ABSTRACT
Jade Daniels is the ultimate millennial Final Girl. She embodies the horror genre in the 21st century as a whole, in all of its fascinating convolutions. She also represents the horror fandom itself, in its increasing diversity and cultural impact, in one messy shoe polish–haired misfit. She characterises the evolution of the genre since the turn of the century, in its self-referential meta-self-awareness, illustrated in the encyclopedic knowledge of the obsessive fan. She is also a shining example of a Classic Final Girl, worthy of standing alongside Sally Hardesty (Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Nancy Thompson (Nightmare on Elm Street), and Alice Hardy (Friday the 13th), even if she does not feel like it. In this way, she is a stand-in for the modern horror community, revealing some fascinating insights into the genre at the moment and the function it fills in the new millennium.
Her character also sheds further light on some of the most enduring questions leveled at the horror genre, which have troubled everyone from Aristotle to Stephen King, namely — why horror? As an iconic ‘horror herd’, she casts a floodlight on the role of the horror fandom since the first Golden Age of slasher movies, allowing us to speculate about where the genre might be heading in an increasingly networked age. While she may be iconic and more than worthy of inclusion in the Final Girl canon, there are some aspects of her character that are uniquely Jade, most notably her identity as a young Indigenous woman, providing some essential and invaluable insights into the function of monsters among marginalised communities.
Taken together, Jade offers an illuminating insight into the current state of horror — as a whole, and of slashers in particular; into feminist discourse and racial discussions, particularly regarding indigenous communities; the function of media in a postmodern society and some aspects that are unique to our particular moment; and our increasingly mediated existence.
