Say it with a smile: Final Girls who fight back
Just as the LA Times named Revenge’s (2017) Jen “the first horror heroine of the Time’s Up era”, Final Girls of the last few years have directly reflected the climate of political change and feminist uprising that they’ve existed in. Narratives of women taking revenge on screen are becoming ever more popular; 2020’s The Invisible Man features a wry-smiled Elisabeth Moss walking away from the house of her abusive ex-boyfriend, after murdering him as vengeance for his treatment of her. Emerald Fennell’s upcoming feature debut Promising Young Woman (2020) also revels in its candy-coloured revenge fantasy. Where the previous Final Girls of horror’s most bloody entries spent most of the film being chased, tormented, and exploited, female protagonists in more recent offerings have proved just as capable as the men of inflicting pain on others. But, in so doing, she has lost something she began her story with. Still, she ends it with something unexpected: a smile. And while her final expression of triumph can bring us catharsis, more often than not, we still watch her endure unimaginable pain and trauma before she finally gets her revenge.
As one of cinema’s most well-known Final Girls, Sally Hardesty in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) is the innocent ‘girl next door’ figure who is attacked, tortured, and eventually saved from Leatherface by a passing trucker. In her final moments on screen, covered in blood, Sally (Marilyn Burns) maniacally laughs, a look of hysteria on her face. Though she laughs at the surprise and luck of her own escape, her life has been irrevocably altered by this traumatic event. In Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), Jessica Harper’s wide-eyed dancer, Suzy, exits her last scene with an elated, relieved smile, after having burnt to the ground the dance school whose presiding coven of witches planned on killing her first. The evolving genre is evident even when just looking at Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 retelling of Suspiria; while Dakota Johnson’s Susie ends the film looking more defeated than joyous, she penetrates and destroys the school and has always planned to do so, rather than being lured to the academy as in the original film. Though both Sally and Suzy only get the chance to escape their torment at the last moment, more modern examples of the Final Girl smile see women taking control of their situations earlier on, choosing to fight back, or even being the source of horror themselves.
The modern Final Girl smile may come in the form of a placid, unnerving expression of contentment, as in Us (2019), Hush (2016) and Midsommar (2019), or it may be an unexpected bout of laughter - a release of long-awaited liberation. The Witch’s (2015) Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) laughs gleefully as she elevates alongside her newfound coven, choosing to “live deliciously” after consistent rejection and bullying from her religious family. In Ready or Not (2019), however, Grace’s (Samara Weaving) status as Final Girl is more complicated; far from the studious, refrained but resourceful characters which usually make up the trope, within Grace’s first few minutes on screen we see her smoke, swear, and discuss sex with her fiancé Alex (Mark O’Brien). She’s outspoken, witty, and often vulgar, though her lacy white wedding dress harks back to the trope’s original virginity and innocence. An orphan, she’s continuously othered by her new in-laws, the affluent Le Domas family, who claim ‘she’ll never be one of us’. After unwittingly pulling the ‘Hide and Seek’ card in a ritualised game night after she and Alex marry at the Le Domas mansion, he explains that the family will spend the evening hunting her down until they find and kill her - if they fail before dawn, they will all die.
Though Grace seemingly admits defeat, initially, realising wearily, “There’s no way for me to win, right?”, she soon becomes more comfortable with her own violence. When she kills her mother-in-law Becky (Andie MacDowell), by repeatedly hitting her over the head, she screams “Fuck your fucking family!” Similarly to Us’s Adelaide, Grace doesn’t simply defend herself against the violence of others, she enacts it herself, an anger pulsating in her. She is undoubtedly resourceful and ultimately manages to one-up every family member, but unlike Final Girls of slashers past, who did little more than run and scream until their final show-down, she plays her own games with the family, subverting their assumptions about her.
Like Grace, Midsommar’s Dani (Florence Pugh) is an orphan who tries to integrate into a new ‘family’ (her uncaring boyfriend and his insolent friends) who reject her, and she ends her boyfriend’s life. After Christian (Jack Reynor) is drugged and coerced, running around naked in a subversion of the many scantily clad female victims which populate slashers like I Spit on Your Grave (1978), Dani knowingly smiles as she watches him and the emotionally unsupportive relationship he represents, burn. In Ready or Not, Grace is similarly gaslighted by Alex - he doesn’t tell her about the family ritual, knowing she’d leave him if he did - but in the film’s climax, she throws her wedding ring at him, stating, “I want a divorce.” It’s at this moment that - the prophecy of the game coming true - Alex’s body explodes in front of her, chunks of his flesh spattering her face. Rather than scream or cry, Grace laughs: against all odds she has escaped what seemed like an inevitable fate, and has come to the realisation that a life with Alex and his family wasn’t what she wanted. She has won; her laugh, almost cruel, is a cathartic sound after rooting for this modern Final Girl for the whole film.
We may be more comfortable with watching women being violent and even evil, but these narratives are still so often centred around women taking revenge on those who’ve wronged them. The arguments about whether or not Midsommar’s Christian ‘deserved’ his violent fate - alongside A24 offering free couple’s therapy - suggest that if the male antagonists aren’t that bad, we’re less inclined to support the Final Girl’s joyous retribution at the film’s end. As cultural critic Annie Lord writes, “Women can be bad in horror, but unfortunately, they still have to be raped, brutalised and maimed first.” Ready or Not’s Grace may go through considerably less than many of the Final Girls before her, but she still suffers from a gunshot to the hand, a car crash, a tranquilizer shot, and a relentless game of collective cat and mouse. While the parameters of horror’s most infamous trope may have adapted and transformed, we’re yet to see women being just as violent as the men on our screens without revenge or self-defence as their motivation. Until then, the Final Girl gives a sly smile so that we might smile along, too.
Hannah Holway is a Film MA student at King’s College London. She writes a column on women in horror for Talk Film Society and has bylines at Girls on Tops, Wonderland and Hero Magazine.
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