There’s a long standing cinematic device wherein characters either come off the silver screen and enter into “real life”, or characters in the “real world” get sucked into a movie. Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose Of Cairo tells a tale of the former. Classic of the modern age Last Action Hero tells a tale of the latter. There are dozens of other examples and certainly the device was borne long before Allen utilized it. Hey, even my generation’s Saturday morning cartoons utilized the trope when a 1980s video game geek gets sucked into his television to become Captain N: The Game Master… a cartoon seemingly solely existing in order to sell Nintendo-branded games. Even Lamberto Bava’s Demons (1985) plays with this movie-within-a-movie dynamic to fun results, creating both an enjoyable straightforward horror tale as well as a knowing film geek wink to the audience, as if to say “we love movies so much that we created this one for you”. We’ve developed the term “meta” to describe this type of knowing/winking storytelling and perhaps nothing pushed this playful technique farther into the mainstream than the Scream franchise of the 1990s. Today, having a meta element mixed into your horror film is almost expected and the trope may have even started to feel a little bit cynical. As though we can’t commit to genuine, straightforward, blood curdling horror without covering our asses and throwing in a knowing wink that we’re all in on the joke.
Meta horror can be a tricky beast to deliver properly. Scream wouldn’t have worked if it had been all jokes and no bite. Then along came Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s Cabin In The Woods and executed such a flawlessly meta concept in such a way as to almost single-handedly dismantle all modern horror and even all the meta-riffs on horror we’ve gotten so used to. So, in 2015, with audiences as cynical and jaded as ever before, having seen the curtain pulled all the way back more times than can be counted… where does a film like The Final Girls fit in?
This is as high concept as movies get, with a mother-daughter duo at the core which anchors things a little bit. Max (Taissa Farmiga) loses her beloved mother Nancy (Malin Akerman) in an auto accident and years later is still wrestling with the loss. Nancy happened to have been a struggling actress who had appeared in Camp Bloodbath, an 80s slasher film with a ravenous cult following and a Jason Vorhees-like masked killer stalking camp counselors. Max is talked into making an appearance at a double feature screening of Camp Bloodbath 1 & 2 and magically her and her friends end up stuck inside of Camp Bloodbath with only their horror movie knowledge to help them survive and escape back into the real world. The Final Girls offers surprisingly robust roles for Farmiga and Akerman. And the supporting cast boasts countless incredible comedic roles from folks like Thomas Middleditch (The Wolf Of Wall Street) as the movie-obsessed know it all, Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development) as Max’s best friend, and even some of the counselors from the movie such as the eternally horny alpha male Kurt (Adam DeVine of Modern Family) and the ditzy Tina (Angela Trimbur of The Kings Of Summer) who can always summon our serial killer with a simple flash of her breasts… which she is so wont to do that she must have oven mitts duct taped to her hands in order to keep the slasher at bay.
The premise sounds a little muddled. And it is. Not as clean and brilliantly simple as the hook of Cabin In The Woods, The Final Girls can swing wildly in tone from one sequence to the next. Knowing 80s sex comedy jokes slam into scenes which attempt a more dramatic weight. Dubious moments of style over substance crash into genuinely awesome slasher sequences with our masked killer bursting through a barn in slow motion, fully engulfed in practical flames. Gags concerning our “out of time” characters interacting with the 1980s counselors fall flat one moment and then hit bulls eye the next.
Oh, but when The Final Girls hits, it knocks it out of the park. I laughed frequently, smiled just as often, and ended up feeling wholly satisfied by the end. Writers M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller clearly love slasher movies and know them well, and know their own characters and love them also. There’s a very clear core relationship between not only Max and Nancy, but also between Max and her friends. “Frenemy” stereotypes are thrown out the window here, with female characters growing in friendship and sorting through their issues even as they try to work their way out of their ridiculous slasher situation. Max must engage with her mother’s character in the movie and sort of gets a second chance to say goodbye to her mother. It is almost shocking how much time is given to developing decent characters in a movie so high concept and tonally challenging. And even more credit is due because the time honored tradition of the “final girl” in slasher cinema is given a bit of a 2015 polish where multiple female characters are given meaty roles, resulting in yet another female-anchored genre film which should maybe wake Hollywood up to the fact that all quadrants want to see female-driven stories.
Upon later conversation with peers I did realize that the film is largely bloodless and almost certainly targeting a PG-13 rating, which clearly didn’t affect my experience of the film prior to pondering its likely future rating. But when this hits theaters, (and it most certainly will if there is any justice in the film festival world) it’ll almost certainly be PG-13. Horror fans won’t appreciate that, and even I personally would’ve cast a sideways glance. But I didn’t notice it during the film (aside from the aforementioned over-tame boob flashing sequence) and can’t claim to have enjoyed the film any less due to its rating.
While The Final Girls may not draw a line in the cultural sand quite the way that Scream or Cabin In The Woods have done, it still offers up some fresh takes on the “movie within a movie” concept. The action sequences are exciting, with the summer camp totem-pole-masked killer giving you that classic Jason feel, and the flashy camera work and over exaggerated lighting and color schemes from director Todd Strauss-Schulson are distinctive and stylish in a way that will likely be divisive, but added one more element of fun for me personally.
I think The Final Girls is going to get people talking. There will be elements that horror die hards may reject outright. And it could’ve been potentially wholly great had it shot for a more authentic R-rating and tightened up its concept just a little bit more. But in a packed and cheering and laughing theater at SXSW, I wasn’t thinking about any of that stuff. I was being thrilled and entertained and engaged by a meta horror film that could easily have collapsed under the weight of its own concept but instead scratched a comedy horror itch that is often very hard to reach.
And I’m Out.
H/T to Collider who had some of the only good images from the film I could find online.