Final Girl Essay

In Tyler Shields 2015 film “Final Girl”, seventeen-year-old trained assassin Veronica, played by Abigail Breslin, is sent on her first mission to kill four teenage boys that have been murdering girls in the woods. Where in a typical slasher setup there is one, typically male, killer murdering a group of teens; in Final Girl there is one female assassin murdering a group of killer boys. The film is set in a modernized version of 1950’s small town America and explores themes of gendered violence and the monstrous masculine. Final Girl desires to posit the villain in society as being capitalist white supremacist patriarchy and the consequences of violence that arise when its entitlement is left unchecked. It is successful in doing this to some

One of the ways Final Girl (Shields, 2015) endeavours to critique monstrous patriarchy is through the family structures of the killer teenage boys. In Professor Lianne McLarty’s lecture on Psycho-Killers (2023) she states that when looking for the meaning of the monstrous, familial structures are a good place to start. Final Girl attempts to isolate patriarchy as the monster through revealing that the leader of the murderous teens, Jameson, was taught how to kill by his abusive father. There is a scene where the group plays a game of truth or dare in the woods and in response to pulling truth, Jameson is asked about the worst thing he has ever done. Jameson’s answer to this question is the story of his first hunt with his father at age ten where he couldn't kill a rabbit and as a result his father hit him and told him to “Never come home empty handed” (Shields, 2015). Jameson then proceeds to explain that he saw this moment as a failure of masculinity stating, “Because I wasn’t man enough to finish what I started, that

In Robin Wood’s (1985) analyses, the Other is described as what a specific society and the self represses in surplus to maintain dominant ideologies. These repressed aspects are then projected outward to be “hated and disowned” and as a result the Other is created (Wood, 1985). In reactionary horror, societal order is restored once the Other has been repressed again through its symbolic death or containment and the dominant institutions, such as the military or patriarchal family, is strengthened through the encounter (McLarty, 2023). In Final Girl, the film tries to criticise patriarchy and subverts the traditional meaning of the Other by having the Other be represented by the dominant group in Western society. Affluent heterosexual white men. By framing this group as the Other, the film argues that what needs to be repressed and removed is the misogyny and entitlement these men show by exerting their will and violence over the women they kill in the woods. In reactionary horror style, the final moments of the film are presented as a triumph, a restoration, the happy ending Woods speaks of. When Veronica finishes killing the boys and exterminating them as a wayward threat, it is implied that their influence as a dominant group has been repressed again and the safety of society is restored. By limiting the scope of patriarchy and the danger it