FINAL GIRLS: A HORROR TROPE WORTH REVISITING

“Riley Sager” takes a look at what might have become of the well-known horror type

Riley Sager wouldn’t exist without the original scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis and her iconic role as the knitting-needlewielding babysitter Laurie Strobe in the 1978 sleepover classic Halloween. Curtis’ preppy prom-queen-turned-survivalist transformed campy slasher films into a subversively feminist genre, paving the way for future generations of nice-girl heroines, such as Freddie Krueger’s nemesis Nancy Thompson in Nightmare on Elm

Street and Ghostface’s target, Sidney Prescott, in Scream.

Sager — the pseudonym of mystery writer Todd Ritter — didn’t become a horror buff until he saw Scream, which hooked him with its combination of mystery, gore and comedy. As a student film critic at Penn State University, Sager was familiar with the “final girls” trope, named after those surprisingly tough female (often virginal) protagonists who survive on their wits after everyone around them is murdered in gory ways. He became fixated on the future lives of these women after the credits rolled. “It always ends the same way: they’re bloodied, but they’re alive and all their friends are dead,” Sager says. “I was just so curious about what happens 10 years from now, and wanted to put a real-world spin on it.”

In Final Girls, Ritter’s first novel written as Riley Sager (a sly nod to the final girls themselves, who often have genderneutral names), the thriller kicks off with the story of Quincy Carpenter, who, years after surviving a horrific massacre at a cottage weekend, has a new “normal” life as a successful food blogger, having mentally blocked out the trauma. After the sudden and mysterious death of Lisa, another media-celebrated final girl, Quincy meets Sam, the lone survivor of the notorious “Sack Man” massacre. The duo become tabloid fodder, as tattooed Sam and her probing questions inflame Quincy’s not-so-deeply bottled rage and she begins having vivid flashbacks, setting off a series of events that puts the two women’s innocence in question and their lives in danger.

Sager believes that final girls as a trope have endured onscreen because they’re often cast as the most relatable and smartest characters. “I think they are the audience surrogate,” he says. “The final girl presents who people think they’d behave like in a horror movie. No one says, ‘I’m the ditzy best friend who gets killed in the second reel.’ ” The character type has become so familiar and ingrained in pop culture that even those who aren’t horror buffs will recognize many of its sly references in his book, and how Sager twists established ideas of how these women should behave. “I wanted to play with the various rules that have been created over the years for final girls,” he says. “I wanted to lean into them and also subvert them and also give a little suspicion about them. People relate to Quincy, but she’s not entirely trustworthy.”

While Final Girls is a loving celebration of the horror genre, Sager sought to avoid parody territory. In an earlier draft of the book, Sam’s character survived a mass killing at a summer camp — a perennial horror setting — but Sager changed it to a motel upon his agent’s suggestion. “I think that was getting a little too on the nose,” he says. Sager admits that some might see Quincy’s escape from a cabin in the woods as cliché, but “I think I was able to get away with it because we have flashbacks to that night,” he says. “I wanted those flashbacks to serve as the horror movie that she survived. Final Girls is actually a sequel to the movie that no one has seen yet.