The Final Girl as the Monstrous Feminine

The final girl is one of the basic elements of a conventional slasher film. The narrative is seen usually from her point of view (Barthes), in order to help the audience understand the terror and therefore gain some of it.She usually has a unisex name  such as Laurie (Halloween,  1978), is not sexually active, is smart, dresses like her mother, rather than like her friends. By possessing those features, the final girl automatically becomes the binary opposite (Claude Levi Strauss) of the first girl, as the first girl is sexually active. And she is also from every perspective, the binary opposite of the killer, as she represents the good and the killer usually represent the evil within the narrative. All these features of the final girl have been pointed out by Carol Clover, a medievalist, in her book Men, Women, and Chain Saw. Most theorists would refer to horror films as a male- driven genre. However, Clover states that mostly in slasher films, the audience, be it male or female, it is strategically forced to identify with the final girl.

In the classical Freudian psychoanalytical theory the Pre- Oedipal is a stage of the Oedipus complex, and it is a stage in the development of a child where he sees no difference between himself and his mother, as it is riddled with sexual drives and makes no distinction between the masculine and the feminine gender. However, the child then goes through a transition and begins to realise their mother is lacking something- a penis. And so, the boy will give up his subconscious incestuous desire for his mother due to the fear of being castrated by his father, when he realises that females have been castrated and this is the Post- Oedipal Stage.   Flipping Mulvey’s classic male-driven identification process of sadistic voyeur, found in cinema, to a masochistic-voyeur, by shifting the identification process to the Final girl, Clover swapped the Post- Oedipal, male sadistic voyeuristic impulse to a Pre- Oedipal masochistic impulse. Sadism is post-Oedipal as it takes shape when identification moves from the mother to the father, whereas masochism is pre-oedipal as it takes place when the mother is the powerful source of the identification of the child, and so the child takes pleasure in the submission to the mother. And so, in a traditional slasher film, the viewer takes a submissive position when they identify with the final girl, as it subconsciously reminds the viewer of their mother, emphasizing the incestuous sexual desire. 

However there will be a transition stage where the viewer stops identifying with the final girl and it is that of when the final girl stabs the killer. And so the female castrated becomes the castrator. An obvious example of this is the final scene of the film ‘Freddy vs Jason’ when Lori the final girl decapitates Freddy with Jason’s (phallic) machete. She tells Freddy, ‘Welcome to my world, bitch!’ This can be seen as the part where the castrated becomes the castrator, and the meaning of her line, due to the word ‘bitch,’ can be easily read as a way of telling the audience she managed to defeat Freddy by decapitating (castrating) him.   Needless to say that the audience will again go into a the post-oedipal , as their subconscious fears of castration is reinforced. This emphasizes Barbara’s Creed theory ‘The Monstrous Feminine.’ She said:

“All human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine, of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific and abject. Freud linked man’s fear of woman to his infantile belief that the mother is castrated.”

And so horror slasher films have chosen this approach to portray the final girl as the monstrous feminine, when she becomes a castrator and eliminates the killer she also becomes a woman, and thus enhances the post-oedipal stage with a different approach: at a subconscious level men will fear the final girl, because it is not a male that would castrate them, but a female. Thus, although, she kills the monster, she becomes the monstrous feminine.

This idea of the monstrous feminine, usually has two readings: one is that women are monsters and should be oppressed and subjugated, while the other one is a more feminine approach which twists the theory into making female powerful.  In slasher films, both of these two readings can be noticed, she becomes the monster when she kills the murderer, but at the same time she also is powerful and unstoppable. However, Clover dismisses the idea of The Monstrous Feminine, and states that when the final girl stabs the killer with the phallic weapon, it is a way of conveying the release of her sexual frustration, as stabbing someone usually alludes to ideas of penetration.

Overall, in my opinion, I believe that the final girl cannot be the monstrous feminine, because if we were to analyse this in terms of the Oedipus complex, since she is conventionally a virgin, she may not be aware of her sexual nature, which means that she may not be subconsciously aware of the differences between genders. Therefore, since she still is in the pre-oedipal stage, she cannot have any intentions to castrate, nor does she believe she has been castrated by her mother, and so there is no penis envy, which means that the final girl is also rejecting the Electra complex. Through the killing of injuring of the monster, I believe that because all her emotions are provoked through the terror, she disrupts the transition stage, which will result in the fear of men, rather than envy and wish to castrate them. Therefore the final girl  does not turn into a woman, nor does she turn into a monster, she is left in a state of terror and horror towards men, which is the male audience stops identifying with her, because they cannot fear their own gender. Thus, at the end of the film, the final girl will dismiss Creed’s monstrous feminine, because she cannot be a monster that men will see as a castrator, when she is terrified of men. Therefore, because of the sudden disruption of transition stage, the final girl will be left with a massive subconscious fear of men, which reflecting back to Freud may result in homosexuality, which is another reason why the male audience may  not identify with her, but again see her as an object of desire.