Not in My Movie
Revisiting horror’s first real “Final Girl”.
The Scream franchise never gets stale for me.
In fact, if Ghostface were to call me up on the phone, I would probably say it’s one of my favorite scary movies.
No matter how many times I watch them, I’m still just as shocked, scared, impressed, and giddy as the first time. Hell, Rose McGowan’s Tatum inspired the title of this blog! They never fail to disappoint. In my opinion, they serve as a bridge forever connecting old and new horror.
So It’s fitting then that Scream’s Final Girl, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) is also a bridge between the trope’s original victim-hero persona and the girl-powerhouse she is today.
In 1992, Carol Clover released Men, Women, and Chainsaws. This book on horror and gender soon gave us the Final Girl, a trope that would become a genre staple. With her tomboyish good looks and sexual purity, the Final Girl character served as an audience stand-in, someone whose fear and pain was empathetic and relatable.
By virtue of gender, she also became a misguided feminist icon.
Not long after the book’s release, critics and filmmakers alike took the phrase at face value for their own purposes. Suddenly, it seemed that every horror movie with a female protagonist was being lauded as a “feminist” film. Every movie pre-Chainsaws was retroactively given a shiny “girl power” button. Even today, the main female character in a scary movie is scrutinized as an ambassador for her gender.
Unsurprisingly, slashers are about the slasher, not the victim. Our girl survives, yes, but as Clover puts it, she’s more of a “victim-hero” with emphasis on the “victim” than she is a feminist hero.
Here’s the thing. Having a female protagonist does not make your movie feminist, in the same way that having a protagonist of color does not address racial issues. Meaning is created when the story’s content relates — through explicit or implicit means — to that aspect of their identity.
If anything, most of our beloved Final Girls exist to give us a safe, warm and fuzzy feeling when we leave the theater. We can root for her when she’s cornered and mourn with her when she stumbles across her friend’s corpse. We can breathe a sigh of relief when she escapes. She’s us, we’re her, and let’s face it: the average person isn’t all that interesting.
So inevitably where she goes, Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome trope follows.
Just as its name might suggest, SSDS is when our protagonist of the first film is unceremoniously killed off — or just disappears — in a subsequent installment.
Sally Hardesty (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) ends up in a coma. Nancy Thompson (Nightmare on Elm Street), by far our most “resourceful” Final Girl, disappears only to get killed in the third film. Even Laurie Strode (Halloween) dies in a car accident. Then that’s retconned and she’s murdered by Michael. Then that’s retconned and she’s just fine.
The mere invention of this trope undercuts whatever feminist intentions this Final Girl character serves to portray. Unsurprisingly, slashers are about the slasher, not the victim. Our girl survives, yes, but as Clover puts it, she’s more of a “victim-hero” with emphasis on the “victim” than she is a feminist hero. She’s a trauma survivor and, if the sequels are anything to go by, she doesn’t survive for long.
Four years after …Chainsaws, Wes Craven’s Scream comes out. With Sidney, audiences received both the victim-hero of Clover’s writings and the feminist Final Girl of their dreams.
Yes, the dialogue around the Scream franchise has been done to death. From the meta-readings to the queer subtext to the ratings of Gale Weather’s (Courtney Cox) hairstyles, every inch of these films have been analyzed, dissected, and returned to time and time again.
Despite this, the hype has not died down. With a new film set to come out in 2022, it’s clear that audiences haven’t gotten enough of Sidney and Ghostface. It’s also the 25-year anniversary of the original Scream this year. With that in mind, we figured it was time to visit Woodsboro once again.
It’s typical for the Final Girl to end her film traumatized. Sidney starts the franchise with that dubious honor. From there on out, it’s a never-ending parade of misery for her. With a murderous boyfriend, secret sibling, and a dead mother with a mysterious past, she’s one bad case of amnesia away from starring in a telenovela.
For Sidney, her mother’s legacy is a killer that she can’t outrun.
Like her predecessors, Sidney is doomed to lose her allies. Star in a movie alongside her and you’re probably dead. Try to romance her and she’ll be rightfully suspicious.
That’s where Scream diverges from usual slasher fare. Unlike the previous franchises that Clover cites in her work, this series isn’t about our killer. It’s about Sidney.
Yes, our Ghostface killers menace the cast, but it’s always their relationship to her that causes the carnage. She’s not another young woman in the wrong place at the wrong time. For the first time, our killers have a — mostly — personal beef with our Final Girl.
More accurately, they have one with her long-dead mother, Maureen.
Scream’s carefree nature hides a darker message about intergenerational trauma. Maureen’s rape leads to an unwanted pregnancy, a ruined movie career, and a loss of self-worth. Her subsequent promiscuity sets the entire franchise in motion, and it is her specter that truly haunts the characters throughout the films, none more so than her daughter.
For Sidney, her mother’s legacy is a killer that she can’t outrun. As her daughter, she’s forced to reconcile her idealized perception of her mom with the woman who inadvertently ruined her life. She loves her dearly, but can’t escape the consequences of her decisions.
This is a rich story previously denied to our garden variety “victim-hero” present in Clover’s …Chainsaws. While Sidney checks a lot of our faux-feminist Final Girl boxes, she’s given a gift that also makes her a true horror Final Girl: she has agency. The events of the films don’t just happen to her. She faces them head-on.
Better still, the killers hunting her don’t even matter in the long run. They all meet their (alleged) and permanent end in each film. The people behind the mask die, but Ghostface always comes back. They’re not supernatural. They’re not even important. What they represent — the inescapability of trauma — is the real killer. If you give into it, it’ll kill you.
Clover’s Final Girls are victims of their circumstances. They don’t survive long enough for us to see the person they could become after their trauma. While it’s impossible to ignore …Chainsaws and its contribution to horror, it’s imperative that we separate Clover’s intentions from the reality.
She wanted to call out the genre’s obsession with making women suffer. The Final Girl as Clover wrote her was just the “tough girl” stereotype covered in her friend’s blood. Her trauma made her stronger, and she was put through it to better resonate with male audiences. After all, surviving is the most “manly” thing you can do.
People ignored that and cherry-picked a catchy phrase from her book.
Luckily for the horror genre, Scream came along to right that wrong.
As I’ve gotten older, Scream has endured as one of my favorite film franchises. It’s fun to revisit and notice new things each time, like Billy’s intense “would-you-please-shut-up” stare at Stu when he starts talking about the murders. How these two weren’t immediately caught is beyond me.
Best of all, it’s nice to watch it and realize that I’m looking down the crossroads of the horror genre.
There would be no true, modern Final Girl without Sidney Prescott. As the only living one free of retcons, she bears a privileged mantle on her shoulders. She dragged the trope kicking and screaming into the future and away from lip-service feminism. I can only hope that Scream 5 continues that mold-breaking tradition.
Screams 1–3 are currently available on HBO Max.
