings that were otherwise forbidden” [emphasis mine](Pinedo 2).

I often experience terror and rage when watching horror film, slasher / stalker film, violent cinema, and exploitation films (both old school and their Tarantino-Rodriquez-inspired modern counterparts). While I love these films, their (occasional) attempts to raise issues about sexual politics, gender, feminism, and world politics often falls flat because the characters in them are routinely and insultingly sexualized and stereotyped.

In this space I will share my fascination and frustration with some of my favorite films while discussing issues of contemporary feminist and world politics. I invite and welcome guest posts, comments, and intelligent conversation! I reserve the right to respond to and then delete homophobic, racist, sexist, fat-phobic, or otherwise insulting comments.

I will be posting weekly to this space in various forms (writing, photography, video, culture jams, links, and reviews).

A little background about the name of this blog:

Carol J. Clover’s analysis of slasher films, Men, Women, and Chainsaws, revealed a commonality in films released post-1974; the “final” character was consistently female in a genre of film “assumed” to draw a mainly teenage male audience. I have named my blog in reference to Clover’s identification of this trend as the “Final Girl.”

Clover observes that not only is the Final Girl introduced as the main character in contemporary slasher films, but she “is the only character to be developed in any psychological detail” (Clover 44). The Final Girl is the reason for my love and fascination with the slasher genre, both personally and academically.

I love the interjection of a strong, will-minded, (mostly) less-sexed than her screen counterparts, hard-assed-woman into a (mainly) sexist genre of film. Let’s face it – Slasher films (1970’s – 80’s) and their contemporary counterparts (mostly re-makes, straight to videos, and bargain bins) are rape narratives. A sexually frustrated male* “psycho” killer spends the film stalking and then stabbing scantily clad women** repeatedly with a phallic object (usually a butcher knife). The Final Girl complicates this space in so many ways yet still (generally) upholds conventional standards of beauty, attractiveness, and heterosexuality. I find her both frustrating and fascinating.

Contemporary feminist film theory has extended Clover’s analysis of the Final Girl more broadly into action film and various other forms of violent cinema. The most notable examples of this are Ripley from the Alien franchise and Sarah Connor in the Terminator franchise. More recent examples would be Beatrix (“The Bride”) Kiddo in both volumes of Kill Bill or Cataleya Restrepo in Columbiana. These films portray women fighting back violently against being manipulated, wronged, abused, and/or tortured by violent powerful men instead of psycho killers (although sometimes the two are interchangeable). Whatever the genre, depictions of violent women have been seen by feminist analysis to be both liberatory and oppressive.