ABSTRACT
Traumatized and bloodied, Sally Hardesty jumps through a window of the Sawyer family’s farmhouse, then limps down the dirt road, screaming as she’s pursued by the cannibalistic Leatherface, chain saw smoking. Through a series of chance events, she evades him, escaping in the bed of a passerby’s truck. She laughs frenziedly into a red dawn while a frustrated Leatherface swings his chain saw around and ‘The Blue Danube’ plays. She’s the only survivor out of her group of friends, one of the first Final Girls in slasher horror franchises.
Fast-forward to 2022, a similar scene splatters across the screen. In Ti West’s X, Maxine boot-scoots out of the farmhouse, the last one standing out of anyone — the film crew she was a part of and the farmhouse’s homicidal inhabitants. She walks past the killer, an elderly woman named Pearl, splayed outside on the driveway with a broken hip from being jettisoned backwards after firing a shotgun at Maxine and missing. Pearl screeches ‘whore’ at Maxine as Maxine gets into a truck and backs up over Pearl’s head, exploding it like a ripe summer melon. Putting the truck in gear, she heads down the road, crucifix swinging on the rearview mirror. She snorts coke and exclaims, ‘Praise the fucking lord’, as she drives into the sunrise, exhaust fumes and carnage in her wake.
Sixth months after X was released, its prequel, Pearl: An X-traordinary Origin Story, premiers, offering a yet more complicated rendition of the Final Girl in Pearl, a female who’s the killer as well as the one left alive to carry on her story. With the actress Mia Goth doubling as both Pearl and Maxine in X and reprising her role as a younger Pearl in the self-titled film, coupled with the echoing lines and ambitions that connect Maxine and Pearl’s arcs in both films, these Final Girls are unconventional ones, to say the least. The chronology further complicates them, with X being released first and set in 1979, and the prequel following set in 1918. These Final Girls in both films serve a role that many Final Girls before them have also served — as cautionary tales — but, again, not with the conventional, chiding lesson at the end. These films and their Final Girls are parables, not proverbs, and not of the American Dream but of its nightmare.
