The Final Girl Support Group

“Men don’t have to pay attention the way we do. Men die because they make mistakes. Women? We die because we’re female.”

This quote is taken from Carol J. Clover’s essay “Her Body, Himself,” which provides subtext throughout the novel for the Final Girl trope. Clover notes that in slasher films, boys die because they have sex with a girl demonized as promiscuous or because they unwittingly get in the killer’s way. Girls, however, die for being female because killers feel aroused by them, are reminded of their mothers, or because they express sexual desire.

“Plenty of women survive violence, but what makes those of us in group our own toxic little category of Final Girls is that we killed our monsters, or we thought we did, and then it happened to us again.”

The Final Girl trope is explored throughout the novel. For Final Girls, unlike for other survivors of violence, the monsters always come back. The monsters survive efforts to kill them, to rise again and again in repeated events that mirror horror movie sequels. Fear of this aspect of being a Final Girl has reduced Lynnette’s life to surviving rather than flourishing.

“Each of us responded to our traumas differently. Dani became self-sufficient, Adrienne got into self-help, Marilyn married up and buried her head in the sand, Heather got high, Julia went activist. Me? I learned to protect myself.”

Lynnette highlights the various ways the Final Girls have coped with living through the unthinkable, but she downplays what she’s done to manage her trauma. The first-person narration allows for Hendrix to use the unreliable narrator tactic to show how defensive or misguided Lynnette’s understanding of herself is. Although those around her point out her over-the-top paranoia, and the reader can see that she has shrunk her life to avoid re-encountering trauma, Lynnette believes she is simply being prudently safe.

“The women themselves remain largely silent, leaving their participation in their own exploitation unaddressed. If any of the fans become unruly they are anesthetized with more T-shirts, more albums, more posters, and action figures featuring their favorite murderers, now elevated to celebrity status.”

A fictional essay from an in-novel anthology about Final Girls discusses how Final Girl movies breed fans for the killers at the expense of the women who survive these massacres. These monster worship fandoms are monetized and appeased with “murderabilia” and swag.

“You don’t want someone angry at you, especially a man, so you say yes to things you don’t want to do because there’s no road map for where you are, nothing to guide you except a neon sign in your head that says Do not make men angry.”

Lynnette has concluded that men are unpredictably and inescapably dangerous, so she can never trust them. Her experience echoes the misogyny frequently on display in 1980s slasher films, where the killers are almost always monstrous men and the victims or survivors are women. Lynnette knows that angry men are especially dangerous because they will turn to violence—a generalization that echoes real-life findings linking men who engage in domestic or spousal abuse with eventual homicidal actions.

“It turns out when push came to shove, I only saved myself.”

Lynnette is haunted by the fact that she watched Ricky Walker murder everyone she loved, especially her sister Gillian. She played dead, terrified to let Ricky know she had survived being impaled on antlers, rather than save anyone else. She carries shame and regret about being a not-quite-final-girl for failing to kill her monster. This feeling drives Lynnette to protect Stephanie and become a “real” Final Girl.

“None of us have to be defined by the worst thing that ever happened to her. Unfortunately, those things have a bad habit of coming back and trying to kill us again. After a while, you start to realize that your life isn’t the thing that happens between the monsters, your life is the monsters.”

When Skye accuses Lynnette of dwelling on what happened to her when she was a teenager, she explains that because Final Girls’ monsters keep returning, she has no choice but to protect herself all the time. Lynnette thus unintentionally summarizes her character’s primary struggle—her trauma has taken over her whole life, and she cannot find a way past it.

“High school was everyone’s glory days. For us, high school is all tangled up in memories of our trauma. We have the same normal inclinations as other people, but when we walk back in our minds to this supposedly wonderful time we have people trying to kill us. For us, nostalgia and violence are inextricably linked.”

Julia explains why Final Girls have a different relationship to the past than others. Many people have fond memories of high school—when they made that touchdown or had their first romantic experiences. The Final Girls can’t think back to that time in their lives without reliving the terror and horror they survived.

“[W]e need to believe each death has a meaning. Each murder must be unique, each victim must meet his killer one-on-one, each slaying must be given an appropriate amount of screen time.”

In this fictionalized essay from an in-novel anthology about film violence, the author examines why slasher film killers never use guns. Hunting knives, machetes, and butcher knives increase the intimacy of the murders: The killers have to get physically close to those they kill and spend time ending their lives, making each death more gruesome, and also more reminiscent of sexual assault. Audiences can revel in the drawn-out attacks, imagining themselves in the killer’s place.

“Out of everyone, you are the absolute fucking worse at letting go of the past.”

Heather cruelly says this to Lynnette, pointing to the theme of Trauma Repeats. Final Girls struggle to integrate their trauma, but Lynnette especially allows her past to run her life, shrinking her existence down to nothing but survival.

“The rest of us are survivors [...] You were always just a victim.”

After calling the police on Lynnette, Heather pours salt on Lynnette’s worst emotional wound—she didn’t survive her tragedy by doing anything considered “special.” She just played dead.

“I thought Garrett had left me alone, but eventually I realized I had always been alone. I had done everything they’d told me to do, and it had happened again. No one had been able to keep me safe. No one had watched out for me. I was the only person who would keep me safe. And so I did.”

Lynnette became dependent on Garrett after he saved her from the Walker brothers, but eventually, he disappeared from her life. This was a defining time in her life—this is when she began to focus only on staying safe, living just to survive.

“That’s what they always said about me: I’m not a real Final Girl. The other ones in group fought back and killed their monsters, but me? I just hung on those antlers like a piece of meat. I just lay on the linoleum getting my skull pulped. I didn’t save anyone.”

Lynnette knows she’s a not-quite-Final Girl because she played dead rather than fight back against Ricky Walker. Motivated by shame and regret, she spends the novel desperately trying to save the other Final Girls rather than repeating the mistakes of her past.

“Who said the police couldn’t be monsters, too?”

Lynnette is attacked by the officer at the jail cell because he’s a fan, confirming once again her conviction that she can’t trust anyone. It doesn’t matter who a person is or what they look like—the world is full of monsters.

“You say tomato and I say shamanistic vision quest that uses an ordeal to lead us inward on a journey of spiritual discovery and eventual synthesis and peace.”

Chrissy wants to ascribe spiritual meaning to her experiences of extreme violence as a way of making sense of what happened to her. Lynnette sees it factually: Psychopaths tried to kill them. Chrissy, meanwhile, sees metaphysical resonances in their ordeals: They were given the opportunity to self-actualize by killing their monsters—an idea Hendrix delivers with subtle mockery directed as theorists of the horror genre.

“Murder is man’s attempt to steal birth from women […] We make children, they kill them. We create life, they create death. It’s the way it’s always been.”

Chrissy believes the killers want to symbolically destroy women’s connection to life and birth. They want to kill the parts of themselves that are vulnerable and feminine, and so they want to kill the women onto whom they project that vulnerability.

“Each of us has a monster we must confront, a monster designed to test our personal weakness. And in the end, they bring about our deaths. Not literal death, but death as the conclusion of this phase and the beginning of another.”

Chrissy describes monsters as symbols of people’s greatest fears, arguing that if this is the case, then those that survive must confront them directly and destroy them to move forward and become better versions of themselves. In this framing, monsters present an opportunity for growth for the Final Girls.

“Will there always be someone out there turning little boys into monsters? Will we always be Final Girls? Will there always be monsters killing us?”

After figuring out that Skye is the novel’s killer, Lynnette despairs to realize that the maternal and caring Dr. Carol has somehow unintentionally raised her son to be a vicious monster—and that, in turn, Skye has brainwashed his little brother Pax into glorifying Violence against Women. Lynnette feels the absence of good, positive male figures in her life.

“It’s not some profound and ancient ritual. It’s just a waste of a life.”

Lynnette is slowly coming to understand that her obsession with staying safe is allowing her trauma to affect her life. Rejecting Chrissy’s theory that the experience was important and spiritual, she commits to living for the present and the future rather than the past.

“But what does it say about us that so much of the entertainment we consume is about killing women? I want you to think about that. How is the murder of women fun?”

This quote comes from a speech Adrienne made before she was killed. Violence permeates the stories of the women, but their stories have been turned into entertainment as horror movies. Adrienne challenges her audience to consider why watching women get slaughtered on screen is entertaining.

“[Y]ou think your sister died so you could quit? You think Tommy died so you could stop when things got too scary? There’s more to life than staying alive.”

Adrienne’s voice comes to Lynnette during the final battle with Sky and Stephanie. She references the pain and regret Lynnette lives with since allowing her sister and boyfriend to die rather than fighting back. Adrienne suggests that by becoming a real Final Girl, by courageously helping others, Lynnette will find meaning for the losses she endured—words that give Lynnette the strength to keep going. The last sentence of this passage foreshadows Lynnette’s transformation at the end of the novel.

“Dying isn’t the important thing. It’s nothing more than the punctuation mark on the end of your life. It’s everything that came before that matters. Punctuation marks, most people skip right over them. They don’t even have a sound.”

Lynnette realizes that her focus on not dying has been a waste of time. Death isn’t the important part of life—what’s important is cultivating a life worth living. Hendrix uses the metaphor of a punctuation mark, a small and inconsequential element that only ends sentences—sentences that derive their meaning from the words within them. Similarly, death only marks the end of life; meaning living has to do with the purpose and experiences that life contains.

“Because no matter how hard we try, we can’t stop life. No matter how much we fight, no matter how many we kill, things keep changing, and growing, and living, and people get lost, and fall away, and come back, and get born, and move on, and no matter what it’s all so much, it’s all so hard, the way life just keeps going and going.”

Arguing in her mind against Chrissy’s idea that death and life are equal forces, Lynnette sees how much exists inside life—movement, difficulties, and changes. Death brings nothing but the end. Hendrix writes a long run-on sentence here to mimic the breathless force of Lynnette’s realization.