She kills you in the end
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Across the slasher genre of horror films and other media, there exists the trope of the Final Girl. The Final Girl, a bookish, wary, virginal, always female figure, is the final survivor of a brutal onslaught, a systematic picking-off of her friends at the hands of a violent Killer. According to Carol J. Clover, the scholar who named the trope, the Final Girl is "the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again" (201). "She Kills You in the End," a collection of essays and accompanying critical introduction, explores the complex origins of the Final Girl trope as a pseudo-male, allowing male horror audiences a figure they can both feminize when wanted and masculinize when required. However, the collection, written by a horror fan who just so happens to be a woman, argues that there exist elements of the Final Girl that lend her to a functional interpretation, one which recognizes her proximity to violence and trauma and allows women, also forced to wrestle with traumatic instances brought about by their very womanhood, an outlet through which to process their own trauma. Using the political and personal lens of autotheory as a means to view the Final Girl, the collection explores the question: with the Final Girl, though "final" and singular, is there room in her body for all of us?
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M.A.