[Pride 2021] A Different King of Final Girl: Asexuality and the Slasher

While the term didn’t come into existence formally until 1992, the idea of the “final girl” has been a mainstay in slashers since their golden age in the 1970s, perhaps most famously iterated by Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween. The final girl is identified not only literally as being the last survivor to face off against the killer, but as a type of moral figure, since she’s a “final girl” and not just a “female survivor” based upon her refusal to engage in the hedonism, like drugs or sex, that played a hand in her friends’ deaths. 

The continued presence of the final girl as a trope in slasher films has been made into something a bit more self-aware thanks to things like Scream, with the famous “NO SEX” tantrum in a video rental store. But while a lot of the community has accepted the rules for attaining final girl status, I’d like us to take a moment to examine the theoretical underpinnings of these rules, since they’re actually – no surprise – fairly regressive. When taken to the logical conclusion of “Consensual Sex = Earned a gruesome death,” the final girl as the lone moral figurehead of the film brings to the forebear that a LOT of slashers, and horror more broadly, speaks to a fairly conservative mindset, with the killers dispensing Old Testament justice for the sins of the youth. 

“Sexually regressive politics? In MY horror?” you may ask, aghast. And sadly, if we accept that the final girl is a pure of heart virgin who doesn’t do the horizontal tango because she knows it’s bad, that’s really what you’re left with. But never fear, because, as I am about to show you, we don’t have to read her that way. My alternate reading not only removes the Puritanical attitudes from our horror, but also further empowers the final girl herself, turning her from meek and repressed into a fully fledged sexual agent. All you have to do is make her asexual. 

This is not, obviously, to say that the final girls of the films of yore were ace all along and I’ve cracked the secret horror code. But if we queer the text, and read (or headcanon, if you prefer) these women as asexual, what happens? How does our understanding of the film change? Well, first of all, the whole moral component of the killings start to feel less deserved. Since the final girl is an active sexual agent who chooses not to engage in coitus not out of fear, shyness, or repression, but because it just isn’t her thing, means that there’s no hierarchy of acceptable sexual appetites. The young couple killed in the throes of passion don’t deserve it for being lascivious and making poor choices – they’re just dumb teenagers who do what a lot of dumb teenagers do. 

In fact, getting rid of the undercurrent of victims deserving to die for things like consensual sex totally reshapes our viewing of slashers. Killers like Jason and Leatherface are no longer moral arbiters of life and death, dealing out the weird justice we’ve come to implicitly accept from the genre. They’re back to being unambiguously bad dudes, whose murderous acts we can’t shrug off as “well, they had it coming.”

Thinking of the final girl as ace also changes the way we view her as a character: while final girls have begun the shift from archetypal damsels in distress to women capable of dispatching the killer themselves (I’m thinking especially here of the stark evolution from the original Halloween to the Rob Zombie remake), adding in an element of sexual agency moves the needle even further toward a progressive ethos. This girl emphatically does not fuck, but it’s a choice made out of an understanding of her own body and desires, not out of a sense of fear, or shame, or not knowing herself. Thus, this final girl is not a girl-in-becoming, someone who has yet to experience a sexual awakening or liberation, but a total and complete entity who has thought about it and decided she’s good, fam. 

I recognize that reading final girls as ace can kind of junk up a lot of the low-impact fun we’re used to having with slashers, because if the kills aren’t deserved, then watching people get brutalized can stop feeling fun and start feeling weird. But really what this is isn’t an indictment on us, the viewers; we’re just savvy consumers of the genre who have figured out the rules. What I’m advocating for, in my own small way, is for more creators of this content to stop feeding into the weird reactionary conservative politics that populate horror, and to give us kills, killers, and final girls that align with a more palatable set of ethics – as ethical as chuckling when someone gets fridged can get, obviously. An ace final girl, not a headcanon or a queering, but a real honest to goodness one, would open so many doors for honoring the horror of the past while paving the way for growth into the future.