The Final Girls

The Final Girls is a loving parody of horror films, especially the slasher films of the late 1970s and early 80s. The name even refers to the familiar trope in which the last girl alive is the one to defeat the big bad. Strangely, despite slasher horror being among my least favorite genres in cinema, the language of these films is so deeply ingrained in culture that everything in The Final Girls feels totally familiar despite having seen essentially none of the films that inspired it.

This form of horror send-up has competition, in the likes of Tucker and Dale vs Evil or Shaun of the Dead, but The Final Girls takes a completely different approach which helps it feel fresh. In other parodies like Tucker and Dale, for example, everything we witness is totally real and the humor is drawn from subverting the expectations of the audience by turning familiar genre cliches on their head. The Final Girls, on the other hand, has the characters sucked into the world of a slasher film quite literally, as some mystical event pulls them into a movie within the movie, a la The Last Action Hero.

This allows for a different form of meta-narrative where the characters from the real world can comment on the tropes they are experiencing in the movie world through the familiar lens of horror cinema. When they want to keep as many of the camp counselors alive as possible to help fight the killer, they do it by making sure that none of them have sex… because being sexually active always leads to death in slasher movies. This makes the movie more like a love letter to cheesy grindhouse horror films than strictly a satire of them.

Despite this structure lending itself to playfully self-aware humor, I found the movie to be less funny than, say, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. While The Final Girls has many funny moments, none of them reach the high peaks of the best of its horror comedy peers. It feels unfair to say, because I really did like the movie and it did make me laugh quite a bit, but at the end I was left with the feeling that it probably didn’t live up to its comedic potential.

However, where the film perhaps fails to maximize its comedic opportunities, it makes up for it with a richer thematic focus and heartfelt sentimentality. At the core of The Final Girls is a genuine exploration of loss, grief, and letting go that is played without a hint of postmodern cynicism or ironic detachment. My expectation going into the movie was a silly comedy that would skewer the familiar tropes of slasher films, so I was pleasantly surprised by how sincerely the film handles its theme of losing a parent and how this creates a compelling throughline that builds to a genuinely moving ending; an intense and cathartic mix of sorrowful and empowering.

It then ruins this moment with some grating comedic bathos in a coda that not only cheapens the strong emotions of what came before it but raises unnecessary and unhelpful questions about the function and rules of whatever magic put our heroes in the movie within a movie in the first place. I recognize that some may appreciate this last sting of comic relief helping to break the tension of the story’s affecting denouement, but it didn’t work for me.

Would Recommend: If you love a good horror comedy, especially parodies.

Would Not Recommend: If your bar for horror comedy is exceptionally high.