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Horror Homeroom is running a series on the “Final Girl” for Women in Horror Month. We’ll be tweeting Final Girls daily and offering posts throughout the month about how people have conceptualized the Final Girl and how she’s evolved in horror film from about 1960 until now.
For this first post, I simply want to lay out how Carol J. Clover, the critic who coined the term, described the Final Girl, and to point out (very briefly) what came before—and thus how revolutionary the Final Girl was when she burst onto the scene.
At the risk of being reductive, prior to about 1960, women in the horror film were either powerful and (then) dead, or they survived only because they were rescued by men.
My favorite classic horror films, Thirteen Woman (David Archainbaud, 1932), Dracula’s Daughter (Lambert Hillyer, 1936), and Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942), all feature powerful, hypnotic women who have few qualms about leaving a trail of bodies in their wake—and who all wield their gaze (always a mark of power in film) with devastating effect.
I watched Everest (Baltasar Kormákur, 2015) last night, and it got me thinking (again) about the boundaries of the horror genre. What makes a horror film? Why is Everest not considered a horror film? It’s called “adventure,” “biography,” “drama,” “disaster,” “survival,” “thriller”—but not horror.
The plot of Everest, which is based on the disastrous expeditions of 1996, certainly sounds like the plot of a horror film: a group of people treks off into an isolated and forbidding place and is beset by dangers, by a force that imperils all their lives. One by one, they succumb to horrible deaths, or struggle and barely survive, maimed and traumatized.
Watching Everest, I certainly experienced the emotions of horror—the fear and dread that Brigid Cherry has argued is so crucial to the genre: “The function of horror,” she writes, is “to scare, shock, revolt or otherwise horrify the viewer.”[i] I felt not only fear but revulsion, something Noël Carroll has (like Cherry) proclaimed as central to horror. Late in the film, one of the climbers, Beck (Josh Brolin), is forced to spend the night on the mountain and wakes up with his hands ungloved, frozen and bloody, black and red—not really his hands at all anymore, although they are still attached to his body. (He later has to have them amputated.) This scene was so painful, it was almost unbearable for me to re-watch it in order to get the screenshot below.
We take for granted how much we learn from our families. Through family, we learn about life, love, strength, absence, guilt, and death. Sociologists frequently categorize the family as a primary socialization group which builds the foundation for future navigation of the world around us. It is widely accepted that within our formative years, from birth to school age, as well as in our later life, we learn from observing this primary social group.[i] Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory suggests that we learn consequence and reward by seeing the results of actions manifest in the lives of those around us. Considering the family as a core teaching mechanism of behavior and cognition helps me understand the film Pet Sematary (1989) in a new way.
In this Short Cut, I want to briefly examine death with a special emphasis on one video clip in Stephen King’s timeless film, Pet Sematary. (WARNING: there are spoilers) The Creed family consists of Louis (Midkiff), Rachel (Crosby), Gage (Hughes), Ellie (Berdahl twins), and Church (played by 7 blue British shorthairs). The first death in the family is that of Churchill the cat. Louis tries to shelter his daughter, Ellie, from the loss by resurrecting him via the pet sematary. One after another, Louis holds on to rotting replicas of the family to dangerous ends, as Gage and Rachel are buried in the same sour ground as Church. Louis Creed’s inability to let go puts the family in escalating danger.
Goodnight Mommy is a 2014 Austrian film directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz and released in the US in 2015. This film blew me away: it is so agonizingly disturbing, so beautiful, and so thought-provoking. I haven’t reviewed it because it would be almost impossible to do so adequately without dropping some major plot spoilers. And I think everyone should watch the film and experience its surprises. Part of the pleasure of watching the film is how unsettling it is, how unsure you become of what’s real and what’s not.
So, in this Short Cut, I just want to point out one of the many fascinating issues Goodnight Mommy raises, and, happily, I can do so without giving anything important away.
