The Final Girls (2015) is a highly meta and referential horror-comedy about a group of friends who find themselves trapped in the world of Camp Bloodbath, a fictional ‘80s slasher classic. Camp Bloodbath has special significance for one member of the friend group in particular: Max’s (Taissa Farmiga) mother Amanda (Malin Åkerman) was a struggling actress who played Nancy, one of the camp counselors/victims of Camp Bloodbath. Amanda died suddenly three years prior in a car accident, as she and Max sang “Bette Davis Eyes,” and that trauma continues to weigh heavily on Max throughout the movie. The friends struggle to navigate a dangerous world of shallow stock characters and a machete-wielding maniac, while Max works tirelessly to find a way to save Nancy from her scripted fate.
In the film’s highly affecting climactic scene, Nancy chooses to perform a sexually provocative dance to summon the killer, sacrificing herself so that Max’s survival as the Final Girl will be guaranteed. It’s a scene that has proven endlessly fascinating to Megan Fariello and Caroline Guthrie since they first saw it, partway through a PhD program where they both specialized in film/media studies. Here, these best pals and frequent collaborators sit down and bring all their skills of analysis to bear in order to once and for all answer the question: just what is going on with this scene? This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Caroline: I cannot think of a movie that has stuck with me less that included a scene that stayed with me so much. I remember when I first watched The Final Girls, you were coming over later that night. And I had the computer up on the table with this moment cued up, waiting. I was like, “You have to watch the scene. Watch this. You don’t have to watch this whole movie. You have to watch this moment.” I watch it at least twice a year. I always find an excuse to show it to students, because I’m endlessly fascinated by it. And I think maybe a reason I always want to keep talking about it is because I still don’t necessarily feel like I totally understand it.
Megan: I think that’s why a conversation is important, because I also am confused as to why it is so effective. And it is not just one of us, right? We both feel this way about this scene. There’s a lot going on in it.
Caroline: The movie is overall, among fans of meta-horror, pretty well-regarded.
Megan: Is that true? I didn’t know that.
Caroline: Yeah. I think that when people talk about The Final Girls, they’re generally like, “That was a pretty good movie.”
Megan: I think it is a fairly standard meta-horror. Plus, it has really good actors. But the scene itself stands apart from the movie as a whole. It just stands head and shoulders above what the film accomplishes. It does something incredible that, like we said, we’re not really sure what it is.
Caroline: I think that we’re right there. I think after seven years of discussion we’re knocking on its door.
Part of why the rest of the movie doesn’t stay with me as much is that it’s not that on target for what an ‘80s horror movie is actually like. Most of the movie doesn’t seem to know the genre that it’s sending up that well. It seems to be responding more to Scary Movie (2000) than Friday the 13th (1980).
Megan: That is true in the content of the film, but also in how it looks. Maybe that’s why it sort of works. Because even if you are not a diehard slasher fan, you would be very familiar with these tropes and get the jokes easily.
Caroline: But if you get a little deeper into what actually makes a slasher film, The Final Girls doesn’t really hit its marks. For example, Adam DeVine plays one of the camp counselors as this very sex-crazed, dumb guy character. And that’s really not a horror stock character. That’s a Porky’s (1981) or Revenge of the Nerds (1984) character. And the same thing happens with the girl who they introduce as the one who’s supposed to be the Final Girl (Paula, played by Chloe Bridges). She’s this super badass. I don’t know what she’s supposed to be from; she’s like Bruce Campbell from Army of Darkness (1992) gender-swapped. It’s weird for them to start the film-within-a-film saying, “This is what a Final Girl is,” when it’s absolutely not.
There are a lot of wild swings happening throughout the movie; some of them work and some of them don’t. I feel like in this scene it stops trying to be funny and really gets at an emotional sincerity.
Megan: In this scene it’s just Max and Amanda/Nancy or Nancy/Amanda. Max has been injured. They are holding out in this chapel; it’s night time. The colors are very blue and purple.
Caroline: It looks amazing. It’s storming outside, so the lightning is flashing and illuminating their faces.
Megan: It’s gorgeously shot.
Max kind of realizes — they’ve gone through the story of Camp Bloodbath, and she realizes that she’s injured. She knows Nancy is probably going to end up being the Final Girl.
Caroline: And she wants that. She wants so badly for some version of her mother to survive that she wants to make Nancy the Final Girl.
Megan: But Nancy understands at this point that she is a fictional character. Which is wild. She takes the position, “No, you’re a real person, and I understand that you think of me as your mom. But, you know, I’m not. And she cares about you and wouldn’t want you to do this.” Nancy steps out of the chapel into an open field. We get this really wide shot with the chapel on the right of the screen and the field coming off it. The sky in the background is purple and looks like a painting. It’s so gorgeous.
Caroline: Gorgeous! It is more striking than the view of Tara in Gone with the Wind (1939). Plus it’s not in a super problematic movie, so it’s even more beautiful.
Megan: And you have not seen a shot like this the entire movie.
So you see Nancy. She turns back to face Max inside the chapel, and starts to strip and to dance. She knows the slasher, Billy (Daniel Norris), is coming out of the woods, but she is facing Max. She’s looking directly at Max. The song “Bette Davis Eyes” starts playing, which the audience knows is important to Max. That was the song that was playing in the car with her and her mom when she died, and was a song that meant a lot to them.
Caroline: She’s doing the striptease for Max. She’s smiling. She’s crying. She’s making eye contact with Max. It’s a joyful kind of movement. It’s a striptease, but it’s not sexual at all. It’s playful.
Megan: You can tell, she’s fully doing this because she wants to do it — it’s her choice.
Caroline: It’s an Oscar-worthy performance. Eventually you get the sound cue of Billy appearing, and he comes up behind her. She knows that he’s there. But she continues to mostly choose not to look at him as she dances. She blows a kiss goodbye to Max, and then is stabbed and dies. Her death causes Max to revive and allows her to assume the role of the Final Girl and succeed in the rest of the movie.
So that is the scene. I’m obsessed with it. There’s so many things happening. I mean, where to even start? What is the first step?
Megan: Well, let’s talk a little bit about the Final Girl in general, as a trope. And what does this movie do with that? Because the Final Girl is a trope that gets used in such an interesting way; you and I talk about this all the time.
Caroline: The term “the Final Girl” was coined by Carol Clover, who is a film theorist, in her essay “Her Body, Himself,” (1987) which later went on to be a part of her larger work on horror, Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1993). And in this essay, she goes through a really deep dive into the meaning of the slasher genre. She does a symbolic reading of all of the major tropes. Very significantly for horror discourse, she talks about the girl who survives – whom she terms “the Final Girl.” She’s writing this years before the second, meta wave of slashers in the ‘90s. She’s just talking about the first round, the unreflexive slashers, to the extent that they were ever unreflexive. She explains the Final Girl is in some way androgynous; she’s de-feminized. She often has an androgynous name, like Max. It’s not essential that she’s a virgin. That idea became a really big deal in the ‘90s, when people started to talk about it more. But for Clover, it’s just that she’s not sexually active during the movie. She could have gone through a breakup or something recently, that works fine.
She will be terrorized by the killer in the first half of the movie, while the film is sort of identifying with the killer’s position. We’re getting I-camera (a term Clover uses to describe a highly intimate point of view shot that incorporates the killer’s subjective perceptions), we’re stalking victims, we’re in that point of view. And in the second half of the movie, the audience and the camera’s loyalty will flip to the Final Girl. She will take up some kind of weapon, and we will cheer for her as she destroys the killer, just as we cheered for the goriness of the killer’s initial destructions.
For Clover, the Final Girl figure is someone for the adolescent male audience members to identify with. In the first part of the movie, she represents a sort of pre-adolescent sexual identity that’s not fully masculine or feminine. And then by taking up the phallic symbol and defeating the killer, who represents all of our Oedipal anxiety and rage, she gives a model for successfully coming through puberty. So even though she’s female, she’s doing a lot of work for male audience members. She gets out all the horror, the screaming and the crying and stuff that they don’t want to be a part of, when we don’t identify with her. Then when it flips, she’s doing the more “becoming a man” kind of work.
I get bothered because people throw around the term “Final Girl” and don’t say Carol Clover’s name, or act like what she wrote doesn’t exist. It’s like it leaked into the culture without her analysis, which is weird.
Megan: It’s been very flattened, I think, to just mean, “the surviving girl.” That is not entirely wrong, but there’s so much more nuance to it.
Caroline: Yeah, the original analysis had her doing something very specific. This movie, The Final Girls, is interesting, because it’s written by men (M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller) and directed by a male filmmaker (Todd Strauss-Schulson), but it is much more attached to a distinctly female perspective than a typical slasher. The male characters are not really front and center. They’re not offering a whole lot. Thomas Middleditch plays a character who sort of thinks he’s got the whole thing figured out, but we lose him pretty early on in the movie.
Megan: The film, and this scene especially, focuses on female relationships and female friendship. And, I think, twists the idea of the Final Girl by introducing — I don’t know if consent is the right word — but the power of decision-making around who gets to be the Final Girl. The meta-narrative allows both Max and Nancy/Amanda to think about what it means to be a Final Girl and to make choices about who gets to do that.
Caroline: Right! It’s not like Nancy is caught off guard in the last minute and gets killed by the slasher. She essentially summons him. She’s saying, “It is my choice that you take me instead of Max.” Which is incredibly wild, especially because they hammer over and over and over again that Nancy is not Amanda. She does not have any memories that belong to her performer. She is just the character that Max’s mom played 20 years ago.
That gets us to another interesting idea: the movie’s relationship with time, and the anxiety about time, that is fluctuating in different directions here. Max lost her mom so suddenly, and then just as suddenly is faced with someone who’s like her mom again, but it’s sort of a shadow of her mom. It’s almost like time traveling. It’s almost a Marty McFly element. There’s a lot happening there.
And then their relationship still falls into the pattern where Nancy’s sacrifice is a maternal sacrifice. And maternal sacrifice, when it comes up in horror, tends to be dreadful. Often it is the thing that fuels “elevated” horror, right? It’s like Hereditary (2018) or The Babadook (2014); the wrenching aspects of motherhood drive the horror. Whereas this scene shows both joy and an ultimate sacrifice in motherhood from the shadow of a mother. So it’s a real collapse of melodrama and horror into each other.
Megan: I think that’s key, how it is this insane blend of horror and melodrama tropes.
Caroline: Ultimately, I think it is a melodrama scene. It is not scary. We see Billy coming. We know what’s happening. There’s no surprise. The kill is shown in a wide shot; there’s no gore whatsoever associated with Nancy’s death.
Megan: I think I want to bring it back to Stella Dallas (1937), because of this idea of mothers, or in this case, a sort of shadow of the mother, their sacrifice being their joy and their life. But it’s also in their control. When Barbara Stanwyck is watching her daughter get married through the window, she knows that her sacrifice allowed that to happen. The same way that Nancy’s sacrifice allows Max to survive.
Caroline: I feel like there’s something here about motherhood being a role, as in a role that one plays. What is most genuine in what is shared between mother and child, hopefully, is the love. You don’t necessarily want to have a relationship, especially when you’re a child, where your mom’s telling you everything that’s in her head or anything like that. But the affection is completely sincere. And so in a movie like Stella Dallas, she is her most genuine, loving, maternal self by adopting a persona for her daughter that is not genuine. She pretends to be selfish as a way of being selfless, and sort of releasing her daughter into the world. And a similar thing is happening here. In this moment she’s pretending to be sexual and pretending to be a victim, for the purpose of giving her daughter, who is not her daughter, longer life. It’s somewhat a reenactment of her death in the car in that it’s a moment of music and shared joy. It’s maybe somewhat affirming for Max that there were no regrets in their relationship; her mother would make the same kind of choices.
Megan: In the moment before she goes out, Nancy says, “Max, I’m not lost. I’m right here. All right, you’ll always know where to find me. But you have to let me go. You have to let me go.” And like we said, Nancy knows she’s not Amanda. But she takes on the role in that moment of telling Max, like, you have to let this go. She takes on a maternal role. She doesn’t have to do that.
Caroline: For a lot of the movie, Max is sort of trying to build her up into Amanda. She tries to encourage her — you’re someone who has these ambitions, you should go for it, you should do this and that. She tries really hard to relate to her as a peer, not to reforge her into a mother but to cultivate a new life for her. Max tries to be Stella Dallas. Max tries to say, “I’ll make the sacrifice and you go live a life.” But ultimately, she can’t. It’s still her mother/not mother who has to be the one to make the sacrifice. And she makes it without reservation.
Megan: Max tells Nancy that she loves her. And she says that’s the one thing that she never got to tell her mother in the end. And Nancy says, “Don’t worry, wherever she is, she knows. You were right about one thing, you know.” Max asks what. Nancy says, very confidently as she’s tearing up, “I’m a movie star.” It makes me cry every time I see it. She’s taking on the role of Max’s mother, despite the fact that she’s basically an NPC. She’s also aware enough of the situation to know that Max’s mother was an actress. So she’s conscious that she needs to be an actress on top of all these other roles that she’s taking on. It’s wild, it’s so layered.
Caroline: And then the song that kicks in is “Bette Davis Eyes.” Which is about an actress who starred in melodramas. It’s about looking at and loving a woman’s image. And being seduced by the image, but knowing you can’t access the woman. The chorus is, “She’ll tease you, she’ll unease you, all the better just to please you. She’s precocious, and she knows just what it takes to make a pro blush. She’s got Greta Garbo’s standoff sighs. She’s got Bette Davis eyes.” It’s all about someone who understands their image, its impact, and how to wield it.
Megan: Which is what the scene is all about. It’s Max, looking at this shadow of her mother, wanting her to be that person. It’s impossible, because this is just an image of her. And I don’t mean to say that flippantly, because Nancy is an insanely complex character. But in terms of her being a mother, she is just an image of her mother. I mean, it is sort of amazing. You know, we talked about how maybe the film doesn’t always land, but it’s amazing how it allows you to be okay with that.
Caroline: By the time you get to the scene, it’s pretty easy to accept what’s happening. There’s a feeling of inevitability, but not dread. Most of the moments that do work throughout the film are these emotional beats. There’s another scene earlier where two of Max’s friends (played by Alia Shawkat and Nina Dobrev) get killed. They have a beat where they’re trapped, and they realize that they’re about to die, and they make eye contact and grab each other’s hands. They’re staring into each other’s eyes holding hands at the moment of death, and the film is choosing to center connection in the face of the inevitable.
Megan: That inevitability is really interesting. The awareness of it is different from a sort of traditional slasher. If you understand the genre, as an audience, maybe you feel the inevitability, but the characters don’t. The characters aren’t assuming only one person is going to make it. There is power in the characters themselves understanding how the world they’re existing in works. And then they can make these insanely emotional choices. The fact that you can decide who the Final Girl is, that’s crazy.
Caroline: Related to that, I’d like to look at the question of what does the killer in a slasher movie usually represent, and what does the killer in The Final Girls represent? Carol Clover says those killers represent failure to navigate the Oedipal complex, and the repressed, immature masculine impulses that cannot be expressed appropriately. But when you put the layer on it, when the slasher of Camp Bloodbath kills people from the real world of The Final Girls, what is that extra layer doing?
Megan: Well, it renders the killer inert, doesn’t it? Because even though he does murder Nancy, the scene is not about him. He’s not the one making decisions. This is a construction so Max and Nancy/Amanda can have this moment. And his story is so unimportant to the rest of the film. That does relate to this idea that the film is not focused on the Freudian kind of sexual ideas that most slashers, or at least original slashers that set the tropes, are. Instead it is about a relationship between this daughter and mother figure. Nancy chooses to have the slasher come to kill her. She does it. It is a melodrama scene, and fear of him has no place here.
Caroline: Maybe that’s part of why it pops so much – it’s putting lenses on top of one another that can’t simultaneously be legible. If we accept that in a typical a slasher movie everything is best explained through Freudian psychoanalysis (which I’ll buy into — Carol Clover is very persuasive), women are literally illegible, because women don’t really have subjectivity in Freudian psychoanalysis. Women don’t transition through the Oedipus complex; women are just there to inspire a fear of castration. You can’t map Freudianism onto female relationships because it’s not a perspective that acknowledges women as having the necessary interiority for complex relationships. But at the same time, the suddenness, the fear, the gore, and all that stuff of the slasher makes no sense in the world of melodrama. Melodrama is all about the feeling when you see it coming and you can’t stop it.
Megan: And that goes to the Linda Williams article, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess” (1991). These are both genres that are very bodily. She talks about horror as a genre and, like you said, it’s the unexpected. So when the slasher jumps out of the closet or whatever, you scream. You scream when the victim screams. With melodrama, your reaction is to cry — your body mirrors the body on screen; you cry when they cry.
Caroline: Which is what happens when I watch this scene. I’m not screaming; I am crying. And so is Nancy. We know it’s melodrama because Nancy and I are weeping together.
Megan: I think that this takes the power away from the figure of the slasher itself. If you don’t have that element of surprise, that unexpected moment of death, then you’re only left with the inevitable — which is the melodrama. I do think it’s a little more complicated, because when I went and saw Scream (2022), I knew that everyone was going to get picked off. But they don’t know that. And I don’t know exactly when that’s going to happen. That’s the fun!
But here, part of why the scene is so powerful is we literally watch characters decide their own fates, and how it’s going to happen. Not even just, “I’m going to sacrifice myself.” She’s not cowering, or waiting in suspense for him to show up. Nancy is so in control of it. She’s essentially saying, “I’m making the sacrifice. I’m making this choice. This isn’t scary. This is me doing what I want to do for my friend/daughter.”
Caroline: If you take the focus on adolescent sexual impulses out of it, and you’re not surprised by it anymore, then the slasher’s not any scarier than the diagnosis of whatever terminal disease is in the melodrama. It’s like…what’s the movie where Bette Davis has an illness that causes her to go blind and then die, but she hides it from her husband in order to not disrupt his work finding a cure for others with the same illness?
Megan: Dark Victory (1939).
Caroline: Yeah, so it’s like a Dark Victory situation. She knows it’s inevitable. She accepts it. It’s interesting to think that the way to take away the fear of a slasher movie is not to take away the violence but to take away the surprise.
Megan: Melodrama can also be violent. Sometimes it’s more emotionally violent. This scene has a way bigger impact on me than anything that happened in Scream (2022). And I like Scream (2022). But we’ve talked for seven years about how this scene has stuck with us. It is a scene we watch regularly. It doesn’t just subvert horror tropes. It also puts this layer of melodrama on top that you don’t see in a slasher.
Caroline: I can see arguments for the presence or the influence of melodrama in a lot of what gets referred to as “elevated horror.” But I think what is different about this is that it’s the beautiful parts of a melodrama. It’s not the gruesomeness; it’s not the crying in the mud. It’s the color saturation and the music. And it’s the connection.
Megan: Yes. We can use Scream (2022) to compare, since it’s recent for both of us. There are a lot of elements of melodrama, especially with the relationship between the two sisters and an absent mother. But it never digs into any of that. Which is not a criticism of that film, it’s just a different thing. There are no moments of catharsis that would fit in a melodrama. The catharsis in a horror film is, you’re waiting for the killer to jump out. Then he finally jumps out: that’s the moment. And in a melodrama it’s that crying moment, it’s that emotional release. I don’t know of any other slasher film that makes me cry. I rewatched it today to talk about this and I got teary-eyed.
Caroline: I would say the rest of the movie is fine, but this scene is brilliant.
Megan: I also don’t know that you could sustain a whole slasher movie with scenes like this. Part of why it works is that it does come as sort of a shock. Although the film has sort of been playing with these emotions or nodding towards these emotions—
Caroline: But it’s not unusual for slasher movies to nod towards friendship, or connection, or whatever. Characters seem distressed when their friends get killed in a slasher. But this level of raw emotion? It’s so melodramatic, and the song is so on point, that it’s almost like it becomes a musical.
I think we would be remiss if we did not take a moment to reflect on the significance of a woman dancing alone in a movie. For me, personally, it might be the image most evocative of magic or surrealness without any kind of special effects. A woman dancing by herself in a space where she is both in public and alone in a movie — I know that’s very specific—
Megan: Not really, it’s definitely a thing. There’s a scene in Almost Famous (2000) where Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) is in the aftermath of a concert and just dancing by herself. There’s a scene in the last episode of Freaks and Geeks (2000) where Lindsay (Linda Cardellini) puts on a Grateful Dead album and dances by herself in her room.
Caroline: We get a lot of Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) dancing alone in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019). I think of those dancing alone images as something out of a dream.
Megan: It is so dreamlike because it’s so personal — you’re not supposed to be seeing that. And I think it’s also incredibly hard to convey as an actor. You have a camera crew around you. So to be able to portray the emotional feeling of what it’s like to hear a song just right, or to be so moved by something that you are dancing in a space, must be a challenge.
Caroline: And also, Nancy’s not her mother, but that’s something you do with your child. You put on a song and do a silly dance to play and to make them laugh. She’s putting her hard emotions aside for Max. She knows Billy is coming, and she is frightened. There is a moment where you see that in her eyes, and then she pushes it aside and goes back to focusing on Max. It’s an incredibly intimate moment.
This is probably very cheesy to say, but it almost feels like a maternal love so strong, that it reaches through genres and shatters their frames. It’s like Amanda loved Max so much, that not only does that love reach across time, but a shadow of herself can still bond with her daughter and give her daughter strength. She loved her so much that she can disrupt Camp Bloodbath and The Final Girls to take care of her daughter.
Megan: We’ve talked a little bit about this film relating to other mother figures in other horror — things like Hereditary (2018), or Rosemary’s Baby (1968), where motherhood is just rendered as terrifying. And with slashers I think it’s less cohesive how mothers are shown, but with characters like Jason (Friday the 13th) or even Michael (Halloween), there’s complicated relationships with female family members.
Caroline: Slashers love Oedipal killers. The idea of a disturbed relationship with a mother driving the terror goes back to the roots of the genre with Psycho (1960).
Megan: But here the mother relationship is an extremely positive force in the film. It is not something to be feared or something that creates a mass murderer.
Caroline: I love what you’re saying. It’s refuting the slasher’s obsession with equating the maternal with death. Whether it’s Rosemary’s Baby, Jason’s mom (Friday the 13th), or Billy’s mom in the Scream movies — because Freudian psychoanalysis is so deeply embedded in Hollywood genres, and especially slashers, motherhood always seems to represent the abject. It’s always mired in the yuckiness, but there’s a sense in which this movie is just uniquely soaring above that. And doing so in a beautiful and uninhibited kind of way.
We talked about “Film Bodies” by Linda Williams, and in that she says that body genres are all about temporal anxiety. She says the anxiety of horror is “too soon” — things happen that you’re not ready for. And then the anxiety of melodrama is being “too late” — things happen and you’re not there in time to stop them or say what you needed to say. You have regret, but you can’t go back. But here the question seems to be, could you try to weave together a movie that balances both of those simultaneously?
Megan: Max’s regret is, “I didn’t tell my mother that I loved her. I was too late to say what I needed to say.” Then with Nancy, she is supposed to be taken too soon, the same way Amanda was, because it’s a slasher film. But she is also fixing Max’s “too late.” So then it becomes that she’s making the choice to say, “Oh, no, this is my time. This is right on time.”
Caroline: By being the one character who exists with a foot in both worlds, who has a natural presence in both the world of The Final Girls and the world of Camp Bloodbath, she is the only one who is able to mediate that temporal gap. And it is only by mediating that temporal gap that she can heal Max’s loss. She is the only one who can be on time.
I’m thinking now that maybe part of why that lands in such a significant way is that in our current moment, by virtue of cameras and recording technology being everywhere, we are constantly creating and preserving shadows of ourselves — in a way that previous generations did not. If something had happened to my mom when I was a kid, which thankfully did not, there would have been some pictures, maybe one or two videos, but just not that much. But if something happens to me while my children are young (knock on wood, we don’t want that) there’s so many more images, there’s videos, there’s hours and hours of my voice. None of that is me; none of that replaces me. But we are creating more and more shadows and imprints of ourselves that remain in these digital spaces on their preordained tracks. This scene takes that idea into a horror movie and doesn’t make it horrific, but instead makes it a comfort. There is a beauty in thinking that memories are not simply inert — that they can have power to create new meaning, to heal in new ways, to recur. Even though they can’t collapse the past into the present, they still have power in bridging the two.
