The Final Girl Support Group

Horror monsters have fan clubs comprised of mostly men. But as the novel makes clear, their worship of the killers comes at the expense of the female survivors, whose traumas are glorified. One of the fictional ephemera the novel includes to give its story a veneer of reality is an essay titled “Women are Our Meat, and the Eating’s Good” from a fictional anthology about Final Girls. The essay describes “slavering male fans” (37) devouring slasher films to live out their violent sexual fantasies:

The women themselves remain largely silent, leaving their participation in their own exploitation unaddressed. If any of the fans become unruly they are anesthetized with more T-shirts, more albums, more posters, and action figures featuring their favorite murderers, now elevated to celebrity status (37).

Throughout the book, fans are not content with appreciating the stories second-hand—the most rabid of them want to become the killers they admire. One of Lynnette’s superfans is a cop who can’t resist the opportunity to kill her, excited that “Everyone is going to be so jealous” (173) that he got to do it. Similarly, Julia’s letter to the parole hearing board about her monster identifies his supporters as murderers in training: “Even today, Raymond Carleton continues to correspond with fans of his violent acts and I believe he encourages them to act out their darkest fantasies” (189). Julia knows about these copycat desires firsthand: Her high school boyfriend went on a killing spree because he was a horror fan who wanted to make Julia his Final Girl, while her college boyfriend sought fame by mimicking what her high school boyfriend had done. In her letter to the parole board, she insists that killer fandoms are only creating more monsters, which in turn endanger survivors. The novel’s killers are similarly motivated: Stephanie is thrilled that after killing the Final Girls, “Skye and I will be heroes” (324). She wants to be famous because “What else is there?” (324).

The profit motive enables and perpetuates the fandom machine. Since monster fans are eager to worship the monsters that are alive for their fame, they are willing to pay for any new information about their favorites. The novel’s media obliges, aiming to capitalize on the devastating stories of the massacres. Each of the women’s stories has been made into a sensationalized movie series. News vans flood Lynnette’s block after the shooting outside her apartment, while paparazzi show up at Marilyn’s party when Lynnette arrives. Garrett has spent his life trying to gain money and fame from Lynnette’s trauma. Journalist Russell Thorn tries to blackmail Lynnette into writing about the support group. Chrissy Mercer parlays her Final Girl status into a career of selling “murderabilia” from monsters and victims. And of course, the novel is part of the same media cycle—by enjoying Hendrix’s book, readers are implicated just as the in-novel fans are.

Readers may wonder why Hendrix depicts fans as twisted, misguided, and dangerous. After all, he relies on their knowledge of pulp horror classics, without which his references to real-life movies would fall flat. The novel’s depiction of crazed fans is itself a trope, surfacing in other horror novels such as Stephen King’s Misery and in other genre fiction—Star Wars: The Force Awakens portrays Kylo Ren as the ultimate Darth Vader superfan and copycat. By using this plot trope here, Hendrix is both calling attention to the way horror silences the women who are slasher movies’ primary victims, and poking fun at the pearl-clutching outrage with which non-horror fans often approach this genre.