Spoilers!
As an ardent fan of horror, particularly the slasher genre (but c’mon, I love all horror), I’m absolutely the target audience for Grady Hendrix’s 2021 book, The Final Girl Support Group. So, what does that say about me? That’s what Grady wants to know with this book. Why do we like slasher films, and why do we love the “final girl” trope, i.e., the killer in the slasher who slashes through others before the quintessential “final girl” — typically stereotyped and characterized as the “good girl” virgin — takes them down to end the film. Think Halloween, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream. In some cases, it sometimes seems like horror fans like the killer more than the “final girl.” Consider how popular Freddy Krueger became in the 1980s, or how protective people are of the Michael Myers character with repeated sequels, remakes, and reboots (myself included, admittedly!). But why do I like slasher films and why do I root for the “final girl”? I think I’ve always gravitated toward a comic book-like good vs. evil story, and there is no more straightforward good vs. evil story than someone hellbent on a murder spree and someone standing in their way. And it gets even more compelling when that evil person seems nearly insurmountable, like Krueger, Myers, Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, and the various people behind Ghostface (the least insurmountable of that grouping).
In The Final Girl Support Group, Hendrix is meta on meta, funny and quirky as usual, but also looking to make a point. The girls in our Final Girl Support Group represent (seeming) stereotypes characteristic of horror movie tropes: Adrienne, who is murdered early on, is the Final Girl of the Final Girls, with our main protagonist, Lynnette taking on the mantle; Heather is the pothead (in this case, alcoholic); Marilyn is the rich girl; Julia is the nerd; and Dani is the token lesbian. Chrissy is another one, but she’s considered a traitor by the others because she embraced the “Monsters” of their lives, the serial killers, through a “murderabilia” museum dedicated to the artifacts of those monsters. Correspondingly, I think, Julia’s final girl scenario was reminiscent of Scream, Adrienne’s Friday the 13th, Marilyn Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Dani’s Halloween, Chrissy’s maybe Leprechaun, and Lynette’s … maybe Black Christmas? But Hendrix has all of them rise up through the stereotypes in the course of the novel to prove they are more than what they’ve been pigeonholed with, and it takes keeping the Final Girl Support Group together for them to realize their strengths.
All of them, minus Adrienne, who is killed by her Monster in a surprising bit of violence to kick off what is coming, and Chrissy, who is banished, have been meeting for 16 years with Dr. Carol as a support group. But the group is on the verge of breaking up. Everyone, except Lynnette, think perhaps it’s time to move on. To live their lives. But Lynnette needs them. Her only real friend outside of group is Fine, her plant. She doesn’t like to watch Friends because they don’t lock their doors. And she erected a literal cage someone has to pass through after stepping through her front door. She’s constantly planning, checking, and observing the world around her to ensure she has a safe exit. That she is safe. To be fair, her observation that it’s better to watch people’s shoes rather than their hats or shirts because it’s not as easy to change out shoes is brilliant (plus, it’s not as noticable to be double-checking shoes as it would someone’s hat!).
And can you blame her, or any of them, given what they’ve experienced? The survivor’s guilt would be one thing, but add in the distorting and disorienting fame stemming from it, as well as the weirdos that comes with fame (the murderabilia collectors and “stans” of serial killers), and they are essentially re-living their trauma all the time. Worse still for Lynnette, is that she feels like a phony, a faux-final girl. She didn’t actually fight back against her killer like the others; she played possum until help arrived. As if that’s really something to feel ashamed about!
Starting with Adrienne, and then with someone firing shots at Lynnette and Julia, Lynnette realizes someone is trying to take out the final girls. Hendrix put the foreshadowing right in front of us at the beginning: What is the slasher — these plodding, slow-moving killers using random objects, such as knives, chainsaws, and machetes — in the age of the school shooting when someone can slaughter scores of people with a gun? Of course, nobody wants to watch a horror film where a kid goes into a cafeteria and slaughters his classmates. For one, it’s too close to reality, obviously, and two, there’s nothing cinematic about it on the face of it for the horror genre. What’s horrifying is that in our real world, survivors (“final girls” and “final guys” and “final parents”) of school shootings really have formed something of a bond after so many school (and other locations) shootings.
Lynnette befriends and mentors Stephanie, who she thinks is the latest final girl making the news, but in fact, Stephanie has secretly partnered with Dr. Carol’s 26-year-old son, Skye, to elevate the “slasher” by combining it with a school shooting, i.e., bringing guns to a knife fight, to paraphrase the saying. She certainly was groomed, though. She was 14 when she would’ve met Skye! Skye’s motivation, it seems, was to kill all the final girls who took his mother’s attention. In effect, he made Dr. Carol a final girl in a new way.
Through this ordeal with Stephanie and Skye (and her Sisters in the Final Girl Support Group doubting and not trusting her), Lynnette becomes a “true” final girl, surviving violence to take down the bad guy and girl. But more importantly, she learns that to be a final girl is to become a woman who does more than merely survive.
Hendrix does it again, with another clever premise to propel his story forward. I enjoyed the chapter names, too, that played on horror franchise tropes, such as calling one of the chapters “The Final Chapter,” even though it wasn’t actually the final chapter. I would slot this one in the middle of the three Hendrix books I’ve read: 1.) 2020’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (reviewed here); 2.) 2021’s The Final Girl Support Group; and 3.) 2023’s How to Sell a Haunted House (reviewed here).
He’s quite good at taking a premise that could be too cute, too clever, and making it work, fleshing out his characters to be people we care about beyond the clever premise, and conveying an important point about individuals and society. In this case, that we should remember the women, final girls and victims alike, rather than venerate their killers. There is something rather sick about a society that does the opposite. We ought to be a society of Laurie Strodes, not Michael Myerses. Right?
Milam's Musings 