The geek, the jock, the brainiac and the final girl
TOM RICHARDSON: I got along to see the new remake of Evil Dead the other day; fairly clichéd cabin-in-the-woods type fare, typified by shallow characters quickly dispatched by some malevolent evil force but distinguished by a few more lashings of gore than you’d tend to expect from mainstream horror.
At any rate, obviously Liberal Upper House leader David Ridgway hasn’t been along to see it.
If he had, he’d never have suggested that the entire Upper House Select Committee examining the issue of wind farms in South Australia should convene for an entire night at an abandoned house in the middle of disused arable land.
For God’s sake, doesn’t he know anything about horror movies?
That’s the oldest cliché in the book: a motley gang of bickering associates – Ridgway, Labor MLC Russell Wortley, and crossbenchers Mark Parnell, Rob Brokenshire and Ann Bressington — forced to spend the night in an old, vacant house. They don’t stand a chance!
I can almost see the unfortunate group, foreboding music looming ominously in the background as they wend their way to the deserted abode, no doubt happening upon a wizened figure on their way (John Darley, perhaps?) who’ll wisely implore them to turn around before it’s too late because there’s “evil in them old Wind Farms”. Of course, none will heed his sage counsel.
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Indeed, all the stereotypes are there; we can almost guess who’ll be first to meet their grisly demise.
Ridgway, as committee chair, may think he’s like the Frederick Loren character played by Vincent Price in House On Haunted Hill – the convenor and arch-conspirator who hosts the unfortunate guests, wagering they won’t accept his challenge to see out the night in his eerie manor.
But in this company, he’s probably more the token jock, and the token jock never survives to see the dawn.
As author/critic John Kenneth Muir writes in Horror Films of the 1980s: “Many slasher films tease audiences by suggesting this alpha male … will survive. … In fact, the jock’s chances of surviving a slasher film are slim.”
He won’t be the first to go, though. The token jock must survive long enough for the group to realise something is amiss. He’ll then get a touch of bravado, maybe even daring the unseen entity to show itself and take him on. Big mistake, Ridgey!
However, if we’re following standard horror movie conventions, my guess would be that the initial victim will be Wortley. He fits the bill: the affable loner, slightly put upon by the rest of the group. For a while no-one notices he’s missing. I suspect his fate will involve some kind of ironic scalping, a la Sam Whitemoon in Creepshow II.
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However, once Wortley’s mangled corpse is discovered, fear and pandemonium seize the group. Ridgway helpfully suggests they all split up to find the culprit. Brokenshire, till that point a picture of austere authority, agrees, helpfully offering to take the only car (a Government-subsidised Toyota Prado) in search of help, because he has a dodgy hip and “won’t be much use in a scrap”.
Of course, in horror movies, cars never work when they’re supposed to. Either a perfectly sound engine will suddenly fail to turn over when ignited by an imperiled protagonist or will almost certainly conk out within minutes of the drive. As the resident Family First delegate, the evil forces in the abandoned house will almost certainly take exception to Brokey from the outset, and take great pleasure in dispatching him in a particularly nasty way – probably involving a crucifix.
Parnell, of course, will outlast Ridgway. He’s the canny intellectual; not much use in fighting evil spirits, but technically necessary for the exposition of the plot. He’s like the Randy Meeks character in Scream, the guy who patiently explains the conventions of the slasher film to his gawking cohorts.
“There are certain RULES that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie”, he’ll say, before himself falling foul of one of the more obvious ones – don’t be the brainy guy, ‘cos you’ll die.
In the meantime, though, he’ll figure out whence the evil has come (as the locals would have it, the spirits of the dead have been roused from their eternal slumber by the impolite introduction of “clean, green energy”) and perhaps even concoct some incantation to repel it. Of course, before he gets a chance to put his plan into action, the Greens activist will be swallowed up by his beloved forest.
Which leaves Bressington. The archetypal “final girl”.
As academic Carol J. Clover’s pivotal feminist horror movie thesis Men, Women and Chainsaws explains: “She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of all her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded … she alone looks death in the face, but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer either long enough to be rescued or to kill him herself.”
"Bressington, then, is Laurie from Halloween, Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm St, Sally from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
The “final girl” must be bookish, resourceful or both (preferably); an outsider in the initial group but with deep wells of inner fortitude on which to draw.
She alone will survive this ill-conceived folly long enough to return to Parliament and file the mother of all select committee minority reports (its thesis, effectively, that wind farms are pure evil and must be sent back to the hell from whence they came).
Of course, since Wolf Creek (massive spoiler alert!), all the conventions of the outback horror have been turned on their decapitated heads, so effectively just being the most resourceful and independent female in the group of victims is no real guarantee of longevity anymore.
Perhaps it would all be far simpler and infinitely safer to give the whole idea of a Wind Farm Select Committee sleepover at an abandoned outback home a rather wide berth.
As King Arthur said in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “On second thought, let’s not go there; ‘tis a silly place!”
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