For the love of blood: Scream queens and final girls
As written for Girl Museum.
Melissa Barrera for Polyesterzine
In their 2023 song, You First, Paramore’s Hayley Williams sings ‘turns out I’m living in a horror film where I’m both the killer and the final girl’. In 2 lines, she summarises the plight of the final girl, embodied once again in Melissa Barrera’s latest horror, Abigail (2024). The film joins the ranks of camp horror and is a fun genre-crossing mix of the silly, the scary, the bloody and the supernatural. Barrera, our movie’s lead, takes another step in the direction of scream queen, following on from her headline performances in Scream (2022) and Scream VI (2023). In Abigail, she is very good. I say this with what feels like an almost personal investment in her success following attempts to blacklist her for supporting Palestine. While the title of scream queen is still under debate, I can tell you now for free, Melissa Barrera is absolutely worthy of the title.
A scream queen is not a final girl, though often conflated. Final girls, as the name implies do indeed make it to the end of the movie, worse for wear but alive. Scream queens however, have evolved from damsel in distress tropes noted for piercing screams. The modern scream queen is instead an actress with a great pitch, a diverse portfolio of horror film appearances and enough personality to command the room. In the case of Barrera, she is as Williams sings, the killer and the final girl and as it stands, our onscreen horror girlies are bloodier and more visceral in the ways they fight back. At the end of Scream 5 and 6, Barrera is covered in blood, a response to fighting for survival and something a bit darker, with links to her ancestry. In Abigail, she is once again head to toe crimson, my dripping and squelching final girl. So what is it about the blood?
For me, it’s the way their autonomy is platformed and fleshed out and marks the way female identity and relationships are developed into something more. We have characters that subvert horror tropes, adding their own little bits to the legacy of the genre. The final girl survived because of her purity and abstinence from vices of alcohol, drugs, sex and boys. In Halloween (1978), Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, survives because she is somewhat savvier and smarter than her counterparts, a keener ability to make it to the end because she’s free from these distractions. The final girl was a symptom of the purity myth. In the Scream movies, our characters of Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) occupy the same scream queen, final girl space that Strode does but in a vastly different way. Neither character exhibits the traits Strode does and in fact, are beloved for their existence not as the antithesis of goodness but for merely being the girls they are. Cox’s character in particular is a great example because she’s kind of a terrible person, and yet they both live well into their adult years. This is the mark of the bloody women in horror, a keen understanding of the many womens a girl is just a girl in all her goodness, evilness or mere existence
The final girl has since become the subject of numerous fan edits and continues to have its cool girl moment within the horror genre. This is in part due to revivals, new material and a younger cast of conventionally attractive women are a recipe for success. This take however, is both true and largely reductive. Dr. Robin Means Coleman in Horror Noire (2019) is clear on the ways horror as a genre is a storytelling medium reflecting our lives, experiences, fears, curiosities and everything in between. In the case of our final girls, the truth lies in the blood.
Here, blood becomes a baptismal experience. In Abigail, the film picks up when Barrera starts to get bloody, a symptom of her fatigue, her fears and her anger and it is in this that her performance shines. To some, this might be interpreted as a depiction of motherhood and the almost primal urge to protect oneself and one’s child and this isn’t wrong. But also, simply put, it’s just kind of fun to watch so much suppressed anger play out on screen. Barrera takes the torch of scream queen and final girl keenly and displays this in her own horror undertakings, a symptom of how characterisation and the freedom to develop oneself is the true legacy of female characterisation in the genre. Barrera is at her strongest when she leans into who she really is, it’s the key to her survival.
Looking at the final girl today, Parker and Miri in Sick (2022), Grace in Ready or Not (2019), Jenna Ortega in almost anything she touches. I think of the final girls that paved the way. Karla in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1988), Ellen Ripley in Alien (1979) and my Scream number ones, Gale and Sidney. My investment is largely in the protection and survival of these women but the rawness they’re allowed to exude in their emotions.
Melissa Barrera (Abigail, 2024)
