There Are No Rules of Horror Movies
If you want to survive a slasher, you'd better know how they actually work
In the opening scene of Scream, Casey Becker, played by Drew Barrymore, receives a call from one of the killers. He’s kidnapped her boyfriend and is threatening to kill them both - unless she can answer a series of trivia questions about scary movies. Casey’s a horror movie buff; this should be easy for her. She can do it. She can save her boyfriend.
‘Who is the killer in the first Friday the 13th?’ The voice on the phone asks. Casey answers ‘Jason’; Ghostface kills her boyfriend, and then her.
Later on, the character Randy will lay out a set of rules for surviving horror movies as he and a group of teens watch Halloween. Laurie Strode is a virgin - that’s why she survives when her friends die. You can’t drink or do drugs - the sin factor. And never say you’ll be right back - because you won’t.
From an in-universe perspective, of course, these rules don’t really make sense. There’s nothing about Scream or Halloween to suggest that in them, like Discworld, narrative tropes act as the laws of nature. Instead, the rules that Randy lays out are how the film’s creators - in this case, Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson - are critiquing the genre. These are the tropes they find tired, and these are the tropes they plan to subvert. Sidney loses her virginity and lives. Almost every character drinks and it has no impact on whether they make it through the film. Stu says he’ll be right back - and he’s one of the killers.
Scream was not the first attempt to codify a set of rules for horror movies, nor was it the last to attempt to subvert them. Joss Whedon has had a couple goes at it: Buffy was “the little blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie. The idea…was to subvert that idea and create someone who was a hero where she had always been a victim.” Whedon would continue this thread with his 2012 film The Cabin in the Woods. The Ancient Ones of that film demand sacrifices, each fitting a certain archetype. The first victim is titled “The Whore”; Jules, who takes that role, dyes her hair blonde and in the process literally makes herself stupider, as her hair dye was laced with chemicals by the Facility. The final victim is called “the Virgin,” an allusion to the physical purity of horror movie heroines - in popular lingo, the final girl. It doesn’t matter if she dies or not - only that she suffers. And of course - she’s a brunette.
Laurie Strode, though - she’s a blonde. She smokes pot, too, though she is clearly less experienced with it than her friends. Annie of the first Friday the Thirteenth is a blonde as well - and she drinks and plays a game of strip Monopoly with her fellow counselors. It’s only by chance, not by choice, that she doesn’t end up undressing. Jess of Black Christmas might be the first final girl - and not only does she have a boyfriend, she’s sexually active, as evidenced by her pregnancy, which she plans on terminating. Occasionally, the main survivor isn’t a girl at all, as evidenced by Tommy Jarvis, Andy Barclay, and Jesse Walsh of Friday the Thirteenth, Child’s Play, and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The question this all avoids - what is a final girl, exactly? The term was coined in Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws, as part of her understanding of what she calls “the female victim-hero” who suffers in the first part of the film only to get some sort of triumph or revenge on her victimizer(s) in the second. The final girl is the slasher’s iteration of the female victim-hero; other genres, like the rape/revenge movie have their own versions of the archetype. Jennifer of I Spit On Your Grave and Carrie of Carrie aren’t final girls - both of them are responsible for all or most of the deaths in their movies - but they are female victim-heroes.
The final girl, embedded within Clover’s female victim-hero and her wider reading of horror movies, is her reparative reading of the genre. As she notes, most criticism of horror movies before the publication of Men, Women and Chainsaws was what Eve Sedgwick describes as “paranoid readings.” The assumption was that the male viewer of the horror movie enjoyed the suffering of the genre’s mostly female victims and identified with the slasher as he killed them; the only pleasure that could be gained from watching horror movies was sadistic in nature. But Clover posited that the pleasure of horror was actually masochistic - that its mostly male audience identified with the female victim-hero as she overcame her victimizer, whose gaze was always unsteady, who was usually degendered and childlike, and who was almost always defeated. Low horror plays with gender and critiques it - to survive those movies, women must become masculine and men feminine. Clover’s paranoid gaze is reserved instead for mainstream recuperations of horror like The Accused, in which the victim successfully finds justice in the legal system - after, as Clover points out, her story is confirmed by a male witness.
And the final girl is descriptive, not prescriptive. A slasher can feature a male protagonist, like Jesse Walsh or Tommy Jarvis, without falling out of the genre. And it’s specifically a trope of slasher movies, not horror movies in general. In the occult movies that Clover examines, the primary character who must overcome some supernatural force is usually a man. A movie like An American Werewolf in London isn’t subverting a trope by having its central character be a male - it’s not a slasher, so the trope doesn’t apply. Searching every horror movie for a final girl misses the point of the concept. Sue may be the last survivor in Carrie, but the film focused on Carrie’s suffering and climaxed when she turned the tables on her attackers. Sleepaway Camp is very clearly a slasher, but no one at all battles and overcomes the killer, Angela. Even though neither of those movies feature a final girl, both Carrie and Angela fall into the broader archetype of the female victim-hero. The victim-hero collapses categories - the hero, in their use of violence, is not easily distinguished from the monster. Carrie and Angela kill, yes - but they specifically kill people who victimized them first.
But Jesse and Tommy are boys, and their love interests, Lisa and Megan, survive - so shouldn’t they qualify as the final girls of those movies? Part of the female victim-hero is suffering and overcoming suffering; Jesse is the primary target of Freddy’s attack and even though Lisa urges him on, he is the one who has to resist Freddy’s attempt to possess his body. Furthermore, Jesse is easy to interpret as gay, with the whole film scanning as a metaphor for struggling with sexuality. Just as the typical slasher movie has the mostly male audience identifying with its female lead during her struggles, A Nightmare On Elm Street II has the mostly straight audience identify with its implicitly gay lead as he is victimized by then overcomes his antagonist. Compare this to Tommy Jarvis, who is more like an action hero. Like Jesse, his love interest Megan survives - but Tommy is the focus of the story, and any transformation from victim to hero is minimal; he is actively pursuing Jason from the beginning of the movie, and most of Jason’s victims are unknown to him.
None of these examples break the rules of horror movies because horror movies do not have rules. A genre is an associated set of tropes and conventions, and when critiques treat these as rules they often end up aiming at something that doesn’t exist - and backfiring in the process. The final girl is one of the most frequent examples of this. Some film parodies treat her as a supernatural figure who, for whatever reason, is the only who can defeat the slasher, period. In The Final Girls, only Max can defeat Billy, as she is the only remaining virgin in the group, and thus the only possible final girl. Compare this to, say, A Nightmare On Elm Street, where Nancy’s clever planning allows her to defeat Freddy, or Friday the 13th II, where Ginny defeats Jason through a combination of psychological knowledge and quick thinking. In Hellraiser, Kirstie is borderline devious in her attempts to protect herself, promising to bring Frank back to the Cenobites in order to save her own life - hardly the picture of purity. Scream and Buffy the Vampire Slayer similarly fail in their critiques. Sidney might have sex and survive the movie - but she’s still punished for it, as her boyfriend Billy is revealed to be one of the killers. Buffy is even worse; her punishment is an explicit rather than implicit result of having sex, as doing so activates a curse that turns Angel evil.
And Joss Whedon is generally pretty bad about this. The Cabin in the Woods is very on-the-nose in being a critique of horror movies in general and horror audiences in particular. In the movie, an organization known as the Facility has, each year, released a monster to torture and kill a group of five young people. These young people must meet five specific archetypes, and if they do not, the Facility will manipulate their behavior so they do. If there are any deviations, the Ancient Ones will rise up from underneath the earth and destroy the world. The Facility are clearly horror movie creators, and the Ancient Ones horror movie audiences, and this metaphor makes no sense at all. The main critique that the movie is making is that horror audiences demand that horror follows very specific patterns or they reject them. Horror in general and slashers in particular were very formulaic in the Eighties - Clover goes so far as to compare them to pornography. But by the Nineties, audiences had begun to reject the formula; the slasher film would be briefly revived by Scream before collapsing again. By the time The Cabin in the Woods released, the subgenre was essentially dead, replaced by J-Horror, found footage, and torture porn, all of which had their own sets of conventions and tropes. The movie was probably responding to a series of financially successful but uninteresting remakes that preceded it, but they were essentially the last gasp of a dying genre; equally uninspired slashers based on original IP like Dead Silence and My Soul To Take failed entirely. Cabin itself would be hugely successful and would be followed by the so-called “elevated horror” genre, beginning with It Follows and The Babadook in 2014. Audiences were clearly ready for movies that broke established genre tropes; they cannot be held entirely responsible for the string of bad remakes that dominated the genre in the late 2000s.
And looking more specifically at what the Ancient Ones demand is revealing. I’ve already noted some of the issues with the movie’s understanding of the final girl, but the way it understands the importance of her suffering is misplaced as well. The film links her suffering and the suffering of her friends to morality; they are punished for their youth and their transgressions. It’s a rather conservative reading of the pleasure of watching horror, ignoring as it does the way the viewer is meant to emphasize with the victims and in particular the final girl. The final girl suffers at the hands of the monster so she can overcome it. This victory may be marginal, like Sally managing to escape Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or substantial, like Ripley defeating the xenomorph in Alien. There are, of course, movies - particularly those that border on horror-comedy - that focus on the contemptibility of characters before offing them; Jeepers Creepers 2, the Final Destination series, and Blair Witch (2016) all indulge in this. But imagining a moral point behind every character death is magical thinking, and rather conservative at that. Nothing that Ned does in Friday the 13th can really be seen as a transgression; the same is true of Claire in Black Christmas, who is a virgin, and Sheila of A Nightmare on Elm Street IV, who is an asthmatic bookworm. Demographic breakdowns, whether by age or gender, fail to illuminate any moral undertone to character deaths as well. The first victim in a slasher movie is usually a woman, but in general men die more in horror movies than women. When a majority of deaths are female, it’s usually in service of an implicitly feminist subtext, like in Black Christmas, #horror, or Suspiria. Even the supposed youthfulness of victims that Cabin cites is less fixed than it seems; why would the horror movie audience, which is mostly young adults, want to see teenagers die out of simple cruelty? The idea that there is something innately sadistic in cinematic violence, that every death is underpinning a moral point, is a belief you’ll find in the works of Satanic Panickers like Phil Phillips and Patricia Pullings. The default position when seeing someone in pain - both in the real world and on film - is empathy.
None of this is to say that the genre lacks worn-out cliches or never trafficks in offensive material. Clover, for example, attempts to recuperate the urban/rural conflict in her reading of the genre, but it still mostly comes off as a way for urban areas to demonize rural areas as they inflict harm upon them. The black dude may not die first, but black characters have, until recently, rarely survived, a fate shared by other minorities. Horror movies are not innately sexist - but some, like Terrifier and Jurassic World, have traded in misogyny in how they have killed off female characters. The point instead is that some of these tropes are less prevalent than popularly believed; others have been fundamentally misunderstood. Ultimately, there are no rules of horror movies. Do what you have to do to survive.