Agents of Their Own Destruction: Horror’s New Final Girls
There is an inescapable tension in how horror handles its women.
On the one hand, the genre is defined by exploitation and slut shaming, the worst puritanical instincts of our culture.
But there has also always been glimmers of a more enlightened sensibility. Particularly, I think, in the famed Final Girl trope. The heroines of HALLOWEEN and NIGHTMARE OF ELM’S STREET and SCREAM were tough. They were resourceful. They survived.
But even in the latter mold — which, let’s be honest, has been outweighed by the former—horror’s strong women lacked a certain agency. They were acted upon and they reacted. Laurie Strode and her friends are assaulted by Michael Myers. Hell, that is a central underpinning of the SCREAM series, subtext made text in the sequels: Neve Campell’s Sidney Prescott just wants to be left alone. Even more recent standout horror films, like IT FOLLOWS, follow that same narrative. Something is coming to get her.
There isn’t anything wrong with that, not exactly. This happens plenty to men too: forces beyond their control, conspiring to make their lives a living hell. That’s downright Lovecraftian. But when, in its history, horror has taken a more interesting route — letting its protagonists become antiheroes or even villains—the beneficiary is usually a man. It goes all the way back to Frankenstein and Dracula, if you think about it. Or in something like THE SHINING, it’s Jack who gets to go mad. Wendy has to deal with him.
But two of horror’s best 2017 entrants give their characters the agency that the genre has so often left lacking: THE BLACKCOAT’S DAUGHTER and RAW.
In both instances, a young woman is put in a horrifying situation — and then she gets to choose. She gets to act. She has a will that drives the film for the rest of its runtime. She has agency. And because this is the horror genre, she becomes an agent of her own destruction.
In THE BLACKCOAT’S DAUGHTER, awkward Kat finds an unexpected soulmate/mentor/friend in, well, the Devil. She goes to terrifying lengths to secure that bond and then to reestablish it. These are decisions she makes; this is her story, not just a story that happens to her.
But—and this is critical—she strangely wins and never quite loses our empathy. The emotional desolation of the film’s final scene is so deep in part because we know why she did what she did. That is a depth and a complexity so rarely granted to our horror heroines.
I found something similar in RAW. Young Justine gets her first taste of flesh and a craving begins to consume her.
But she isn’t helpless. It becomes a way for her to explore new freedoms, new sensations, new relationships. It helps her build a deeper bond with her sister. She is not defined for us by cannibalism, but she uses it to define herself. It’s as well-executed an allegory as I have seen in some time, one that deepens rather than flattens as the story grows.
The common thread, for me, is that the stories are driven by how these women act, not how they are acted upon. That feels different. This being the horror genre, still things end badly for them—but it feels new. This is a more sophisticated understanding of how the female experience can inform a horror story. These women are more than proxies for our blind terror.
I would be remiss not to mention here at the end CARRIE, which was pioneering on this front. But the funny thing about CARRIE, to me, is it felt like a horror film without real successors — an oddity, in a genre so informed by itself and its past. We never took quite the same perspective again, however else Brian de Palma’s film might have influence what came after.
Maybe the time wasn’t right. But now, I hope, we are entering a new era for horror. A period where women can write their own stories — even those that end in blood.
