Member-only story
Final Girl Evenings
I’ve been itching to write about horror films, the genre in all its masterful and complicated, oozing, campy extravagance. Over the past year, watching horror movies has become my primary coping mechanism, and yet in the solitary darkness of my childhood bedroom with greasy microwave popcorn and a glass of red wine, something is missing. I want to talk to people about these films; I want to analyze and excavate the narrative routes and valleys the horror genre can create, reinforce, or subvert.
I miss the audience, I’ve realized; the anonymous audience of a movie theater. How weirdly tender it is, a gathering of strangers leaning back in their seats, gorging on popcorn and candy and all the sweet-salty treats we so often deny ourselves in the everyday. How we are all momentarily joined together to sit down and gaze up at a huge screen, how suddenly this private, utterly desperate desire, this most-human hunger—for fantasy, for self-obliteration, for the bravado and color of story—is made communal and wholly acceptable. How, for example, when you go to a movie with an enormous, overzealous fan base and, let’s say, a new film in a franchise comes out, the theater is overstuffed and brimming with such unrestrained and wholesome excitement, how this silent act of witnessing-as-wanting comes alive. The audience reactions often enthrall me more than the movie itself—the shared, unconstricted hyperbole of the…
