‘Ever since I was a little boy, I’ve dreamed of being the final girl...’
Despite being too sides of the same coin, horror and comedy are often difficult to combine. What scares us and what makes us laugh, are often so subjective, so unexplainable, and so disparate, that rolling the dice on both disciplines in one film feels like a hiding to nothing. That being said, when it’s done right (Evil Dead II, Shaun of the Dead, An American Werewolf in London), the results can be stunning. The Final Girls is not in the same league as the aforementioned, but it is a carefully crafted love letter to a subgenre that is easy to dismiss…
The plot is the kind of high-concept, ghost-train-ride story that you only see in genre movies. Following the tragic death of her mother, Amanda (Malin Åkerman), in a car crash, Max (Taissa Farmiga) finds herself drifting aimlessly through life in search of something to ease the pain. Her mother was a working actress who couldn’t shake a role that she played in a horror movie two decades before, and when Max is invited to a screening of her mother’s film (Camp Bloodbath) by super fan, Duncan (Thomas Middleditch), she decides to give it a try. After a freak accident, Max, along with Duncan; his step sister, Gertie (Alia Shawkat); Max’s potential love interest, Chris (Alexander Ludwig); and his ex-girlfriend, Vicki (Nina Dobrev); somehow find themselves living in the world of Camp Bloodbath, thus reuniting Max with her dead mother (kinda).
I should begin by stating that there hasn’t been an official Friday the 13th movie since 2009 (!), and yet in that time, The Cabin in the Woods (2011), this film (2015) and In a Violent Nature (2024) could all easily have been retconned into the franchise. Frustrating. Director Todd Strauss-Schulson, working from a screenplay by writing duo M. A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller, clearly understands the world of the teen slasher, and everyone has great fun in lampooning it here. You have to love something to be able to parody it so successfully, and my one criticism is that The Final Girls could afford to be a little more scathing in the shots that it takes at the Friday the 13th franchise (and at the slasher subgenre in general).
The Final Girls will be catnip for any horror nerds out there, and any Jason Vorhees devotees will find that it fills the grave-shaped hole left by the total absence of that franchise from our screens for 15 goddamn years. Sure, it’s a little too gentle, but it’s also a lot of fun.
