Imaginary Worlds - Who Gets to Survive: The Final Girls of Horror

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

Horror movies are best known for their monsters and villains – but there’s another half to the equation. The Final Girls who survive horror films and live to see another sequel have been fueling the genre for half a century. Freddie Krueger met his match in Nancy. Michael Myers can’t outwit Laurie. Ripley is the ultimate survivor of Alien movies. But the trope of the Final Girl has gone through an evolution in recent years. I talk with Robin Means Coleman, University of Virginia professor and author of the book Horror Noire, about the underlying issues of race and gender in who gets to be considered a Final Girl, and why she coined the term Enduring Women. Cultural critic Jenika McCrayer guides us through modern day Final Girls, who are more diverse and complex. And PhD student Morgan Podraza maps out the evolution of Jamie Lee Curtis’s character in the Halloween franchise, from innocent high schooler to gun-toting grandma. This week's episode is sponsored by Sol Reader and Henson Saving Go to solreader.com to and use the code IMAGINARY at checkout to receive 15% off your purchase of Sol Reader Limited Edition. Visit hensonshaving.com/imaginary to pick the razor for you and use the code “imaginary” to get two years' worth of blades free with your razor – just make sure to add them to your cart. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is it about the supernatural that's captivated us for generations? Is it the mysterious allure of the unknown? The heart-pounding thrill of an unexplainable sighting? Or the creeping fear that a life-changing encounter could happen to you? Sightings is the new series that puts you at the center of the world's strangest unexplained events. From Roswell to Amityville to Loch Ness and beyond, each episode combines a never-before-heard story of an infamous supernatural encounter with mind bending

investigations that will leave you questioning what's real and what's impossible. Enter the unexplained with Sightings, available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Earlier this year, we did a mini-series about iconic works of pop culture that came out

in 1984, including Nightmare on Elm Street. During our research into the Nightmare franchise, we became fascinated by the trope of the Final Girl. The Final Girl is the characterpe of the final girl. The final girl is the character who survives the movie and keeps coming back in sequel after sequel. In Nightmare on Elm Street, it's Nancy, played by Heather Langenkamp. This is just a dream. He isn't real.

In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the character is Sally, played by Marilyn Burns. In the Halloween franchise, it's Laurie, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. Are you fooling around again? I'll kill you if this is a joke. In the Scream films, it's Sydney, played by Nev Campbell. So where are you? Your front porch. gamble. And Sigourney Weaver's character Ripley in the Alien films counts as a final girl. I mean those movies are more science fiction, but they still follow the same pattern as horror movies.

There are also novels about final girls, comic books, a board game, and pop songs. But what really fascinated us is that there's also a field of academic studies around final girls. Because who gets to survive a horror movie overlaps with a lot of social issues. So in the spirit of my favorite holiday, Halloween, we decided to take a deep dive into the trope of the final girl and find out why there's more to her than some people might expect. By the way, this episode has spoilers. I mean, I've already given away a spoiler by calling them final girls, but not every

final girl survives every sequel. Now I thought the term final girl was one of those cultural memes where no one can remember where it came from. Turns out that's not the case. The term was first coined in 1987 by a film professor named Carol Clover in an article and then she explored it later in a book. Robin Means Coleman is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. She also wrote a book called Horror Noir, which looks at how the horror genre reflects the history of Black Americans. She says when Carole Clover first began writing about Final Girls,

What Clover is interested in figuring out is as we're watching these 1970s horror films, how come all of a sudden there are all of these women who are starring in these films, but up until this point, sort of early to mid 70s, it's like men who are showing up as heroes or monsters or anti-heroes, and then all of a sudden we've got women. So who are these women? and then all of a sudden we've got women. So who are these women? So she comes up with this concept called the final girl. And there's some sort of techniques that these filmmakers use to draw men in. First, they give these women kind of masculine sounding names

like Ripley. And then they also give them sort of masculine almost phallic type weapons like chainsaws. So that helps with that kind of cross gender identification. But in looking at what's happening with this sort of fandom, okay, not only are these women starring in these films, but they're actually surviving. And that was what was sort of new and unexpected. So it isn't just that this is the sort of last person to survive, but it is also kind of a heroism that's happening with these women. HOFFMAN Janika McCrary is a cultural critic who's written about final girls.

I asked her what makes a successful final girl. She says the characters need grit, determination, cleverness, a will to survive. But when it came to casting or writing, there were other factors to middle class in suburbia. You see all the other women who are like punished for not being that. So like, you know, we have that trope that like if you have sex, like you die first. If you do drugs, if you do anything illicit, that you're like, you're dead. You're not going to make it to the end. That was famously discussed in the 1996 movie Scream.

The characters are fans of horror movies without realizing they're in a horror movie. There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie. For instance, number one, you can never have sex. No, no, no. Big no, no. Big no. No, no. Even in popular sex equals death. OK, number two, you can never drink or do drugs.

No, the sin factor. It's a sin. It's an extension of number one. The sin factor. It's a sin. It's an extension of number one. Janika says even movies like Scream weren't self-aware enough to see the larger pattern. Most of those horror movies took place far from the cities, where danger was supposedly contained. The social anxiety is around Reagan-Almonds and especially urban decay. So with like urban decay and white flight, you see more like white families move out to the suburbs where they think it's safe, but you have these two villains, Michael Myers and Freddie Krueger,

that follow them, that pursue them, and like turn their worlds upside down. And I think that was something to be said about society and like how we try to flee our fears, but they always end up at our doorstep. There's another elephant in the room with final girls. Trauma. I remember when the slasher genre was huge in the 1980s. And the psychological state of the final girls was not something my friends talked about. After a new slasher movie came out, on Monday morning, what the kids at school

would be talking about is all the horrible but kind of awesome ways the characters got killed. Morgan Pedraza is getting her PhD at Ohio State University, and she published an academic paper about Jamie Lee Curtis's character in the Halloween franchise. One of the things that inspired her research was hearing Jamie Lee Curtis in 2018 promoting one of the more recent Halloween sequels.

Jamie Lee Curtis started incorporating these conversations about the hashtag MeToo movement into her conversations about the experiences of women in the Halloween franchise. And so once I started kind of digging in more, I realized that this kind of experience of women re-experiencing trauma within horror franchises was something that was tied directly to slashers in general but also the actors who were coming back to play these roles so that it was actually this larger pattern or trend

having women come back into their roles within the slasher franchises to be the final girl over and over again. In a system that limits the roles that women can play, especially as main characters, the trope of the final girl allowed certain actresses to get more work and more visibility. But the systemic sexism of Hollywood overlaps with racism, and the famous final girls are

mostly white. But there were black final girls even before Carol Clover was writing about this trope. She may not have recognized them as final girls because they overlapped with a different genre, but they were there, fighting their own battles. Every night before going to bed, I have to read a book. It can't be a scary book. Reading is supposed to help me wind down from a long day.

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Edition. Robin Means Coleman says that when Carol Clover was writing about the origin of Final Girls, she was looking at movies like Halloween and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Remember, we're talking about the 70s. So why do I say that with such emphasis? This is what the so-called black exploitation era of filmmaking. So you're seeing this real flood, a rush of not just black horror films, but black films in particular, race films. These are films that are focusing on blackness. Some of these black exploitation horror films had voodoo or vampires, or both. They're popular tropes in the 70s. And there were female characters who survived to the end. But Janika McCrary says in these movies.

Black women are hypersexualized in a way that white final girls are not. They're ultra feminine and sexy in a way that white final girls of the time were not. There were some exceptions. One of her favorites is a movie called Ganja and Hess. It's a really art house vampire film. It has Marlene Clark and Dwayne Jones. He was also in Night of the Living Dead. He played Ben. They're vampires. It's actually like a metaphor for like drug use, like drug use in the black community and like Christianity is really fun. So Dwayne Jones's character ends up wanting to repent for his sins and being a

vampire and he wants to like give his life to Christ. But Ganja Marlene Clark is like, no, actually, I love being a vampire. I love having all this power. If the shadow of the cross is against our heart, it'll destroy us. The cross is only an implement of torture. Its shadow is the darkness that carries us. See, nothing can survive the shadows. She lets him sacrifice himself and she just goes on living her life, which I really enjoy. One of Robin's favorite examples

is Scream Blackula Scream starring Pam Greer. The black prince of darkness, Blackula, recalled by the awesome powers of Voodoo to stalk the earth in a new quest for blood. Pam Greer starred in a lot of black exploitation movies. But up until Scream Blackula Scream, Pam Greer is always sort of partially nude, right? This is how she's been sort of treated in these other exploitation genre films. She gets in Scream Blackula Scream and she does two things. One, she is fully clothed. So, and I mean, she has on something that has a collar up to her neck. That just was unheard of. So that's really important. The second is she's quite smart. She's depicted as almost scholarly in her attention

as almost scholarly in her attention to black history, black artifacts, but also black religion. The third then is that she kind of recuperates the depiction of voodoo and black magic, but she's doing this in a really different way. So it's not the kind of vulgar voodoo that you see in these films. Really she's practicing, it's closer the kind of vulgar voodoo that you see in these films. Really she's practicing, it's closer to, you know, watching somebody do Santoria or something

like that. It's not this ridiculous sort of people frantically dancing around a bonfire and you're hearing bass drums all the time. It's not that at all. I've been informed that you have exceptional powers in the exceedingly complex science of voodoo. Science? I never thought of it that way.

To us, voodoo is simply a religion based on faith. A powerful, powerful faith. It's interesting because I feel like if it's a if you're talking about a man surviving a horror film, he's just the protagonist, you know, it's still just simply to have a woman as the main character, especially in a genre like horror, that that alone needs to be pointed out. Well, within blackness, it does still need to be pointed out. So if you look at the blackening, we just which just came out, what, has it been a year or two now? Part of that storyline was we're rejecting that the black guy or girl dies first.

This is how the villain sets a trap for the characters in The Blackening. In your predicament, the black character is always the first to die. I will spare your lives if you sacrifice the person you deem the blackest. The blackest? Nobody should judge anybody in your brain. You have two first to die. I will spare your lives if you sacrifice the person you deem the blackest. The blackest? Nobody should judge anybody in here, bro. You have two minutes to decide. Kind of hovering over representations of blackness, the way black people show up in horror films,

there is still, still a conversation of, is this person going to make it to the end of the movie? But we haven't fully resolved that yet. And so we name it. So what you're really saying is in horror films where there's a white guy, they're just the protagonist. But in horror films, particularly mainstream sort of non-black horror films or blacks in horror films,

there's still a question of whether the Black guy will die first or die somewhere mid movie. We die these awful perfunctory deaths fairly early on and our deaths are in service to show the superiority of something or someone else. of something or someone else. So if black female protagonists don't fit the classic definition of vinyl girls, what should we call them?

Robin came up with a new term, enduring women. She says enduring women aren't just trying to survive. They're often seeking revenge against someone who committed a grievous harm against them or their partner. In most Pam Grier films as an example, there's often charged kind of horrific rape scenes. She's using that as a part of her arsenal to kind of get close to the gangsters or the man or whatever it is to sort of try to exact her revenge. So there's a kind of brutal sexual availability that's written into these characters.

You don't see that in the sort of white final girl films. The other thing is, unlike white final girls, there is no closure for these Black women. So franchise is not, you know, sort of notwithstanding. At the end of Alien, Ripley, you know, sort of goes into hyper sleep with her cat. And if we didn't have all of these sequels, that would kind of be the end of it. Sally is on the back of a truck and Leatherface is waving his chainsaw, but Sally drives away, literally off into the sunset. She is saved. Some of those classic horror movies

end with the promise of a sequel. A hint that the monster was not defeated. The final girl is not out of danger. But Robin says, in these black exploitation films... Black women aren't just fighting sort of a monstrous person. They're fighting monstrous people and systems that have invaded their black community. Because at the end of these movies, they're still fighting the good fight. They may have secured, you know, sort of avenged their boyfriend's or partner's death, but

there is still guns and drugs and other exploitive practices happening in the community, and they still have an ongoing battle. Morgan-Pedraza appreciates the term enduring women because it highlights another problematic aspect of the term final girls. Something I like about that concept is that it challenges the idea of girlness, which is certainly something that downplays

the experiences of women in these franchises. The original concept certainly developed because the slasher, original slasher films were interested in teenagers and youth culture, but over time, calling women girls infantilizes them. So I really appreciate this, this challenging of the concept by expanding it to think like, no, these are women. We're not going to treat them like they're children or that their experiences were childish or that they're acting childish as a result of these experiences. Janika McQuarrie also appreciates the term enduring women, but she still uses the term final girls,

especially with contemporary horror films because the trope has evolved. There's less differences between enduring women and final girls. And now we see more final girls of color, not just black women, but like other women of color, Asian women, Latino women. That's like when there's some big mainstream thing

and then some alternative thing comes up and the mainstream things like, you know what, I'll just buy that. Right. I'll just incorporate that into what I already do. It's mine now. Right, like it's a big tent. Basically, but like that's definitely something that we want.

Like we want to see more women of color, like more women leads. There's room for everybody. So what is going on in this new era of final girls or enduring women? How do they reflect the culture of our times? Another trope in a scary movie is when a guy takes out a really sharp blade to shave himself. I want to yell at the screen. don't you hear the scary music? Don't you see the dim lighting?

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in the mid-1990s. One of the first modern black vinyl girls was Jada Pinkett Smith's character, Jeralyn, in the movie Tales from the Crypt, Demonite. They're here! The demons are here! Run! Run! Let's go!

There's a monster, she's gotta do away with it, she does, it's not necessarily overtly about these sort of systems of oppression. What's interesting about Demonite and this character is that there is still some enduring woman sort of tendencies there. So again, if you remember Alien and Ripley, franchise is notwithstanding, she could go to hypersleep with her

cat, land on Earth and be perfectly fine. But spoiler alert, at the end of Demon Night, Jeralyn's character, though she vanquishes the demon, it comes back. And now it's stalking her, it's following her. So you still feel like, oh, okay, she's got to continue to endure. So the very end of that film is not her sort of falling back in a seat and continuing her journey home, but she's aware that she's now sort of been pulled But she's aware that she's now sort of been pulled into this ongoing battle against these evil forces to help try to save the world. Another contemporary horror film with an enduring woman is Candyman from 2021.

It's a sequel to the 1992 film Candyman. Both films are called Candyman. The Candyman himself is the vengeful spirit of a black man who was murdered by racists in the 19th century. Now he's wreaking havoc in modern day Chicago. I am the writing on the wall, the whisper in the classroom. Without these things, I am nothing. So now I must shed innocent blood. Come with me. That's how the Candyman sounded in the 92 film. The 2021 film was directed by a Black filmmaker, Nia DaCosta. Nia DaCosta comes in and says, this is an interesting candyman, sort of take on the candyman where there's this focus on this white woman and her trials and her tribulations,

even as it's this black guy who has suffered all of this trauma. Let's revisit this narrative of trauma. So in 2021, Candyman, Nia DaCosta does exactly that. And while we see black men sort of as the focus of the story, right? In the end, it's a woman. It's a woman who brings kind of justice, social justice, who recognizes and sees the trauma, who in some ways controls this candy man monster

and does away with the injustice that is plaguing this Chicago community by using the candy man to annihilate that injustice, which is represented by police officers. That scene takes place in the back of a police car of a corrupt cop. Candyman? Candyman? What?

Candyman? Candyman? And two here! Stop! Stop! And two of Jordan Peele's films, Us and Nope, have enduring women. Jordan Peele and his sort of methodology is that we won't be annihilating a whole bunch of black folks today, right? The genre has done that for decades, and we won't be doing that. Janika thought the character of Emerald, played by Kiki Palmer in NOPE, was groundbreaking because she's so different from the stereotypical final girl.

The main characters in NOPE are being hunted by an alien monster in the skies above their ranch. It's in the cloud. It's in the cloud. Oh, Janik! It's in the cloud! Emerald in NOPE is a struggling actress. Like, she wants to make a name for herself.

She feels like stuck in, like, her father's shadow legacy. Oh, she's also a lesbian in the film. And we see her struggle with her relationships with her father, her brother. We see her smoking weed, getting drunk. She's, like like fiercely independent. And she also makes mistakes. And she's like motivated by like money and fame. That's something you don't really see in like a heroic protagonist a lot. But yeah, she still like comes through in the end. And she says other contemporary filmmakers have been turning the trope of the final girl upside down.

The character of Maxine Minx in the X franchise is a final girl and an adult film star. In some movies, the final girl ends up becoming a villain. You have more final girls with like mysterious pasts or like they have sex and they do drugs or like they're trying to make up for mistakes that they made in the past. It just makes them feel more like human. I personally want to see more trans representation, more queer representation. There's this great horror film from a trans filmmaker called T Blockers and the final

girl is a trans woman. I think that's great. The big date. Well, his name is Adam. Before you ask, he's totally cool with the whole trans thing. Hey. Hi. The diversity of people behind the camera has clearly made a difference. Janika has noticed that in a subgenre called revenge horror. The first act, they're sexually assaulted and left for dead.

And then the middle act, they recover and they try to plan the way to fight back. And the third act is them like just going all out against their attacker, their assailant. Men directors tend to focus more on the assault, it's more graphic, whereas female directors usually tend to gloss over the sexual assault and focus more on how it makes that character feel

and how they react to it. Even some of the mainstream horror franchises are diving deep into the psychology of legacy final girls. Morgan Pedraza thinks that change actually began with the first screen movie. I think that as Wes Craven started making these like meta films that were meant to kind of be humorous in some ways,

but also critiques in other ways, that more horror generally started to become more reflective about what it meant to represent violence against women. But also I think what it means to represent violence against marginalized groups in general. Women just happen to be kind of the most popular marginalized group to be slashed in the slasher franchises. Morgan wrote about the evolution of Laurie Strode in the Halloween franchise. That's Jamie Lee Curtis's character.

When Carol Clover first coined the term Final Girl, she wrote about the qualities of Laurie Strode that helped her survive the first Halloween movie. She talks about how Laurie Strode is a solitary figure, but in a way that is, like, allows her to protect herself. We also have her being really watchful, which is what allows her to see the threat that Michael Myers poses before anyone else realizes that there is a threat.

We also see her as this protector in that original film, where she ends up being responsible for these two children whom she's babysitting. Laurie senses something is wrong when one of their friends doesn't come home. She calls another friend who is about to hook up with a boy. Have her call me when she gets home though. I have Lindsay here and I want to know what time to put her to bed. Okay, later. Have a good time. We definitely will.

The character of Laurie Strode has a very complicated history. She's been killed off twice in different timelines. She was also rebooted into being a teenager. But Jamie Lee Curtis recently completed a trilogy of films, which was in direct continuity to the original films directed by John Carpenter, Emily Curtis recently completed a trilogy of films, which was in direct continuity to the original films directed by John Carpenter, erasing all the movies that came in between.

And in this new trilogy, we see the impact that Michael Myers had on her character. Laurie Strode is now a grandmother. She's estranged from her family. And she has an arsenal of weapons. All of those things that made her successful as a final girl in that 1978 scenario become warped and she herself is framed by other characters in the in the films that last trilogy as like monstrous. She doesn't want to have relationships with outsiders. She physically separates herself from her community. We also have this sense of the watchfulness becoming paranoia

that she sees a threat at every corner. Some of the characters say that she just made it up, that it never actually happened. And so I thought it was a really striking representation of that kind of conversation around what it means to be a survivor of violence and trauma and how socially and culturally those experiences are discussed in popular media and narratives. Laurie's granddaughter, Allison, is one of the people who thinks that Laurie's watchfulness is the real problem. All this hiding, all this

preparation, it was for nothing. It took priority over your family. It cost you your family. If the way I raised your mother means that she hates me, but that she's prepared for the horrors of this world, then I can live with that. Say goodbye to Michael and get over it. But then ultimately, of course, we see that she was right the whole time, that the threat was returning, that the trauma hadn't gone away. And it's because of those extreme versions of her qualities and characteristics that she's able to protect

ultimately herself and her granddaughter. And she says the recent Halloween movies reflected another trend. I also think that there is a change in the solitariness of the final girl. Whereas in the 80s, when the slasher genre was really gaining momentum, the final girl had to be alone. She had to be a solitary survivor. And now we see more examples of when women get to survive together and get to work together to overcome the monstrous threat. We see that even at the end of the Halloween franchise where Laurie Strode and her granddaughter, Allison, work together to overcome the monstrous threat. We see that even at the end of the Halloween franchise where Laurie Strode and her granddaughter, Allison,

work together. As this trope keeps adapting and evolving, I wonder at a certain point if the term final girl will finally fade away and she's just the protagonist. In some ways, it's a sign of progress, the ultimate triumph over forces that are trying to box her in and categorize her. It might also feel like a loss, like something is missing. But that's part of surviving and moving forward. Even if you

get away, the monster always takes a little part of you. That's it for this week. Special thanks to Morgan Pedraza, Janika McCrary, and Robin Means Coleman. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. We have a new show called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show, only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon.

Last week I talked with Brandon Grafius. His books explore the intersection of religion and horror. For instance, they're both concerned with the question of death. Horror really is explicitly focused not just on the process of death and trying to avoid it but what it means and how it makes us reflect on our lives. And I think religion is in many ways a really grand structure to try to help us cope with the reality of death. Next week, I'll be talking with Helen Zaltzman, host of the podcast, The Illusionist. She

tries to convince me that a 1930s British novel has been misunderstood because it's really science fiction. Plus, I discussed with her husband, Martin Oswick, whether the lyrics to Tom Waits songs are actually a self-contained fantasy world. The best way to support Imaginary Worlds is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you get either free Imaginary World stickers, a mug, a t-shirt,

and a link to a Dropbox account, which has a full length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can also get access to our new show, Between Imaginary Worlds, which comes included with the ad-free version of the show that you can get on Patreon. You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at ImaginaryWorldsPodcast.org. What is it about the supernatural that's captivated us for generations? Is it the mysterious allure of the unknown? The heart-pounding thrill of an unexplainable sighting?

Or the creeping fear that a life-changing encounter could happen to you? Sightings is the new series that puts you at the center of the world's strangest unexplained events. From Roswell to Amityville to Loch Ness and beyond. Each episode combines a never-before-heard story of an infamous supernatural encounter with mind-bending investigations that will leave you questioning what's real and what's impossible. Enter The Unexplained with Sightings, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.