It is generally accepted that the final girl in late-twentieth-century slashers evidences a “moral integrity mark[ing] [her] as special” (Gill 19). Less discussed, however, has been the final girl as a mother figure who, in contrast with her peers, shows traditional maternal values (Christensen 40). These maternal qualities include “female self-sacrifice and motherly love” (Nickerson […]
Alissa Burger In the slasher tradition, there is usually a singular Final Girl, who is traumatized by the deaths of her friends and survives her own showdown with the killer, emerging battered and bloody but unbroken. But what happens after the credits roll? Who does this Final Girl become when she is on her own, […]
Marco Malvestio Italian literature is rarely associated with horror. Surely, Italy is associated with the genre: after all, the country was one of the favorite settings of Gothic novels for at least a century, from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860). At the same time, Italian horror […]
Named for their natural settings, The Handmaid’s Tale season four finale, “The Wilderness” (2021) and Land (2021) are both, importantly, women-directed stories that expand ecohorror elements and the feminist horror genre, flipping the Final Girl horror trope. Protagonists June (Elisabeth Moss) and Edee (Robin Wright) are not simply the stereotypical Final Girls walking out of […]
It’s summer, so shark movies abound, notably Meg 2: The Trench (Ben Wheatley, 2023) and The Black Demon (Adrian Grünberg, 2023). Both films feature not just a shark but a megalodon, suggesting the need to up the ante when it comes to shark fare – the ante, in this case, being the shark’s size. Neither […]
Justin Wigard In comparison to hegemonic mainstream tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) like Dungeons and Dragons (Wizards of the Coast), Pathfinder (Paizo), and Call of Cthulhu (Chaosium) that have more or less codified what a “standard” TTRPG looks and functions like, independent or indie TTRPGs have long been a space for creators to experiment with the […]
Devin McGrath-Conwell It is only fitting that as technology and the consumption of media evolves that the found footage genre would progress in turn. If flashpoints such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007) codified the mainstream success of finding footage in a camera, more recent fare propels the genre squarely into […]
Heather Roberts In Joseph and Vanessa Winter’s horror comedy Deadstream (2022), disgraced influencer Shawn Ruddy (Joseph Winter) attempts to resuscitate his career by livestreaming his stay at a haunted house. The film is part of a newer, more Generation Z-friendly iteration of found footage horror that explores the alarming lengths influencers can go to in […]
Thomas Britt The ontological and epistemological underpinnings of found footage horror movies are often inseparable from popular and critical discussions of the form. An evaluative consideration of classic or conventional fictional films involves the indexicality or artificiality of the filmed people and objects they contain and the promotion of the resulting images in artistic and […]