Who Are We? Queering the Final Girl in Alexandre Aja’s High Tension

Abstract

Willoughby explores contemporary shifts in Carol J. Clover’s model of the Final Girl by examining a film of the New French Extremity that revises this horror trope. High Tension presents viewers with a protagonist who has repressed her homosexual desire and combines the characteristics of both the Final Girl and the killer. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Aja’s film encourages audience identification with a character later revealed to be capable of terrifying acts. In this chapter, Willoughby argues that by placing the audience in a queer subject position, High Tension moves away from the slasher’s binary construction of sexuality in regards to the killer and the Final Girl and progressively asks the audience to identify-and perhaps even empathize-with a queer character.