Abstract
This chapter looks at how David Robert Mitchell’s 2015 supernatural slasher film, It Follows, updates Carol Clover’s theorization of the slasher formula and the Final Girl trope. It hones in on the film’s disruption of the traditional binaries of the slasher and shows how the film denies the anticipated identificatory processes that suture the audience to the Final Girl. In doing so, it redirects attention to the film’s underlying commentary on race, class and gender. While these issues have always been latent in the slasher, they were often never made explicit. Emerging in the context of the fourth wave, It Follows opens up a space for imagining what a twenty-first-century Final Girl might look like in a conservative era that grows increasingly hostile to women and other minorities.
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Notes
- 1.
Reagan’s politics were aligned with the conservative religious groups in the 1980s such as the Moral Majority, considered the forerunner for the Christian Coalition. The Moral Majority was a political action group that sought to influence public policy. They fought against what they deemed the moral decline of the nation, advocating for a strict agenda based on traditional American, pro-family values.
- 2.
- 3.
The rise of the fourth wave coincided with massive changes in the political arena. Hillary Clinton stepped into the limelight with a popular presidential campaign, unprecedented for a woman at the time. While she may have lost, Barack Obama won the election, becoming America’s first black president. There was a sense of hope and the possibility of overturning oppressive patriarchy and hegemonic white masculinity. Moreover, the Internet had become a platform for social networking, and women began ‘creat[ing] blogs, Twitter campaigns and online media with names like Racialicious and Feministing, or wrote for Jezebel and Salon’s Broadsheet’ (Baumgardner 2011, 251). A tide had changed, and women and other minorities started finding their voice and sharing their stories through media.
- 4.
For instance, during the party scene in Scream, Randy (Jamie Kennedy) tells his friends: ‘There are certain RULES that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie. For instance, number one: you can never have sex.’ The group of teens mock his declaration. However, it is in this very sequence when Sidney’s (Neve Campbell) sexually active friend, Tatum (Rose McGowan), is killed after leaving the group to get beer. Thus, while the teens joke around and make fun of these mandates, their friend is in the next room being brutally murdered.
- 5.
In most slasher films, the viewer starts off sutured to the killer through the I-camera. As the narrative continues, the Final Girl’s perspective is increasingly privileged and the viewer begins to identify with her via point-of-view shots. This is not the case in It Follows, as Jay never controls the gaze, which suggests that she is powerless to the ghostly curse.
- 6.
Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out (USA/Japan) and his 2019 film Us (USA/Japan/China) are welcome exceptions to this trend.
- 7.
Barbara Creed, in her 1993 book titled The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, discusses the relationship between the abject, the child and the mother figure. The child struggles to break free from the mother in an attempt to fulfill their role within the symbolic function. Failure to do so prevents the child from taking up their ‘proper’ place in the social order. Greg’s death in It Follows reveals the fragility of masculinity in the face of the mother that embodies abjection.
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Filmography
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, USA, dir. Wes Craven).
Halloween (1978, USA, dir. John Carpenter).
Halloween II (1981, USA, dir. Rick Rosenthal).
It Follows (2014, USA, dir. David Robert Mitchell).
Psycho (1960, USA, dir. Alfred Hitchcock).
Scream (1996, USA, dir. Wes Craven).
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, USA, dir. Tobe Hooper).
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Rusnak, S. (2020). The Slasher Film and the Final Girl Get Makeovers: It Follows and the Politics of Fourth Wave Feminism. In: Paszkiewicz, K., Rusnak, S. (eds) Final Girls, Feminism and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31523-8_6
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