Karyn Kusama, television and film director
Horror is an interesting genre. It is the home of taboo, already being shunned by the mainstream, there was no fear of looking at other shunned subjects like sexuality, race, and social politics. It’s the outcasts playground of expression, but has still fallen prey to the morals of the western world and worldview of men.
In her essay Her Body, Himself, Carol J. Clover says, ‘...horror and pornography are the only two genres specifically devoted to the arousal of bodily sensation.’ With these two genres being so closely linked in this way, there’s bound to be a crossover in those who watch it, and those who make it; namely, men. It is in this way that female characters within the horror genre become not much more than objects for both the viewer and the in-film characters. They’re written partly as characters and party as prizes to be won - this may be as a love interest for the male hero of the story, or as the final kill that the antagonist has been chasing for the entirety of the film, the tantalisingly close, but so far unreachable, final girl.
In this essay I will look at the way women have been characterised in a horror-specific archetypal role - the Final Girl - and give a good and bad example of each, with an analysis and reasoning as to why they’re good or bad female characters in the horror genre.
In Her Body, Himself, Clover looks at the way women are written in horror films and coins the term ‘Final Girl’ for the first time. She describes the the Final Girl;
‘She is the girl scout, the bookworm, the mechanic. Unlike her girlfriends, she is not sexually active. [...] The Final Girl is also watchful to the point of paranoia; small signs of danger that her friends ignore she takes in and turns over. Above all she is intelligent and resourceful in extreme situations. [...] Finally, although she is always smaller and weaker than the killer, she grapples with him energetically and convincingly. The Final Girl is boyish, in a word. Just as the killer is not fully masculine, she is not fully feminine - not, in any case, feminine in the ways of her friends. Her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from the other girls and ally her, ironically, with the very boys she fears or rejects, not to speak of the killer himself.'
The earliest example of a Final Girl comes from what is commonly accepted as the first film of the Slasher genre of horror - Sally Hardesty from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). She is also, unfortunately, one of the most poorly written women in any film I have watched. The film follows a group of teens travelling to visit the vandalised grave of siblings Franklin and Sally Hardesty’s grandfather. They unfortunately one by one fall victim to titular antagonist ‘Leatherface’, one member of a local family of cannibals, with Sally surviving the night, and her tortuous ordeal, and escaping into the sunrise.
Clover’s outlines for the Final Girl are an accumulation of traits from the majority of characters who fit the archetype, so with Sally being the first of her kind there are many traits that won’t fit with her as they hadn’t been established yet, but she is a Final Girl nonetheless.As far as the film shows or suggests, she is not sexually active, despite flirting with her friend Jerry. Regardless, she could be considered ‘virtuous’ and good because of her loyalty to her disabled brother. She doesn’t see the bodies of her three murdered friends, but she does witness the killing of her own brother at the hands of Leatherface.
While not necessarily resourceful, and with no outright evidence of her intelligence, Sally’s ‘will to survive is astonishing’ [Clover, p83]. From the point of her brother’s murder, Sally spends the rest of the film running from or being tortured by either Leatherface or his family (the Sawyers) and jumps through a window on two separate occasions.As for being ‘boyish’, Sally’s appearance does match Clover’s description of the Final Girl quite well when comparing her to the only other female character in the film, Pam; Pam is dressed in cheek-grazing shorts and an open backed bodysuit, with curled and pinned hair, whereas Sally wears a simple vest top, white flared trousers, and has long, unstyled hair. If a man were to dress the same as Sally, it wouldn’t look all that out of place (in the era the film was shot in). Comparing the two women, Sally could definitely be regarded as ‘plain’ or ‘boyish’.
However, regardless of how well she fits the archetype, Sally is not a particularly well-written character.Despite being one of the two characters upon whom the films plot rests, Sally has very little involvement in anything until she’s the last of the group alive. Her three friends go off and meet their demise without any involvement from Sally, and it’s only when her brother needs her to help look for their friends when it gets dark that she really becomes a player in the story.
Even then, her screen time is spent running from Leatherface, being kidnapped, tied up and mocked, beaten, and chased again. Sally spends the latter half of the film (from the death of her brother at 52 minutes [Janisse, 2019] until the end of the film’s 1 hour 23 minute runtime - a total of 31 minutes) in her ‘Final Girl sequence’. As Clover describes, ‘She alone looked death in the face, but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B).’During this time her only dialogue is pleading with the Sawyers, and her escape is only possible due to the family’s inability to kill her fast enough. The only tool, skill or character trait, even, that she seems to have been given by the two male writers, Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel [IMDb, 2019], is a will to survive. Outside of this, she is written as little more than a young attractive woman to watch running around in fear. This intention is evident in the original script by Hooper and Heknel when Sally is first introduced;
‘Sally is braless and her breasts bounce enticingly beneath the thin fabric of her t-shirt.’ [Jahn, 2014].
The intention to sexualise Sally from the beginning of the script never changed or evolved from that point, and she was unfortunately left as a two dimensional personification of fear that seemed to serve no purpose other than to be the focus of the Sawyer’s (and the writers) sadism.
I would also like to briefly mention the fact that the only two female characters in this film, Sally and Pam are both tortured in the attempts on their lives, as opposed to the three men who are also killed.
Jerry and Kirk are both killed by no more than two blows to the skull with a sledgehammer [Jannise, 2019], and while Franklin is slowly killed with repeated blows from a chainsaw, this does happen in front of his sister who is visibly distressed, and one could argue that his murder is a part of Sally’s ordeal. Pam also endures a tortuous death after stumbling into the Sawyer home and being chased by Leatherface. She is grabbed from behind, hung up on a meat hook, witnesses the mutilation of her boyfriend’s corpse, and is then placed into a freezer, only to be seen once more as she witnesses Jerry’s swift death before being shut back in the freezer.Even though they are the only two women in a main cast of eight people, Pam’s death is easily the most memorable and drawn out, and Sally’s ‘Final Girl sequence’ lasts for more than a third of the film’s runtime.
In huge contrast to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Sally’s characterisation as a Final Girl, we can take a look at Erin Harson from the 2011 film You’re Next.You’re Next is a home invasion film centred around the Davison family [Horror Film Wiki, 2019]. Celebrating the parents wedding anniversary, the four adult children and their partners come under attack from masked assailants who have surrounded the house under the cover of night to pick off the family one by one. It transpires that the assailants had been hired by brothers Felix and Crispian, as well as Felix’s girlfriend Zee, to kill off the family and claim their parents inheritance, with Crispian’s girlfriend Erin there as an innocent party who could testify to Felix and Crispian’s innocence. The plan is found out by Erin though, and she is left as the last woman standing, the Final Girl.
Looking back at Clover’s outlines of the Final Girl criteria, Erin is once again a comfortably subtle fit in the role. Erin is not established as a ‘bookworm’ or ‘mechanic’ but she is an outsider in a very literal sense; she is Australian (played by Australian actress Sharni Vinson [IMDb, 2019]) and it is shown through dialogue that she as not met her American boyfriend’s family before.
She is shown to be intelligent and resourceful at several points in the film, but early on she instructs the family to use chairs as shields against crossbow bolts being fired at them through a window. Later on, whilst helping to make defensive mechanisms for the house, she’s asked how she knows ‘all this stuff’ and she explains that she ‘had kind of a weird childhood’ and grew up on a survivalist compound [Janisse, 2017].
She also faces off against the multiple masked attackers, all of whom are men who have been contracted specifically to kill a family of adults, as well as Felix and Zee, and finally her boyfriend, Crispian. While this is not strictly ‘boyish’, she is absolutely on the same level of intelligence, resourcefulness, and resilience as the attackers.
Compared to Sally, Erin is actually perhaps a weaker fit for the Final Girl archetype, but she’s a far better written character, making her more interesting to watch and allows the audience to connect with her as more of a human being.
We learn about her relationship with Crispian, her worries about meeting his family for the first time, we see nuanced elements of her personality in a dinner scene, and, most importantly, she is given a large amount of dialogue that affects the direction of scenes. She is not a bystander to whom these events happen to - she directly affects how events play out.
You’re Next has a higher number of antagonists than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (a two to one ratio) with three of these being active attackers from their introduction, but Erin’s characterisation allows for her to survive them all and attack back multiple times, even killing one of the masked attackers 49 minutes into the film [Janisse, 2017]. Much like Sally Hardesty, Erin has multiple chase sequences (or ‘Final Girl sequences’), but she takes the time to misdirect and hide from her pursuers, giving her respite between and time to think of what to do next. At one point, Erin jumps through a second story window, a feat also performed by Sally. Unlike Sally, however, she is injured and has to deal with the wound and is affected by it for the rest of the film.
The film has a total of fifteen deaths, and Erin isn’t only the soul survivor; seven of those deaths were caused by Erin herself - the three masked attackers, Felix, Zee, and Crispian (who had planned the attack) and one police officer who accidentally triggers a trap set by Erin at the very end of the film.Erin is a character with a personality and a backstory, who has the beginnings of relationships set up between most of the other characters (not including the three masked attackers), and a clear thought process behind each action that can be easily read by the audience.
A point that I feel needs to be made, too, is that many Final Girls seem to have skills (such as knowing how to use a gun, superhuman strength, or olympic speed) without explanation or set up. Erin’s ingenuity with traps and fighting are given a reason with one line; “I grew up on a survivalist compound.”
With that line, her ability to fight back and survive is given an air of believability that otherwise may seem far fetched, and the audience has faith in her.The Final Girl trope is scattered through the Slasher genre and can be easy to spot when you’re looking for it, even before the climax of the film. But simply meeting the criteria for a Final Girl doesn’t automatically make a character enjoyable, well rounded, or believable.
At the same time, a believable character doesn’t necessarily make for a beloved or iconic one, and sometimes a character needs to be stripped down to a few core elements to leave a lasting impression on an audience.
Bibliography
- Clover, C.J. (1996). ‘Her Body, Himself; Gender in the Slasher Genre’, in Grant, K.B. (ed.) The Fear of Difference; Gender and the Horror Film. Texas, USA; University of Texas. ‘Her Body, Himself’ is an essay exploring the ways in which men and women are written in Slasher films, and how gender often determines archetype and stereotypes, from backstories, motives, and outcomes, with examples of characters from horror. This is my key text for this essay.
- Janisse, J. (2019). The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) KILL COUNT. [online] YouTube. Available at: youtube.com/watch?v=PYIg8wNKymw [Accessed 1 May 2019]. Dead Meat is a horror based YouTube channel with two main series; the Dead Meat Podcast and the Kill Count. The Kill Count series tallies up the number of kills in a film, as well as giving a timestamp, cause of death, average kills-per-minute, and a breakdown of the gender ratio.
- IMDb. (2019). The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) - IMDb. [online] Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [Accessed 31 Apr. 2019]. IMDb is an online database for visual media, such as films and television. For this essay I used it as a resource to check facts for the films, such as character names, personel, and years of release.
- Jahn, P. (2014). The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: A Script Analysis. [online] Electric Sheep. Available at: http://www.electricsheepmagazi... [Accessed 31 Apr. 2019]. Electric Sheep is an online magazine/publication for left-of-centre cinema, with articles including film reviews, interviews, and essays. In this particular article, Pam Jahn mentions Carol J. Clover and her book Men, Women and Chainsaws, which also features her essay Her Body, Himself.
- Horror Film Wiki. (2019). You're Next. [online] Available at: https://horror.fandom.com/wiki... [Accessed 1 May 2019]. Horror Film Wiki is a fan-made database of horror film franchises, with information on films, TV shows, and the subsequent characters. This includes plot synopses, cast and crew, and trivia. It’s owned and moderated by the media brand Fandom.
- Janisse, J. (2017). You're Next (2011) KILL COUNT. [online] YouTube. Available at: youtube.com/watch?v=LQpLMvC7Et0&t=1s [Accessed 1 May 2019].