Don't grow up.

So. Link off a link, from peaseblossom's journal; from Pretty/Scary, an essay on the final girl. (You know her if you've ever seen a slasher movie. She's the good girl, the one who doesn't do drugs or have illicit[1] sex, and the one who survives and probably kills the monster.)

Anyway, this essay--called "Demon of the Threshold: or, Why the "Final Girl" Can Kiss My Ass"--asserts that

The reason that the Final Girl can emerge victorious at the end of a slasher movie is that she remains a girl—a child who does not take any independent steps toward adulthood. The traditional acts “punished” by the slasher are drinking, smoking and sex—all of the fun things that adults are allowed to do and children aren’t.

And the first thing that came to mind, immediately, was the common element of all the protagonists in Stephen King's IT, when they're back in Derry after Mike Hanlon's call (or dead in the ground after not being able to come back). It's not that they're all rich, or all successful, or that they've all forgotten--Hanlon is none of those things, although being rich and successful does let them live in a kind of fairytale world--a modern fairytale, where you don't need to worry about money or security.

The common element? "I'm not sure," Beverly says,[2] "but I think we're all childless."

She's right. Not only are they all childless, but the space between their childhood and their adulthood is glossed over, deliberately absent from the narrative. Bill himself thinks of it as the Great Unknown, and wonders about it briefly, but it gets maybe a handful of paragraphs over the entire length of a thousand-plus page book.

Hell, forget the protagonists--Henry Bowers goes straight from childhood to adult without any real description of the process of maturation. (Given where he spent the time, this is understandable.)

And I think nothing is as big a cue that you *must* leave behind childhood and take on adult responsibilities as having a child. Possibly having your parents die. I've tried to articulate my thoughts about my grandmother's death, and I suspect it would be a bigger thing than that.

The essay also goes on to observe

The slasher [...] defends the barrier between the world of children and the world of adults, and will not allow anyone to pass. If you look at the background story for all of the classic slasher figures—Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers—you find that every one of them emerges from a torturous realm of abuse as a child (sometimes, as in Freddy’s case, a child cursed even before conception). If you could rip away the killer’s dreadful mask, you would find the face of an angry child—trapped forever, like one of those fiendish things from the old German fairy tales which begin as a little boy or girl and then spend centuries not growing up, until they become unspeakable.

Now, aside from a sudden desire to go hunting up these German fairy tales because that is just a lovely idea and I want to see it, it's a good point. (Also, it's somewhat reminiscent of Batman's origin and current motivations; something to look at later.)

The essay goes on to argue that both the Final Girl and the monster are conveying the same message; that becoming an adult gets you killed, so don't do that. The adults die. The child that didn't grow up right kills them. The child that's still a child defeats the monster and lives. And what comes to mind there is the line "Childhood ends the moment you know you're going to die"--I have no idea where that's from and I'm just writing right now, this is raw reflex stuff, I'll dig up references later because I'm worried that if I stop to Google I'll get distracted and loose my words--which has always rung true. Maybe not the *whole* truth, but a goodly chunk of it.

And the writer--a mother raising two kids--finishes with

You accept your own mortality; the knife descends. It is a death of sorts: the death of a child who regarded himself/herself as the center of the universe, and the birth of an adult who is capable of real love and sacrifice for another.

And in a slasher movie, where you identify with the Final Girl, you've got a flickering ninety minutes to be a child again. To be frightened and challenged and to succeed. To be someone who won't die. You can live in a Never-Never Land where you have all the potential of an adolescent, and haven't done anything to screw up. And the world is never unfair, and your eyes into the story are the eyes of the kind and good immortal who will emerge bloody but unbowed, and safe.

Horror is about the Appolonian trying to survive the Dionysian. Slasher movies end with the Appolonian surviving, and a long golden day where the sun never sets.

It's not fine and subtle art and characterization. I *know* that. And it's all too often neophobic, anti-intellectual, and stunningly misogynistic.

I wouldn't call myself an intellectual, although I can at least function in an intellectual setting.

I'm a feminist.

I'm an adult.

And it's really scary. So let me watch my trashy horror movies, and love them for their cathartic scares, and their ritualized stories, and their brief chance to remember what it's like to feel young and immortal?

(God I love this genre. But I'm starting to suspect I need to take a *really* long look at its various types.)
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[1] Ton of assumptions in that word, most of them reflecting the oft-teenaged nature of the protagonist. Sex with boyfriend if you're still living in your parents' house? Illicit. OTOH, sex with your husband in your own home? Not illicit. Also probably means you're not a protagonist, but this is a bit of a tangent.
[2] If it wasn't Beverly, my apologies. I'm going from memory here; I haven't read through IT in about a year.

Continuing

Further note, developed from previous post:

The children have the power, either to be the monster or to stop the monster.

Hmh. The unaged might be a better word. I was going to say the unspoilt, but Freddy and Michael and Jason definitely aren't that.

Admittedly, in a lot of modern horror novels, the protagonist isn't a child, but a widower--and when they are a child, it's usually a literal child, not a late-teens individual who's resisting the lure of sex, drugs, and growing up.

In horror novels (and frequently stories), children are also barometers. If the kids all think one particular child is awful; if they start talking about their invisible friend after you've moved into the house where the murders happened; if they have hysterics because the scary lady put their tongue out at them, and her tongue was black; if they start trying to choke their siblings instead of giving them Indian burns...

...look, just move. Move right away. Grab the cat, stuff your armload of goods into a duffel bag as you're walking out the door, and hit the road.

(Of course, I'm now thinking of Salem's Lot, where the two who survived Barlow are a widower (Ben Mears) and a child (Mark Petrie). And let us be honest; Mark went through a hell of a lot more than any other character in the book and came out a hell of a lot better.)

But yeah. From the generally presumed to be more adult perspective of the horror reader[1], both the widower and the literal child share a particular quality: society says it's okay if they're outsiders. And from this priviledged outside perspective, they can see what's coming or what's there, because they are neither protected nor blinded by the social understanding of what is correct.

And this priviledged outside perspective comes with the isolation that's such a critical element of horror.

(Okay. I really need to sit down and articulate the difference between slashers and others. I think it might just be that the commonly intangible elements of horror (evil, isolation, arguably moral strength) are given material form? Probably it's more of a continuum. Will work on that later.)

But in slashers, the (functional) child has the *power*, pretty much throughout. In other works, there's a sharper division between the role of hero and monster--the adult hero is more likely to protect a world without rejecting adulthood, and the child is more likely to just have *insight*, rather than power. You don't get the case of the slasher movie, where both hero and monster are resisting or retaliating against adulthood.

Mhm. Possibly a skewed impression; and even if it's accurate, it probably springs from the relatively compact story that you need to fit into your average movie. Still, something to mull over.
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[1] Look, I know many of the people who read horror started reading it young. But most people who write do so for their peers, and most people who write it are adults. Slasher movies, OTOH, are made by adults and targeted at a teenage audience.