Readers dive deeper into the “Final Girl” theory of slasher films
The Final Girl
This week, Kyle Fowle wrote about the parallels between the women of ’70s slasher movies and the stars of some recent games. He, like film academic Carol Clover who coined the term “Final Girl” to describe these horror heroes, argued that it’s not the perfect step in the right direction for the representation of women in games, but it is a step. Merlin the Tuna echoed those sentiments:
I can imagine it being a foot in the door—think of how often we’ve heard the “Games with female protagonists don’t sell” line of late—but at the same time, it’s not a terribly good foot in the door. I’m reminded of The Cabin in the Woods’ explicit call-out of the Final Girl being the most traditionally “good” and virginal, whereas any interest in sex (or drugs, alcohol, or even loud music) marked a female character for death, often as the first one to die. It essentially says that women can play in our sandbox, but only if they still adhere to good old fashioned gender politics.
NakedSnake then pointed out that there are also virginal characters who get slaughtered in these flicks. Michael Thompson explained that there’s more to the weeding-out process than just killing off the more sexual characters:
For the most part, if you get into the backbone of most of the horror movies, it’s less about the sex and more about the responsibility. Laurie Strode of Halloween, for example, does her job. In fact, she not only does her job, she also picks up the extra responsibility of doing another person’s job so that person can go off and shirk her responsibilities. Unsurprisingly, within the context of the movie, that other person suffers a horrific punishment for her lapse in work ethic. Laurie is then rewarded for her idealized American work ethic by being able to successfully confront Michael Myers on several different occasions.
When Vorhees’ mother lays out her motivation at the end of Friday The 13th, almost everyone who listened to it glommed on to the sex the teenagers were having when her child drowned, so they believed the teenagers were being punished for the sex. But the reality is that the far more important part of her explanation is that “They weren’t watching my son.” Hence, in America, where refusing to work or fulfill your responsibilities is something to be punished, by shirking their jobs, the teenagers in question, (and by extension every teenager from that point forward by association) became worthy of their grisly fate.
Friday The 13th was a bit clumsier than Halloween in that it didn’t draw the clear distinctions between the “worthy” teenagers who did their jobs and fulfilled their responsibilities and the “unworthy” ones who shirked their responsibilities and didn’t do their jobs, but it’s still there—at least until the later installments of both series when each of the series lost its focus about what it was really supposed to be about.
Story Time
There were two board game-based Inventories that ran together this week, one about TV shows that became board games and one about board games that became TV shows. In the comments of the latter article, MissBeaHaven shared a funny story from a game of Pictionary:
Playing a round of Pictionary once, I was the artist for my brother and my mom was the artist for my aunt. My mom looked at the word first and handed it off to me. I had a look and immediately became perplexed and confused as to what it was. I had no idea.
I asked “What happens if you don’t know what the word means?”, and my mother looked at me like I was insane. She’s like “You don’t know what that means???” as if it was the simplest thing in the world. I looked down again, studied it, and confirmed I didn’t know what the hell it meant. Mom called a private meeting away from the table, and she asked me what the problem was. “What the hell is a stome-ah-cha-chee? Is that some kind of Russian dance?” I asked.