Introduction and Overview
The horror genre has long been dismissed as decadent and depraved “low-brow” cinema. However, what is altogether overlooked is horror’s grand ability to use shock, awe, and gore in a subversive and transgressive attempt to shift the gendered status quo. Growing up, I always recognized horror films’—and in particular the slasher horror sub-genre’s—focus on female protagonists, but it was not until a couple years ago that I began to develop a hunger for more knowledge about this unique pattern. An unwavering affinity for the aforementioned narratives and a heightened level of feminist consciousness enabled me to realize that sexual politics and horror go hand in hand and, moreover, have been explored by film critics and academics alike for nearly two decades.
In her seminal 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, professor Carol J. Clover coins the now iconic Final Girl:
The image of the distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl. She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified. If her friends knew they were about to die only seconds before the event, the Final Girl lives with the knowledge for long minutes or hours. She alone looks death in the face, but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B). But in either case, from 1974 on, the survivor figure has been female. (Clover 35)
Although Clover examines a myriad of horror films, her analysis can definitely be applied to a new generation of Final Girl characters. In the following research paper, I will walk feminist horror aficionados and novices alike through the rich and complex history of women in horror, magnifying the larger sociopolitical and psychosexual implications of a genre notorious for its simultaneous valorization and vilification of female protagonists. Most significantly, this project will culminate in a critical feminist deconstruction of the singular contemporary Final Girl Dawn O’Keefe, the main character of Mitchell Lichtenstein’s 2007 rape-revenge horror film Teeth, a powerful albeit underrated cinematic text that functions to utterly reconceptualize, radicalize, and revolutionize the Final Girl character.
(via feministfilm)
