Where is the Final Boy?
The Internet deep-dive is a rite of passage for every fledgling genre cinephile. Often, it manifests after a revelatory first viewing of a decades-old slasher. One’s experience with something as perfectly rendered as Halloween or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre can’t begin and end with the story itself. Horror is a cultural institution spanning hundreds of years, and no institution maintains its supremacy without traditions. And no tradition is more beloved, nor resolute, than that first discovery of a horror-centric deep-dive: the trope of the Final Girl.
Coined by professor Carol J. Clover in 1987, the Final Girl long ago graduated from the niche space of academia to pop culture ubiquity. Unlike brainier, more elaborate film theories, the Final Girl is easily telegraphed, even by audiences used to consuming ‘content’ while scrolling social media. The utility of ‘the female gaze’ is frequently contentious (1); if the 2019 Met Gala proved anything, it’s that very few really know what ‘camp’ means (2). But the moment a young woman in a horror movie steps into frame, quiet and standoffish as compared to her boorish gaggle of friends, viewers know to point to the screen, like children at a zoo: “Yup, that’s the Final Girl.”
Horror, like romantic comedy, is a genre courted by parties who assume themselves smarter than the filmmakers. They’ve read Cracked, and they’ve studied YouTube’s countless video essays. They’re aware of every shallow convention, and expect to laugh with derision when the film plays into them. They know that the Black guy will die first. They know that he’ll quickly be followed into the grave by those who dare to embrace their sexuality. Obviously, they know of the Final Girl: the virginal, bookish tag-along friend who, in the face of unthinkable terror, takes up a phallic weapon to defeat the boogeyman. Be it Laurie Strode’s kitchen knife or Alice Hardy of Friday the 13th’s machete, inherent to the Final Girl trope is that assuming of a masculine style of heroism.
It’s all very Film Theory 101, this incessant Final Girl frenzy. As a beleaguered enthusiast, it can feel like 1996 never ended, that the paradigm-shifting satirical pleasures of Scream proved so addictive that audiences never again felt the need to shift gears. In the same way that superhero yarns attract swarms of incel dweebs eager to prove they’ve read several articles on the comic-book backstory, horror flicks bring self-righteous genre pedants out of the woodwork with each new release. There is a reason the absurd notion of ‘elevated horror’ has ascended in an era of Extremely Online behavior (3). Discussing film in the wake of the Internet is as much about asserting one’s intelligence as it is about actually entertaining debate, at the great expense of the art.
As such, the Final Girl has become a cottage industry unto itself, a term so trendy it rivals ‘gaslighting’ in the way overuse has nearly sapped it of all meaning. There’s a novel from 2017, Riley Sager’s Final Girls (4), marketed as a beach read as absorbing as a foam Koozie. There’s a comic series, Tim Seeley’s Hack/Slash (5), starring a Buffy-esque Final Girl. 2015 saw the release of not one, but two movies: Todd Strauss-Schulson’s The Final Girls (6), or Tyler Shields’ Final Girl (7), for those who prefer parties of one. Throw a stone at any relevant TV from recent memory, the Scream Queens and just-plain-Screams, and one finds showrunners toying with Final Girl archetypes like they’re not trailing twenty years behind Wes Craven. [You’ll note that every one of these self-aware pieces of Final Girl media were brought into being by men.]
In short, horror is a genre inextricably tied to tropes: the knowledge of them and, more often than not, the playful subversion of them. Why, then, is it a Final Girl every time? Why does she dig her sensible Keds into the haunted campground mud, refusing to cede space to a new sort of horror protagonist? A commitment to the Final Girl trope is a simultaneous commitment to traditional gender norms, and for as much as horror audiences seem to crave subversion, there remains a persistent struggle to upend the binary. Where is the Final Boy?
For the purposes of brevity, let’s assume that horror (and really, cinema at large) is not ready for an influx of gender-agnostic protagonist representation. If a Final Boy is still hard to come by, it will be a very long time before the multiplex hosts a Final Person.
It is of interest, however, that an air of queerness feels central to the Final Boy proposition. If all of the aforementioned Final Girl products were penned by men, it means that a bunch of dudes, so infatuated with dark shit and gory violence that they’re willing to stake their careers on it, sat at a computer and imagined themselves speaking and acting as women. What’s queerer than gender play, however unintentional?
A lazy construction of a Final Boy narrative would simply swap the genders, a male-identifying protagonist made to take up a phallic object to defeat a slasher. I would contend that this is not a Final Boy. By that logic, Ash from The Evil Dead, with his mighty phallic chainsaw (8), is a Final Boy. But the trope extends beyond mere survival. There is more to a Final Girl than simply being the final girl.
It is key to remember that art, since the dawn of time, has been created and dissected through the prism of heterosexual male existence. The Final Girl evokes Sigmund Freud’s Madonna-whore complex, another of those pervasive 101 ideas. It posits that men are sexually impotent when faced with a saintly woman; they cannot seduce her, only respect her. To say nothing of the veracity of Freudian theory, the most enduring slashers certainly abide by the Madonna-whore complex. Audiences, so they say, go to horror movies for sex and death, to literally straddle the line between eroticism and fatalism. The whores of the supporting ensemble provide the easy titillation, while the Madonna, who does not need to be seductive to the male viewer, earns his respect. It is presumed that the women are too busy shielding their eyes to have an opinion.
Of course, women do have an opinion, which is why countless female horror enthusiasts return time and again to these superficially misogynist narratives (9). Yes, Final Girl theory is about a woman taking on masculine qualities, but a more critical eye finds that Final Girl theory is just as much about a woman learning to survive under the oppressive control of a man, a man emboldened to violence by patriarchal society at large.
As is the refrain for so many screenwriting texts, a film is all about a protagonist’s arc, their journey from one flawed pole of existence to the other, more tenable pole. A Final Girl’s arc finds her suffering trauma and struggling to reconcile, so steadfast is she in her bookish, virginal ways. By the climactic battle, however, she’s risen above it; the opposite of her emotional, traditionally-feminine pole of existence is a fight-or-flight survival state, though a coda will usually suggest she’s still a Girl, tearfully mourning the loss of her friends in the back of an ambulance as the sun rises on a new day.
Likewise, a horror film with a true Final Boy would need to present him as an Other, a man who has not yet learned how to survive under the patriarchy, and track his mastery in the wake of male violence. A Final Boy is not so much about performing opposite to a Final Girl, but rather earning respect from a male-centered audience by the same means as a Final Girl. The boogeyman is toxic masculinity, and the Final Boy must overcome it as thoroughly as his feminine counterpart.
Thus, we arrive at the conundrum of the Final Boy, the reason he is so absent despite a blueprint being readily available for use. We’ve seen noxious, fratty men in slashers, and they’re just as easily mowed down as the women with whom they have indulgent, predictably deadly sex. A compelling Final Boy would likely be above such frivolities. This is not to say he must be one of those dreaded sexless, “respectable” types, but if a hypothetical viewer is to assume he can outsmart a killing machine, he must be as studied as his Madonna forebears. He must be emotional, or at least able to convey emotion beyond snide alpha superiority. Most troubling of all to a straight male creative, a Final Boy must visibly suffer, performing trauma with the same frightened incredulity as Laurie Strode or Sally Hardesty, the Final Girl of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
In essence, the Final Boy must embark on a journey in active opposition to conventional masculinity. He must convey fear and pain, what some would call weakness. He must be imbued with many of the qualities that the imagined monolith of the horror community would consider gay.
I recall a moment midway through my first screening of Ari Aster’s Hereditary. Annie (Toni Collette) has made contact with the spirit of her dead daughter, as the rest of her family bears frightful witness. Hereditary is revered for its minimalist approach, relying mostly on the performances of its cast to evince real scares. The cast delivers: Peter (Alex Wolff) is so shaken by the unbelievable supernatural event, he begins to sob, loudly, violently. Realistically. A vocal minority of men in the audience began to guffaw, and persisted until the next scene.
This sort of reaction is a constant nuisance for any acolyte of the “horror community,” whoever is allowed entrance through the gates of that nebulous catch-all. The more one attends genre flicks in theaters, the more one notices the moments in which men find it appropriate to laugh at terror. It happened when I saw Blue Velvet, as Laura Dern’s Sandy shatters at the revelation of her lover’s infidelity. It is a perfectly calibrated expression of adolescent helplessness; it is also a meme, the Laura Dern Cry Face (10). It happened when I saw The Shining, as Shelley Duvall’s Wendy flees maniacal Jack Torrance. Kubrick’s epic is perhaps the horror film most deified by white male spaces of criticism for transcending its “lesser” genre, and even still, pockets of cinephiles find Duvall’s wild, flailing arms undignified. The First Annual Razzies nominated her for Worst Actress.
Indeed, defensive fans will try to explain that they laugh because these performances are bad. Really, these performances are honest, bold subversions of the crowdsourced expectation that all characters in horror must react rationally to irrational violence. But then, straight white men have always defined what makes a performance, or a character, or a trope, ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Laura Dern and Shelley Duvall are not portraying immaculate Final Girls, nor are they portraying disposable whores. Alex Wolff is not aiming for an alpha display of male virility. Because of this, all three become objects of mockery. For this strain of fan, femininity in any form is a punchline.
The trouble is not that The Horror Community is composed entirely of straight white men. Such a rudimentary approximation betrays the empirical data. An October (natch) 2017 study conducted by CivicScience (11) found that 60% of horror fans surveyed identified as female. A 2018 study by Movio (12) reported a more even split at 49% women, though that number is still higher than the 44% of women who make up the average blockbuster crowd. You know, the blockbuster? That colossus which allegedly caters to all four quadrants?
Further, a 2014 Nielsen study (13) found that 27% of LGBTQ+ moviegoers surveyed were more likely to select horror as their favorite genre, as compared to their heterosexual counterparts. Nielsen also submits that LGBTQ+ people are ideal consumers for a studio: 49% of queer viewers said that they will post about the movies they watch on social media, generating organic word-of-mouth. They’re also 22% more likely to see a film more than once in the theater than a straight audience member.
It makes perfect sense. Like pop music, and really any ephemera enjoyed by girls and gays, horror is dismissed as artless, formulaic cash grabbery in service of a cynical marketing machine. It’s the perennial underdog, which means the genre has been able to covertly shift culture from its inception, inciting discussion on taboo subjects like racism (Night of the Living Dead) and bodily autonomy (Black Christmas) before any other flavor of film dared to touch them.
No, the trouble is that straight white men are the loudest voices in any community, horror or otherwise. As such, its audience is conceived of as homogeneous. When creative execs greenlight their grisly projects, they do so while dreaming of the sold-out queue tracing the block on opening night. And when they walk that line in their mind, the sea of faces they conjure are uniformly white, bearded, and frowning, clad in black graphic tees from whichever musty novelty store they seem to live in.
And so, horror remains mired in its Final Girl infatuation. The genre that once lived at the fore of shifts in national thought, entertaining provocative and progressive conversation singlehandedly, now finds itself stuck in the past, a stalled car with a Final Girl revving the engine to no avail.
There is a scene in HBO’s Veep (14), in which an exasperated Amy (Anna Chlumsky) berates her boss, sitting President Selina Meyer, after years of subservience. “You have achieved nothing apart from one thing,” she spits. “The fact that you are a woman means we will have no more women Presidents, because we tried one and she fucking sucked.” I’m reminded of this scene because, well, there is a Final Boy. We tried one, once. And, though some partisans will contend otherwise, most agree: he fucking sucked.
Striking Shudder in a summer of relative famine for content, the documentary Scream, Queen! (15) relitigates the legacy of the loathed sequel A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge through the eyes of its lead actor, Mark Patton. Closeted at the time of release, Patton has since accepted the flop that cratered his ascendant career, as its portrayal of a Final Boy struggling with subtextual (and occasionally textual) queer feelings proved accidentally groundbreaking. Simultaneously, the doc shows, marginalized slasher aficionados have embraced Elm Street 2’s ludicrous plotting and tone, reclaiming it as a bold, one-of-a-kind experiment. Scream, Queen! finds a resurfaced Patton touring America to conventions, reunions, and repertory screenings, to the delight of those in the Krueger cohort who can invoke entire passages of dialogue by heart.
It’s a well-done, charming doc, even as its premise nags at the viewer. The love these fans have for Elm Street 2 is genuine, but one catches a whiff of self-preservation. Scream, Queen! takes pains to explain why Freddy’s Revenge deserves re-assessment, but kneecaps its argument by… showing clips from Freddy’s Revenge. It’s simply not good, through no fault of its queer lead actor, nor its coded-queer fictive protagonist. Still, scream queens – that is, drag queens with an affinity for scary movies – and LGBTQ+ fans have no choice but to defend its honor. It is a unicorn, the only slice of mainstream American horror to even attempt to subvert gender norms. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge hit theaters in 1985. It is still the only morsel of representation we have.
A similar defense arose this summer for 1997’s Batman & Robin upon the passing of its director, Joel Schumacher. That notorious bomb also aimed for a queer sensibility in a steak-eating subgenre, superhero flicks. Like Elm Street 2, it proves a miserable endeavor, to die on the hill of a misfire just barely engaging enough to qualify as an inebriated midnight-madness watch. Even still, Gay Twitter answered the Bat-call. There’s room enough for camp among the annals of cinema, but in defending middling works that stretch the generosity of the ‘camp’ tag to its breaking point, LGBTQ+ audiences rob themselves of nobler, more challenging narratives. In other words, save the breathless defense of bad superhero movies for the straight nerds.
“I don’t think [the mainstream public] thought, ‘Oh, this sucks because it’s gay,’” says Peaches Christ, a talking head featured in Scream, Queen! “I think they weren’t ready for a male scream queen, [but] they couldn’t articulate it.”
Thirty-five years later, there is language aplenty to articulate the queer experience, and a bevy of filmmakers with the capability of doing so thoughtfully. It bears mention that Scream, the seminal forefather to every self-satisfied meta horror narrative, was penned by a gay man, Kevin Williamson. Christopher Landon is the openly gay director of Happy Death Day and its sequel, which actually make good on the promise of camp cinema, and which have provided, in protagonist Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe), a memorable modern Final Girl. Don Mancini’s sequels to Child’s Play make a playground of the gender binary (16), appeasing bloodthirsty auds with Chucky and Tiffany’s audacious kills, whilst slyly ribbing the absurdity of boy/girl constructs.
Clearly, the trouble is not a lack of diversity behind the camera. Hell, James Whale was queering horror (17) as far back as the Universal Monster days. The feverish anticipation for Nia DaCosta’s Candyman proves there’s financial gain in providing marginalized creatives the space to tell their own stories through beloved intellectual property. Why is it, then, that one finds pointed regression in the genre: not just erasure of the Final Boy, but a dismantling of all textual queerness? Mancini was vocal in denouncing MGM’s remake of Child’s Play (18), which wrested control away, a creator no longer in charge of his own characters. Upon arrival, Child’s Play (2019) underlined the writer/director’s necessity: a dull, unimaginative reboot putting the ‘straight’ in straightforward, it tanked at the box office (19) and seemed to satisfy no one (20).
Hollywood has tried to retrofit a queer horror story into a conventional, hetero-palatable mold. They have failed, fabulously so. If that is the case, why not try the inverse? Why not take a benchwarmer villain and revive them for an exercise in, shall we say, experimentation? The traditional slasher most ripe for a queering is likely I Know What You Did Last Summer. Another Kevin Williamson product, prodding at tropes is elemental to the franchise. Plus, who knows the terror of a dangerous secret being exposed better than the gay community?
Stan Winston’s effects extravaganza Pumpkinhead, last revisited in 2007, is a cautionary tale, a fable about the “terrible price” of revenge. What if the monster is brought to life not by a rural father grieving his slain son, but a rural LGBTQ+ parent seeking vengeance on abusive townsfolk? What if a gay man is made to do battle with the monstrous product of his own inner demons?
Body snatcher cinema remains an enduring source of fear. From the timeless Philip Kaufman adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, to the chilling Japanese export Kairo (Pulse), there is an inherent eeriness to the dysphoria between another person’s veneer of normalcy, and what lies just underneath. One could trace a perfect parallel to the experience of being closeted, or the vital need for code switching in unsafe environments.
In a similar key, body horror is a nasty pocket that feels distinctly gay-friendly. If cisgender communities insist on misunderstanding and demonizing the existence of bodies along the spectrum of gender identity, there lies untold potential in weaponizing that misunderstanding to empower trans folks. Snag the rights to any one of David Cronenberg’s nightmares and center a trans lead; in particular, the dual nature of Dead Ringers screams allegory. The result would no doubt prove more inventive than whatever ghastly dreck will arrive in theaters (or on VOD) the first week of January.
Must it be campy? Are LGBTQ+ people relegated to play in a surreal sandbox? So be it. Give Killer Klowns from Outer Space a big gay makeover. Drop the Leprechaun into West Hollywood on a Friday night. Drag us to Hell with another iteration of Drag Me to Hell. I couldn’t care less. Queer people love a dose of stoner entertainment as much as anyone. (Although it’s a tad gauche, I’ll add that I’m available to write and direct any one of these off-the-cuff ideas. Mr. Blum, you may coordinate the finer points with my manager, who is presently just myself in a disheveled blond wig.)
All of this is to say that a Final Boy in any iteration is feasible, ready to be welcomed, and could prove a game-changer if provided the opportunity. And providing the opportunity, I believe, is a reasonable request. If there’s one thing the general public knows about horror, besides that it’s violent, it’s that the genre is cheap. It’s a training ground for so many actors and directors (lest we forget James Cameron’s debut, Piranha II: The Spawning) because new ideas can be tested, while studios get away with putting very little skin in the game, financially speaking.
Certainly, no horror IP is too precious for a pivot. Jaws was a Best Picture nominee, and won three Academy Awards; two entries later, Bruce the Animatronic Shark was busting through red-and-blue paper glasses (21). Jason Voorhees went to Hell; then, he went to space. Chris Rock was handed the reins to the Saw franchise over small talk at a friend’s wedding (22). Halloween III: Season of the Witch attempted an anthology until audiences made resoundingly clear that, for as multitudinous as the word ‘Halloween’ may be, there’s only one unkillable boogeyman fit to fill the jumpsuit at the heart of a film with ‘Halloween’ in the title. Even iconic chillers are amenable to transition, and that’s a good thing: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge still finds a viewership of millions every October.
So… why hasn’t it happened? When and where is our next Final Boy? I wish I could provide an answer, beyond the simple fact that queer theory does not often cross an executive’s mind; beyond the cynical truth that social justice is only prioritized when a surge of feedback deems it financially lucrative; beyond the disheartening reality that when creatives count themselves among the crowd for sold-out scary movies, there is an implicit affirmation that the masses will always cheer when a woman takes up her phallus.
I want to believe that people will cheer for a Final Boy, too. Instead, I and millions of LGBTQ+ cinephiles are left stranded in a state of un-knowing, a Schrodinger’s Cat scenario with no studios willing to open the box and discover the results. Without a novel take on a Final Boy for the new age, the monsters of horror cinema are left to prey upon victims, and eventual survivors, of a duller, standard sort.
In 1978, Laurie Strode hid in a closet (23), wire hanger at the ready, as the threat of Michael Myers haunted the bedroom shadows. The visual metaphor is so easy, it practically makes itself; still, our Final Boy lies suspended in wait, their looming specter of a scene partner never to strike. In 2020, the Final Boy is still trapped in the closet. – Stanley Swindling