NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

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.