Grady Hendrix’s The Final Girls Support Group answers the question, “if horror movies were real, what happens after?” The novel deals with a support group for survivors of murder sprees, each traumatized by the things they saw and had to do in order to survive. Much like the slasher films we are familiar with, all of these survivors were young women— ‘final girls’— but over a decade has passed since each of them were faced with death.
Lynette Tarkington has become paranoid and lives in constant fear, knowing that an attack could come from anyone, at any moment. Her apartment has become a fortress— its location unknown to all but one other person in case of dire emergencies. Aside from the other women in the support group, she does not interact with or seek out any kind of relationship with anyone else. When other women in the group start being targeted, Lynette uncovers a conspiracy against them and has to uncover the mystery assailant while being suspected herself. In order to save herself and her friends, she will have to learn how to trust again, and face off against her worst fear which took everything from her as a young girl.
In Hendrix’s universe, slasher movies still exist as normal, but are dramatic retellings of real tragedies these women went through. Although they have to change the names of the film franchises in the novel for rights purposes, these women had to live through the events of tales such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, and Halloween. In the aftermath, they all became minor celebrities as well as objects of interest for many stalkers and brooding psychopaths after their stories were turned into movies. The group of women represents a great diversity of both demographics and coping mechanisms ranging from drugs to obsessive philanthropy.
At its core, Final Girls is about how society views violence against women, as well as the virtues of survivors. The heavy-handedness with which the novel discusses how real life tragedies are turned into blockbuster entertainment serves to point out that so much of the horror genre is about the acceptability of torturing fictional women for entertainment. One of the most important aspects of the final girl in slasher films is what they represent in accepted values. The last survivor of any slasher film is almost guaranteed to be a young woman who has never had premarital sex, drank, smoked pot, or acted aggressively toward other characters. The subliminal messaging instills in young women that purity and abstinence are defenses against evil. In Final Girls, the virtues of the survivors are explored years down the line. One turns to drugs to cope with the survivor’s guilt and trauma, another spends her time only with her wife in their secluded ranch, holding on to the one good relationship she has, while another uses all of the money she earned from movie deals to set up a retreat for other survivors of similar violence. We are able to see that in real life, women who survive such horrors are not merely caricatures of purity, but complex individuals who can choose to process in a number of different ways. It points the finger at classic horror films, and why they never choose to represent women in this realistic way.
It is important to note that even to the other Final Girls, Lynette is seen as ‘crazy’ and ‘overreacting’, despite sharing similar traumatic experiences. It is meant to make the reader empathize with how survivors, particularly women, are often dismissed as “not letting go” of trauma and allowing it to “overtake their lives”. Although this extreme caution ends up saving Lynette’s life, the other characters’ dismissal of her is correctly portrayed as insensitive and harmful.
Hendrix’s novel does an excellent job bridging the fun, gripping tone of casual slasher films with a serious analysis of their implications on society and its treatment of women onscreen and off. It is a rare example of a true thriller novel that tries to make a point, and pulls it off wonderfully. There is not going to be a sequel, but a miniseries has been teased and Hendrix’s other work will satisfy fans of Final Girls.