The Final Girl Support Group

Dani is one of the Final Girls. She has a tough, no-nonsense approach to life. She believes in law and order and lives on her remote ranch with her wife Michelle, who is dying of cancer. Dani has promised Michelle that she will get to die at the ranch, her favorite place.

Dani’s backstory is based on the Halloween franchise. Her older brother Nick badly hurt their babysitter one night, and he was sent to an psychiatric facility. When Dani visited him, she was so disturbed to see him practically catatonic on the antipsychotic Thorazine that she never went back. One Halloween, when Dani was 17, some inmates escaped, including Nick, who came to find his sister, wearing a mask, carrying a knife, and killing along the way. Dani stabbed him with his own knife. Police shot him, but he survived that and a second-story fall, to come back to Dani in the hospital, where he murdered more people. Finally, Dani beat Nick to death with a tire iron.

Dani’s biggest fear is that the killer in the mask wasn’t actually Nick—that she killed her brother for no reason. The novel suggests that this is a real possibility when another escaped inmate confesses to Nick’s crimes. When the FBI takes Dani into custody to reopen the investigation into that long-ago Halloween night, they move Michelle to hospice, forcing Dani to break her promise to her wife.

Dani’s character arc is defined by this unfairness. In an act of intense grief, Dani burns everything she owns, frees their horses, and abandons the ranch. This renunciation is only interrupted when Lynnette convinces Dani to help save the rest of the Final Girls by using Dani’s catchphrase: “One is none and two is one” (293)—a military phrase that stresses over-preparing because, as Murphy’s Law has it, if something can go wrong, it will. After their Final Girls’ triumph, Dani starts using a wheelchair, but also finds meaning again in the group’s friendship.

Julia is the most educated of the Final Girls, but her life has been filled with bad luck. Her story is based on the Scream movies: Her high school boyfriend killed people while wearing a ghost mask, hoping to make Julia his Final Girl. Later, her college boyfriend copied her high school boyfriend, wanting fame. To save her roommate, Julia pushed her boyfriend out the window, but she fell too. Now she uses a wheelchair—her lasting physical injury is an outward sign of the emotional and psychic damage that the other women in the support group have sustained. Hendrix includes Julia’s disability as a commentary on pulp horror’s casting choices, which prioritize those considered beautiful and non-disabled: “They left [Julia’s partial paralysis] out of the movie when they cast a doe-eyed, able-bodied ballerina in her place” (44).

In a turn the novel uses to demonstrate how vulnerable women are to men even outside their horror-genre ordeals, Julia married her physiotherapist, who sold her in-novel Slay movie franchise and stole all her money. Julia is a flat character who mostly lacks an arc, but after helping save her fellow Final Girls in the showdown with Sky and Stephanie, she reaffirms her commitment to the group, showing Dani how to use a wheelchair.

Texas debutante Marilyn’s backstory is based on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies. When Marilyn was a teenager, she went with her brother and friends to protect her grandfather’s grave, but ran into the disturbed and cannibalistic Hansen family. A year later, the surviving members of the Hansen family attacked Marilyn at a radio station, and she and the police killed them.

Marilyn exemplifies one approach to dealing with the kind of traumatic events the women in the support group underwent: She prefers to ignore that part of her life. Married to the heir of Rehabilitation America Partners, a correctional facility company, Marilyn is very wealthy and something of a social climber, as shown by the elaborate fundraising party she throws at her mansion. Still a Southern belle, Marilyn is always polite, but this is not a veneer hiding a mean-girl personality—circumventing what in a less nuanced approach to horror would be a stock popular girl type. Instead, Hendrix writes Marilyn as a surprisingly kind woman who cares deeply about the people around her. She is the one who takes care of Michelle as she dies, and at the end of the novel, she calls Lynnette. 

Heather’s backstory is based on the Nightmare on Elm Street movie franchise. Heather’s story is the only one to include the supernatural, which makes her a Final Girl outlier like Lynnette. Journalist Russell Thorn questions whether Heather’s events even happened: “Is Heather DeLuca a real Final Girl or is she a studio-created publicity stunt?” (67). Readers are aligned with the rest of the novel’s public on this, as we also never learn what happened to Heather. Even when Lynnette encounters Heather’s life-size diorama in Chrissy’s museum, readers don’t see what is in the room—all the readers get is Lynnette’s horrified reaction to the depiction of the Dream King. The lack of external validation explains why Heather is the least considerate of Lynnette’s feelings, constantly saying Lynnette is not a real Final Girl. Heather’s vitriol is a projection of her internal struggle with not being able to prove her experiences.

Heather’s response to her trauma seems to be greater than the rest of the women. Heather is in recovery for drug addiction, and she starts the novel unwilling to put loyalty to the support group above her own needs. Selfishly, Heather calls the cops on Lynnette to avoid having them pursue her own warrant. During the showdown between the Final Girls and Skye and Stephanie, Heather has a moment of selflessness, knocking Skye out before he can shoot Lynnette, and then agreeing with Lynnette not to kill Skye. But this doesn’t signal a complete change of heart. At the end of the novel, no one knows where Heather is because “Heather isn’t going to give anyone an ounce of satisfaction” (336). Still, there is a sense that Heather has evolved away from her initial depiction.

The reader never meets Adrienne because she’s killed before the story begins, but she lives on in the story as a sort of heroine of the Final Girls and a mentor to Lynnette. Adrienne’s backstory is an adaptation of Friday the 13th, one of the better-known and often parodied slasher films from the 1980s. At Camp Red Lake, after two counselors let a boy named Teddy drown while they had sex, Teddy’s father Bruce Volker avenged the death by killing many camp counselors 20 years later while claiming that the real killer was a resurrected Teddy. The killings stopped when Adrienne decapitated Bruce Volker with his machete.

Adrienne’s life after her ordeal is one of the novel’s few considerations of race in the horror genre. After the in-novel movie of Adrienne’s story cast a white actress despite the fact that Adrienne is Black, Adrienne had a lawyer file an injunction to get back full rights for her story. She won, creating an important precedent for the other Final Girls: The stories belong to the survivors.

Adrienne was arguably the best adjusted of the support group: With the proceeds of her movies, she created the Adrienne Butler Fund for the Prevention of Violence against Women, which turned her tragedy into empathy by transforming Camp Red Lake into a retreat center for survivors of violence. She wrote books, gave lectures, and held workshops and seminars, becoming “America’s favorite Final Girl” (31). Adrienne was also tirelessly there for Lynnette—so much so that during the final showdown with Skye and Stephanie Adrienne appears as a ghost and urges on Lynnette to keep fighting, to not give up.

Named in tribute to Carol J. Clover, the scholar who coined the term “Final Girl,” Dr. Carol is a psychologist who runs the Final Girl support group after writing a book about the experience of living through a massacre, Interrupted by Silence: Six Survivors. Dr. Carol is kind and compassionate. She goes out of her way to help, taking Lynnette in after Lynnette’s apartment becomes unsafe, and trying to protect Stephanie when she believes the newest Final Girl is in danger.

Despite her maternal presence in the lives of the novel’s women protagonists, Dr. Carol is arguably a failure as an actual mother. Her eight-year-old son Pax is obnoxious and chaotic; he tries to stab Lynnette with a pencil. Much more disturbingly, the killer targeting the Final Girls turns out to be Dr. Carol’s other son, the 20-something Skye, who feels abandoned by his mother and so decides to kill all of her patients to destroy her professional life. Dr. Carol’s ignorance of what is happening in her own home is a stunning indictment: She has no idea that Skye has broken into her files to get information on the Final Girls, that he has been grooming Stephanie into becoming his accomplice, and that he has brainwashed Pax into glorifying Skye for his murderous plans. At the end of the novel, Dr. Carol is so distraught that she disappears.

16-year-old Stephanie is the newest Final Girl, who survives the recent attack at Camp Red Lake. Unlike the support group members, Stephanie’s backstory is inspired by real-life events: She is named after Caril Ann Fugate, a 13-year-old seduced by 19-year-old Charles Starkweather in the 1950s. The pair embarked on a murder spree across the Midwest; their crimes inspired movies like Badlands, Kalifornia, and Natural Born Killers. Similarly, Stephanie is groomed by Skye to kill the Final Girls for fame.

Spunky and smart, Stephanie is a deft manipulator and a resourceful antagonist. To kill Adrienne without making Skye seem suspicious, Stephanie befriends Christophe Volker (Bruce Volker’s nephew, who was disgruntled at not getting a cut of the profits from Adrienne’s movies), gets him into Camp Red Lake, and gives him Adrienne’s address so he can threaten her by putting Bruce’s head into her freezer. When Lynnette believes Stephanie is in danger from Dr. Carol, Stephanie plays along to get Lynnette to bring her to the other Final Girls.

Lynnette uses Stephanie’s innate intelligence to convince her to turn on Skye—Stephanie is smart enough to realize that Lynnette is right to point out that given the horror genre’s misogynistic fans, only Skye will become famous for murdering the Final Girls. In the end, Lynnette invites Stephanie to the Final Girl support group; as a victim of Skye’s manipulation, Stephanie belongs.