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October 14 - October 17, 2024
The slasher film lies by and large beyond the purview of the respectable —Carol J. Clover
whispering because there’s something solemn about being awake when everyone’s asleep.
She falls back, almost over the side, when Sven starts screaming. In Dutch, in English, in human, except more primal—the way you only ever scream once, Lotte knows.
“Wat is er mis met haar mond?” before his voice gargles down, stops abruptly.
What is wrong with her mouth?
“You said this place was haunted,” Shooting Glasses tells her. “By all the ghosts of who everybody used to want to be, before they died inside,” Jade says.
her orange hair, her blue lips, her red left leg, her pitch-black heart.
Final girls are good, they’re uncomplicated, they have these reserves of courage coiled up inside them, not layer after layer of shame, or guilt, or whatever this festering poison is. Real final girls only want the horror to be over. They don’t stay up late praying to Craven and Carpenter to send one of their savage angels down, just for a weekend maybe. Just for one night. Just for one dance, please? One last dance?
So what I'm saying is that in the slasher, wrongs are always punished. The crew that did the Bad Prank years ago gets the just dessert they deserve, with a bloody cherry on top, and when they least expect it, making it all better, which should convert you to my side of the movie aisle and the water's fine over here, Mr. Holmes, really. A little bloody maybe, but all the dead people are people who were asking for it. Which is my argument in a gory nutshell.
In slashers, the local cops are always useless. It’s a hard and fast rule of the genre. Sheriff Hardy not sticking to that is just one more nail in the coffin of Jade’s dreams. By now that coffin’s pretty much all nails.
this Final Girl stands up through the heart of it all, through the fragile shell of her old self, and she goes toe to toe with this bad evil.
To put it in conclusion, sir, final girls are the vessel we keep all our hope in. Bad guys don't just die by themselves, I mean. Sometimes they need help in the form of a furie running at them, her mouth open in scream, her eyes white hot, her heart forever pure.
‘Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ ”
“It’s from George Santayana, a Spanish-American philosopher from the first part of the twentieth century. He also famously said that history is a pack of lies about events that never happened, told by people who weren’t there.”
“Letha!” Jade yells up to her, and Letha cocks those bug-eyed shades up on her forehead, which is all the invitation Jade needs. She stops hard, her combat boots finding traction for once, and turns all that momentum into one desperate throw. The machete goes twirling up into the night, Mars Baker turning around to track it, Hardy’s tires screeching, all of Jade’s hopes and prayers in that spinning blade, now. It climbs, it climbs, and, just when it should be lodging in Letha’s chest, instead her hand stabs out as only a final girl’s can, and catches that machete by the handle as perfect as
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You'll also have to start getting excellent jokes from somewhere else, sir, sorry about that.
