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October 29 - November 6, 2024
This is Friday the 13th, after all, the holiest of the holies.
“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.
No, she can never be a final girl. 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.
Jade guesses she doesn’t know which came first, the slasher or the final girl, the chicken or the bloody egg, but she does know that where there’s one, there’s gonna be the other, so it doesn’t really matter.
There’s always an axe around when you need it. If there’s one thing horror movies have taught her, it’s that.
forever stumbling on eviscerated bodies, decapitated heads. Each one is a stepping stone to who she’s about to become.
Everybody has a function, everybody in a slasher cycle has a role—isn’t that a line from the Bible, even? Not the over-the-top violent one Craven and Carpenter wrote, with all the massacres and gore, but the other violent one with all the massacres and gore. The one where revenge comes not in a hulking shape lurking at the edge of the light but as a series of plagues that starts out feeling random, come to feel a lot more like justice, like the scales rebalancing.
She’s not worried about dying and going to hell for all her sins. She’s not worried because she’s been living in hell for seventeen years already.
Finally, after all these years, she understands Laurie Strode: you cringe, you fall, you shriek and you cry. Never because you want to, not because you intend to, but because it’s scary shit.
Except Letha’s own words are echoing: this is the real world, not a movie, and the real world doesn’t have to follow any special rules. It just does what it does. You can’t pick your genre, no. Has that been what Jade’s been doing all along? Trying to shape an unwieldy string of dead people into a movie, just so she can have a minor role? So she can feel some sense of control?
And, zero surprise here, isn’t this where she’s always been? Way on the outside, everyone deaf to her cries? Deaf when she cried?
Like that it’s panic at the disco.
her jaw. It’s been wrenched out of place, cracked away at the hinges, so her chin’s hanging low and crooked. The only reason it’s still even close to in place, isn’t torn away and tossed aside to sink, is… it’s her moisturizer regimen, isn’t it?
