Consider This from NPR - Author Grady Hendrix Explores What Happens To 'Final Girls' After The Credits Roll

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

A final girl in the horror genre is the woman who is left to deal with the aftermath of surviving a terrifying killer. From The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, to Friday the 13th, to Halloween.The term 'Final Girl' was first coined by writer Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Society knows this trope well. But after the credits roll, audiences typically don't know much about what actually happens to that final girl. Or whether she can live a normal life after being hunted down by a masker killer. Author Grady Hendrix unpacks that in his latest novel, The Final Girl Support Group."The ultimate faceless killer they can't escape is the forces of market capitalism. There's always a sequel. So even if you survive Part I and II, they're going to get you in Part III. And there's something terrible about that to me, that you never get to let your guard down," Hendrix said.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu slash forward. Brianna Scott's earliest memory of seeing a horror movie? Well, she was about 12 years old in middle school. The film was Halloween 2, Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode versus the killer Michael. Listen, listen, listen, because this is where it gets really weird and why this sticks out in my memory. I remember being so scared by the movie that like I stayed up the entire night and I had a nightlight on in my room. I also, I took a knife to bed with me and I put it under my pillow just in case

Michael came to get me. And because I was still pretty young, my mom would come in and like check on me. And so she comes in my room and I'm still like sitting up in bed with the like knife next to me. And she's like, so why do you have this? To be fair, it was a butter knife. Brianna is now a producer here at Consider This. And we spoke because frankly, I'm not exactly a fan of the genre. Whereas she is a super fan with like deeply random recommendations. A really weird horror franchise that I like is Leprechaun, and it stars Warwick Davis from Harry Potter. And it's funny. It's a slasher. It's hilarious. It's camp. Now, I had a

whole feminist rant about how I wasn't sure I could get down with a genre that features women hunted down and ground up for entertainment. Brianna Scott feels the opposite. She's in it for the final girl. Coined by writer Carol Clover, the final girl is a character specific to horror films, the last girl or woman alive to confront the killer. It's too late, Kruger. I know the secret now. This is just a dream. I really liked Nancy Thompson from Nightmare on Elm Street because she was actually smart. Like, everyone else around her was like, oh, you know, we don't know what's going on. And she was like, wait a minute, I'm going to find out.

She was being like an investigative reporter in a way. Like, she wanted to know who Freddie was. And so this is kind of slightly why I feel like for me as a woman, that's what is in it for me is the final girls that I can relate to. And I feel like I would, if I was in their position, that's what I would do. Consider this. The so-called final girl trope works for a reason. It's been with us a long time. If you look at Red Riding Hood, that is the proto slasher.

A teenage girl goes in the woods all alone, is immediately confronted with this male coded, overpowering, kind of sexualized figure of the wolf, and she has to defeat him through guile and cunning. Author Grady Hendrix talks to us about his book, The Final Girl Support Group, and why at least some of us love horror. From NPR, I'm Adi Cornish. It's Friday, October 29th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally,

and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Now, before we get started, I should say we are talking about a film genre that will include descriptions of violence. It might not be suitable for all listeners. Now, as a kid, author Grady Hendrix thought he knew what horror movies were all about. Oh, it's a slasher movie. It's going to be some really lame, brutal, awful thing. And some guy's going to kill a lot of women without shirts on. I couldn't have been more wrong, but that's what I thought even as a kid.

But something changed his perspective. The opening scene of 1981's Friday the 13th, Part 2. In which the final girl from Part 1, played by Adrienne King, is just having a chill night in her apartment and arguing with her mom on the phone, making tea, and all of a sudden Jason shows up and ice picks her in the head. And it blew my mind. The casual cruelty of that stuck with me. And I always wanted a brighter, happier ending.

And not just for her. I really wanted to think what would happen if the worst thing that could happen to you had happened when you were 17 and you lived in the shadow of that for the rest of your life. And that sort of sent me down this rabbit hole. For instance, Hitchcock's 1960 classic, Psycho,

was loosely based on the real-life killings of Wisconsin serial murderer Ed Gein. So who were these women that these horror stories might have borrowed from? Hendrix's book imagines a world where the women of all those cult horror classics were real people, who long after the credits have rolled,

are still trying to put their lives back together. Starting with group therapy. The hero of this story is named Lynette Tarkington. I wanted each final girl to sort of be iconic for a different franchise and a franchise that we all know, even if we're not horror fans. I think everyone knows, oh, the summer camp killer. Oh, you know, the guy who killed people in their dreams. And Lynette is out of that really bottom of the barrel genre of slasher movies from the 80s, the Christmas slasher, Silent Night, Deadly Night, Black Christmas is one of those. And so Lynette was a guy dressed as Santa Claus, broken to her house on Christmas Eve and impaled her on a rack of antlers.

And she has lived with that ever since. And that was always a thing that really fascinated me about Final Girls is the ultimate faceless killer they can't escape is the forces of market capitalism. There's always a sequel. So even if you survive part one and two, they're going to get you in part three. And there's something terrible about that to me that you never get to let your guard down. What if there's a sequel? What if there's a reboot of the franchise? And that to me is harrowing. I can't imagine living like that. And it's funny. Someone said to me, so you take this sort of jump into fantasy with this world where there are these entertainment franchises based on murder. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Let's run down a list of actors who've won Academy Awards for portraying real life murderers. We live in a culture based on murder. We make TV shows about it. We make books about it. We love murder. We can't look away. I don't know what to make of that, if it's good or bad, but it is such a part of our culture. You talk about a culture that is, as you said, obsessed with violence and obsessed with the people who impose the violence, but not the victims. So how did you think about the appetites of fans and male fans, right? Because you're coming to this as a man who is drawn to the genre. And the book really

does seem to raise some questions about what's behind that appetite. Right. And one of the places this book came from is me realizing that as a 48-year-old dude, I love horror movies. I've watched them all my life. And so I've spent 40 years watching people get murdered for my viewing pleasure. And that's weird. Is that healthy? Is that not healthy? What does that mean? And so every book I write, I'm trying to sort of wrestle with some question. The reader doesn't need to know, but it's a question that gets my butt in the chair every day. And with this book, that was really like, what is this coming from? And what I realized is the movies that I keep coming back to,

they're the ones with final girls in them. They're the ones where people manage to escape, the ones where people manage to get somewhere better. And there is something really reassuring about seeing the worst possible thing happen to someone and they survive. One of the things that startled me when I was reading it is that even though I'm reading the story of characters who are traumatized, scared, and clearly have PTSD, right, have taken all kinds of unusual security measures in their life as a result of what they've survived, but there were some aspects of the way that they would think that I would like, well, that doesn't seem so strange.

That's how you stay safe. And I don't know if that's generational or what that means. But as a male writer, like, how did you think about that? It's just treating them like people and trying to think it through logically, how these women would be living in the wake of what's happened to them. Did you ever think, what's wrong with us as men? Do you know what I mean? Because you had to get into the mind of the killers also to write this book. And people who treat women as objects to be collected or harmed. I mean, it's really dark.

Yeah. And it's interesting because the actual killers I had to think like in the book, who were the ones sort of hunting these final girls, their issue derives so much from rage and anger at this. And I think you can't be alive in the world and not notice that we become very angry with some women for weird reasons. You look at Hillary Clinton. You look at someone like Lorena Bobbitt back in the 90s. You look at these women and you think, where is this rage coming from? What is this lesson, our press, us? We are trying to teach them. It's so strange. So that was a very easy mindset to get into because it's one I see around me a lot. This anger at women who don't do as

they're told. Before I let you go, I want to talk about sort of how this trope, so to speak, has evolved. Who are the final girls of today, so to speak? I mean, has there been any sort of shift in the approach in storytelling? Sure. I mean, there absolutely has. And one of the things that's really interesting is to see sort of the final girl of today, who's cut from a very different mold. She's more of a Buffy or a Xena or a Furiosa in Mad Max Fear Road. She is a woman who shows up ready to rock and roll. She can hold her own physically. She comes out of the box completely loaded for bear and ready to rumble. And that's a lot of fun to watch. But the final girls that I love are the ones from the

70s and the 80s who were just people. They weren't particularly smart or strong or anything. They survived not because they had some exceptional quality or some ability to kick butt. They survived just because they kept going. They just kept finding enough to take one more step, to climb up on one more rooftop, to hold one more door shut. And that, to me me is so inspiring. Grady Hendrix, the author of The Final Girl Support Group.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish.