The Final Girl Support Group

by Grady Hendrix

There’s so much life and it just keeps going. Maybe not everyone’s life, but Life. It doesn’t stop for anyone. Chrissy said there were only two forces in the world and they balance each other: life and death. Creation and destruction. But she’s wrong. There’s only one. Because no matter how hard we try, we can’t stop life. No matter how much we fight, no matter how many we kill, things keep changing, and growing, and living, and people get lost, and fall away, and come back, and get born, and move on, and no matter what it’s all so much, it’s all so hard, the way life just keeps going and going.

In this age of Glocks and AR-15s, of pipe bombs and high-capacity magazines, the arsenals of our movie monsters seem quaint. Teddy and his machete stalking campers in Summer Slaughter, the Babysitter Murderer with his butcher’s blade, the masked killers of the Stab franchise and their hunting knives. Why do they chalk up such low body counts with these crude implements when they could mow down dozens of victims with a semiautomatic rifle? Why do their weapons become increasingly baroque in later installments: curling irons and ice skates, menorahs and outdoor grills? The reason is simple: we need to believe death has meaning. Each murder must be unique, each victim must meet his killer one-on-one, each slaying must be given an appropriate amount of screen time. The real violence of a child entering a school cafeteria and spraying bullets at random is too cruel. It reduces human beings to a body count; it robs life of all individuality. It is the ultimate statement that we cannot abide: death is devoid of meaning, and it will swallow everything in the end. Against that nihilism, the violence in a slasher film is a comforting blanket drawn up against the chill of the infinite moral void of reality.

ALL OUR MONSTERS ARE THE SAME MONSTER, the male monster. The Bzou wolf, the vampire, the troll, the ogre. Bannik, the Russian demon who travels by night and flays disrespectful children. Bluebeard, who kills his child bride. What is the story of the Minotaur but the story of Teddy Volker at Camp Blood: youths sent to a faraway place where they cannot escape, stalked and murdered by a monster in a ritual sacrifice? Our monsters are the night visitors, the child stealers, the boo-baggers, the baby guzzlers. They are the men who eat children. It is the oldest and only story, our attempt to imitate the two divine acts of God: creation and destruction. Birth and death. Women get birth, so men must settle for death. And they’ve become experts on the subject.