‘Just Keep Looking Forward or We’ll Be Stuck Here Forever’: The Final Girls, Spectatorial Address and Transformations of the Slasher Form

Abstract

This chapter offers a reflection on the horror film’s spectatorial address through an analysis of Todd Strauss-Schulson’s The Final Girls (2015). In particular, it shows how the film’s self-referentiality and metagenericity help destabilize horror’s assumed gendered address, bridging ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ cinematic codes, as they have traditionally been perceived by film criticism. By establishing intertextual dialogue with Wes Craven’s Scream franchise, the chapter focuses on two particular aspects: the place of motherhood in the horror film and a reconsideration of the Final Girl trope through the affective politics set up by the hybridized conventions of the slasher form and maternal melodrama. Paszkiewicz concludes that what might be considered new in the film-female friendship, a collaborative front against the patriarchy, self-referentiality interwoven with the emotional intensity and affect-is already present in the horror genre.