Autumn: season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and the final girl, a lone female survivor triumphing over the masked killer who has butchered her friends. This isn’t a spoiler for the new Halloween film, because we all know that this final girl – the slasher movie archetype incarnated by Jamie Lee Curtis in her early horror roles and first identified by Carol J Clover in her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws – will survive. She is the last woman standing and always outlives the rest.
Unless, of course, the trope is being subverted. But the fact that it can be subverted emphasises how much the final girl is embedded in culture. Her behaviour and sexuality have been analysed, horror films have even been named after her (2015’s Final Girl), but there is one question no one seems to ask. Where are all the final boys?
They are there, but you have to dig a bit. There is Chris in Get Out, who manages to turn the tables on his abusers, just as Paxton emerges from Hostel intact, give or take a couple of fingers. Brent gets his feet nailed to the floor, but manages to escape before his captors lobotomise him in The Loved Ones. Mark dodges Death itself in Dario Argento’s Inferno, although you can be sure it will catch up with him in the end, the way it nails Alex, who survives all the way through Final Destination, only for the sequel to reveal that he was later brained, offscreen, by a falling brick. MacReady and Childs make it to the end of The Thing without being infected (or do they? Although heaven knows how long they wll last in those sub-zero temperatures): this is a film that would have had trouble drumming up a final girl since there aren’t any girls in it.
And there is a list of quasi-final boys in everything from Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now to Hereditary, in which a male character seems poised to survive – only to fall victim to a last-minute ironic twist.
You could almost think men are in danger being erased from the annals of survivors as horror becomes increasingly feminised. “The strongest audience for horror, traditionally the bastion of young males, is now younger females,” Screen Daily reported earlier this year. But although final girls outnumber the boys, it is worth remembering that, before the heroine can triumph, we first have to share in her being threatened and abused. Could it be that film-makers and audiences feel more comfortable with this type of treatment meted out to female characters rather than male ones? How often have you heard men screaming or begging for their lives in horror movies? But if it is rare to see male characters terrorised on screen, perhaps this is because it conflicts with preconceived notions of masculinity.Men are supposed to be pillars of strength, not snivelling victims – that’s the stuff of comedy not horror. Where it is thought noteworthy when women fight back, being the final boy is just business as usual – men are expected to kick ass. Think of Arnie in Predator, Bruce Willis in Die Hard, or James Bond or Jason Bourne defeating aliens or megavillains to emerge as the last man standing.
It could be that male directors prefer to terrorise women as a form of surrogate sexual domination – a way to put them in their place. “If they have a good face or figure I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man,” Argento once said. The same goes for Carrie director Brian de Palma, who said: “You fear more for her than you would for a husky man.” But this says more about the film-makers than about horror.
The French director Pascal Laugier, best known for torturing his heroine to death in the 2008 psychological thriller Martyrs, admits that the bond between the two sisters who are comprehensively abused and tormented in his latest film, Incident in a Ghostland, was inspired by the relationship he had with his brother. So why didn’t he make the characters male? “Male characters pull me back into a sort of realism that I naturally try to escape from, whereas female characters instantly slot into the sort of storytelling that interests me,” he said.
To which I say – try harder. Anyone can terrorise girls, but it is far more powerful to explore precisely what it is that makes film-makers so reluctant to put male characters through the wringer, as Belgian director Fabrice Du Welz did in Calvaire, in which the protagonist is abducted, forcibly dressed in a frock, and sexually abused before he manages to flee his attackers. One of horror’s abiding strengths is the way it allows film-makers and audiences to plumb those parts of the psyche into which mainstream genres dare not go, so surely the limits of masculine identity would be a rich and potentially illuminating seam to mine?
Just as feminism is as much about liberating men from traditional, restrictive notions of masculinity as it is about furthering the cause of women themselves, it might be useful, even healthy, for more horror films to explore the vulnerability of male characters as well as female ones.
