I remember that when Scream
came out in 1996 how much electricity it put into the horror genre, a trope
that had been running on sequels and not much more for nearly a decade. Both deconstructionist and meta before we
truly knew what either term was, it gave new life to almost every horror film
that has come out in its wake – and keeps getting brought back every decade
well past the passing of Wes Craven, the man who gave it life. It was fitting
that Craven, who had created the slasher film with Nightmare on Elm Street had
been the man who created Scream, but it wasn’t his first attempt to
deconstruct the genre he’d given birth too. Two years earlier he actually tried
something more radical in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare in which the
performers and Craven himself turned out to be conduits for Freddy Kruger who
Craven had given birth by accident. Heather Langenkamp, who’d played the
survivor of the first Elm Street movie, found herself the target of the
actual Freddy Kreuger and also played herself living through the world of being
an actress who could not escape her one big role.
It was impossible not
to think of either film while reading The Final Girl Support Group which
makes Scream look like a rip-off. Grady Hendrix asks a very probing
question from the start of the book. How much would we have enjoyed Scream if
we had known that Sydney Prescott was a fictionalized version of a real person?
Taking it further, how much would we have enjoyed any of the horror films that
are ripped upon throughout Scream had we known that every single one
of them was based on a true story. Indeed, this very question is put forth
in a lecture by one of those very same final girls to an audience years later.
I’ve read more
than my share of horror novels over the
years but its worth noting I have very little use for the slasher movies that
are at the center of Final Girl. I’d
like to say that even as a child I was an ally for women, but in truth it’s
just that I couldn’t then (and frankly even now) stand the profusion of slaughter
and gore that makes up all of these movies. That doesn’t mean I can’t tolerate
and even truly enjoy the literary equivalent, if for no other reason that it’s
easier to stand on the page than on the screen. I have read more than my share
of these novels, and I would know what a final girl was if even if Hendrix did
not go out of his way to define it before the book begins. And it is possible
that people might just pick up a copy of the book read the title and jacket and
have a very good idea what they were getting.
Indeed the book jacket
seems to give you that idea. The novel tells you that this is the story of
Lynnette Tarkington, who survived a massacre twenty-two years earlier and it
has defined every day of her life since.
It also tells you that she has been meeting with five other final girls
and a therapist for the past decade for a support group, putting their lives
together, piece by piece. And it tells you one of the woman misses a meeting
and Lynette’s worst fears are realized – someone knows about the group and is
determined to take their lives apart, piece by piece.
All of this is true in
the skeleton of the plot. But it is the details that make Final Girl Support
Group haunting, satirical and out-and-out frightening in more ways than you
could imagine. And it is because the novel chooses to center on Lynne – who is
by far the most damaged of the survivors
- that we truly realize the heart of this book and makes a lot of the enjoyment
we might have gotten from horror films hollow.
Lynette survived her experience
but isn’t living. She makes it clear
that the only places she goes every week outside of her apartment is this
support group. In the first chapter we see just how much effort it takes Lynette
to leave her apartment in the first place. The group is only a sanctuary in the
sense that it’s a routine. At the start of the novel, we see a journal entry
from Dr. Carol that after the past year, the dynamic that has kept the group
going all this time is beginning to deteriorate and that she has begun to feel
that she has failed. With one exception, none of the survivors are doing well.
Heather has been addicted to drugs and gone to rehab several times. Marilyn, the richest and most successful, is
obsessed with materialism. Dani has been married to Michelle (another final
girl) for a while and now Michelle is dying of cancer. Julia has been in a wheelchair
for a while and Lynette, as we quickly learn, has been unresponsive to any form
of change. In the first meeting all of them are snapping at each other and Dani
announces that this will be her final session. Lynette is hysterical about this
because she says the group will far about with it – but insists she’s fine.
It becomes clear within
a few pages that only reason Lynette is clinging to group so fiercely has
nothing to do with her caring for any of fellow Final Girls, their well-being
or even hers. She knows that without
these therapy sessions, she would have nowhere to go and just be in her apartment
all the time. Lynette makes it clear at
the start that the six people in this group are the last ones – “we’re an
eighties thing’ she says in a self-referential nod– but that there have been
dozens, if not hundreds before. Lynette’s situation reminds me in a sense of
Bruce Wayne’s at the beginning of The Dark Knight Rises – she hasn’t
gotten a life; she’s been waiting around for things to get bad again. With her,
however, the trauma is far deeper – she has exercise routine, suffers from multiple
panic attacks a day, lives in an apartment that is essentially a fortress and
the only thing she cares about is a fern she calls: “Final Plant’. And this is
not a healthy relationship, either; she seems to think ‘Fine’ as she calls it
is a sentient being and in a journal entry, says it talks to her.
In notes from her
therapist, Dr. Carol says that she has reduced her life to a series of tics and
routines and she did not think it was possible to reduce it further. She takes
this as criticism and refuses to answer. Lynette spends every scenario looking for the
quickest exit and has spent her entire life since her attack waiting for
everything to go balls up. And at the start of the novel, it does.
There has been a
massacre at Camp Red Lake where Adrienne, the first ‘final girl’ survived a similar
massacre in the 1970s. There is only one survivor: Stephanie Fugate. It is not
until the middle of the session that all of them learn that one of the woman
killed was Adrienne. Lynette’s reaction.
All of them scatter according to their routines. Lynette’s is to return to her
apartment and barricades herself in.
What’s clear from the
moment this starts is that Lynette has in a sense, become exactly the kind of
person who doesn’t survive a horror movie. Over and over throughout the
novel, she is both incredibly stupid in who she trusts and only concerned with
her own survival. Even though she knows her fellow Final Girls will be the
targets, she does nothing to help protect them. Julia comes to her door not
long after to check in and Lynette refuses to let her in until Julia pulls a
trick out of desperation and concern. Lynette’s attitude is to pull the door
open and try to kill her. When the
actual attack does come, she runs away and leaves her friend to die. She does
everything she can to escape, but when her ways or blocked, she becomes
panicked. She goes to her therapist and shows she has no trust in her. She says
the only people she trusts are final girls, even though she just left one
behind to die. When her therapist takes her into her home and is remarkably accommodating,
she rejects her offer of safety with a plan to leave. She then tries to warn Marilyn
and is angry that Heather is there ahead of her because she thinks she’s the
monster. When she learns Dani is under arrest, she finds herself concerned for
Michelle, but she is reluctant to bring it up because Michelle’s in a hospice
and that’s not secure. Then because Michelle isn’t dying fast enough for her
to be safe, she, Heather and Marilyn break her out of the hospice – making sure
that Dani can’t say goodbye. Even that is tame compared to what she ends up
doing while they are in the car to protect herself. The betrayal she suffers
when this is over would be worse were it not for the fact you almost feel she
deserves what she gets.
This is very grim stuff,
but it’s also vastly entertaining much of the way because Hendrix doesn’t bother
to hide who his characters are. The novel makes it very clear that each of the
central characters are famous because they got movie deals turning their story
into box office gold. Several of the cuts between chapters critique and reference
many of these films, and there are reviews ranking them and promotions of them.
Hendrix doesn’t even bother to hide the origins of most of the movies involved –
Heather’s monster is called The Dream King, after all, and we later learn that
most of them can’t get along with her because she’s too ‘spiritual’. Marilyn
was a Texas debutante who ran into a bunch of inbred cannibals who used
chainsaw. Julia is a young college student
who was tortured and nearly killed by a bunch of horror buffs who used a mask
called the Ghost. Dani was babysitting
her neighbors when her brother escaped from a mental institution and tried to
kill her. Adrienne is the first survivor of a massacre whose camp counselors
were massacred by a deranged father who believed his son has been killed there
years ago. And at one point a desperate Lynette finds herself visiting ‘the
fallen Final Girl’ Christine who has taken it upon herself to sell memorabilia
based on all of these massacres and murders, including some of theirs and it
should surprise no one she lives in a cabin in the woods. Lynette for the
record survived a massacre of her family when a lunatic from an asylum dressed
as Santa Claus came to her house. (You might not know that’s Silent Night,
Deadly Night and if you don’t you’re blessed. Hendrix says that it’s
equivalent Slay bells ‘went straight to Blockbuster’)
Of course, all of these
woman would manage to rebuild their lives before another monster relating to
the first came out of the woodwork to slaughter their lives again, and of
course in all these cases, they killed their monster. (There is one exception,
but I’ll leave it to you to learn who it is.) And the chapter titles all bear
the name Final Girl Support Group followed with an appropriate numeral and
pretty much every variation you’ve heard of before: Son of The Final Girl, The
Final Sacrifice, Dream Warriors, and I’m pretty sure Lynette lives in Apartment
3-D on purpose.
This is very funny to
read and there are several sections that are laugh-out loud hysterical. But
underlying all of this is the very real trauma all of these women have gone
through and how they deal with it, sometimes in subtle ways. Heather has been
addicted to drugs, maybe to deal with the pain, perhaps because she thinks it’s
the only way to find the Dream King. (We read an article where it seems Heather
may be delusional.) Marilyn is a rich socialite but she has suffered from
alcoholism. Michelle and Dani seem to have survived only because they have found
each other. And all of these women have the kind of codependent relationships
with much older men, sometimes therapists, sometimes police, that often lead to
them being exploited in different ways.
In the case of Lynette,
it is Office Garrett Cannon. Cannon saved Lynette both times. The second time,
after Lynette turned eighteen, he has sex with her in her hospital room. For
two years, he was the only person Lynette counted on but she didn’t see that he
was using her for a movie deal. The moment Lynette doesn’t show up for an
appearance for the film, he begins to reject her. Later in the novel, he comes
out to save her but it turns out he just wants to use her for another book deal,
and the best way to do this is to have her catch the real killer.
Late in the novel we
learn that Adrienne turned Red Lake, the sight of her slaughter, into a salvation
for her and her fellow Final Girls. Lynette tells us that some Final Girls,
kill themselves or end up dying at the hands of abusers. Lynette built a sanctuary
where therapists split Final girls into teams and that they stick with each
other for their entire stay: “they do therapies together, they are held accountable
for each other, they take responsibility for each other. They call themselves
sisters. We learn that sixty percent of these families last, that they move
closer to each other, that they rescue each other. None of them die. The argument
is that the Final Girls in this therapy group have barely functioned because
they are patients but not family – and they end surviving what happens in this
novel (because of course they will) because they become one.
I won’t tell you who
the actual killer is behind what is happening in the novel, save to say that,
like every horror film, everything goes wrong because Lynette stupidly trusts
the wrong people and does not see the call is coming from inside the house.
What I do say that I understand why Hendrix wrote this novel and how, even
though it is set in 2010, the deeper themes that are pertinent now. Most of them are crystal clear in my summary
and the rest will become revealed as the novel progresses and you realize the
psychology of the killers behind it (because in these movies there’s always
more than one)
Final Girl Support
Group is
as brilliant a deconstructionist work of horror as any of the Scream films
or the work of Jordan Peele. Yet I can not see it being adapted into a film or even
a TV series any time soon. Hendrix uses the tropes of the horror film to make
the viewer take a far closer look as to why we watched so many of the movies in
the first place, and the view isn’t pretty.
The toxic masculinity that pervades so much of our world today is visited
in a very clear sense on even the woman who have survived the most horrible of
massacres. I think that is why so many
of the brief chapter breaks involve so many often dismissive reviews of the
horror films that are versions of what these girls lived through and why
Hendrix chooses to intercut them with transcripts of these woman’s police and
therapy statements taken immediately or years after the fact.
Yet this is exactly the
kind of work that needs to be turned into a limited series. It covers much of the same territory that The
Handmaid’s Tale does but does so in ways that are both more subtle and more
direct than the Hulu series. The fact
that it is set in the recent past rather than a distant future makes the tales
more pertinent. And it does help that all the characters in this novel are
survivors, not victims and that the ending has notes of happiness rather than
the pure dystopia Gilead seems to be five years later. I still have no desire to watch an episode of
The Handmaid’s Tale despite its supposed pertinence. But if Final
Girl Support Group was made into a series by Hulu or any service, I’d
admittedly tune in. I think you should read it to find out why.
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