Final Girls, Feminism and Popular Culture

This volume examines contemporary reformulations of the ‘Final Girl’ in film, TV, literature and comic, expanding the discussion of the trope beyond the slasher subgenre. Focusing specifically on popular texts that emerged in the 21st century, the volume asks: What is the sociocultural context that facilitated the remarkable proliferation of the Final Girls? What kinds of stories are told in these narratives and can they help us make sense of feminism? What are the roles of literature and media in the reconsiderations of Carol J. Clover’s term of thirty years ago and how does this term continue to inform our understanding of popular culture? The contributors to this collection take up these concerns from diverse perspectives and with different answers, notably spanning theories of genre, posthumanism, gender, sexuality and race, as well as audience reception and spectatorship.

       

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: May 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030315238

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2020

K. Paszkiewicz, S. Rusnak (eds.)Final Girls, Feminism and Popular Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31523-8_1

1. Introduction: Reimagining the Final Girl in the Twenty-First Century

Katarzyna Paszkiewicz¹   and Stacy Rusnak²  

(1)

University of the Balearic Islands, Palma de Mallorca, Spain

(2)

Georgia Gwinnett College, Lawrenceville, GA, USA

Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Stacy Rusnak (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Keywords

Carol J. CloverFinal GirlSlasher filmHorror filmTwenty-first-century popular cultureFeminism

In her 1987 essay, ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,’¹ Carol J. Clover introduced the concept of the Final Girl—the one female character who, while being chased, wounded and cornered by the killer, is forced to endure the trauma of encountering the mutilated bodies of her friends long enough to either be rescued or slaughter the killer herself. Through this term, Clover challenged the simplistic assumption that the pleasures of horror cinema begin and end in sadism of misogynistic men, finding in slasher films a productive space to explore the issues of gender ambiguity and cross-gender identification. However, the Final Girl of the early slasher films, despite her ‘smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters,’ lacked any real potential in terms of feminist politics (1987, 204). This is because, for Clover, the surviving, ‘boyish’ girl (1987, 204) merely stood in for male desires, acting as a source of identification for the predominantly male teenage audience.

In the years following Clover’s essay, scholars took up the figure of the Final Girl as a critical trope to stimulate feminist debate about gendered spectatorship and female empowerment, while mainstream producers of horror-related products appropriated her image in every popular media form. In her new preface to the 2015 edition of Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in Modern Horror Film (Princeton University Press), Clover offers an insightful reflection on this discursive circulation of the Final Girl trope, making reference to the book’s previous covers: the original 1992 Princeton University Press edition, which shows a close-up photo of a psychotic killer, and the 1996 British Film Institute edition, also featuring a close-up, but this time of a terrified woman looking directly at us. As Clover explains in the preface, the tension between these two opposing covers anticipated a tension in the book’s reception more generally in the following decades: the public response turned, for the most part, on the Final Girl. ‘The fate of that trope since then has largely determined, for better or worse, the intellectual and more broadly cultural trajectory of the book itself’ (2015, x), Clover writes, arguing that in the course of history, the Final Girl seems to have ‘hijacked’ the later reflections on slasher films, eclipsing other figures and issues discussed in the book—such as the Final Girl’s victim-hero status, with an emphasis on ‘victim.’ ‘Detached from her low-budget origins and messier meanings, she now circulates in these mostly cleaner and more upscale venues as female avenger, triumphant feminist hero, and the like,’ Clover concludes (2015, x).

Indeed, it could be argued that, rather than a ‘tortured survivor’ (2015, x), the contemporary Final Girl is often understood through the lens of fantasies of empowerment and neoliberal ‘Girl Power’ discourse, the shift that speaks to the complex redefinition of gender roles ‘legitimated’ under postfeminism (Tasker and Negra 2007).² An unconditional glorification of the Final Girl in horror films as an agent of violence raises doubts about the extent to which these images can be considered empowering. Linking the proliferation of these representations with a postfeminist discourse centered on apolitical, individualistic and capitalist celebration of a violent woman, Lisa Coulthard (2007, 173) demonstrates in her analysis of Kill Bill (2003, USA), Tarantino’s take on the rape-revenge film, that rather than being phallicized or masculinized—as Clover states in relation to the Final Girl—the violent action heroine is ‘postfeminized’: ‘The film’s depiction of female violence is entwined with discourses of idealised feminine whiteness, heterosexuality, victimhood, sacrificial purity, maternal devotion, and eroticised, exhibitionistic, sexual availability’ (2007, 158). Several scholars, however, are wary of seeing these new facets of the Final Girl as necessarily depoliticizing, reading them as both symptomatic of, and oppositional to, postfeminist discourse.³ As Martin Fradley (2013) argues, contemporary horror cinema often displays a thematic preoccupation with neoliberal femininity and, at the same time, an increasing disillusionment with the limitations of its individualistic nature.

The aim of this volume is to revisit these debates by examining the significance of Clover’s legacy and its connections to twenty-first-century feminism. We are particularly keen to expand research on the Final Girl trope by complicating the celebratory storylines of the figure à la ‘Girl Power,’ which proliferated in the late 1990s and 2000s, thinking about the ways in which these powerful characters continue to inspire far-reaching audiences, while also responding to the socio-political backdrop of their time. Even if the Final Girl ‘is only a sketch,’ as Clover argues in reference to the current circulation of the trope, we propose to ask: what does this sketch tell us about gender, sexuality, race, ability and shifting modalities of genre? If the proliferation of the Final Girls in the mid-1970s was an effect, as it has been argued,⁴ of discourses on gender during that period, in particular within the women’s movement, then the recent resurgence of the Final Girl across a wide spectrum of popular culture forms—the 2015 films Final Girl (Canada/USA, dir. Tyler Shields) and The Final Girls (USA, dir. Todd Strauss-Schulson); TV’s popular Scream Queens (2015–2016, USA, Fox), which concluded its first season with an episode titled ‘The Final Girl(s)’; Riley Sager’s novel Final Girls (2017), which plays on horror movie themes from Scream (1996, USA, dir. Wes Craven); several videogames⁵ and a handful of board/card games,⁶ just to give a few examples—raises questions about how to rethink this figure in contemporary terms. These recent reformulations of the Final Girl in films, TV, games and literature confirm the pervasiveness and flexibility of the trope, as well as the need to expand discussion of Clover’s framework beyond the traditional ruminations of the slasher subgenre that have been so central to most of the research to date. While the Final Girl continues to materialize in slasher remakes and revisions, often in a highly self-conscious way,⁷ it also circulates in other genres, such as dystopian Young Adult literature or superhero comic books, which refocus critical attention on the trope as a cross-media phenomenon. Even if Clover’s original analysis addressed mainly the dynamics of cinema spectatorship, it is our contention that, given this transmigration of the figure between different genres and modes, as well as the abundance of onscreen and literary material produced since the beginning of the twenty-first century that references, often explicitly, the Final Girl, Clover’s theory equips us with a number of useful tools to think about gender, feminism and popular culture in a wider sense. However, and bearing in mind the mutability of the trope across diverse formats, these tools need to be expanded and reworked.

The texts addressed in this volume provide rich opportunities to redefine the Final Girl figure on many levels, from a reconsideration of the narrative and visual traits that Clover identified in early slashers to the critique of her understanding of horror spectatorship. One of the most contested aspects of Clover’s theory has been her claim that the slasher audience was composed of mostly young male spectators, which mandates that the Final Girl be ‘boyish’ to appeal to these audience members. Clover remarks that in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986, USA, dir. Tobe Hooper), when the Final Girl Strech (Caroline Williams) takes up the chainsaw and kills Chop Top (Bill Moseley), she performs in ‘high drag’ (1987, 217). Her aggressiveness and phallic agency in this moment make her a ‘congenial double for the adolescent male’ (1987, 212). For this reason, the Final Girl is nothing more than ‘an agreed-upon fiction and the male viewer’s use of her as a vehicle for his own sadomasochistic fantasies an act of perhaps timeless dishonesty’ (1987, 214).

Clover’s original model was necessarily limited in scope, as it focused only on a handful of films. Both Richard Nowell and Janet Staiger stress that Clover’s sample size of case study films was simply too small to generalize across the entire subgenre. Researching early slasher films not included in Clover’s essay, Nowell critiques Clover’s description of the Final Girl as boyish, noting that many such characters did possess feminine traits and appeared glamorous on screen. He states that ‘boyish Final Girls were actually closer to the exception than the rule’ (2011, 167), citing Prom Night’s (1980, USA, dir. Paul Lynch) Kim, interpreted by Jamie Lee Curtis, ‘as an ambassador of varnished femininity’ (2011, 167). Staiger, in turn, investigates 31 films, a vastly larger corpus than Clover’s study, and proposes a model for ‘Final Victim.’ In her own analysis, Staiger concludes that women are often victims and heroines, ‘but they are not always Final Girls in the strong sense that Clover implies’ (2015, 222). They can be quite feminine and they learn from boyfriends, fathers and other male characters, who teach them how to dominate the fight against the killer. ‘And they are rewarded not just with survival but also with romance’ (Staiger 2015, 222). Finally, Jeremy Maron prefers the term ‘Final Subject,’ arguing that the value of Clover’s theory to slasher discourse can be expanded if ‘we view the Final Girl as a conceptual figure rather than a particular character with identifiably gendered qualities’ (Maron 2015). Using two case studies, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985, USA, dir. Jack Sholder) and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984, USA, dir. Joseph Zito), Maron illustrates how the non-female main characters ‘transform from abject to subject and operate as the Cloverian Final Girl, destroying (castrating) an emasculated monster’ (Maron 2015). Maron’s use of ‘Final Subject’ is meant to shift the focus away from Clover’s binary gendered relations, broadening the applicability of her theory to the slasher subgenre. However, as Pinedo notices in her chapter included in this collection, this approach risks obscuring the novelty of the fact that women were predominantly cast in this role during the late 1970s and 1980s.

As early as the 1990s, Barbara Creed challenged the notion of the masculinized Final Girl as a source of identification for teenage males. Creed’s contribution to horror studies provided insights into the monstrous-feminine, which comes in various forms in the horror film: ‘the deadly femme castratrice, the castrating mother and the vagina dentata ’ (Creed 1993, 7). Their presence on screen undermines the traditional, essentialist view ‘that the male spectator is almost always situated in an active, sadistic position and the female spectator in a passive, masochistic one’ (1993, 7). Creed contends that in films such as Carrie (1976, USA, dir. Brian De Palma) or I Spit on Your Grave (1978, USA, dir. Meir Zarchi), the castrating female points more to men’s fear of monstrous women than to male fantasies of being subjected to feminine sensations, as Clover stated. Yet, in a similar way to Clover, Creed makes clear that the monstrous-feminine’s construction as an active agent, rather than a passive one, is not enough to render a ‘feminist’ or ‘liberated’ discourse. Thus, for both scholars, the horror film remains centered on the male psyche and male experience and tells us nothing about women’s experience of watching horror.

The Final Girl’s breathtaking malleability urges us to rethink Clover’s and Creed’s theories, while at the same time it demonstrates their continued relevance. This is illustrated, for example, by the recent surge in what has been dubbed ‘the new horror of motherhood,’⁸ with some scholars suggesting that films like Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014, Australia) or, more recently, Hereditary (2018, USA, dir. Ari Aster), are populated not with Final Girls but with Final Moms. In a similar way to Clover’s trope, the Final Mom—the maternal figure that fights the monstrous creatures, which often stand in for her anxieties regarding motherhood—is the last one to survive. As Amanda Greer argues, ‘unlike the traditional slasher films’ masculinized modes of identification, in these Final Mom films we are encouraged to identify solely with the maternal figure, opening the genre to the possibility of a purely feminized experience of identification’ (2017, 9).

The vibrant horror film scholarship, especially the critical strands drawing on queer theory, demonstrates that slasher and horror media offer a wide variety of possibilities for rethinking the questions of representation and spectatorship. In Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters Jack Halberstam considers that ‘fear and monstrosity are historically specific forms rather than psychological universals’ (1995, 24). In his analysis of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Halberstam reads Stretch, the tomboy Final Girl, as a representation of gender that splatters, meaning, that exceeds human categories, transforming into ‘something messier than male or female’ (1995, 143). This way, Halberstam challenges Clover’s notion of the Final Girl as ‘boyish,’ arguing that this model ‘remains caught in a gender lock’ (1995, 143): it re-establishes normative gender positions in relation to fear and violence, leaving little space for addressing identification between female audiences and the aggressor.

In addition to queer readings of the Final Girl, we are witnessing a renewed attention to representations of race in the horror genre.⁹ There is still much work that needs to be done on how the focus on racialized identities and discourses in contemporary horror cinema can help us think about the ways in which race and racism are experienced and negotiated by horror audience members that are more diverse than Clover’s originally conceptualized white male majority. Even if race in horror has been explored to some extent, most scholarship centers on representations of black masculinity on screen and/or the experiences of black, male viewers. Kinitra D. Brooks’ reading of zombie films through the lens of bell hook’s concept of the oppositional gaze is an example of an analysis that goes beyond ‘simplistic explorations of whiteness and masculinity’ in horror cinema (2014, 461). She contends that the figure of the Final Girl is problematic when racially coded as black because the masculinization of the Final Girl extended to a woman of color becomes pejorative. Her displays of strength, aggressiveness and violence are considered threatening instead of ‘positive and plucky’ (2014, 464), as is the case when the Final Girl is racially coded as white. As Joanne Hollows observes: ‘White middle-class femininity has not only been privileged over other forms of feminine identities, but only gets its meaning through its difference to forms of feminine identity which have been labelled as deviant or dangerous, identities which have usually been identified with black and white working-class women’ (2000, 31). Black women on screen tend to be reduced to stereotypes that dehumanize them and construct them as monstrous Others: the angry black woman, the voodoo priestess, the oversexualized Jezebel. Yet, Brooks asks viewers to read against these negative stereotypes and to acknowledge multifaceted Final Girls such as Selena from Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002, UK) and Michonne from Robert Kirkman’s graphic novel series The Walking Dead (2003–2019).

While the mainstream film and television industries continue to receive criticism regarding their failure to include more realistic representations of diversity, there have been a handful of noteworthy films that have directly addressed issues of race through the slasher formula and the Final Girl trope, often to comment on racism in America. This cycle of films was prompted by Jordan Peele’s Oscar-nominated Get Out (2017, USA/Japan), which renovated Clover’s model by replacing the conventional Final Girl with the final black male character, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), and by locating the horrors of racism in white suburbia. A year later, James McTeigue directed the crime drama Breaking In (2018, USA/Japan) about a black, middle-class mother who battles a team of criminals when they invade her childhood home, which she happens to be selling after the death of her father. While not a slasher film, the main character, Shaun (Gabrielle Union), does possess characteristics of the Final Girl, as she cleverly outwits the team of thieves and battles them to save her children when the family is taken hostage. In a similar vein, Deon Taylor’s 2018 film Traffik (USA) also places a black female character, Christine (Priscilla Quintana), in the Final Girl’s role, as she is forced to ward off a violent group of sex traffickers when she inadvertently winds up with one of their victims’ cellphones. Christine survives because of her shrewd intelligence, manages to maim or kill several of the attackers, saves her best friend and exposes the small town’s racketeering. Finally, Peele again showed his predilection for the horror genre in his 2019 film Us (USA/Japan/China), which stages an African American Final Girl, who is not what she seems on the surface. She slays the monster in the end, saving her family, but in a way, she loses part of herself. Her ambiguity evokes W.E.B Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness,¹⁰ reflecting the underlying tensions of black identity in America.

These examples, which borrow from the slasher film, push the boundaries of the Final Girl trope as a way to bring awareness of racism to the screen and demonstrate the horror film’s potential for ideological renewal and reinvention, while posing questions about the resilience and versatility of Clover’s model. The need for such analysis is of particular relevance because horror studies in general, and feminist horror studies in particular, have often overlooked the importance of highlighting the multiple intersections of race and gender. For example, it is particularly striking how the Final Girl’s whiteness has remained almost unattended in the now-voluminous scholarship on the slasher film. This is addressed, for instance, in the article by Lucia Palmer on Undocumented (2010, USA, dir. Chris Peckover), read in the context of post-9/11 anxieties surrounding the penetration of national borders and anti-immigration rhetoric. Palmer demonstrates how the film unequivocally reaffirms whiteness as the norm for female empowerment, suggesting that ‘it is common sense for the white Final Girl to be the one who embodies feminist empowerment while the bodies of brown women are victimized’ (2017, 27).¹¹ This study shows that, as Brigid Cherry also noted in reference to horror cinema, ‘any one factor of identity cannot be analyzed without considering others: gendered identities can be strongly linked to class or racial identity, for example, and the one cannot be discussed without considering the other’ (2009, 176). Several of the chapters in this anthology critically investigate the ways in which race, class and gender intersect, bringing much needed attention to the issues frequently underrepresented within the studies on the horror genre.¹²

As a whole, this collection is intended to center on the most recent examples of the Final Girl trope in order to redefine or expand its parameters as a theoretical concept. Since its main aim is to examine the reimagining of the Final Girl in the twenty-first century, we offer close textual readings of a number of popular fictions across a variety of genres, highlighting narrative construction and/or mise-en-scène and, especially in the last section, how these relate to film spectatorship. Our wish is to address these issues across a non-binary spectrum to broaden Clover’s framework and reflect a more inclusive approach to the twenty-first century Final Girl(s). We are particularly interested in feminist, queer and critical race theory approaches that make use of Clover’s concepts beyond psychoanalytic tools and allow for a consideration of the Final Girl across a wide spectrum of texts: from films such as High Tension (2003, France/Italy/Romania, dir. Alexandre Aja), Twilight (2008, USA, dir. Catherine Hardwicke), It Follows (2014, USA, dir. David Robert Mitchell), The Witch (2015, UK/Canada/USA, dir. Robert Eggers), The Final Girls and Get Out , the Resident Evil franchise (2002–2016), TV series Scream (2015–present, USA, Netflix) and Scream Queens , literary works such as The Hunger Games trilogy, The Windup Girl (Bacigalupi 2010), The Girl with All the Gifts (Carey 2014) and the comic book Ms. Marvel (Willow 2014–present). This is, obviously, not an exhaustive, nor the most representative, account of the twenty-first-century manifestations of the Final Girl trope, and we have selected some areas of debate, some cultural forms and some geographical locations, over others. Our focus on primarily US texts—although we do include an instance of the horror film associated with the New French Extremity cinema, High Tension ¹³—is dictated by the historical prominence of the slasher formula in this cultural context. However, we are convinced that broadening the research to the use of the trope in a variety of non-US cultural products and its transmigration between national cultures in and beyond dominant industries is vital for horror studies. Another fruitful way of interrogating the relevance of Clover’s Final Girl today would be to discuss specific contextualized reception frameworks, for example a range of horror fan cultures and cult film audiences. While occasional references are made to online forums, fan sites and social media posts, the field of Reception Studies remains outside of the scope of this volume.¹⁴ With the intention of recognizing the value of exploring the ways in which twenty-first-century popular culture has reconceptualized Clover’s model of the Final Girl, we have decided to focus on texts that are considered ‘popular,’¹⁵ that is, enjoyed or consumed by large numbers of people, and which have had discursive visibility in current debates on feminism. This is why we have prioritized TV, films and literature over more ‘niche’ media such as videogames and board games, incorporating case studies that might not initially appear to be particularly obvious candidates for this volume, as they do not tend to be associated with the Final Girl, such as The Hunger Games novels, Twilight films or Ms. Marvel . However, as the chapters in this collection demonstrate, tracing, even if only selectively, the differences and continuities between 1970s and 1980s manifestations of the slasher heroine and the more recent representations of female protagonists across genres opens up a space to rethink the negotiated meanings of gender, politics and power and allows for assessing how these stories contribute to remaking cultural imaginaries.

Our central premise is that popular culture constitutes a public arena in which different ideologies and practices become visible. This is not to suggest that the texts under discussion in this volume reflect identities as they ‘really exist’ in the social world¹⁶; rather we propose to explore the cultural imaginaries through which the Final Girl emerges, mostly in the USA and to some extent in European contexts, as a set of features across a wide range of genres and modes, which in turn circulate these cultural imaginaries back into the social sphere. The analyses are informed by Joanne Hollows’ understanding of popular culture, who, drawing on Stuart Hall, defines it ‘as a site of struggle, a place where conflicts between dominant and subordinate groups are played out, and distinctions between the cultures of these groups are continually constructed and reconstructed’ (2000, 27). Such an approach has much to offer feminism, as it ‘not only forces us to think about how gendered identities are both produced by, and produced in, specific power relations but also how gendered identities (within, and between, historical contexts) are cross-cut by other forms of cultural identity which are themselves structured by relations of power’ (2000, 31). In looking at a broad spectrum of texts, we attempt to recognize these tensions, as well as underscoring how popular culture offers possibilities for intervention through ideological and aesthetic renewal, re-inflection and contestation. As Kathleen Rowe Karlyn puts it: ‘popular culture is a natural site of identity-formation and empowerment, providing an abundant storehouse of images and narratives valuable less as a means of representing reality than as motifs available for contesting, rewriting and recoding’ (2011, 33–34).

Feminism and the (Final) Girl Power

Against the comprehension of the Final Girl as an empowered, feminist heroine who turns the knife on the killer—an interpretative framework that has largely determined the reception of Men, Women and Chain Saws—Clover states in the first edition of her book: ‘to applaud the Final Girl as a feminist development […] is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking’ (1992, 53). Two decades later, while still critical of the overly enthusiastic feminist readings of the trope, Clover acknowledges that these accounts are not entirely wrong—the slasher’s early Final Girl ‘does look something like a female hero,’ an aftermath of ‘the powerful discourses on gender during that era, above all the women’s movement’ (2015, x).

The political implications of the Final Girl for feminism deserve closer examination, especially considering ‘the real-life sex/gender transformations in the intervening decades’ (Clover 2015, xii), as well as, we might add, the complex shifts within feminism itself. However, rather than constructing a narrative of ‘progress’—either in terms of feminism or the evolution of the trope—in which the old mistakes are ‘corrected,’ we want to emphasize ‘the continuities between feminisms’ pasts and presents,’ which are important, as Hollows reminds us, because ‘the mistakes of the past that have been assumed to be corrected often reappear in another guise’ (Hollows 2000, 34). In particular, it is worth looking in more detail at the 1990s conjunction between feminism, popular culture and the teen horror cycle that emerged during that period—often dismissed by film criticism as ‘a Hollywoodized iteration of the beloved slasher subgenre of the 1970s and 1980s horror,’ as Alexandra West (2018) has recently argued.¹⁷ The context in which these films were released is significant, as neatly summarized by West:

By the end of 1991, Nirvana’s rallying rock anthem ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was dominating popular music and at the same time the Riot Grrrl movement was starting to spread farther than the boundaries of its city of origin, Olympia, Washington. The bands that comprised the Riot Grrrl scene called out rape, abuse and assault in their songs and at their shows and attempted to make feminism as punk rock as it felt at the time. Third Wave feminism was coined by Rebecca Walker in Ms. Magazine after the Anita Hill hearings in Washington. Rodney King’s beating by police and the guilty officers’ subsequent acquittal, even though the beating was caught on tape, incited the Los Angeles riots and forced America to realize that even after the Civil Rights movements, America was not a post-race society as so many liked to claim. […] The notions of survival in the face of trauma, fear and violence were part of the national conversation. (2018, 6–7)

In her study of this new slasher formula, West argues that films like I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997, USA, dir. Jim Gillespie), Urban Legend (1998, USA/Canada, dir. Jamie Blanks), Halloween: H20 (1998, USA, dir. Steve Miner), Cherry Falls (2000, USA, dir. Geoffrey Wright) and the now iconic Scream saga (1996–2011, USA, dir. Wes Craven), differ significantly from what came before. The Final Girls in these films debuted in the cultural climate of the third wave of feminism, the alternative culture of the 1990s and the more mainstream ‘Girl Power’ rhetoric, all of which paved the way for a shift in focus toward female characters and their survival. West recognizes that ‘for all that 1990s Teen Horror did for some young women, it failed on numerous levels to include those who were not white cis hetero middle class female (and occasional male) heroes’ (2018, 170). Nevertheless, she insists on the films’ fascinating intersection of popular culture and third wave feminism, as they often stage ‘the struggle of a young woman to control her own narrative in the face of misogynist forces’ (2018, 69).

Already in the early 2000s, Rowe Karlyn makes similar arguments on the Scream films,¹⁸ situating them within the larger context of girl culture, in particular, the wave of movies and TV shows targeted to teen female viewers, such as teenflick romances that followed the release of Clueless (1997, USA, dir. Amy Heckerling), TV hits including Felicity (1998–2002, USA, The WB Television Network), Dawnson’s Creek (1998–2003, USA, The WB Television Network) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003, USA, The WB Television Network/United Paramount Network), as well as the immensely popular, but disparaged by both mainstream and feminist critics, girl band the Spice Girls. These new images surfacing in mass media in the late 1990s ‘chang[ed] the face of popular culture in a decidedly more youthful and feminine direction’ (2011, 5).

Rowe Karlyn maps out the cultural landscape from which the convergence of popular culture and the third wave of feminism emerged, along with the attendant representations of female empowerment, paying attention to both their potentialities and limitations. For example, while pointing to the new Final Girl’s strength and resourcefulness and an ultimate victory over the psychopath, Rowe Karlyn does not underemphasize her fear, pain and vulnerability. If Clover was interested in looking at how the early slasher films offered ‘variant imaginings of what it is, or might be, like to be a woman—[…] to be vulnerable to and endure male violence, to be sexually violated,’ arguing that ‘at least some male audiences were willing to make-believe these sensations’ (2015, 13), Rowe Karlyn pushes this idea further, asking what the Final Girl means specifically for the female viewer. Thus, her essay underlines what might be considered one of the key aspects in contemplating the contemporary permutations of the Final Girl: the slasher film’s gendered address.

Indeed, although Clover’s feminist reading of the slasher film called into question traditional understandings of film identification, offering a productive model of the fluidity of cross-gender identification with the Final Girl, it assumed that the slasher audience was mostly male (1992, 6–7).¹⁹ This assertion has been revised by a number of scholars. In Recreational Terror Isabel Pinedo reclaims the Final Girl as a figure of female agency and a potential source of female viewing pleasures, showing how an ongoing overemphasis on the masculinization of female characters in horror films runs the risk of inscribing the genre within ‘a male-dominated discourse where power is coded as masculine, even when embodied in biological females’ (1997, 81–82). On the other hand, in his analysis of the marketing strategies for the 1970s teen slasher cycle, Richard Nowell challenges the idea that these films were advertised primarily toward young men, arguing that the films’ portrayal of ‘the emotional, social, and psychological pressures of burgeoning heterosexuality’ was seen as particularly appealing to a young female demographic (2011, 210). He notes that representations of progressively stronger, heroic and more glamorous female characters, as well