EASTER EGGS If you’re a normal person, you’ll read The Final Girl Support Group for the story. If you’re a weirdo like me, some of it will feel vaguely familiar—a name here, a situation there. You aren’t wrong. I figured if I was writing a book that revolved around slasher movies like Friday the 13th and Scream, then I was going to pack it with call-outs, references, and Easter eggs. If you’re not interested, you’ll never even notice they’re there. If you are, it might be more fun to find them on your own, but let me take you just a little way down the rabbit hole I’ve been living in for the past few years to get you started. THE TWO DR. CAROLS: Dr. Carol Elliott gets her name from two places. First, she’s named after the other famous Dr. Carol: Dr. Carol Clover, a professor of medieval studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Clover wrote the 1992 book Men, Women, and Chain Saws that first popularized the term “final girl” as the name of the female survivor of a slasher movie. The other half of Dr. Carol’s name comes from Dr. Robert Elliott, one of the worst bigscreen therapists of all time. Played by Michael Caine in Brian De Palma’s 1980 slasher, Dressed to Kill, Caine’s Dr. Elliott turns out to be a straight razor–wielding, crossdressing killer called Bobbi. I combined their names to tip the hat to the woman who codified the concept of the final girl, while also tipping off readers who’ve seen too many movies that Dr. Carol, like Dr. Robert Elliott, might have something to hide. GNOMECOMING: Between 1975 and 1982, Canadian producers were allowed to deduct 100 percent of their production costs from their taxes, resulting in about 350 tax shelter films getting filmed north of the border, one of which was Bob Clark’s Toronto-shot Black Christmas (1974), which kick-started the slasher genre. Since then, Canadian tax shelter movies have given us genre classics like Prom Night (1980) and My Bloody Valentine (1981), so I had to have at least one Canadian final girl. Enter Chrissy Mercer and her homecoming night massacre flick, Gnomecoming. SANTA CLAUS SLASHERS: There are a lot more of these than you’d think, but for The Final Girl Support Group I wanted to stick with the one that caused a moral panic and movie theater protests, Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984). Because it was filmed (for some strange reason) in Utah, I decided to make that Lynnette Tarkington’s hometown and gave her the same fate as scream queen Linnea Quigley: impaled on a rack of antlers. In Silent Night, Deadly Night 2, Ricky Caldwell, brother to Billy Caldwell, the killer in the first movie, goes on a shooting rampage in a suburban neighborhood in broad daylight. Right before he shoots a guy taking out the trash he infamously sneers, “Garbage day!” which has become an internet meme thanks to his inappropriately overcommitted line
reading, and you’ll find a nod to it in the book. I chose to name Lynnette’s franchise Slay Bells instead of Slayride (the original name of Silent Night, Deadly Night) after my favorite slasher novel, Slay Bells (1994), written by Jo Gibson, which is the closest I’ve come to finding an eightiesstyle teen slasher in book form. STAB: I’m a huge fan of the Scream franchise, and Julia is my small tribute to Neve Campbell’s performance as Sidney Prescott in that series (named for Neve Campbell’s character Julia Salinger in Party of Five, a show I was obsessed with in university). In the world of Scream, the Scream movie actually exists, although it’s called Stab, so of course Stab had to be the name of Julia’s franchise in The Final Girl Support Group. If you had any doubts about my weirdly personal connection with these slasher movies, let me tell you about me and Scream 2 (1997). Scream 2 begins with a scene set at the premiere of Stab, the movie within the movie, where Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett Smith, are killed. At the time, my wife and I were living in Los Angeles and doing work as extras to make ends meet and I’m one of the masked killers in the audience at the premiere. My wife totally upstages me, however, playing the annoyed girl who turns around and shushes Jada Pinkett Smith. (To see more of our oeuvre, please consult the pool party scene in Dennis the Menace 2, the gorilla escape in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater in Mighty Joe Young, my multi-episode appearance as a construction foreman in Saved By the Bell: The New Class, and my method work as a public radio producer in the opening of A Civil Action, where I overslept on the second day of shooting and delayed production, causing John Travolta to cool his heels in his trailer for hours, thereby ending my career as an extra.)
ONE FOR YOU TO HUNT FOR . . . THE CAMP RED LAKE DEAD: In the final chapter of the book there’s a list of the people killed in the Camp Red Lake Massacre. See if you recognize where the names come from. Yes, I got that obsessed.
Bracket:
THE HORROR MOVIES FACE-OFF Group activity to bracket which horror movie is the u ltimate winner (use the bracket on the next page!): 1 . NIG HT OF T HE LI V I NG DE AD 2. US 3 . J URASSI C PARK 4 . HALL OWE E N 5 . Z OMB I E LAND 6 . A NIGHT MARE ON E LM ST RE ET 7 . FR I DAY T HE 13T H 8 . BLAC K C HRI ST MAS 9 . TH E TEXAS C HAINSAW MASSAC RE 1 0. S C RE AM 1 1 . S ILENT NIGHT, DE ADLY NIGHT 1 2 . DAWN OF T HE DE AD 1 3. C ANDYMAN 1 4 . T HE SHINING 1 5 . BRID E OF F RANK E NST E IN 16. C ARRIE
THE HORROR MOVIES FACE-OFF
Bracket:
TOP 5 THINGS YOU NEED AS A FINAL GIRL 1 . FLAS HLI GHT
2. A P LA N T T O K EEP YOU C OMPAN Y
3. A BAG OF EXTR A C AS H
4 . ROA D T RI P S NAC K S LI K E T WI ZZLER S
5. C A R K EYS F OR 3 DI FFER EN T C AR S
WHAT’S YOUR FINAL GIRL STORY? MY WEAPON IS FIGHTING 1 . YO U R STAR SI G N I S YO UR WEAP ON ARIES - MAC HETE TAURUS - F ORK GEMINI - G ARDEN HOSE C ANC ER - LAMP LEO - C ROSSB OW VIRGO - C HAIR LIBRA - STEAK KNIFE S C ORP IO - IC E P IC K SAGIT TARIUS - BRIC K C AP RIC ORN - P IT C HF ORK AQUARIUS - BU T TER KNIFE P IS C ES - LAWN MOWER
, AND I’M AT / I N
2. F IRST LET TER OF YOUR FIR ST NAM E IS WHO YOU ARE F IGH TIN G A–C: FREDDY KRUEGER (A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET) D–F: JAS ON VOORHEES (FRIDAY THE 13TH) G–I: C ANDYMAN (C ANDYMAN) J–L: SAMARA MORG AN (THE RING) M–O: P INHEAD (HELLRAISER) P–R : HANNIBAL LECTER (THE SILENC E OF THE LAMBS) S –U: P ENNYWISE (IT) V–Z: C HUC KY (C HUC KY)
3 . F I R ST LET TE R O F YO UR LAST NAM E IS YOUR L OC ATION A–C: DARK F OREST D–F: BASEMENT G–I: DISNEYLAND J–L: C OMMUNIT Y P OOL M–O: G AS STATION P–R : KIT C HEN S –U: SUMMER C AMP V–Z: AN OL D MANSION
.
WHAT’S A
FINAL GIRL ANYWAY?
I
N HER 1992 BOOK, MEN, WOMEN, AND CHAIN SAWS, Dr. Carol Clover coined the term “final girl” to define the female survivor of a horror movie, writing that she’s “introduced at the beginning [of the film] and is the only character to be developed in any psychological detail…She is intelligent, watchful, level-headed; the first character to sense something amiss and the only one to deduce from the accumulating evidence the patterns and extent of the threat.” She also makes it to the closing credits alive. As Clover writes, the final girl is “the resourceful young female who survives the serial attacker and usually ends the threat (until the sequel anyway).” Clover also pointed out that the audience, both male and female, identified with the final girl and shared her point of view, making horror movies one of the few film genres where men were encouraged to identify with women. Some of the most famous final girls are Laurie Strode from Halloween (1978), played by Jamie Lee Curtis; Ripley from Alien (1979), played by Sigourney Weaver; and Sidney Prescott from Scream (1996), played by Neve Campbell. However, there have been final girls who are men, like Mark Patton’s character in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985), and Tommy Jarvis, a character played, respectively, by Corey Feldman, John Shepherd, and Thom Matthews in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984), Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985), and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986). By the way, if anyone in 1984 truly thought that Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter would actually
be the final chapter of that franchise, they hadn’t learned about the most unstoppable force in the world, one that can bring a killer back from his grave: market capitalism. Which brings up another aspect of the final girl: she always gets a sequel. Except for Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), most final girls have to face their killers in other installments in the franchise, a fate that seems particularly brutal for someone who’s already gone through so much. The first time I remember seeing a final girl on screen was in Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), which opens with the final girl from Part 1, Alice Hardy (Adrienne King), on the phone with her mom in her kitchen. She’s trying to piece her life back together after the first movie, until Jason pops back up and stabs her to death with an ice pick. It always struck me as exquisitely cruel. Here was a woman who had lost all her friends, survived a night of terror, killed the killer, and was doing the hard work of going on with her life. Instead of honoring that, the filmmakers have her bumped off in the first five minutes. Final girls fascinated me for years, and I never knew why. It’s only through writing this book that I understood. If you like horror movies you’re used to people thinking you’re morbid. After all, you’re spending your free time watching people get killed. But final girls taught me that there’s more to horror movies than murder. If you’re watching the movie from the final girl’s point of view, horror movies are about facing the worst possible thing that can happen to you, and how, against all odds, you can survive.
THE FINAL GIRL TRADING CARD ART
New from the author of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires
P R I N T T H E A B O V E P O S T E R AT H O M E !
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 1. If you had to use three words to describe Lynnette, what would they be? If she had to use three words to describe herself, what do you think they would be? 2. Dr. Carol wrote in her notes that “Lynnette’s coping mechanisms are extreme by any measure. Her behavior feels less like survivor ’s guilt and more like an attempt to punish herself.” Do you agree with that statement? 3. Even though the support group is fracturing in the beginning of the book, all the members do come together as the danger against them grows. Each of the women has different strengths and weaknesses. What does each contribute to the survival of the group? Which final girl did you identify most strongly with and why? 4. In the excerpt we see of Adrienne’s speech, she writes, “What does it say about us that so much of the entertainment we consume is about killing women?” Why do you think the women-in-peril trope and slasher films have been so popular over the years and what does that say about our society? 5. In this book, Adrienne won a case that meant the women can profit off of the movies that glorify violence against them. How does that complicate their relationship to the films? 6. Which twists in the book did you find the most shocking? Which ones did you see coming? 7. How much do you think Stephanie acted under her own will? How much blame do you think she deserves for her actions? 8. What kind of future do you see for the final girls? Also, after losing so much, does Dr. Carol become a new final girl now?
MURDER BOOKS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED Ever since human beings started putting pen to paper, or chisel to rock, we’ve been writing stories about killing each other. I’m one of those writers who likes to read as much as I possibly can around the same subject when I’m working on a book, so when I wrote The Final Girl Support Group I read more books about murder than should be strictly legal. Since my tastes run more toward books from the past that shaped the genre, I tend to ignore what got published last week and bigger books like Thomas Harris’s amazing Red Dragon or Ann Rule’s
The Stranger Beside Me. So here’s a quick tour of a poorly lit basement where you can find a few obscure but worthy books that are a little harder to find. THE SHADOW KNOWS (Diane Johnson, 1974): Whenever a new technology appears it doesn’t take long before we start using it to kill people. The seventies and eighties were full of books about killer telephones, like Phone Call (1979) about phones that melt people’s brains, Night Calls (1986) about a serial killer who forces a chandelier salesman named Chad to listen to him murder people over the phone, and Tandem Rush (1978) about hackers plotting to destroy Ma Bell, but there’s nothing like The Shadow Knows. An unnamed narrator (shades of Daphne Du Maurier ’s narrator in Rebecca) lives in a dumpy condo after her divorce, raising her four children, and trying to get a graduate degree so she can find a job that pays enough to support them. Someone begins to call her, explaining quite clearly that they will soon murder her. Stylish and sharp as a straight razor, it quickly gets into some surreal David Lynch territory and becomes a kind of working-class nightmare. Stanley Kubrick was so impressed by this book that he hired Johnson to write the screenplay of The Shining with him, and once you read it you’ll understand why. IN A LONELY PLACE (Dorothy B. Hughes, 1947): There’s a certain kind of murder book that’s entirely told from the killer ’s point of view. Jim Thompson wrote the classic of this mini-genre in 1952 with The Killer Inside Me, a fantastic novel that’s highly recommended, but of course a woman did it first. Dorothy Hughes’s 1947 thriller, In a Lonely Place, got made into a swank Hollywood film starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame that has absolutely nothing to do with the book, which is far too unsavory for the big screen. Trapped in the point of view of Dix Steele, a World War II veteran who floats around Los Angeles at loose ends after the war is over, it seems like a portrait of the Greatest Generation as Steele hangs out drinking with his wartime buddy who’s now a cop. Slowly, the reader begins to realize that the women showing up strangled all over the city are Steele’s work, and the fact that he’s murdered some of them right under the reader ’s nose gets even
more unnerving as his cat-and-mouse game with his cop buddy slowly makes him come unstrung. The harder he tries to convince the reader that he’s perfectly fine, the sweatier your hands get. BRAINCHILD or PIN (Andrew Neiderman, both 1981): He’s most famous as V.C. Andrews’s ghost writer, but Andrew Neiderman wrote a lot of great potboilers under his own name (besides authoring sixty-eight as Andrews). I couldn’t decide which I liked more so I’m recommending both Brainchild and Pin. The former tells the story of Lois, a brainy high school student who views everyone as data points on a graph. When she gets obsessed with behavioral science and her dad gets confined to his bed after suffering a stroke, she decides to turn her entire house into an experiment in conditioned behavior, with her own family as the subjects. Needless to say, this doesn’t go well and no one gets extra credit on their year-end grade. Pin is an even stranger beast, focusing on a brother and sister whose distant, controlling doctor father was so uncomfortable with human sexuality that he explained the facts of life to his children by throwing his voice into the mouth of one of his life-sized anatomical dummies. Now that he’s dead, his children believe that the dummy, named Pin, is still alive and Pin doesn’t want anyone to interfere with the happy little family they’ve formed. Both books are fantastic pulpy fun. BLACK AMBROSIA (Elizabeth Engstrom, 1986): One of the writers who bloomed during the seventies and eighties paperback horror boom, Elizabeth Engstrom wrote an absolutely blood-chilling pair of novellas that were published under the title When Darkness Loves Us. She followed them up with Black Ambrosia, which seems to be about Angelina Watson, a young girl who’s sexually assaulted and discovers afterwards that she’s a vampire. Unable to connect with other human beings, Angelina takes to the road, making her way through the impoverished, rural underbelly of Reagan’s America, wandering chilly highways and hooking up with lonely people living far from their neighbors, all the while feeding
GRADY HENDRIX
her bloodlust. Only she’s not a vampire. Every chapter is told from her point of view, but each ends with a section where another character repeats what occurred from a more mundane point of view, replacing Angelina’s operatic flights of romantic gothic fantasy with squalid, pointless little crimes. Is she a vampire or is she a serial killer is the question that haunts this portrait of all-American murder all the way to its end.
is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. He is the author of Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s
Exorcism, We Sold Our Souls, and the
RAPTURE (Thomas Tessier, 1987): A straightforward writer whose plainspoken narration hides a spare, elegant style that creeps up on you like a cold hand settling on the back of your neck, Thomas Tessier wrote some of the chilliest psychopaths in the eighties, and Jeff Lisker is one of his best. At first, Jeff feels like a parody of an eighties yuppie, and when he stumbles across his old high school friend Bonnie, you’re rooting for him as he decides to woo her the way he wasn’t bold enough to do twenty years ago. Unfortunately, Bonnie is married with a family, so Jeff slyly insinuates himself into her life, and the life of her teenaged daughter. Then he decides that he’s spent so much time and effort being her friend again that she “owes” him love. One of the bluntest books ever written about masculinity so toxic it can only be stored in a steel drum and buried in concrete, this is what Brett Easton Ellis wanted American Psycho to be.
New York Times bestselling The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, which is being adapted into a series by AmazonStudios. Grady also authored the Bram Stoker Awar–dwinning nonfiction book, P aperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom of the seventies and eighties. You can uncover more shocking facts about him at: GRADYHENDRIX.COM GRADY_HENDRIX
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © A L B E RT M I T C H E L
SLAY BELLS (Jo Gibson, 1994): Sometimes you want something that’s just plain old fun and I have never read a book that feels more like a corny, campy, cheesy eighties teen slasher movie than Slay Bells, written by Jo Gibson, a pen name for Joanne Fluke, beloved author of the Hannah Swensen baking mystery books. A gang of teens get snowed in right before Christmas at the brand-new Crossroads Mall, the biggest shopping center in Central Minnesota! Wouldn’t you know it? A killer dressed as Santa Claus begins to pick them off one by one inspired by repeated playings of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” that he hears over and over again on the mall’s Muzak system. By the time this book is through there will have been booby-trapped guardrails, deadly smoke breaks, terrible teen fashions, and an escape by snow mobile. An absolute trashy delight.
