LE3 .A278 2020

2020

Pinder, Kait

Acadia University

Bachelor of Arts

Honours

English

English & Theatre Studies

This thesis examines the last girl standing in two Wes Craven slasher franchises, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream. Film theorist Carol J. Clover calls this figure the Final Girl, the one who survives the massacre of the killer. I aim to synthesise the arguments of Clover and Julia Kristeva, in their respective theorisations of the Final Girl and the abject, while also extending their analyses to cover theoretical gaps in the way horror film scholarship understands female characters. The first chapter argues that Nancy Thompson and Sidney Prescott, the two Final Girls in A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream offer a different model of the trope Clover theorizes. The chapter contends that these Final Girls are not masculinized virgin figures who act as stand-ins for a male sadomasochistic fantasy. Rather, they are characters who survive because of their wit and strength, not allowing themselves to be defined by the sexual standards that capture the classic Final Girl. These two characters survive despite their relationships (romantic and sexual) with male characters. They also disparage the tradition of viewing sex as abject and rather are motivated by their interactions with the killer figure, seeking to expel him as an abject threat rather than succumb to it. The second chapter proposes a new character model, the Final Mother, seen in Craven’s sequel films New Nightmare and Scream 4. This figure protects not only herself from a returned abject killer but also a child in her care. The Final Mother repurposes the trauma she endured in the original film in order to transcend the binary that seeks to categorize her as victim or monster. She emerges from the sequel film an agent of maternal heroism, who rids the abject threat once and for all. This thesis thus aims to extend Clover’s original trope to synthesize it with Kristeva’s theory, while also recommending the acknowledgement of the Final Mother, a grown-up Final Girl oft-ignored in horror scholarship.

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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:3385