Death of the Final Girl - research

Death of the Final Girl in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof

Jennifer Wei
May 9, 2009

A conversation proceeds as follows:

BENNY:     But I still want to know what happens!
BUFFY:     Everyone gets horribly killed except the blonde girl in the nightie, who finally kills the monster with a machete but it’s not really dead.
JENNIFER:     Oh, my God. Is that true?
BUFFY:     Probably. What movie is this?[1]

As spoken from the hit TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this dialogue best encapsulates the rigid Hollywood horror formula which creator Joss Whedon set out to invert one night.  In Buffy, Whedon takes the concept of the traditional final girl—the typically virginal, boyish, bookish last-girl-standing in a slasher film—and creates, instead, a hero that is at once an empowered woman, yet still “sexually active, conventionally attractive, and generally, a lot more girly than the norm.”[2]  The classic final girl theory evokes the innocence of Laurie in Halloween and the quiet strength of Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, who both, while more intelligent and resourceful than their peers, nonetheless reinforce the horror genre’s socially conservative definition of what a woman “should be.”  Conversely, Buffy fits the profile of what Whedon calls “the little blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie.”[3]   In creating a hero out of the long-suffering victim, giving her a loyal group of friends that live and a name that could not be more feminine, Whedon gave birth to the newly progressive, modern—and perhaps even postmodern—final girl.

Since Whedon, slasher and horror films have increasingly tinkered with the trope of the final girl, from completely averting it in the indiscriminate bloodbath of The Descent (the UK release), to one of the more dramatic genre subversions in Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 film, Death Proof.  Death Proof follows the psychopathic serial killer, Stuntman Mike, as he stalks two consecutive groups of girls in his tricked up “death proof” car, effectively splitting the film into two contrasting segments.

The first half sets up all the slasher movie expectations: we learn that our Austin heroines smoke weed and drink booze, they like boys, they flaunt their sexuality, they’re going to a cabin later, and Arlene, while not a virgin, refrains from going all the way with her date.  She’s more reserved and is the odd ball out in her group—the target of DJ Jungle Julia’s practical radio joke, in which Julia dares listeners earlier that day to approach Arlene with a drink, call her Butterfly, and recite a sassier, modified Robert Frost poem in order to receive a lap dance.  Needless to say, Stuntman Mike is the lucky recipient that night.  Tarantino cinematically codes Arlene as the final girl, setting her up to survive and confront the villain.  She’s the only one who notices Mike following them, the only one who’s afraid of him—thematically, we identify with Arlene because her perspective of Mike approaches our own.  So, it seems logical that the girls should head to the cabin to be killed off one-by-one “until Butterfly pulls it together and, say, runs over Mike while yelling that poem menacingly.”[4]  Instead, at almost an hour into the film, Mike rams his car into the girls, killing them all in one fell swoop and simultaneously running down the entire slasher movie formula.[5] Whoops.  Start over.

Cut to fourteen months later, cue the scene change to Tennessee: Stuntman Mike is up to his old tricks again—stalking another four girls, walking around with a studied cool, licking their feet while they nap[6], etc.  Equipped with their very own final girl, this second group essentially mirrors the first, except they also happen to be in the entertainment industry.

Their leisurely conversations set up what’s really going to happen this time around.  For instance, Kim establishes that she owns a gun and believes in killing someone who tries to hurt her.  When Mike begins to pursue them on the road, he repeatedly crashes into them, terrifying the girls though they manage to outdrive him to safety.  Kim then pulls out her gun and shoots Mike in the arm, initiating a complete role reversal as he begins to scream and sob.  Hysterical, Mike flees in his car, and the girls begin to pursue him, crashing the death-proof car and causing him to break his arm.  Stuntwoman Zoë Bell beats Mike with a lead pipe, and the film ends with the girls delivering a vicious beating that includes a severe axe kick to the face by Rosario Dawson.[7]

In this final scene, Quentin’s girls are ostensibly beating Mike to death, though what they are ultimately sending to its final grave is the classic conception of the final girl.  For years, Joss Whedon and many others have whittled away at this trope, and in today’s postmodern, post-Buffy world, Death Proof bangs in the final nail on the coffin.  In terms of new films (excluding remakes), it’s hard to imagine that a major work of importance in the slasher genre will simply play it straight—that is, without some alteration or parody on its structural typologies.  Possible variations abound, with the more visible examples often subverting the final girl to be the villain, as seen in May and Shrooms (Freud’s “monstrous-feminine” archetype is also cited in earlier films like Carrie[8]), or completely averting, i.e. ignoring, the concept, either resulting in more than one survivor (Mindhunters, April Fool’s Day), or democratically killing off the final girl like any other character (Final Destination 3, The Cottage, Deep Blue Sea).  A third more feminist subversion is actually a maturation of the trope—the final girl becomes the final woman: she’s an action hero who not only survives, but conquers, and has no need for rescue.

Labeled by some as the “New Final Girl,” this Heroine 2.0 markedly differs from her prototype, intentionally taking on the challenge, and often seeking out the villain as seen in Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, in Aliens.  Tarantino’s Death Proof best incorporates these last two subversions—he initially averts the final girl theory by killing off the entire first group of girls regardless of final girl coding, then indiscriminately empowering everyone for survival in the second group, creating four final girls in place of the traditional one.  He takes this subversion a step further by distinguishing these girls as “New Final Girls” (with perhaps the exception of Lee, who isn’t involved in the action), in that we know their lives and psychology; they are complex, developed characters, physically fit, proactive in their self-defense (or offense), and visible from the beginning of the second story arc.  Tarantino’s conception of the final girl has undeniably transcended traditional horror structures, and his film Death Proof has most recently, most powerfully and self-reflexively, laid the original final girl to rest.

The horror genre has long been one of the most rigid structures, consistently reinforcing a system of socially conservative underlying values.  “Those who dare stray outside the bounds of conservatism are the first to be murdered.  The slutty female, those who get drunk, those who use drugs, those who have sex before marriage.”[9]  If you go into the woods to have sex, if you took part in the obligatory nude scene, you’re going to die.  In this conservative genre, the killer eradicates those who act outside socially acceptable parameters.  Critics have suggested that Halloween is a social critique of the immorality of American youth in the 1970s, as many of Myers’ victims are sexually promiscuous substance abusers, while the lone heroine Laurie is depicted as chaste and innocent.[10]   As the final girl, Laurie escapes because she does not partake in these symbols of adult life; the final girl is essentially stuck in a pre-pubescent state.  Survival is a definition of character, and the final girl’s innocence and moral fortitude enable her to overcome the evil.  The final girl is also, undisputedly, the main character, both because of increased character development afforded her throughout the film and her early discovery of the killer, which the audience has been aware of since the beginning.  Because she knows what we know, the final girl becomes an “I” for the audience to identify with.[11]  “She’s the one who finds the bodies of her friends and understands that it is she who is in danger.  She is the one who runs and suffers.  She is the one who shrieks and falls.  Her friends understand what is happening to them for no more than an instant before they die.  But the Final Girl knows for hours, maybe days, that she is going to die. She hears death coming.”[12]  Her loss of innocence comes at the moment of confrontation with the killer, from whence the final girl will emerge a woman, self-actualized, born-again with a vengeance, having survived by learning to kill.

While the final girl is, in many ways, the living embodiment of stereotypical conservative attitudes, she was also viewed as a progressive device that forces male audiences to identify with a female protagonist in the climax of the movie.  Author Carol J. Clover, who coined the term “final girl,” theorized that while male audiences identify mostly with male protagonists, female audience identification is more fluid across gender lines.  However, she argues that a successful film would require the surviving hero to be female, since the victim of a horror film must experience abject terror, and viewers would reject the portrayal of such terror on the part of a male protagonist.  Thus, the final girl typically has a compromised femininity—she is desexualized, often has an androgynous or non-traditionally feminine name (Parker, Stretch, Sydney, Laurie), favors practical clothing, and is similar to an adolescent boy.  Correspondingly, the villain’s masculinity or sexuality must somehow be in crisis; as if in order for audiences to accept a female hero, the villain should be weakened with feminine traits as well.  Norman Bates in Psycho dresses as his mother to commit his crimes; Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs doesn’t qualify mentally for a sex operation and consequently skins his female victims in order to fashion a “woman suit;” Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre kills women and turns their skin into female masks, thus his face becomes female; Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Streetwas the result of a brutal rape and subsequently molests children at his janitorial job; Michael Myers in Halloween kills in response to his sister having sex, using a phallic weapon to deal with his repressed sexuality, and Deleuzian analysis portrays him as having the mindset of a pre-pubescent girl.

In this sense, the gender of both heroine and villain is fluid for purposes of audience identification.  Upon her confrontation with the killer, with whom she may also have a shared history, the final girl will empower herself with some sort of phallic weapon—e.g. an axe, machete, chainsaw—masculinizing herself in a process which Clover terms “phallic appropriation.”  The final girl is the female who possesses the qualities of Freud’s woman-as-castrated-male theory.  This is quite literally portrayed in Death Proof’s graphic car crash scene, in which Julia’s leg is ripped off in a figurative castration, although in that averted example, none of the girls are particularly final.

In an interview, Tarantino cited the strong influence of Clover’s book on the resultant gender roles he set up in Death Proof only to later subvert.   While Stuntman Mike isn’t as conspicuously feminized a villain (at least not until his gurgling sobs take hold), his vehicular pathology is representative of his compromised masculinity, or sexuality.  The audience is presented a third-party psychological profiling of Mike, in which the Texas Rangers theorize that this villain expresses his sexual frustrations by ramming his car into girls, the only way, as Earl McGraw puts it, “that degenerate sonofabitch can shoot his goo.”  To further this analogy, as Mike’s taking his first victim away to her high-speed death, Julia turns to Arlene (who has just given him a lap dance) and says, “I think you got Mike laid tonight.”  The remaining banter reinforces the film’s sex and vehicular violence connection:

PAM:                He’s just giving me a ride.
JULIA:             Oh, no doubt.
ARLENE:        [waves to them] Have a nice ride.

From the passive defense of Sally in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (she eludes Leatherface until rescued by a passing truck driver) to the more active defense of Laurie in Halloween, who ultimately ceases to run and retaliates in violence, the horror genre has conscientiously evolved over the years, increasingly depicting the final girl as more powerful than ever before.  Where the 1970s slasher heroines survived seemingly on the basis of their abilities to scream, run, and avoid the monster, the 1980s heroines would go beyond simple defense, often matching or exceeding the powers of their monsters.  By the time the Nightmare on Elm Street series came along, the final girl, Nancy, was taking immediate, proactive action upon discovery of the killer.  She “draws up a precise plan of action, timed to the very minute…reads manuals on home defense and subsequently rigs her house with traps, including a sledgehammer hung from a door, an exploding light, a tripwire, and a bottle of gas with matches with which she sets Freddy on fire.”[13]  Furthermore, she seeks out his origins and uses the knowledge she obtains of Freddy’s past to subvert his power.  “Nancy describes herself as ‘into survival,’ and like Ripley of the Alienseries, this Final Girl survives by her ‘ability to adapt to the new: to negotiate change.’  She must believe, quickly and without doubt, in the supernatural elements of Freddy’s origin, and transform her views of reality and the adult world accordingly.”[14]  Each sequel progressively develops a more prepared and resourceful heroine, with Nancy even returning in Nightmare 3 to instruct the new final girl on harnessing her dream powers and equipping the other teens with these survival skills.  All the characters then unite in the realm of dreams to defeat Freddy, marking an instance where the final girl(s) actually takes action to spread her finality.  Nightmare on Elm Street 4 arguably features the most powerful final girl of the series—Alice, the Dream Master, who is equipped with powers to not only draw people into her dreams but to take an aspect of each person as they die, effectively becoming a collector of people’s powers.  “Like Ripley, who merges with computers, technology, and finally, the alien, Alice is ‘a network of differences composed of whatever signs have been picked up and reassembled into a new active-heroine machine.”[15]  Alice’s continued survival begins to necessitate, in addition to overcoming Freddy, an increased assertion in her daily life, as she learns to confront equally threatening systems of authority she once unquestioningly obeyed.  “She knocks a deadly syringe out of a doctor’s hands when he ignores her warnings, affirming, ‘Those are my rules.’”[16]  Her confidence grows as she embodies the role of heroine, a role that is essentially a legacy in the Nightmare series, a passing of the torch from each generation’s final girl to the next, as they train each other in an act of female solidarity.  The evolution of final girls as portrayed by Alice, Ripley, and many others, dramatizes the growing distance between them and the victimized final girl whom Clover once defined as “abject terror personified.”[17]  Clover’s supposedly progressive final girl has been questioned by theorists such as Tony Williams, who holds up examples like Lila Crane in Psycho and Laurie Strode in Halloween, who are both technically rescued by a male at the end of the film.  In his 1996 article, “Trying to Survive on the Darker Side,” Williams contends that Clover’s final girls are “never entirely victorious at the culmination of a film nor do they manage to eschew the male order of things.”[18]  While he acknowledged that the 1980s heroines were more progressive in comparison to those of earlier decades, he argued that the gender change is nonetheless done conservatively, and that the final girl trope, in its standard form, could not yet be regarded as a progressive one “without a more thorough investigation.”[19]

The punishment of beauty and sexual availability has always been an interesting feature of the horror genre.  By 1997, Whedon’s conscious reimagining of the final girl had resulted in a beautiful blonde who got to have sex with boys and still kill the monster.  Like any other, the horror genre reinvents itself, and the emergence of Buffy came like a proclamation: horror followed a style that had quite simply been done to death.  While Buffy was a particularly evident inversion of the final girl trope, there were already other films that were also playing around with the genre.  The 1986 slasher/comedy horror film, April Fool’s Day, reveals the killer to be one of the character’s crazy twin sister who has escaped.  The cast is whittled down to two, and when the boy is locked in a closet, the final girl is left to confront the killer.  However, she backs into a room where all the “dead” people are walking around behaving quite calmly, and after she freaks out for a good thirty seconds, everyone starts laughing and explains that it was all an elaborate rehearsal and practical joke.  Then they have a party.  Since then, there has been an ever-growing prominence of subverted and averted final girl theory in horror films.  The 2004 film Mindhunters seems to leave a final girl, until it is revealed that one of the other victims only passed out.  The 2006 British comedy horror, Severance, leaves four survivors—the final girl, the boy who wants to get in her pants, and two hookers, thrown in somewhere towards the end—one of whom actually saves the final girl’s life.  The 2006 Final Destination 3 kills off the final girl as well as the two other people she managed to save, and the UK release of The Descentalso ends with the death of the entire female cast (in typical corporate fashion, the US version leaves a final girl for sequel purposes).  The 2008 darkly comic horror film, The Cottage, has an unpleasantly psychotic final girl who not only frees the monster, but manages to get herself killed before any of the other males by obnoxiously taunting the villain (though everyone in the film eventually dies), and the final girl in Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem also dies prematurely, abruptly pinned to the wall about three-quarters into the film.  2005’s Hostel has a “final male” named Paxton, who is incidentally a heavy drinker, drug user, and very sexually active, nonetheless surviving while the relatively innocent Josh dies gruesomely.  Saw’s final girl is also far from innocent, having been addicted to heroin and professing empathy for the killer’s methods—by the time the sequel rolls around, she is his protégée.  In the 2007 film, Shrooms, the final girl is revealed to be the killer, having been driven insane by the titular shrooms, and the films High Tensionand May have similar twist endings in which the final girl is the villain as well.  The 2008 film, The Devil’s Curse, the final girl is sweet, studious, and innocent, and the last to, nonetheless, die.  However, it is then revealed that most of the film was a hallucination brought on to Alice by an evil demon released by the other college students downstairs, who have been alive the whole time and are still playing with the Ouija Board.

Just as the evolution of genre naturally progresses toward a more self-referential phase which film theorist Thomas Schatz labels baroque, one could chart the general progression of tropes: begin with a clever idea, which evolves into a trope, then a subverted trope, a discredited trope, a dead horse trope, and perhaps finally, even a forgotten trope.  Discredited tropes might be described as those overused to the point where one wouldn’t dare use them seriously—good taste restricts their use to parody, satire, homage or pastiche, e.g., “Luke, I am your father,” or “it was all just a dream.”  A dead horse trope has gone so far beyond being subverted and discredited that the very act of parodying or subverting the trope is now a cliché of its own, e.g. the “extra extra!” newsboy; “my dog ate my homework,” and “speak now or forever hold your peace.”  One can label forgotten tropes as those so old they aren’t really used in any form currently, e.g. Horatio Alger Jr.’s work.  While the final girl is not so far gone as the face on a milk carton, the theory has seen a growing number of subversions, aversions, and parodies in recent years, which indicates that it is slowly weakening.  The current final girl trope, then, is more often than not inverted, subverted, averted, parodied, deconstructed, reconstructed, invoked, defied, justified, enforced, double subverted, lampshaded (explicitly pointing out use of a standard trope, e.g. “I’ve always wanted to say that the butler did it!”), the list goes on.  Cindy Campbell in the Scary Movie films is basically a sustained spoof of final girls—the parodied trope.  In the slasher deconstruction Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, the final girl trope (self-reflexively referred to in the film as “survivor girl”) and the extreme lampshade hanging thereof, becomes a central plot element.  Leslie Vernon is an aspiring serial killer whose rise and exploits are being documented by a film crew.  Leslie demystifies the process by walking the crew through his villainous preparations (essentially calling attention to the film’s standard use of horror tropes), which includes intermittently spooking his chosen final girl (allowing for her cliché “early discovery” of the killer).  However, this is subverted when it turns out that Leslie has falsely set up the quiet final girl—who comically turns out to be far from virginal—to mislead both the film crew and the audience, and that the true final girl has been the female leader of the film crew all along.  In the case of characters such as Ripley in Aliens, who actively fights back against the patriarchy, the final girl may not technically be subverted or parodied, but her character traits no longer fit the profile of the standard final girl.  Ripley has evolved beyond the standard trope into that of a “new final girl,” or final woman, empowered and adjusted to modern times.  It is in these very times that the standard final girl seems not so final—she is instead, quite literally, a dying trope.

Filmmakers’ proliferating subversions of the horror syntax can be seen as part of a larger breakdown of the conventional story both in Hollywood and the wider media.  Tarantino has been integral to “taking straightforward narratives apart and putting them back together in a different order.”[20]  His films, so taken up with atmosphere, mise en scène, and a comparatively slower pace, play a certain role in this rejection of story.  Recent films regularly deconstruct and reconstruct the age-old horror form to varying degrees, seen more prominently in the subverted semiotics and storyline of the final girl.  With each film, we are solidifying our grounding in a post-final girl era.  Tarantino’s Death Proof takes apart the syntax of the horror film and reassembles it into a new, modified structure.  The film reconstructs several genres, for that matter, though it is not so much a detailed examination, deconstruction, or cataloguing of each, but rather, it builds upon these varied aesthetic and thematic elements, creating a non-ironic celebration of what captured our interest in the first place.  Death Proof, then, is Tarantino’s tribute to the muscle car, exploitation, and slasher film genres of the 1970s.

In focusing on the slasher reconstruction, the final girls in Death Proof provide a model case of a subverted trope.  Tarantino deliberately and successfully builds an expectation that a trope is coming (thus leveraging the trope to give his story texture), “then wrests the situation into a very new shape, invalidating the expectation and surprising the viewer.”[21]  The set-up of Arlene as the final girl is the trope, and what happens instead for the rest of the film is the subversion.  The element of surprise and genre-busting is integral to many postmodern genre films, including much of Tarantino’s work; he states in an interview that he never “[does] proper genre movies.”[22]  Instead, he takes great pains to establish the typical slasher conventions in order to mislead the audience and subsequently, keep them on their toes.  In a Sight and Sound interview, he explains his motives, saying, “As shocking to audiences as the crash itself is, there’s even more when [Arlene] gets it, because they weren’t prepared for her to get it.  I’ve been giving subconscious hints that she’s going to be ok, which to me makes it all the more exciting.  When later you see Zoë on that hood, I know you know that now I’m not to be trusted.”  Tarantino, like many other filmmakers, understands that tropes live inside the mind of the viewer, and that audiences quickly become savvy to a genre.  In order to keep the audience guessing, filmmakers are less and less frequently playing out the final girl trope the way we would expect, though they often set up the standard trope in order to mislead us.  As game designer Hideo Kojima so wisely puts it, “The story does not trick the player, it is the player that tricks himself.”  Indeed, Death Proof consistently suggests that Arlene will survive.  When Stuntman Mike throws away the photographs of his soon-to-be victims, he tosses them in a wide shot that closes in to show only Arlene’s photo landing face up.  The viewer automatically reads this as yet another instance of final girl coding.  Tarantino recalls, “I realized I couldn’t do a straight slasher film, because with the exception of women-in-prison films, there is no other genre quite as rigid. And if you break that up, you aren’t really doing it anymore. It’s inorganic, so I realized—let me take the structure of a slasher film and just do what I do.  My version is going to be fucked up and disjointed, but it seemingly uses the structure of a slasher film, hopefully against you.”

Just as Tarantino transcends the grindhouse theme with his personalized exploitation film, he transcends the final girl trope he’s placed in Death Proof as well.  His film is both nostalgic and progressive, and, despite its allusions to the past, Tarantino creates a cinematic world that is wholly his own.  Not only does he modify the grindhouse genre by setting up slasher film conventions and car-chase action, his eight-girl-posse truly turns the concept of the final girl on its ear.  The last four girls are incongruently all final girls, and furthermore, Tarantino’s female characters are indiscriminately well developed and complex regardless of their chances for survival—they are all main characters.  He grants them a richness and authenticity seen most prominently through their dialogue, explaining, “They’re likeable, but flawed at the same time; the dialogue is real… It’s my job to be interested in other people’s humanity and not just write about myself…This is almost my love letter to them.  I got the chance to say all their funniest lines, and a couple of the girls are based on girls in particular, and a couple of them aren’t but were informed by my knowledge of femininity.”[23]  Tarantino’s girl conversations string together long Quentin-esque riffs, comprised of strong lines filled with pop culture discussion reminiscent of hangout films.  The filmmaker relishes this aspect, saying, “Do you want me to write now like David Hare?  They are my characters. They’re gonna talk, they are gonna jockey for position in their group, and they are all gonna be very confident in the way they express themselves…They sound like women generally today, and one of my biggest pleasures about the movie is girls watch the movie and they say: you know, that is exactly like me and my friends talking last fucking night.”[24]

While the car gets to star in the poster, some fans would argue that Zoë Bell—the actual name of the real-life stuntwoman—is the true star of this film.  She was Beatrix running up that handrail in Kill Bill, she was Xena flying through the air on fire, she’s now Zoë the Cat falling in the ditch and emerging unscathed—she is death-proof, as much the reason for the film’s title as Stuntman Mike’s car.  In his violent, vehicular destruction of the preliminary group of girls, Tarantino simultaneously demolishes the original Final Girl in all her slasher conventions with an irrevocable, resounding crash.  From the wreckage of their devastation comes the rebirth of the New Final Girl.  Zoë is one out of a group of intensely capable final girls, all of whom collectively display far more resilience than Mike or his villainous car.  Their death-proof humanity, independence, and fearlessness firmly establish Death Proof’s declaratory announcement of Tarantino’s remodeled and refurbished, postmodern final girl.

FIN

(-al girl)

Notes

[1] Cut dialogue from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.

[2] “Buffy, (Re)gendering Heroism.”
< http://ubc-engl-110-002-fall08.blogspot.com/>

[3] Whedon, Joss. “Welcome to the Hellmouth.” Buffy DVD Commentary.

[4] “Vern Reviews The DEATH PROOF DVD!”

<http://www.aintitcool.com/node/34089>

[5] cf. video clip:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS6VRfJbI4c>

[6] Stuntman Mike pretends to drop his keys in order to lick Abernathy’s toes as she naps in the back seat of the Lee’s car.  cf image:

<http://www.cinemaisdope.com/news/films/deathproof/dp-1024-3.jpg>

[7] cf. video clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9WIxeh6l6c

[8] Creed, Barbara.  The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.  London:  1993

[9] Clover, Carol J.  Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Genre in the Modern Horror Film.  New Jersey: 1992.

[10] Rockoff, Adam.  Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978-1986.  Jefferson, N.C.: 2002.

[11] Trencansky, Sarah.  Final Girls and Terrible Youth: Transgression in 1980s Slasher Horror.  Journal of Popular Film and Television 29.2.  Summer 2001.

[12] Mendelsohn, Jane.  Innocence.  New York: 2001.

[13] Trencansky, Sarah.  Final Girls and Terrible Youth: Transgression in 1980s Slasher Horror.  Journal of Popular Film and Television 29.2.  Summer 2001.

[14] ibid.

[15] ibid.

[16] ibid.

[17] Clover, Carol J.  Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Genre in the Modern Horror Film.  New Jersey: 1992.

[18] Williams, Tony.  “Trying to Survive on the Darker Side” in Barry Keith Grant’s The Dread of Difference.  Texas: 1996.

[19] ibid.

[20] James, Nick.  “Tarantino Bites Back.”  Sight and Sound.  February 2008.

< http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49432>

[21] “Subverted Trope.”

< http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SubvertedTrope>

[22] James, Nick.  “Tarantino Bites Back.”  Sight and Sound.  February 2008.

< http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49432>

[23] James, Nick.  “Tarantino Bites Back.”  Sight and Sound.  February 2008.

< http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49432>

[24] James, Nick.  “Tarantino Bites Back.”  Sight and Sound.  February 2008.

< http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49432>

Works Cited

Alexander, Victoria.  “‘GRINDHOUSE’ LOS ANGELES PREMIERE.”  April 1, 2007.
<http://www.celebritywonder.com/movie/2007_Grindhouse.html>

Clover, Carol J.  Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Genre in the Modern Horror Film.  New Jersey: 1992.

Creed, Barbara.  The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.  New York: 1993.

Creed, Barbara.  Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny.  New York: 2005.

Harpymarx.  “The Final Girl, Misogyny and the Slasher Film…”  November 2, 2008.
<http://harpymarx.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/the-final-girl-misogyny-and-the-slasher-film/>

James, Nick.  “Tarantino Bites Back.”  Sight and Sound.  February 2008.
<http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49432>

McMahan, Uel.  “The Alienation of Ripley and the Maturation of the Final Girl.”  June 21, 2008.
<http://interactive.usc.edu/members/umcmahan/2008/06/the_alienation_of_ripley_and_t.html>

Mendelsohn, Jane.  Innocence.  New York: 2001.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley.  New York: 1988.

Pinedo, Isabel Cristina.  Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing.  New York: 1997

Rocchi, James.  “Cannes Review: Death Proof.”  June 2, 2007.
<http://www.cinematical.com/2007/06/02/cannes-review-death-proof/>

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