Thursday, Jun 2, 2022 • 8min
Grady Hendrix reimagines the horror movie sequel in 'Final Girl Support Group'
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Grady Hendrix loves horror movies, especially those old 80s slashers. And his new book is a tribute to that "final girl" at the end of so many of them: The one who doesn't necessarily survive by being smarter or stronger, but simply makes it to the end alive by not giving up. NPR's Audie Cornish interviewed him about his novel Final Girl Support Group, which is about exactly what it sounds like, a support group for women who survived psycho murderers — except it seems like someone's starting to hunt them down – again. As Hendrix says, what's the scariest thing for a "Final Girl?" A sequel.
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Grady Hendrix
Audie Cornish
Andrew Limbong
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Andrew Limbong
00:01
Hi, it's
NPR's
Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Okay, did you see the trailer for Scream 5
? It is absolutely bonkers.Share
Others
00:11
Would you like to play a game, Tara?
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Andrew Limbong
00:14
In it,
Neve Campbell
is back as Sidney Prescott and she has to tell whoever the new main girl is everything she's learned - you know, having lived through Screams 1 through 4. It's something I thought about while listening to this interview with author Grady Hendrix
. His novel "The Final Girl Support Group" imagines the survivors of different horror movies coming together and comparing notes on everything from survival strategies to lingering unease.Share
Speaker 3
00:43
And
Hendrix
says something like: "the only thing a so-called Final Girl can't escape is a sequel". The book goes deep into his horror film fandom, and he talks about it with NPR's
Audie Cornish
.Share
Audie Cornish
00:56
I'm going to start this segment with a few names you might recognize: Michael, Freddy Jason, the classic horror movie killers. Now, how about
Laurie Strode
, Nancy Thompson
, Alice Hardy
? Well, these are the names of the women - the fictional characters - who are targeted in those films.Share
01:15
Laurie Strode
is the main character played by Jamie Lee Curtis
in the Halloween franchise; Nancy Thompson
is the teenager haunted by Freddy Krueger
in her dreams in Nightmare on Elm Street
; and Alice Hardy
had the misfortune to be a counselor at Camp Crystal Lake. Spoiler alert: she's the lone survivor at the end of the first Friday the 13th
movie, but dies early on in the sequel.Share
01:39
All of those characters and slasher movies in general have intrigued author
Grady Hendrix
since he was a kid.Share
Grady Hendrix
01:46
I really wanted to think what would happen if the worst thing that could happen to you had happened when you were 17, and you lived in the shadow of that for the rest of your life. And that sort of sent me down this rabbit hole.
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Audie Cornish
01:59
And that trip down the rabbit hole resulted in
Hendrix's
book, the "Final Girls Support Group".Share
Grady Hendrix
02:04
A Final Girl is simply the woman who survives till the end of the horror movie.
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Audie Cornish
02:09
So his book operates on the premise that those women are real people, who long after the credits have rolled, are still trying to put their lives back together. To do that, six of them meet up for group therapy - Lynnette Tarkington is one of them.
Share
02:22
And a brief warning here, this is going to be a conversation about horror films, so some of the language will be graphic. Tell us about the hero, so to speak. She is a quote-unquote Final Girl, she survived what kind of assault?
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Grady Hendrix
02:35
I wanted each Final Girl to sort of be iconic for a different franchise and a franchise that we all know, even if we're not horror fans. I think everyone knows "oh, the summer camp killer", "oh, you know, the guy who killed people in their dreams", and Lynette is out of that really bottom of the barrel genre of slasher movies from the 80's - the Christmas Slasher, Silent Night Deadly Night, Black Christmas is one of those.
Share
02:59
And so Lynette was a guy dressed as Santa Claus broke into her house on Christmas Eve and impaled her on a rack of antlers and she has lived with that ever since. And that was always a thing that really fascinated me about Final Girls is: the ultimate faceless killer they can't escape is the forces of market capitalism. There's always a sequel.
Share
03:20
So even if you survive part one and two, they're going to get you in part three and there's something terrible about that to me that you never get to let your guard down. What if there's a sequel? What if there's a reboot of the franchise? And that to me is harrowing, I can't imagine living like that.
Share
03:38
And it's funny, someone said to me - so you take this sort of jump into fantasy with this world where these entertainment franchises based on murder? And I was like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Let's run down a list of actors who have won Academy Awards for portraying real life murderers.
Share
03:54
We live in a culture based on murder, we make TV shows about it, we make books about it, we love murder, we can't look away. I don't know what to make of that - if it's good or bad - but it is such a part of our culture.
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Audie Cornish
04:09
You talk about a culture that is, as you said, obsessed with violence and obsessed with the people who impose the violence, but not the victims. So, how did you think about the appetites of fans, and male fans, right? Because you're coming to this as a man who was drawn to the genre. And the book really does seem to raise some questions about what's behind that appetite.
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Grady Hendrix
04:36
Right, and you know, one of the places this book came from is me realizing that as a 48 year old dude, I love horror movies, I've watched them all my life. And so I've spent 40 years watching people get murdered for my viewing pleasure, and that's weird. Like, is that healthy? Is that not healthy? What does that mean?
Share
04:54
And so every book I write, I'm trying to sort of wrestle with some question. The reader doesn't need to know, but it's a question that gets my butt in the chair every day. And with this book that was really like: what is this coming from?
Share
05:05
And what I realized is the movies that I keep coming back to, they're the ones with Final Girls in them. They're the ones where people managed to escape, the ones where people managed to get somewhere better. And there is something really reassuring about seeing the worst possible thing happened to someone and they survive.
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Audie Cornish
05:29
One of the things that startled me when I was reading it is that even though I'm reading the story of characters who are traumatized, scared, clearly have PTSD, right? Have taken all kinds of unusual security measures in their life as a result of what they've survived.
Share
05:46
But there were some aspects of the way that they would think that I would like... well that doesn't seem so strange, that's how you stay safe. And I don't know if that's generational or what that means, but as a male writer, how did you think about that?
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Grady Hendrix
06:03
It's just treating them like people and trying to think through logically how these women would be living in the wake of what's happened to them.
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Audie Cornish
06:11
Did you ever think what's wrong with us as men? Do you know what I mean? Because you had to get into the mind of the killer's also, to write this book. And people who treat women as objects to be collected or harmed. I mean, it's really dark.
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Grady Hendrix
06:29
Yeah, and it's interesting because the actual killers I had to think like in the book, who were the one sort of hunting these Final Girls, their issues derived so much from rage and anger at this. And I think you can't be alive in the world and not notice that we become very angry with some women for weird reasons.
Share
06:51
You know, you look at
Hillary Clinton
, you look at uh someone like Lorena Bobbitt back in the 90's. You look at these women and you think: where is this rage coming from? What is this lesson, or press us, we are trying to teach them? It's so strange. So that was a very easy mindset to get into, because it's one I see around me a lot. This anger at women who don't do as they're told.Share
Audie Cornish
07:19
Before I let you go, I want to talk about sort of how this trope - so to speak - has evolved. Who are the Final Girls of today, so to speak? I mean, has there been any sort of shift in the approach in storytelling?
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Grady Hendrix
07:34
Sure. I mean, there absolutely has. And one of the things that's really interesting is to see sort of the Final Girl of today who is cut from a very different mold. She's more of a
Buffy
or Xena
or a Furiosa
in Mad Max Fury Road
. She is a woman who shows up ready to rock and roll, she can hold her own physically, she comes out of the box completely loaded for bear and ready to rumble, and that's a lot of fun to watch.Share
07:59
But the Final Girls that I love are the ones from the 70's and the 80's who were just people. They weren't particularly smart or strong or anything. They survived not because they had some exceptional quality or some ability to kick butt, they survived just because they kept going. They just kept finding enough to take one more step, to climb up on one more rooftop, to hold one more door shut. And that to me is so inspiring.
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Audie Cornish
08:30
Grady Hendrix
is the author of "The Final Girls Support Group". Thank you so much for talking with us.Share
Grady Hendrix
08:35
Thank you for having me.
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