Dark Descent Contributors

It’s October 31st and I’m about to sink into my couch and watch John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) for the first time. I’m far too young for this, but I’ve always loved a good scare, and ‘tis the season after all. Oh, and did I mention it’s my birthday?

Somewhere between the pinning of poor Bob to the fridge (that’ll teach you to drink underage), and that iconic, chilling shot of Laurie sobbing on the staircase, what Randy from Scream (1996) will later refer to as “the rules” for the modern horror film are laid down. And chief among them: the Final Girl.

In her brilliantly-titled book Men, Women & Chainsaws (1992), Professor Carol Clover describes the Final Girl as 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 the goodie-little-two-shoes who survives, now realizing the danger she has been in all along, before escaping through a conceptual funhouse filled with the mutilated corpses of her friends, being terrorized at every turn.

Enter Jordan Peele in the summer of 2017. I missed his seminal debut Get Out (2017) in theaters, but when the Blu-Ray rolled around, I was front-row, center to borrow a friend’s copy. I’ve loved Daniel Kaluuya since I first saw him in Psychoville (2009), and his portrayal in Get Out of Chris Washington (one of many references to Americana in the film) had me on pins. But it was to the nuanced, amoral performance of Allison Williams, who plays his girlfriend Rose Armitage, that I was immediately drawn. There are some pretty major spoilers for the film up ahead, so if you haven’t seen it yet: I know someone who can lend you the Blu-Ray.

It’s really the end of the film that I want to talk about. That and its Final Girl. Girls. When Chris makes his escape from the Coagula, brutally murdering his way through the Armitages to do so, we are reminded of the violence of other pseudo-social horrors like Last House on the Left (1972) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977). Audiences in these films are also left wanting to defend the violence perpetrated by ordinary people in response to the horrors to which they have been subjected.

Chris kills Dean Armitage with a stuffed deer (symbolic in the film of both mothers and racism), stabs Missy Armitage with an antique letter opener in her Colonial-era study (ouch!), then uses the same letter opener to escape from brother Jeremy, whom he had previously incapacitated with a croquet ball. The trappings of middle-class America very much turned against them in the finale.

By many legitimate arguments, it is Chris who fulfills the criteria for Final Girl. From the moment Rose informs him, “You know I can’t give you the keys, right, babe?”, Chris “perceives the full extent of the preceding horror”. He is the one “who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again—” although his screams are muted in the sunken place: Peele’s self-confessed metaphor for black marginalization. And the “mutilated bodies of his friends”? Photographs of the many black victims Rose has done this to before, some of whom — ‘Georgina’ and ‘Walter’ — are still in this house.

But the idea of the Final Girl is complicated by Rose’s survival. She is the last Armitage standing. Infantilized in her fruit-loop crunching bedroom, she is the Final Girl who comes down through the house and encounters (albeit off-camera) the bodies of her mother and brother. The smoke licking from the basement surgery indicates the deaths of her father and family friend Jim (“I want your eye, man”). Rose is the one who perceives her own preceding horror: it is too late to do anything about the fact that, this time the livestock fought back. In her pursuit of Chris, she is wounded, staggers and falls. No screaming though. In a cold mockery of the muteness of the sunken place, Rose affords Chris (and the audience) no manner of atonement or regret for her crimes. Just the cold sneer of disdain that Chris cannot even choke out of her.

And she almost survives. We never see her die on screen. When the cop car arrives at the end of the film and Chris prepares for his impending arrest, it seems as though Peele has gone full-Omen (1976) on us, with the police riding to the rescue of the young, white villain.

Through Rose’s “encounters” and Chris’ “peril”, Peele splits the Final Girl across two characters, updating Carpenter’s 1978 trope for post-modern audiences, and allowing us all to sink into our couches — or the floor — and enjoy a smart scare.