The Final Girl Support Group

“We’re the women who kept fighting back no matter how much it hurt, who jumped out of that third-story window, who dragged ourselves up onto that roof when our bodies were screaming for us to roll over and die. Once we start something, it’s hard for us to stop.”

Final Girls are similar to each other in several ways. They have resilience and strength in situations where others might give up. This reference to Julia’s and Marilyn’s Final Girl stories foreshadows that Lynnette will become a new kind of Final Girl by the end of the novel.

“Men don’t have to pay attention the way we do. Men die because they make mistakes. Women? We die because we’re female.”

This quote is taken from Carol J. Clover’s essay “Her Body, Himself,” which provides subtext throughout the novel for the Final Girl trope. Clover notes that in slasher films, boys die because they have sex with a girl demonized as promiscuous or because they unwittingly get in the killer’s way. Girls, however, die for being female because killers feel aroused by them, are reminded of their mothers, or because they express sexual desire.

“Plenty of women survive violence, but what makes those of us in group our own toxic little category of Final Girls is that we killed our monsters, or we thought we did, and then it happened to us again.”

The Final Girl trope is explored throughout the novel. For Final Girls, unlike for other survivors of violence, the monsters always come back. The monsters survive efforts to kill them, to rise again and again in repeated events that mirror horror movie sequels. Fear of this aspect of being a Final Girl has reduced Lynnette’s life to surviving rather than flourishing.