The Final Girls (2015)

Imagine if Field of Dreams was about slasher films rather than baseball, and that it explored the relationship between a mother and daughter rather than a father and son, and you'd have The Final Girls. This 2015 horror-comedy tells the story of a college-aged woman, played by Taissa Farmiga, who has tragically lost her mother, played by Malin Akerman. Akerman's character is a struggling actor remembered only for her involvement in a campy 80s slasher, Camp Bloodbath, in which she played the "shy girl" who loses her virginity and then, like clockwork, gets murdered by the masked antagonist. In Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner's character builds a baseball field in a cornfield and, by way of some kind of unspecified magic, he gets to meet long-deceased members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox and, eventually, his estranged father, all of whom step out from the stalks of corn. In The Final Girls, Taissa Farmiga's character and her friends, by way of some kind of unspecified magic, get to step into Camp Bloodbath through a rent in a movie screen. They all become participants in Camp Bloodbath and, as such, Farmiga's character must encounter her deceased mother. All at once, the merger of 80s slasher silliness and overdetermined 2010s meta-horror motif-spotting blend to create a poignant exploration of the relationship between children and prematurely deceased parents. When Farmiga's character watches her mother meet her fate in the film-within-the-film, the scene is wrenchingly bittersweet, a strange synthesis of maternal nostalgia and revulsion. Your reviewer (a man who watches movies like Nightmares in a Damaged Brain and Cannibal Holocaust for relaxation purposes) wept unabashedly, something a film hadn't reduced him to since Field of Dreams. For that reason, and for the beautiful, unspecified magic under which it operates, The Final Girls gets the highest of recommendations.

As is obvious from its title, the film goes all in on the "Final Girl" tautology brought forth by a number of feminist critics of slasher films. This analytical framework, asserted most notably by Carol Clover, suggests that most or all slashers are based on a formula dictating that any character who drinks, does drugs, or, most importantly, has sex, will be killed by the antagonist, and, as a corollary, only the girl who has engaged in none of these acts will survive. I hope I am being redundant when I say that this analytical framework is overdetermined. Moreover, it rarely bears out when watching the actual early-80s slasher cycle films. As Michael Koven has averred in his book Film, Folklore and Urban Legends, Friday the 13th's characters are "neither chaste nor rampantly sexual." Indeed, the only people who die after intimate encounters are the nameless counsellors from the pre-credit sequence, and, later on, Kevin Bacon's character and his female companion. Moreover, Friday the 13th's "Final Girl" Alice participates in a game of strip Monopoly and even takes a toke from a joint while doing so, but nonetheless survives. The "Final Girl," then, is an ideal type, and while the fictional Camp Bloodbath may doggedly follow such a model, it appears in few if any actual slashers. I mention this not as a point of critique against The Final Girls, but rather as a call for reflection and re-evaluation among film scholars and critics. The inclusion of this sex = death axiom is not to the detriment of The Final Girls. Instead, The Final Girls can be read as a send-up of not just 80s slashers, but also of frighteningly predictable scholarly and critical categories for analyzing this subgenre.