That Final Girl Life

About That Final Girl Life

Survival is just the beginning. Welcome to the story that continues after the movie ends. This podcast exists to show you what it's really like to be a final girl out there in the world. When the movie's over and the lights come up, what happens to Sidney, Laurie, Max(xx)ine? How do you survive in the day-to-day world when you know the horrors that lurk beneath it? I'm a real life final girl, and I'm here to tell you what comes after the end of the story.

Publisher

Chindilani

Category

tv & film

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

21 Jun 2026

Latest episode

11 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

13 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   11 Oct 2026

   E13 I'll Be Right Back 😉

   It's a wrap for Season One of That Final Girl Life! In the thirteenth episode I recap what I've spoken about this season and share some of the things I've learned as a total newbie to podcasting. Resources mentioned: Andrea Dunlop (https://www.andreadunlop.net/), who runs podcast courses Garageband (https://getgarageband.com/), free recording software iZotope (https://www.izotope.com/), for production + editing Letterboxd (https://letterboxd.com/chindilani/), where I keep my lists of movies to cover Macbook Air (https://www.apple.com/uk/macbook-air/), in case you've been living under a rock and have never heard of them Multitude's page (https://www.multitudeshows.com/free-resources) of free resources for starting a podcast Proton (https://proton.me/), a more secure alternative to Google Røde (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00MMKQOEM?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_dt_b_fed_asin_title_1&th=1) USB microphone Skullcandy (https://www.skullcandy.co.uk/products/crusher-anc-2-sensory-bass-headphones-with-active-noise-canceling?variant=55619512467840) headphones Transcript: Haters and gentlefriends, welcome to That Final Girl Life. It's your favourite final girl here, taking you through the horrors and out the other side to find out what life is really like after the movie ends. This episode is going to be a bit different. It's gonna be more chatty, more informal, and I'm gonna use this as an episode to wrap up season one. I've done twelve episodes, this is going to be number thirteen, which feels like an appropriately horrory number. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about some of the things I've learned whilst doing season one, and then I'm gonna talk about season two and onwards and how all of that's going to work. When I first started, I didn't know if this was going to be seasonal or if I was just gonna start and keep going. I've decided to turn it into a podcast that has seasons, and that's for a couple of reasons: firstly, it's because I would like some down time in between. I'm doing everything by myself in my living room, and I also am a PhD student... so, you know, I've got other stuff to do as well. And I'm disabled and chronically ill, so I spend a lot of time in bed. And [I] want to have time to watch horror movies for fun, as well. So, yeah. So I'm gonna do some seasons partly to give myself some little breaks in between. But I found, also, as I was recording, that sometimes the episodes week on week were really similar, and I would be like, oh, I don't know if I'm really adding anything useful in this episode, I'm sort of not going as far into it as I would like to go, and I don't know how to do that because it doesn't really follow on from the previous one. And then sometimes they were so different that I almost had the opposite problem, where I was like, I want to explore this more, but... but I don't have time to kind of go deep into a topic. So I thought, OK, if I sit down and map out some seasons, then I can take like a topic within horror and go a little bit deeper into it over the course of several weeks, and kind of each episode can draw on the previous one, which is what a lot of horror podcasts do. I think I'm gonna do it slightly differently, in terms of... because we're not so much about horror movies as about final girls, so it's not going to be so much, y'know, "The Folk Horror Season," and "The Slasher Season," and... It might become that later on, I don't know, but right now I think I'm going to start by looking at different types of final girl and how they're portrayed in horror films. My next season, Season Two, is going to be about disability in horror. This is something I am very interested in because I am disabled. And also, I am disabled in quite a lot of ways that would have put me in a freak show, if we were living in Victorian times. Case in point: And actually, I did do some performance when I was younger of, like, contortion, which I can do because my bones and muscles are... strange. So I'm quite interested in how we view disabled people in horror. I watched The Elephant Man recently. I thought that was... I thought that was actually very well done, the David Lynch film, I mean it was a David Lynch film, he's a fucking legend, so of course it was great. But I thought it was quite sympathetically done to the elephant man himself, and I don't often find that when I see disabled characters in horror. There's obviously a lot that kind of comes out about the disability itself being horrifying, and the fact that the person is disabled being part of the horror. The number of times I have heard people say that the sister in Pet Sematary is the scariest thing because of her -- is it spina bifida? I can't remember what it is that she's supposed to have -- but this, this kind of spinal problem that she is supposed to have that makes her horrifying to people, and I find that problematic, and also interesting, as a disabled person, especially one with a spinal condition that makes my body twist in strange ways. So we're going to start off with that. I've got a really exciting guest coming on to talk about Hush, the Mike Flanagan movie, which a lot of the time people put forward as an example of: this is a movie in which the disability is not to her disadvantage, particularly, other than that she can't hear the guy. But it's not something that makes her horrifying, and she's really good at doing well despite it, and all of this stuff. So it's quite often put forward as an example of positive disabled representation. But I noticed when... I'm not Deaf or hard of hearing, but I noticed when I was watching it that... I wasn't convinced that they had spoken to many Deaf people. I do have quite a few Deaf friends, and I thought, I swear that, for example, when friend is, like, BANGING BANGING BANGING on the door, like, sure she wouldn't be able to hear it the way a hearing person would, but I'm sure my Deaf friends can, like, feel vibrations, that's why Deaf people go to concerts, right? Because you can feel the vibrations of the music, the bassline. Yeah. So there were a couple of things where I was like, I don't think this looks very accurate, but I don't know for sure. And also when I was reading a lot of the reviews that were full of praise for it, none of them were from Deaf people. And I was like, hmm, I dunno. I want to get views from the Deaf community about this. So I reached out to someone who has a YouTube channel about being Deaf, and who has talked about Hush the movie on their YouTube channel. And so we're hopefully gonna do an episode together. I'm gonna try to maybe get some guests on here and there, where there's someone who has more expertise within the subgenre or the thing I'm talking about than I do. Obviously I am not an expert in very many things, so that would be helpful! The challenge is stuff like timing and, y'know, all of that malarkey. So we'll have to see. But I'm definitely going to get that guest on and that's going to be really exciting. So that's going to be the next season. I don't know what the other seasons are going to be yet. I'm gonna spend the next few weeks mind mapping and also setting up the next season. I thought this would be a good [episode] to start with, both because it's something that I'm particularly passionate about, but also because Mike Flanagan's in the news because of Carrie. Which I haven't watched yet. Is it good? It's probably good, his series do tend to be phenomenal. Yeah, so that's the... that's the vibe, the seasonal vibe that is coming up. In an ideal world, I would start the new season on Hallowe'en and run it roughly until the end of the year, but I don't know... that's not very far away and it's not much of a break, so I don't know if that's gonna be what happens, but that would be nice. So! What have I learned from podcasting? I knew fuck all when I started. I'd listened to a lot of them, like them, including some horror ones, specifically The Final Girls horror podcast by Anna Bogutskaya and various guests; obviously The Evolution of Horror, which everyone loves; The Horror And Her, I really like, in which they talk about people's first ever horror experiences and how they came to love horror. And I found it really funny how many of us had childhood experiences of watching a horror movie way too young, and being like, oh, now I'm kind of hooked... that's quite interesting... to me. So, yeah. I've been a podcast listener for years, but I just... I dunno, audio is not a medium I'm particularly comfortable in. I'm a writer, so I was confident I could write episodes, but I wasn't particularly confident that I could speak them in ways that would sound coherent and nice for people to listen to. So I didn' t know how it was going to go, but I thought I'd give it a try. I didn't know if I was going to carry it on. I thought... I worried that I would do, like, two episodes and then give up, and I'm quite proud that I didn't do that. Actually, I did find it really fun. And I learned a lot as well about, sort of, random subjects that I wouldn't have learned anything about otherwise. How did I set things up? I did a course by Andrea Dunlop, who hosts a podcast called Nobody Should Believe Me, which is about medical child abuse, which is not a fun topic, but it's very interesting, and if you're interested in that kind of thing, I would highly recommend it. She had a course called something like "How to start a podcast," so I did that course and that was very helpful in terms of working out what I had to work out upfront and what I could kind of wing it as I went along. Spirits is a podcast that's been going for absolutely years. I used to listen to it a lot, I don't listen to it as much anymore. It's about mythology, and they make a different cocktail or mocktail each week and talk about mythology from around the world. Great premise. Really fun. And they have a resources page, which I will try to find and link to in the show notes, where they talk about stuff like: do you actually need a professional microphone and if so, what's the best one to buy given that you probably have a low budget? And all that stuff, which I found really helpful. So I will link to that if I can find it. I will also link to the stuff that I bought, with the caveat that... iuno. Some of it I had already and some of it I bought because it was just there, or because it was recommended, and there might be better options out there. Listen to someone who knows what they're talking about, if you can, but if you're here, you can listen to me. I suppose that's the point! Anyway. So I have a Røde microphone which plugs into my computer. I just have a laptop, I have a Macbook Air, it's not very old, which is nice, like it runs quite well, it's got quite a high processing speed because I broke my old one, and so it's fairly new, which I think probably helps. But I'm sure you can use whatever you have. So it plugs into that very easily and that is what I use to record. I also have some Skullcandy headphones, which honestly I primarily got because they're pretty. And I used them-- Meow! There is the cat. Meow! Hi! --I used them for the first few episodes and then I realised I didn't really need to be wearing headphones in order to record, and-- Meow! --and that was fine. Hi baby! You gonna come and say hi? I'm not on video today, so you won't be able to see her, but anyway. (Here you go!) You can hear her! MEOOOWWW! And it demonstrates, again, that this is a human making a podcast in her living room and not some AI bot. I am on a Macbook, like I said, and I'm using Garageband, which is free, and I think just comes with the Macbook, I don't think I even had to download it. It's really simple to use, if you have no idea what you're doing, it's pretty good as a kind of starting point. There's loads of tutorials on YouTube that can help you get better. I learned about things like equalising volume... I didn't learn very much, I didn't learn enough to explain it to somebody else, but I learned enough to be able to drag things around and go, oh, that does make a difference! The other main thing that I would really recommend is the iZotope RX Voice De-click, especially if you have a dry mouth and make a lot of mouth noises. I hate that phrase! But I have Sjøgren's, which is a type of autoimmune disease which makes you unable to produce saliva like you're supposed to, so one of the things I was genuinely really worried about was that. And the first couple of episodes I didn't have the De-clicker and then I added it later, and it is so good. It comes with a bunch of other things as well that you can fiddle around with that are, like, noise gates and things that take out the background noises and stuff. And I have not done as much fiddling as I probably eventually will, but that's been really helpful. I have learned that it makes a difference whether I record close to, or far away from, my living room windows. I know it's better if I sit over there, but my desk is here, next to the windows, and I can't be arsed to move my living room around, so maybe in the future I'll do that. Meow! Hi! Editing and stuff I found fairly straightforward. I think Garageband is relatively intuitive? So I found that sort of alright. The music I wrote and recorded just, like, a very simple piano and vocal thing just so that I had something, like, in between sections of the podcast. And I think that's it, basically. I have a Proton Drive where I keep all my notes and stuff like that. I have a Letterboxd, which I use to keep track of what I'm watching. And actually, the way that I worked out which films I was gonna do for this season, because it didn't have a theme and I was just going along with it and seeing if I enjoyed it, I made a massive Letterboxd list of everything that had a final girl in it, that I had already watched or that I knew of, and then once a week I would just go to that list and hit 'Shuffle,' and then whichever one came up first, as long as I could find it somewhere online that I could watch it, and I would just do that one. With a couple of exceptions, those being Midsommar, which I started with because it was Midsummer's Day when I started the podcast; and Obsession, because it was huge. So I was like, well, I'm definitely doing that one. So, yeah. That's how it's been going. It's been... I think it's been a pretty successful endeavour so far, given that I know nothing? We have done... which films have we done? I don't even know, let me fiiiind myyyy thiiiing. We have done: Episode 1: Dani from Midsommar That was really fun. What happens when you end up in a cult and then everyone around you dies, and then you're left in this cult and they're the only family you have. I found that one quite interesting. I think cult-based and religious horror might be a good theme at some point. Episode 2: Cecilia from The Invisible Man ...which is a fantastic film. I'd remembered that I'd loved it but I'd forgotten just how excellent it is until I watched it again. That was a really interesting look into believing people who have gone through really difficult things. Episode 3: Sarah from The Descent Actually, one of the things that I might do a season on at some point is the concept of metaphor, because so many... I mean, kind of part of the point of horror films is that a lot of the time they are metaphorical. So you can read The Descent so easily as a metaphor for grief, and I kind of talked about that in the episode. And I was like, so if it was "just" a metaphor for grief, then this is how her life might turn out, but if the events of The Descent actually happened and they actually found all of the... y'know, scary creatures in the cave, then this is how it might have turned out. And I think it might be interesting, at some point, to do a kind of metaphor season. Episode 4: Nikki from Obsession I adore Nikki from Obsession. She is my homegirl. I love her. And I had a really interesting time thinking about borderline personality disorder, which she is very evocative of from a psychotherapy point of view (I'm a trained psychotherapist as well). So that was quite interesting. Episode 5: Scarlett from As Above, So Below I just really enjoyed this one, it was so much fun. It was quite reminiscent of The Descent, I think it probably... took a lot of inspiration... from The Descent as a film. But it was just fun to look at the catacombs and all of the... you know, I always find it fascinating to watch people squeeze themselves through tiny gaps in caves-- Meow! --I watch a lot of those TikTok videos, just to be like, what the fuck are you doing with your lives?! Episode 6: Annika from The Voices of Our Mother ...which was quite an interesting film, because the first time I watched it I really didn't like it, and I had really expected to like it, and I couldn't quite work out what I didn't like about it. I think some of the things were a little bit obvious, were a little bit too heavy-handed. But then when it came up on my shuffle[d] list and I watched it to do an episode about it, I found that I liked it a lot more. And actually, that was a bit of a theme, was that sometimes I would watch something that I'd already watched before, and I would rewatch it for the podcast, and I would go, "Oh, there's actually much more here than I realised when I was just watching it as a general viewer." So that was quite interesting. I liked the religion themes. I loooove an intergenerational trauma horror film, that's one of my favourite tropes. That was a really interesting one. Episode 7: Mari from The Last House on the Left (2009) That was really interesting. So Mari from the remake, which was 2009, I think? And the original was from the '70s, a Wes Craven movie. And I was making the podcast and so I watched the original and then the remake -- in fact I think I watched the remake first and then the original, because I didn't know I was watching a remake -- and I didn't know anything about The Last House on the Left other than I knew that there's a podcast called The Last Podcast on the Left, so I was like, ooo, this is obviously a really kind of genre-defining moment. So I watched that. And then I wrote a review on Letterboxd of the original and of the remake, and then I met this guy who knows sort of everything about the lore of the original Last House on the Left, the original, which... behind the scenes there was all sorts of horrible stuff going on with the lead actor, Sandra Peabody, being really badly treated by the rest of the cast. And I watched some videos that I can never unsee in which David Hess says some really awful things about women, and her in particular, and it's awful. So that was quite an interesting look at the behind-the-scenes horror, which again is something I might end up theming at some point. Like, the final girl comes out of the film in some way, and the point of my podcast is: what is her life like later? But doing The Last House on the Left and learning about... and learning about the events that went on behind the scenes of the original I was like, oh that's interesting, because it's not only the final girls, the characters in the movies, who are affected by making films. Presumably, the entire cast and crew and everyone is affected by the making of the film in some way, even if it's not... you know, a huge lifelong impact. But I suspect that the filming of The Last House on the Left probably was that for Sandra Peabody, actually. It sounded horrendous. I've had thoughts like this before about people in horror films. Like Dakota Fanning in Hide and Seek, I remember watching that when it came out and thinking, "You shouldn't be that good at playing someone who's deeply traumatised, you shouldn't know how to do the Trauma Stare. You're, like, seven." Or something, I don't know how old she was when she filmed it. And also watching some of Elliot Page's old work and some of the things that he had to do in -- is it An American Girl? Is that the name of the film? But there's a few where I watch it and I'm like, oh. That's gotta have an impact. You know? And actually in The Last House on the Left, Sara Paxton, who plays Mari in the remake... and the remake's the only one where she's a final girl, because in the original she doesn't survive. Sorry, spoiler alert, but it was made in the '70s, so... And one of the things I found interesting was Sara Paxton in interviews for the film was talking about how actually she had been OK with the filming even though the subject matter had been so awful, but she had been really nervous about it because she was going to the middle of nowhere with a bunch of people she didn't know! You know? And she was like, it only went OK because the team were so good, and there was so much support, and all of this stuff. So I was like, oh, actually, it would be really interesting to kind of think about that properly: the sort of behind-the-scenes impact and the final girl actor, and how they are... impacted. That's the word. By the events of the film, and the events of the filming of the film. So that might become a season at some point, who knows? Episode 8: Meredith from A Wounded Fawn I just remembered [this film] being trippy as fuck. And it was. It was really fun to watch. It actually was one of the ones that made me go, I think I really want to do seasons, because it was just so out there that I was like, oh, I think this doesn't really sit so well with, like, more normal horror films? And I maybe would have wanted to do a few episodes about things that are much more arty horror. There's stuff like Violett as well, which I really enjoyed, which is a very strange arty horror but very beautifully shot. I also watched Obscura which is a slightly overly long film, but was made on a nothing budget by a couple of art students and it is so, so good. So yeah, there's something about that as well, about horror and aesthetics and the arts. In my PhD I'm writing about the uncanny and the aesthetics of the uncanny, which was something that Freud was very into. And I find all of that stuff very interesting as well, so. Watch this space, maybe we'll do that later. Episode 9: Anaia from Is God Is That was another one... oh actually, it might have come up on shuffle. Can't remember. Anyway. Either it came up on shuffle or I decided to watch it because I had heard really good things about it, like scrolling through Instagram a lot of the reviews were like, "This is fantastic." And it is. It is so, so good. It has not had anywhere near the attention it deserves. It came out this year. It deserves as much attention as Obsession. It's not getting it. Hmm, I wonder why? But it's really, really good. It's about twins, and twins are often seen as uncanny in a similar way to how disabled people are, and things like that. So I thought, yeah, that's going to be an interesting one. I really enjoyed Is God Is and... yeah. It's just a great film. Episode 10: Shoo from Fréwaka Fantastic Irish film. It might be interesting to do a few international seasons, I don't know how I would put that together, but I love Irish folk horror, they do it really really well. Shoo was great, actually, she was one of the more depressing final girls and I loved her for that. I love the ones where I can say, like, actually I don't think she's going to be OK, I think she's just setting herself up to, like, repeat the traumatic patterns of the past. So, yeah, I personally really enjoyed that, but I felt almost guilty at the end of the episode because I thought, like, I need to... I don't know, I don't know if other people like it when I'm like: "There is no hope!" [laughs] "Everything is terrible, and generational patterns do just repeat themselves, and it is all awful, and..." you know. I feel like people prefer it, maybe, when I give them a bit of hope. But I don't know what I'm basing that on. If you're a horror fan, you probably like the darkness as well. Episode 11: Grace from Raging Grace + Episode 12: Joy from Raging Grace Again, a film that I think doesn't get anywhere near the attention it deserves. It's about a Filipina cleaner who lives in the UK and is undocumented. And she gets a job at this old man's house, basically caring for him. And it's the story of her and her daughter: the daughter is Grace, and the mum is Joy. When it came up on my shuffle list thing, I was like, OK, cool, Raging Grace, I know the title is Raging Grace, but I know that the mum is Joy, and so mum Joy will be the final girl. But then as I was watching the film I was like, actually Grace is kind of the final girl? Actually they both are final girls, and technically I suppose so is Katherine, this other lady in the film. But I was like, it's Grace, really, who saves the day, in many ways. So I was like, oh, how interesting it would be to do one about the daughter and then one about the mum, which is what I did. I wish... at the time when I was recording those I was extremely stressed and on deadline for some PhD stuff and a bunch of other things. In fact, I think I had three deadlines coming up in the same week, and I only hit one of them. And I wish I had had a little bit more space to give it the attention it really deserves, and I felt a little bit like I didn't get a chance to do that, which is part of the reason why I decided to do seasons instead, so that I can properly do that for future episodes. So, yeah, Raging Grace is really good. If you haven't seen it, I think it's very slept on, so if you haven't seen it, please do watch it. So, yeah! That's a kind of overview of things we've done in season one, an overview of things I've learned. What else have I learned? Oh, I've learned as well... I read a lot about behind-the-scenes [of the podcast] content being really interesting, and people do love a cut-down. And they do love a video of, like, me making stupid faces. And that is fun and I don't mind posting them. But they do take a long time to make! And I think, maybe, given that I am not making a podcast with the goal of becoming, like, a content creator, but I am making one with the goal of learning more about horror films and thinking more deeply about them, partly because it informs my PhD, I think I'm actually going to stop doing those. I might just post unedited audio and be like, you can have the audio before I've edited it, if you want the podcast a day early and you want to pay for it, thats fine. And then just do the proper episode the following day. That's probably something that I would be up for. But I found that I couldn't record... because I'm just a girl in her living room... --"I'm literally just a girl"-- I couldn't record the video and the audio well enough at the same time, so it meant that I would have to record twice: once on a video and once just with the audio. And there was something about, like, when I was doing the video I knew that I was going to be doing it as a behind-the-scenes, so I was like, "Am I fucking this up deliberately? I don't think I am, but I can't actually tell." So I think I'm just gonna take that away because I don't have time. If at some point in the future I end up with loads of money somehow and can pay other people to produce things, I might go back to doing it again, but right now I don't have the energy. I also learned that social media, Jesus Christ, it takes a lot of time. And it's not even time, actually, it's more like... there are some days when I just don't want to. And that's the thing about when you turn something into a job or, like, a task that you have to do. It becomes quite different in how it, like, sits in your life. And in your mind. Prior to the podcast and in the first few weeks of it, I would get into bed to have phone-in-bed-time, which I love, and I would go on my Instagram for the podcast and I would be like, yay, let's post things and think about horror films! And then a few weeks in I was like, I don't wanna do that right now. You know? So I think that's something that I need to think about. I need to get smarter about... I don't know, scheduling posts, or something. Or work out a way of making that less annoying. I was going to say "I'm not a huge fan of social media." I'm fucking constantly on social media! But I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it, as many people do. So that's something I need to think about for future episodes. What else did I learn? I learned that I genuinely enjoyed it. And I really didn't know, when I started, whether I would or not. I didn't know if it would become boring, or if it would become like a chore. And it didn't. The only time I felt like, ugghhh, about it was a week when I was really unwell and it hurt to speak, that was quite annoying to record. And also there was the week I talked about when I was doing Raging Grace, or the two weeks when I was doing the two Raging Grace episodes, when I was just so hectically busy that it really didn't go very well. And again, part of the reason for doing seasons is that I can record some stuff upfront and kind of stack it up hopefully so that it's a little bit less pressure week on week. I have been talking for a while now, I can see, so I'm going to sign off. But if you have listened to this episode, thank you; if you've listened to any of the episodes, thank you. If you are one of the three people who has left me a five-star rating, thank you so much! I don't know who you are, but I love you. And, you know, if you share, you comment, you do anything, it genuinely brings a little spark of joy to my life. And god knows we're in a time of history where there's not that many sparks of joy, so I really do appreciate it! And, yeah! I look forward to bringing you season two. If you have any questions; if there's anything you want me to talk about; if you've got any suggestions for future episodes... I normally do a little outtro... can't remember what it is.... You can catch me everywhere at that final girl life. You can email that final girl life at gmail dot com. You can support the podcast on patreon dot com forward slash that final girl life. Thank you for listening, and until next time, remember: The horrors persist... but so do we.

2. 

   27 Sept 2026

   E12 Joy from Raging Grace (2023)

   Resources used: Books Peacebuilding and Memory in the Philippines: Transgenerational Resilience (https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/peacebuilding-and-memory-in-the-philippines-transgenerational-resilience-primitivo-iii-cabanes-ragandang/79cb6a11ba097e20?ean=9783031903748&bkshp-astro=t) by Primitivo III Cabanes Ragandang Social media posts Studies Alotiby, Amna (2024) 'Immunology of stress: A review article' (https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/13/21/6394) Journal of Clinical Medicine 13(21):6394 Dhabhar, Firdaus S. (2009) 'Enhancing versus suppressive effects of stress on immune function: Implications for immunoprotection and immunopathology' (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2790771/pdf/nim0016-0300.pdf) Neuroimmunomodulation 16:300-317 Dhabhar, Firdaus S. (2014) 'Effects of stress on immune function: The good, the bad, and the beautiful' (https://lundifourie.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/EBSCO-FullText-04_10_2025.pdf) Immunologic Research 58:193-210 Puno, Abigail et al. (2023) 'Intergenerational transmission of intimate partner violence among women: Evidence from the 2017 Philippines National Demographic and Health Survey' (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827323000575) SSM - Population Health 23:101392 Raj, Anita and Wagman, Jennifer (2023) 'Expanding knowledge of intergenerational violence in the Philippines: A commentary on Kim et al.' (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827323001155) SSM - Population Health 23:101450 Segerstrom, Suzanne C. and Miller, Gregory E. (2004) 'Psychological stress and the human immune system: A meta-analytic study of 30 years of inquiry' (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1361287/pdf/nihms4008.pdf) Psychological Bulletin 130(4):601-630 Snell, Amanda (2016) 'Forgotten Voices: A critical literature review of the impact of intergenerational trauma transmissions within the Filipino psyche' (https://www.proquest.com/docview/1904385222?%20Theses&fromopenview=true&pq-origsite=gscholar&sourcetype=Dissertations%20) Doctoral thesis. The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. About That Final Girl Life: You can keep up with the podcast on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/cw/thatfinalgirllife), or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the pod on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife (https://www.instagram.com/thatfinalgirllife), or email thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com (mailto:thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com) if you want to say hello. Script: Haters and gentlefriends, welcome to That Final Girl Life. It’s your favourite final girl here, taking you through The Horrors and out the other side to find out what life is really like after the movie ends. This is the second of two episodes discussing Raging Grace. Last time we talked about the eponymous Grace; this week we're discussing her mother, Joy. Please be aware that there will be spoilers throughout the episode. In this episode I’ll be talking about racism, classism, sexism, rape, autoimmune disease and the impact of chronic stress on the body. Ready? Put some chicken adobo on the stove and make sure the old man's sleeping as we get ready to discuss... Raging Grace. Joy is a cleaner. She's from the Philippines, but she lives in the UK. She's currently undocumented, and she's trying to get citizenship via a dodgy bloke she knows who is charging her £15,000 for the paperwork. She has ten of it but needs the other five. So when she unexpectedly lands a job as the housekeeper for an elderly gentleman who's bedbound and mostly asleep, it seems like all her prayers have been answered. But Joy is a final girl and this is a horror film, so... not quite. Right from the very beginning there is the added complication of her daughter, Grace. Grace is maybe seven or eight years old, a lovely, cheeky kid whom we talked about at length in the previous episode. But Joy finds it hard enough to find work for herself, let alone places that will also allow her to bring her child along. A bedbound old man, however, might be the perfect solution. Joy smuggles Grace into the house in a suitcase and makes her a bed in the wardrobe, a situation Grace isn't exactly enamoured with, but it's obvious that they're used to making things work. The person who hired Joy and who deals with her ongoing payments and instructions is the old man's niece, Katherine. She's one of those obnoxious white people who thinks she's not racist because she treats Joy like a human being, but she still maintains an obvious distaste for Joy's cuisine and customs. But they're all muddling along kind of OK until Grace tells Joy that Katherine is poisoning the old man in an attempt to hasten his death. Joy, who back in the Philippines had been at medical school, checks the pills and sees that Grace is correct. So when Katherine goes away for a few days, Joy gathers what she needs to rid the old man of the poison and bring him back to consciousness. Immediately he befriends them both, telling them that his nanny when he was a boy was from the Philippines. Initially it seems sweet and lovely, a good solution all round... until things start to turn. He asks if they would like to live with him indefinitely; if Grace would like her own room. The only condition, he says, is that Grace should call him 'lolo': a Tagalog word meaning 'grandpa.' Grace enthusiastically agrees, but Joy is a little more cautious; with good reason, as it turns out. Because very quickly after agreeing to his "one condition," he tells Joy that he would like her to call him 'Master.' Thus begins a dynamic which is as complex as it is harmful, with the old man gradually enticing Grace over to his side while Joy feels helpless to do anything about it. This is surely the best living situation they're ever going to be offered, and besides, the old man has said he will sort out her citizenship papers. But after she disagrees with him one too many times, Joy opens the door one day to find the immigration police there to arrest her. They take her away, luckily not noticing Grace, and all hope seems to be lost. Katherine is hardly going to help her either. Not only did they already get off to a difficult start, but now Joy has directly disobeyed Katherine by reviving the old man. And, of course, now that she's living out in the open, Katherine knows about Grace. Joy is once again alone in life, and worse than that, she's been separated from her daughter. But in the meantime Grace has been coming to some realisations of her own. Ultimately, through a combination of good luck and badassery, Grace manages to kill the old man, rescue Katherine, and get her mother out of jail with Katherine's help. Katherine then offers the services of her lawyer friend, who sorts out the citizenship issue, and the movie ends with Joy singing happily with the rest of her choir at church, while a delighted Grace looks on. In the previous episode we talked about intergenerational trauma and how the history of the colonisation of the Philippines might play out in Grace's life even though she's never been there. Joy, on the other hand, grew up there and moved to England as an adult, so she can remember what things were like back in her home country, whilst also seeing that the UK isn't as welcoming as she had perhaps hoped. Last time we learned that Filipino people were promised much better lives if they moved to the US and UK, only to discover upon arrival that they were treated like slaves; in some cases literally being trafficked into domestic slavery. Luckily that hasn't happened for Joy, but she has found herself in a near-impossible situation: a lone parent living here without the required documents, trying to make ends meet and give her daughter as much of a chance of success as possible. We learn during the film that Grace was conceived when one of Joy's previous employers raped her. A couple of times in the movie we see her try to approach the house, presumably to ask him to take some kind of responsibility or at the very least help them out financially, but understandably she can't quite bring herself to knock on the door. The level of strength and resourcefulness Joy displays in these most desperate of circumstances is amazing. Nonetheless, we can see that she's struggling at times to hold it together. Being a single parent is hard at the best of times, let alone when you're carting your energetic kid around in a suitcase to keep her hidden from view. I was trying to imagine the level of constant stress she'd be under given the situation she's found herself in. At the beginning of the film, before she's offered the job as the old man's housekeeper, Joy is secretly staying in the houses of people she's cleaned for while she knows they're away on holiday. If you've ever slept somewhere you're not supposed to be, or somewhere you know might be dangerous, you'll have an embodied sense of the underlying stress that's constantly humming away in the background. Imagine that, for years. In some ways her job as a cleaner might actually be helping her stress levels, in that it provides her with a way to work off the nervous energy she's accruing every night. But still, her cortisol level is going to be pretty high. She's living on constant alert, ready to flee at any moment: a state psychologists call 'hypervigilance.' This refers to the feeling that you can't ever let your guard down; it's frequently seen in people who have been through trauma, especially in childhood. The thing is, quite often it's the moment when you're finally safe when everything starts to go wrong. Joy has been holding so much inside her for so long: the rape, raising a child in secret, financial insecurity, living as an undocumented person, going through periods of homelessness... not to mention probably missing her family and friends back home. Joy is therefore a prime candidate for some kind of complex health problem. All of the things I've just mentioned, combined with a life of hard physical work, could easily leave her with any number of health issues. We know, for example, that chronic stress impacts leukocytes as well as suppressing cytokines and T cells. All of these things reduce the body's capacity to respond appropriately to challenges faced by the immune system, and simultaneously it worsens allergies and inflammation. This renders people much more susceptible to things like cancer and autoimmune diseases. Back in 2020, Dr. Jocelyn Fitzgerald tweeted: "In med school, I took an elective called 'Stress,' foolishly thinking I was going to learn about meditation and yoga. Instead the professor spent 6 weeks proving that being poor or a minority literally destroys your health on a molecular level, and I think about that every day." Joy has spent years living in the UK in both of those categories: poor and a member of a minority ethnic group. So whilst there's some stress that can be eased through activities like meditation and yoga, like Dr. Fitzgerald thought she was going to learn about, the stresses of constant insecurity and discrimination are not examples of this. In 2021, Yuka Ishikawa and Tomoyuki Furuyashiki published their research into the links between stress and mental illness. Whilst this might initially seem obvious, they identified that the physiological impacts of stress on the kinds of cells just mentioned can actually cause feelings of depression, as well as depressive and anxious behaviours, even in the absence of prior depression. In other words, even if you're really good at staying positive, if your body's been under too much stress for too long, you might end up depressed and anxious anyway. I know this is all sounding very doom and gloom. But my point is that Joy is unlikely to escape unscathed, and I don't know about you, but that seems really unfair to me. She's fought so hard for herself and her child to have a better life, and she's finally got there... and now she's likely to end up with some kind of disease. Also, given that she's a woman and a person of colour, she's less likely to be believed when she goes to the doctor and reports whatever symptoms she's having, so getting help for her chronic health problems is going to be a challenge. She has also learned from her various experiences that people in power lie, and that they don't actually care about her. Now, to some extent these are lessons we pretty much all learn at some point, but they don't impact all of us the way they've impacted Joy. Not only did she experience an egregious abuse of power when her previous employer raped her, she's also seen a variety of forms of racism from subtle to obvious throughout her life as a cleaner in the UK. She's probably seen classism, too: I'm not sure if Joy trained as a doctor, nurse or other kind of medical professional back in the Philippines, but one of the reasons I'm not sure about that is that no one she works for ever asks her anything about herself, other than basic questions about where she's from. People overlook cleaners all the time, along with loads of other people who hold up society, without whom our lives would swiftly become utterly miserable. Towards the end of the film Joy has an excellent speech about exactly this. It's after she's found out that her predecessor Gloria, who had been the elderly man's carer, had written letters home which had never been sent. Her past, present and future had all been taken away from her in secret, while she wrote letter after letter talking about how desperate she was to see everyone again, wondering all the time whether they'd just given up on her or if her letters weren't getting through. Katherine rages at Joy's indignation, claiming that Gloria could never have managed without their help. "Help?" replies Joy incredulously, "What help? We prepare your meals. Administer your medicine. We sing your kids to sleep. We walk your dogs. We take care of your parents. We pick up your shit. And when you’re dying, we comfort you until your last breath. We don’t need your help. You need ours." She's right, of course. And the fact that people refuse to admit it is simply evidence of the deeply ingrained racism and classism that underpin British society in ways both obvious and subtle. It's like how some jobs are seen as "unskilled," mostly jobs relating to manual or domestic labour, which are often done by people who are in one way or another the opposite of straight cis middle-class white men. What utter bollocks. They're no less skilled than any other job, and describing them as such is pure snobbery. I'd love to say that Joy would escape all of this once she's out from under the old man's grip and instead is living a much freer life with all the required documentation, in a home she and her daughter are officially occupying. But unfortunately that's not really how things go. To some extent, like we talked about last time, Grace will probably be able to pull herself out of poverty and into some kind of life where people offer her a modicum of respect, but for Joy, the world around her will probably continue to treat her badly. At least she has her church. There's a community there from the Philippines and she's able to sing in the choir, something she evidently loves. She has friends, people with whom she can speak her native language, people who probably will understand what she's going through and will treat her with a level of respect appropriate to her status as a human being. That is a welcome balm in amongst all the stress, I'm sure. And she has Grace. Her little shining star, the one she's done all of this for. The lengths people will go to in order to ensure their children are safe and have the opportunity to build a life for themselves never ceases to move me. The people who arrive here at the UK coastline in boats hardly fit for the journeys they've made, the people who have to entrust their lives to dodgy blokes with windowless vans at border crossings, the people like Joy who came here hoping for something better and ending up in impossible situations. I genuinely find it difficult to understand how anyone can feel anything other than compassion along with a deep respect for people who are willing to risk absolutely everything like that. I spoke a bit about Joy and Grace's relationship when Grace grows up in the previous episode, but now let's think about that from the other side. Grace seems like a cheerful, sweet kid who makes the best of a difficult situation, the latter quality undoubtedly gleaned from her mother. Nonetheless she has seen more than a child should have to see, not only during the events of the film but probably throughout most of her short life. Joy has taken her kid from place to place, hiding her, keeping her secret, unable to allow her to run around and be goofy and clumsy and wild. She's promised it'll be "just a few more weeks" countless times. She's required Grace to be patient, obedient, understanding, old beyond her years. And, from time to time, she's acted in ways she's no doubt regretted later. At one point in the film we see Joy snap: “You make everything harder for me," she tells her daughter in a burst of anger, "Everything is a game to you. What’s wrong with you?” I hope Joy is kind to herself about this later on. The pressure she was under was immense, and the majority of the time she did a phenomenal job of showing Grace love and care despite their circumstances. I hope Grace understands that too. I hope they manage to maintain a relationship despite everything they've been through. Sometimes that's not possible regardless of how much you understand the reasons behind the circumstances you were in. Sometimes it's not even about understanding or forgiveness, but about ongoing trauma, repetitive patterns in relationships, unhealthy dynamics that seem impossible to fix. From what we see in Raging Grace, I think there's enough love there, and that the love is obvious enough, for them to be able to stay in touch when Grace is older. But if Grace does go off and train as a lawyer or something similar like I predicted before, that might have its own kind of impact. Joy went through everything in the film in order to give Grace a better life, but in doing so, she inevitably allows Grace to move away from her, not only physically but emotionally, too. Grace will probably have to leave some of her traditions behind. She might stop going to church, stop speaking Tagalog, stop spending so much time with Filipino communities. All of which is OK, if that's what she wants to do, but it might create a distance between the two of them which leaves Joy feeling like she's out on her own yet again. In terms of the more subtle aftereffects of the trauma she's been through, mostly for Joy I think this will come down to a lack of capacity to trust, especially white people, and especially people in positions of power. Even Katherine, who came through for them in the end, did so only after Grace had saved her life. The old man who seemed so kind immediately switched when he got what he wanted. And, whilst of course there are arseholes all over the world, some of this is indicative of the West's obsession with individualism. Probably this will really stand out for Joy. She only goes to the old man's house in the first place because she receives a call from someone at her church who asks her to go and check on him. I'm not saying Westerners never do each other favours, of course we do, but it's far less ingrained, and they do tend to be seen as favours rather than as responsibilities. When everyone's out for themselves, then relationships necessarily have a transactional feel to them, especially when they're being contrasted with a society in which people are working together for the benefit of the society as a whole, rather than themselves as individual members. Of course there are problems with collectivism as well, I'm not trying to claim that one way of being is better than the other, or that I'd have any idea which one it was even if so. What I am trying to do is highlight the cultural contrast which sits alongside all the other challenges Joy experiences in the UK. There's the racism and the classism and the misogyny, all of which are bad things in and of themselves. But then there are the cultural differences which might have no moral weight but are so dissimilar that they make things harder anyway. What am I even allowed to ask people for over here, Joy might wonder. If she has a housing officer, for example, to help her and Grace get on their feet in the immediate aftermath of the events of the film, it might be difficult for Joy to work out where the balance is. She's not allowed to ask them for money, but she is allowed to ask them to help her fill out a form. How is she supposed to know that, though? All of the unwritten rules which we take for granted in whichever society we've grown up in are really difficult for outsiders to even know about, let alone understand. And then, going back to the individualist vs. collectivist thing, there's the question of what people might want from Joy in exchange for their help. If someone at church offers to come with her to a scary appointment, will they expect her to do something for them in return? If a man helps her, will he want her to engage in some kind of sexual activity to thank him? If he does and she says no, will he force her? If he doesn't but she assumes he does because of her prior experiences, will that taint his view of her, and who else's view of her might be influenced as a result? Navigating any new culture is a minefield, and having seen herself through countless difficult situations already, Joy is now going to have to try to get used to a whole new one with different rules from the ones she was in before. Nonetheless she stands a reasonable chance at success. Once she has citizenship, regardless of whether Katherine helps her financially or only provides her with a lawyer, Joy will be able to claim some level of benefits and hopefully get herself back into med school if she hasn't already completed it. Maybe she won't have to keep working as a cleaner: maybe, once she's got her papers sorted out, she'll be able to work in the field she originally chose. Maybe she'll become one of the excellent NHS workers who came here from abroad, who have to put up with people's prejudices on top of an already gruelling job. Or maybe she'll find work in a small community where people get to know her and allow themselves to see what a wonderful, strong, determined woman she is. I really, really want the best for Joy and Grace, as you can probably tell. And I don't think that's out of their reach. But for both of them, in both similar and different ways, things are going to be a challenge even after they're out of the initially challenging situations. Best case scenario: they get housed somewhere clean and safe, in close enough proximity to their church and community. Joy gets a job in medicine, Grace ends up at a school which nurtures her talents and provides her with friends. Grace soars; Joy, who has less overall energy than Grace, flies along behind her, watching her riding the currents. They maintain a good relationship and they never lose the ability to play together. Joy makes sure Grace remains rooted in some of her cultural traditions, while Grace opens Joy's eyes to new ideas and helps her understand the culture they're living in now. Neither one of them forgets where they came from. Both of them remain grateful but also are able to acknowledge how much strength it took them to get to where they are. They both have bad days, probably Joy more than Grace, but they're there for each other and they have other people around who love them too. They don't need to rage quite so much anymore, except at broader issues in society which send familiar pains through their hearts when they see the mistreatment people go through for no reason other than other people's prejudices. But their lives, overall, are mostly fulfilling and relatively comfortable, filled with contentment, love, and, yes... Joy. Raging Grace was directed by Paris Zarcilla and came out in 2023. Our final girl Joy was played perfectly by Max Eigenmann. You can follow the podcast on Instagram at that final girl life, or support us on patreon dot com slash that final girl life. If you have any suggestions for future episodes, you can email them to that final girl life at gmail dot com. Thank you for listening. And until next time, remember: the horrors persist… but so do we.

3. 

   14 Sept 2026

   E11 Grace from Raging Grace (2023)

   Resources used: Articles '"I know what you've been through. You're in good hands." Life as an immigration lawyer' (https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/topics/immigration/meet-qays-sediqi-immigration-lawyer) The Law Society blog, 16th January 2026 Books Peacebuilding and Memory in the Philippines: Transgenerational Resilience (https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/peacebuilding-and-memory-in-the-philippines-transgenerational-resilience-primitivo-iii-cabanes-ragandang/79cb6a11ba097e20?ean=9783031903748&bkshp-astro=t) by Primitivo III Cabanes Ragandang Yes To Life In Spite Of Everything (https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/yes-to-life-in-spite-of-everything-viktor-e-frankl/e5fa5d771c1752d6) by Viktor Frankl Studies Puno, Abigail et al. (2023) 'Intergenerational transmission of intimate partner violence among women: Evidence from the 2017 Philippines National Demographic and Health Survey' (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827323000575) SSM - Population Health 23:101392 Raj, Anita and Wagman, Jennifer (2023) 'Expanding knowledge of intergenerational violence in the Philippines: A commentary on Kim et al.' (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827323001155) SSM - Population Health 23:101450 Snell, Amanda (2016) 'Forgotten Voices: A critical literature review of the impact of intergenerational trauma transmissions within the Filipino psyche' (https://www.proquest.com/docview/1904385222?%20Theses&fromopenview=true&pq-origsite=gscholar&sourcetype=Dissertations%20) Doctoral thesis. The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. Web Pages Legal Practice Areas (https://www.law.ac.uk/employability/legal-practice-areas/) University of Law Restructuring and insolvency law (https://www.law.ac.uk/employability/legal-practice-areas/restructuring-and-insolvency-law/) University of Law About That Final Girl Life: You can keep up with the podcast on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/cw/thatfinalgirllife), or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the pod on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife (https://www.instagram.com/thatfinalgirllife), or email thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com (mailto:thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com) if you want to say hello. Script: Haters and gentlefriends, welcome to That Final Girl Life. It’s your favourite final girl here, taking you through The Horrors and out the other side to find out what life is really like after the movie ends. In this episode we’ll be discussing Raging Grace. Please be aware that there will be spoilers throughout the episode. This one's a little bit different in that it's a two-parter. I'd watched Raging Grace before and had added it to my secret Letterboxd list of potential future episodes. When it's time to record an episode I go to the list, hit 'Shuffle,' and as long as the first one that comes up is watchable somewhere that's available to me, I rewatch it and write the episode. When the list shuffled Raging Grace at me I was pleased, because I think it's very underappreciated and it deserves more hype than it gets. Perhaps I think that because I find it relatable, which not everyone will. But anyway, I was happy to be giving it some attention. Even though Grace is in the title, I thought I'd be making an episode about her mum Joy, who is the main protagonist of the movie and is indeed a final girl in that she survives the ending. However, as I watched I realised that Grace would also be interesting to talk about. She too survives the end of the film, and in some ways she's more of a final girl than Joy, in that she ultimately saves the day. And Grace is a child, which is interesting because the vast majority of final girls are in fact final women. The youngest so far was Mari from The Last House on the Left, who was still living with her parents, however even she is in her late teens and therefore almost aging out of childhood. But Grace is... I'm not sure exactly, but probably about seven or eight. Very much still a child, and yet nonetheless a total badass. So we're going to talk about her here, and then in the following episode we'll talk about her mother Joy. I thought it would be interesting to look at intergenerational trauma using the dual perspective of both the child and the mother. So here we go. In this episode I’ll be talking about intergenerational trauma, obviously, and also poverty, immigration, racism particularly of the subtle kind, the UK class system, rapists and other generically creepy men, sleepwalking, and of course, PTSD. Ready? Climb into this nice big suitcase and get ready to be wheeled over to discuss... Raging Grace. The first time you watch this movie, you assume that in the opening scene you're watching your average family get ready for the day. The kid's colouring in at her desk, the mum wakes up suddenly having slept on the sofa, makes them breakfast, tells the kid to grab her vitamins from the bathroom, and they head out. We immediately see that Grace is a sweet, mischievous kid. She's switched the coffee granules for gravy and the ketchup for jam. She's energetic and smiley. Cute. Basically, just a normal kid. But she very much is not living in normal circumstances. You see, it's only when they're leaving that you learn it's not their house. Grace's mum is a cleaner. When the families she's cleaned for in the past go away on holiday, she lets herself into their homes and that is where she and Grace live for the duration of the other family's vacation. Grace visibly doesn't love this, but she's very much making the best of it. And then one day her mum lands a dream job: housekeeping for a rich old man who's bedbound and dying. The only catch is that his niece, who hired her, doesn't know that Grace exists. OK, well, this seems like a situation they've had before. Grace gets into a suitcase and is smuggled into the house by Joy, her mum, who then sets up a bed for her in the wardrobe of the room she's given to stay in. Which obviously isn't exactly the best case scenario, but it certainly beats living somewhere they both have to hide all the time. The niece is in and out all the time, so Grace doesn't have much freedom to play, but one night she goes exploring and discovers the old man's niece, whose name is Katherine, sleepwalking through the house. Following her, Grace finds a secret room in which she sees an old dead woman locked up in a box at the far end. She tells Joy, who naturally doesn't believe her. What Joy does believe, however, is that Grace has discovered that Katherine is drugging her uncle, trying to bring on his death as quickly as possible so that she can inherit the estate. When Katherine goes away for a few days, Joy and Grace set about helping the old man to get better, and ultimately he wakes up. "I haven't got a niece" is his chilling reply when they mention Katherine. Surprisingly, despite being a white Scottish bloke, the old man is familiar with the Philippines, where Joy is from. He had a Filipina nanny growing up, he explains, and he begins to befriend Grace and Joy. He offers Joy a permanent position, which she is overjoyed to accept, but then he adds "On one condition. You" -- he points to Grace -- "call me Lolo." This is a Tagalog word for 'grandpa.' Grace initially finds his request to be her honorary Lolo a bit weird, but she soon gets used to it. Besides, he's lovely and probably lonely, right? He makes her hot chocolates. Plays with her. Does fun magic tricks. They enjoy each other's company. Katherine's unhappy about the changes when she returns, of course, but there's not much she can do. Grace, in a show of solidarity with the old man, switches Katherine's shampoo and shower gel for bleach, causing her hair to fall out and her face to blister. Apparently Katherine is the old man's niece after all. Weird. But she's definitely not being kind to him and she did seem to be trying to kill him, so Grace remains firmly on the old man's side in this family drama. And then a couple of days later there's all this shouting, and Grace creeps along the hallway and looks down through the bannister to see her mum being arrested. Immigration has somehow caught up with her, apparently. She glances at the old man, who holds a finger over his lips: sshhhh, keep quiet. She does. After her mum gets taken away, Grace is of course deeply concerned. The old man assures her they'll try to get her mum back. Meanwhile Katherine has a very weird night. This was not a movie in which I expected to see a trippy dream sequence, but right near the end we get a really good one, including that classic horror trope of loads of insects running out of someone's mouth. Katherine also sees lots of spooky witch-doctor-looking people of indeterminate ethnicity, as well as the Filipina nanny from when she was younger, and then she sees Joy and then Grace, who pushes her and Katherine falls down the stairs. Yet Grace, in a moment of clarity, comes to realise that Katherine is not really the main enemy here. "You called them, didn't you?" she rages at the old man. She begins to run, but he manages to get up out of his wheelchair and follow her. He chases her into the basement, where the dead old woman -- the body of his old Filipina nanny -- is kept. All seems to be lost for Grace, but then she manages to start a fire, get past the old man, rescue Katherine and get out of the house. Because she's a really cool kid. (Some people might call this unrealistic. I'd argue that it's no less realistic than most final girls' story arcs, really. Didn't you read adventure books as a kid and convince yourself you'd be able to solve mysteries that stumped the police? Yeah, same.) So they're out of the house, and Grace persuades a reluctant Katherine to rescue her mother from jail and set her up with a lawyer who can get her citizenship. Right at the very end, Grace is also taken to meet her dad, who she originally thought was dead. But you'll find out more about him in Joy's episode... Grace is a child and yes, kids are remarkably resilient. She'll probably turn out kind of OK. But there's a level of trauma that will be left by not only her own experiences but also the things her mother went through, and the trauma of her people playing out both in the microcosm of her own little family unit and the macrocosm of the wider world. I'm not sure exactly when the events of the movie take place, but it's a contemporary setting. People have smartphones. So once they're set up and living in the UK legally, Grace will presumably have one of those too, and therefore access to the internet, and therefore will become fluent in the language of popular psychology that pervades the various apps the kids are on these days in ways that are simultaneously helpful and annoying. And I guess some of how her life turns out will depend on how she reacts to that. In many ways, Grace would be entirely justified as an adult if she decided not to speak to her mother again. Going no contact with your parents used to be pretty rare, but these days it's becoming more common. This also speaks to one of the many cultural clashes Grace will be exposed to during her life: the Western obsession with autonomy and individuality, which includes such moral statements as "your parents decided to bring you into this world, you didn't make that decision, so while they are responsible for you, you're not responsible for them." But she's also from the Philippines, where the culture has much more of a collectivist morality, and the idea of sacking off your mother for the mistakes she made when she was just trying to keep you both alive would be abhorrent. Where will Grace land? I'm not sure. She's already lost her mother once, though, when she got taken away by immigration, and that kind of thing burrows itself deep down inside you and stays there for ages. She'd probably feel concern for her Joy, wouldn't want to not know what was happening to her again. And Grace, at least as a child, seems sweet and happy and kind. Likewise, whilst Joy understandably has her Moments given the stress she's constantly under, it's very evident that she really loves her daughter and genuinely wants the best for her. So, whilst of course this is totally Grace's decision, I would hope that despite the Western context and the trauma she's been through, Grace might be understanding enough to keep her mother in her life. I would think, though, that she's perhaps less securely attached than Joy would like her to be. And we don't actually know what happened with the old man: was he simply a nice, if controlling, lolo figure to Grace, or did he do anything more sinister to her when they were left alone? Impossible to tell. But Grace worked out that he'd sent her mother away in the end, and the knowledge that someone could be that controlling and that devious is the sort of thing that sets you up for not exactly being the most trusting person on the planet. And Grace already had good reason to distrust the people around her. The history of white people's behaviour towards Filipino people is predictably awful. Of course this was true during the Spanish and US colonisation drives, but it's also still true now. One PhD thesis I read which discusses intergenerational trauma from a Filipino perspective includes the phrase "conditions similar to genocide were established within the Philippines" and then goes on to discuss the extreme torture of vast numbers of people, as well as the death of an estimated over one million. I don't know about you, but that sounds like it fits my understanding of a genocide. So there's this huge historic burden that Grace is living with, knowing what happened to her people in her homeland; a homeland she'd never even been able to visit when we caught up with her during the film. And this same type of relationship has been perpetuated in her own more direct history, too: we learn during the movie that Grace was a product of rape, and right at the end we realise that her mother was raped by one of the men who'd hired her as a cleaner. He was visibly a family man -- early on in the film, Joy bumps into his wife and child -- and he's white, and living in a huge, beautiful home while Grace is still curling up inside suitcases and being smuggled into other people's houses. It does something to a person, as well, to know they're the outcome of rape. It's hard to live with, knowing one of your parents didn't consent to your existence and is probably angry you're even here. And realising you were conceived not out of love but as the consequence of a violent crime is surely a burden that's hard to bear. It's not clear exactly what Grace has been told about her father when they go to visit him, but she probably gets the full picture eventually, especially since their lawyer is going to be using the rape to argue their case for being granted citizenship. So Grace's heritage is Filipina and British; mother and father; colonised and coloniser; victim and rapist. Her mother obviously loves her a lot, a feeling she evidently returns given the risk she goes to in order to get back to Joy at the end of the film. But it's a difficult thing to carry the identity of being from both the culture that was suppressed and also the culture that did the suppressing, let alone when that's added to the story of Grace's conception. Still, Grace is at least growing up in a time when people are more open about these things than they used to be. There is more discussion about intergenerational trauma and also about intersectionality. Decolonisation is starting to become a bit of a buzzword, which is great in that it shows it's gaining popularity, but less great in that it probably means we'll end up with a watered-down version that's more similar to diversity, equality and inclusion than to actual decolonisation. Though obviously DEI is useful and important too. It just doesn't go far enough, in my opinion. But then, I have 'land back' tattooed across my knuckles, I'm not exactly a moderate example of this view. I can see Grace growing up well-rounded, getting a good education and generally doing well. She'll probably be pretty popular, too: she's certainly got a likeable personality and, despite spending years being hidden away in various strange situations, she's already more than capable of chatting away to people when we meet her. She is, in other words, adorable and resilient. What a great example of a final girl. However, she's also got a lot to be angry about and not a lot of places to direct that anger. As a teenager she'll probably go through a phase of being furious with her mum, because let's face it, whilst we can absolutely see that Joy was doing the best she possibly could, she still put Grace in some really difficult positions during her childhood. Once she's past the generic teenage anger which in her case is warranted, though, Grace is pretty likely to end up somewhere on the people pleasing spectrum. After all, the behaviour that has consistently been rewarded throughout her life has been when she's been extra nice to the people around her. When she was sweet and adorable to the old man, he offered them a place to live. When she was kind to Katherine, saving her from the fire even though she could have just left, Katherine in turn saved Joy and got them a lawyer. So there's been a few examples -- probably more than we know -- of her being rewarded for sweetness, for remaining quiet, for being well-behaved if occasionally a bit cheeky. By contrast, Grace had no option to be loud, rambunctious and annoying. She and her mother were in a situation that felt like, and probably was, life and death most of the time. Let's say she grows up and moves away, not super far, but at the very least out of whatever home she and Joy ended up in together. What might she become? A lawyer, perhaps, fighting for other immigrants the way Katherine's friend helped her and her mum. She certainly seems smart enough. So she's at law school, she manages to get through that without too many hitches, makes some friends, the lecturers like her because honestly how could you not? And then she's out in the real world looking for her first job. Of course, Grace doesn't only have to deal with her personal problems. There's also the world at large to think about. And given that this film is set roughly nowadays, she's graduating into a hellscape of a job market. Reading an account of a young immigration lawyer who moved here as a refugee and ultimately set up his own firm -- which sounds like it's probably a dream scenario for someone like Grace -- I learned that he applied for about 500 jobs before he finally landed an entry-level position at a law firm. And even when he did, it wasn't in immigration. You have to take what you can get, these days more than ever, so he ended up in criminal law for a bit before he managed to specialise. Who knows what Grace would end up in? I mean, I don't even know what the different types of law specialism are... OK, I just googled it and I got bored just looking at the list that came up. I definitely am not cut out to be a lawyer! But some of the areas listed were consumer, housing, corporate, personal injury and restructuring & insolvency. Let's pick one at random -- that last one, maybe -- and say Grace gets her first job there. So she's working with individuals or companies that have found themselves in financial trouble and are having to restructure their wealth in some way. There are all sorts of reasons why Grace might find this difficult. For one thing, in order to lose your wealth you have to have it in the first place. These are the kinds of people whose houses Grace's mum used to clean. These are people whose sofas she's secretly slept on, people whose wardrobes she's hidden in, people whose kids' desks she's used while they're away on holiday. She's showered in their luxurious bathrooms and watched their huge TVs. But she knew those things weren't hers: weren't made for her. And she's seen how Joy pulled them up from that into a life they could actually live in the open. Sure, Grace herself had a hand in that too, but Joy was on her way there even before Grace managed to bring Katherine in to help. Having that much wealth and still managing to squander it? It might be difficult for Grace to summon up a lot of sympathy for her clients. Even if you understand that a situation is genuinely difficult for someone, if it's way milder than anything you've ever experienced it can feel sort of absurd if they come and ask you for help with it. I remember a few years ago a friend of mine complaining to me about a financial situation they were in, in which they "only" had £19,000 in savings and they were worried because they didn't have a job with a reliably steady income and what would they do when the money ran out? The thing is, I get that if you're used to having a huge safety net then the idea that it might disappear is presumably really scary. But my friend hadn't even started looking for a job yet. They had thousands of pounds to run through before they would be at anything approaching financial difficulty, and they weren't even paying rent! By contrast, I spent parts of my childhood street homeless, and in my 20s went through another period where I was in severe financial trouble. By which I mean that I had literally nothing in my bank account and had to go out busking for rent, not that I had a healthy amount of savings and was spiralling for no good reason. I don't mean to imply that people shouldn't feel anxious. Of course any potential change in circumstances is hard, no matter where you're coming from. But if you're from a position of relatively little privilege, but the person who wants help from you had so much more going for them than you ever did, then it's sometimes kind of hard to care as much as you're supposed to. And I reckon Grace will come up against this over and over again. On top of which, many of her clients will not treat her well, not to mention the people she works with. Those attitudes that pervaded the people she cleaned for will also be there amongst the people she's working for and with. The thesis I mentioned earlier also talks about how during the colonisation of the Philippines, many people were told that they should move to the US because they would be able to have a much higher quality of life there, whilst the Americans who were promising this were actually saying it because they knew they'd be able to get away with paying them much less than anyone else. In a new country with an unfamiliar legal system and little grasp of the financial structures, any Filipino immigrants would be extremely vulnerable to domestic trafficking. Even those Americans who believed themselves to be kind-hearted towards the people they'd persuaded to immigrate were incredibly patronising in how they described them: "little brown brothers" who needed to be "uplifted and civilized," for example. And whilst that was the US not the UK, and hopefully things have moved on a bit, a lot of what "moving on" looks like in this kind of context is that the racism, far from going away, simply becomes more subtle. White people are allowed to be ignorant of the violent crimes committed during their colonial histories, whilst the colonised peoples aren't able to forget about that even if they want to, because the effects are still here to this day. I can't remember if I've already mentioned this on the podcast, but a little while ago I realised that if Australia hadn't been colonised, I probably wouldn't have been trafficked as a child, for example. History has really long-reaching arms, down through many generations, in loads of different ways. There's also the fact that a lot of kids who grow up in a dominant culture they're not from have to learn two or three cultures simultaneously, and be able to switch between them. Grace's white peers won't have had to learn anything about the history of the Philippines unless they specifically elected to do so, whereas she had to learn white history at school, and all about the UK's perspective of things as well as its deeply embedded class system and bizarre social norms. But alongside that, I'm sure many children of immigrants will relate to being brought up to revere the culture they came from: if Grace suddenly stopped speaking Tagalog, refused to learn the traditions her mother is passing down to her, there would probably be some kind of punishment. So in order to get to and through law school in the first place, by definition Grace will have had to do much more work than her white peers. And now she's found a job helping rich white people to hang on to as much of their money as possible, whilst knowing that most of them would have been singularly unhappy to help her and her mother when they were in need. After all, there's a reason why Joy didn't just ask people if she could stay and look after their homes while they were away. Anyone who's been in a job they find ethically questionable will know how much of an existential drain it is. I've done it, during periods when I needed to just whatever would make me enough money to pay the rent, and I often found myself drenched in self-hatred as a result. I hated myself for contributing to the very structures that were upholding all the things that had historically harmed -- and were still harming -- groups of people I considered myself to be part of, or at least aligned with. Grace is doing the same, and she's doing it during a time in history in which middle-class white people -- which will probably be most of her law firm peers -- are especially aware of how they're coming across ethically. There will be a lot of performative morality going on around her, and she might meet people at networking events who work in other areas of law, like immigration or human rights, who will treat her badly because she's doing a job she has to do rather than a job she wants to do. All of this might wear her down, and one day she might find herself cracking and acting out of character. Perhaps she just loses her shit and screams at someone she's working for. Given the probable undertone of "you don't really deserve to be here in the first place," and given that she's got there through hard work rather than connections, she is ironically much more likely to be fired than one of her peers who got his job through, for example, daddy who runs the firm next door. In which case she'd be back where she started, desperately looking for a job but unable to find anything she likes because of discrimination. But in this case the discrimination might not even look like discrimination, because she's been fired for yelling at a client, and we all know you can't yell at a client, right? Sure. But that didn't come from nowhere. Nor did it come from a place of entitlement. It came from a buildup, not just of years of Grace's own experiences, but of the generations of people before her over whose backs white people walked to get to where they are now. Joy has a brilliant speech about this during the film, but I'll save that for her episode next week. But, OK. I'm being negative again. Maybe Grace doesn't shout at a client. Maybe she's a little superstar in the early part of her career, and whilst she'll definitely meet with some prejudice, maybe it's not too bad and she does end up in a role she actually enjoys and believes in. Maybe she's like the guy in the article I read, helping families like hers. Are there other, more subtle, ways in which we might see her final-girl-ness play out? I think these too are likely to have something to do with the trauma, not just experienced by her people back in the Philippines throughout recent history, but also coming from the story of her own birth. Let's say she meets a nice white man. I'm told they exist. She falls in love with him. What would that love be like? Lovely, I'm sure. Adorable, even. Cute, maybe. But it would be truly remarkable if there wasn't at least some tiny undertone of not-quite-full-trust. Because she knows what white men have done to her heritage, her cultural identity, and to her mother. Plus, her mother's rape wasn't only about one thing. He was able to rape her because she was in a position of less power than him. She was his cleaner, and not only that but his illegal immigrant cleaner. He was able to rape her because he spoke fluent English and had access to lawyers, and she didn't. He was able to rape her because he was white and she was Filipina, because his people had raped her people for generations, because his culture had forced hers into submission in a violent, torturous, arguably genocidal way. We can't expect trauma like that to just... disappear, never to come up again. What's Grace going to feel like the first time she has sex with a white man? Even if he's kind? Especially if he isn't? Even if she loves him and wants to have sex with him, how's she going to feel afterwards? Might there be a kind of weird guilty feeling of having betrayed her mother in some way? Of course she has no logical reason to feel guilty. But emotions don't work on logic: they work on patterns of wounds. If Grace has children with him, how much of the family story will she tell them? Not much, probably. In which case, she'll be left carrying a secret. And when you carry a secret you get weird. I know, because I carry loads of them and always have, and therefore I'm a total fucking freak. I do think Grace has a genuinely decent chance of turning out OK, and I don't want to sound like I'm all doom and gloom about intercultural relationships. I think they're great! Of course I do. But I don't think it's realistic to assume that such huge intergenerational problems just disappear as soon as you have a roof over your head. If anything, they suddenly appear more, because like Viktor Frankl said, suffering kind of expands and contracts and adapts to whatever situation you're in. It's how he could keep working as a psychiatrist even after he'd been in a concentration camp. It's why Grace isn't supposed to feel unsympathetic towards her rich white clients. Suffering is part of human existence, it just is, and therefore we're primed to suffer to some extent regardless of what our actual circumstances are. And often, if you've been through trauma, you only really start to feel the effects of it once you finally know you're safe from it. Because while you're in it, the entirety of you is concentrated on survival. I remember learning this when I was studying psychology in my twenties and finally understanding my teenage years. Because I'd had a really difficult life prior to the age of thirteen, especially the years from eight to twelve. But then we moved to England and I started at the local state secondary school, which just so happened to be a really good school, and although we were poor we had a roof over our heads, and although my mother's boyfriend was a creep he wasn't a child trafficker, and so for years I could not understand why I felt so much worse now than I remembered feeling a couple of years earlier, when objectively things were far worse. "The bad stuff's over now," I remember thinking, "why am I still so broken?" I was angry with myself for being what I thought of as 'pathetic.' I was furious that I couldn't just pull myself together. And then I trained in psychology, much for the same reason as I've said Grace might train to be a lawyer: to help people who were in the situation I was in as a child. And during that training I learned some stuff about how trauma works, including that it's not just a one-and-done but rather it sticks with you. And also that the worst of its effects often come up after you've left the actual traumatic situation. It's a little bit like how people who work really hard often get ill during the holidays. Because while they're still working working working, they're so focused on that that their entire state -- embodiment, mental, whatever -- does not allow for illness. But then the moment they stop -- thank god, they think, it's Christmas, I can chill out for a couple of weeks -- they immediately get some kind of horrible cold that lands them in bed for five days. They probably picked up the germs earlier. Things have been festering in their system under the surface. And now that they've stopped, their body's like, oh good, an actual rest. And it relaxes and lets go of all the defences it's had up, and therefore all the bad stuff rushes in and takes over. Similar with trauma. You hold yourself together and together and together until you're free. And then you think, oh thank god, now I can actually get on with building a life away from the monsters I grew up with. But then your brain relaxes, and your nervous system isn't receiving its usual signals anymore, and everything goes fucking haywire, and all of a sudden you're slicing into your wrist with a razor blade and wondering why you're even doing it but knowing you have to, you have to, just in order to get through the rest of the day. So, yeah. Grace is going to have some shit to deal with, not only in terms of current prejudices and societal issues and all sorts of other day-to-day stuff, but also in terms of her own past, and her mother's past, and her mother's mother's past, and the past of her entire people. But Joy's done a good job -- as good a job as she possibly could -- and Grace has done a good job too. And that for sure counts for something. Also, Grace has learned through the experiences she's had in the film that she has agency. She can, and does, save the day. As long as she doesn't forget that, she might just turn out alright. Raging Grace was directed by Paris Zarcilla and came out in 2023. Our final girl Grace was played beautifully by Jaeden Page Boadilla. You can follow the podcast on Instagram at that final girl life, or support us on patreon dot com slash that final girl life. If you have any suggestions for future episodes, you can email them to that final girl life at gmail dot com. Thank you for listening. And until next time, remember: the horrors persist… but so do we.

4. 

   8 Sept 2026

   E10 Shoo from Fréwaka (2024)

   Resources used: Reddit discussions u/KetchupGeorg on r/CPTSDMemes: 'Shoutout to my mother for whatever the hell this was' (https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSDmemes/comments/1w7b8bi/comment/p7vijba/?context=3) Studies Jesuthasan et al. (2025) 'Childhood adversity as a risk factor for autoimmune disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis with implications for psychiatry' (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40320015/) Brain, Behaviour & Immunity 128:643-653 Köhler-Forsberg et al. (2025) 'Adverse childhood experiences, mental distress, and autoimmune disease in adult women: Findings from two large cohort studies' (https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/C16C8A4C7E5D91E5A46BCC1066A45908/S0033291724003544a.pdf/div-class-title-adverse-childhood-experiences-mental-distress-and-autoimmune-disease-in-adult-women-findings-from-two-large-cohort-studies-div.pdf) Psychological Medicine 55(36):1-10 Videos Aislinn Clarke Fréwaka Irish director talks folk horror, found footage & more (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r_muQnhfh4) Fréwaka official trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EHKJvIdFEY) The Magdalen Sisters official trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dqMxvJLmew) About That Final Girl Life: You can keep up with the podcast on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/cw/thatfinalgirllife), or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the pod on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife (https://www.instagram.com/thatfinalgirllife), or email thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com (mailto:thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com) if you want to say hello. Script Haters and gentlefriends, welcome to That Final Girl Life. It’s your favourite final girl here, taking you through The Horrors and out the other side to find out what life is really like after the movie ends. In this episode we’ll be discussing Fréwaka and its very traumatised final girl Shoo. Please be aware that there will be spoilers throughout the episode. In this episode I’ll be talking about intergenerational trauma, madness, literal demons, and religion. Ready? Open the red door, descend into the basement and steel yourself as we get ready to discuss... Fréwaka. As soon as we start watching this movie we can see it's going to be a folk horror. Right in the opening credits is a goat standing in a field, and given that it's a horror film we all know what that means: eeeevil things are coming. We begin with the suicide of a woman whose daughter will be the main character and also our final girl. Shoo, the daughter, is tasked with the death admin following her mother's suicide and has gone to her mother's house to sort through everything. If you've done death admin you'll know it's a soul-destroying process even in the best possible circumstances. Shoo hasn't seen her mother in a long time, and we learn during the film that she was abused by her as a child. So going back isn't exactly something Shoo's been looking forward to. Luckily she has the help of her pregnant fiancée Mila, although tensions are high between the couple because Mila just doesn't quite understand how much Shoo hates seeing any reminder of her childhood. So when Shoo gets a text message asking if she can go and take care of an elderly lady who needs an Irish speaker, she jumps at the opportunity. It should be a simple enough job, she thinks: a couple of weeks looking after someone who's just come out of hospital following a stroke. But then she arrives and it all gets complicated. First of all, the old woman won't let her in when she arrives. Then once she's finally inside the house, she learns that the woman, whose name is Peig, has shut off the basement because she believes there's a kind of gateway to the underworld down there. "There's another house underneath this house," she says at one point, backing up the line in Shoo's notes from the care company which state that Peig has dementia and episodes of psychosis. The thing is, Shoo isn't exactly mentally well herself. She's on medication for it, but Peig keeps throwing both of their meds away. Thus begins a slide down the slippery walls of reality into the pit of insanity. ...or is it? When she arrives, Shoo is more than willing to believe that Peig is simply insane. But as time goes on, she starts to understand that there might be something to what Peig is saying. Certainly Peig has been mistreated throughout her life: on her wedding night, she was taken away by what she calls "them" and gave birth to a baby which she had to give away for its own safety. "Them" is how Peig refers to the hellbeasts in the basement, but Shoo learns it could also refer to the church or the Magdalene Laundries which were active at the time. Peig was pregnant when she got married, something the church would not have accepted, so her mistreatment at the hands of shady people who whisked her away at the first opportunity is in fact a matter of record. Things just get weirder and weirder, until by the end Shoo and Peig have locked themselves in an upstairs room together and are desperately trying to keep themselves safe from the people who are trying to get in, who are variously the townsfolk, Shoo's fiancée Mila, and the woman from the care agency who came to check up on Shoo's work. The thing is, throughout their mental journey together, Shoo and Peig have discovered that they are in fact grandmother and granddaughter. This has been the final thing that has seemingly tipped them both over the edge, though whether you believe they've been tipped into madness or into finally understanding the nature of the demons who have been after them is up to you. Gazing into a mirror, Shoo sees a vision of her mother reaching out to her. "Mammy," she says in a cracked, emotional tone: even if your mother's a monster, you somehow never quite stop wishing she'll love you. As Peig realises Shoo is about to surrender herself to the demons, she makes a final gesture of love, grabbing a sharp tool and stabbing it through her eye into her brain. With Peig dead, Shoo leaves the room and runs downstairs, seeing that Mila has in fact been there: her presence wasn't a trick or a hallucination. As she nears the basement the spooky red door opens on its own, and a wedding dress appears. Shoo puts the dress on and descends the steps, ending up in a field where she's bestowed with a minimalist tiara and shown her groom: a horned man. As the credits begin to roll, we see Mila on the floor in front of the now closed red door, crying and begging for Shoo to return. "I'll give you anything you want," she tells the entities, but the film ends before we hear their answer. That Final Girl Life... If that all sounds a bit complex, it's because it is. I've watched this film four times in total, three this week, and it is so rich that it's really difficult to do a synopsis of it without that taking up the entire episode on its own. I also want to say upfront that Fréwaka is deeply steeped in Irish history and mythology, and whilst I do know a bit about that, it's not my own culture and therefore I might get things wrong. If I do, please feel free to correct me. Also, I apologise in advance for any mispronunciations. I'll do my best! So. We're at the end of the film. Shoo's in the basement underworld marrying a goat-man while her pregnant fiancée sobs frantically on the other side of the door and offers the underworld creatures whatever they want in exchange for Shoo's freedom. This is a direct parallel of what happened with Peig: when she was taken away, her husband Daithí came to rescue her, but in order to get her back he had to promise the baby to "them." But when the baby was born, Daithí broke his promise and instead sent her away to be adopted, which is why Shoo never knew her grandmother before the events of the film took place. We can sort of assume therefore that Mila is being set up to make exactly the same decision. Agreeing to give away the baby will get Shoo back to her, but when the baby is born they too might send it away to be raised elsewhere in the hopes of breaking the curse. But generational curses don't just lift. Regardless of where and how it's raised, the baby will have some innate memory of something being not-quite-right. The curse in this film is linked to madness -- specifically, to psychosis -- and this is something that can run in families genetically as well as environmentally. So at the end of the film we're set up to believe that Shoo is replaying the life of Peig, with Mila playing the part of Daithí, and their baby will play the part of Shoo's mother, and then any baby she has will grow up to play the same role Shoo did. And on and on, ad infinitum, until someone finally gives up and just doesn't reproduce. Or, I suppose, surrenders to "them" and reproduces in the basement underworld, but I don't even know what that would look like. Obviously most people who are watching this film will probably view it as a folk horror with a lot of metaphorical elements, rather than a literal chain of events. However, I grew up in a family that was both completely insane and deeply religious, so for me it was pretty relatable on a literal level. One of my grandparents even had a chained-up basement because of what he called "black magic." Yes, really. I wasn't totally sure if Shoo qualified as a final girl, but I decided to include her because she's representative of some of the things I want to get across on this podcast, namely that yeah, final girls are badass, but we're also deeply traumatised and often kinda strange as a result. If Mila manages to get Shoo out of the basement, regardless of whether you believe it's an actual portal to the underworld or that she's just having some kind of psychotic episode, Shoo is not going to be OK. At the end of the film she surrenders herself to "them." Does that count as fighting to survive? I sat with that question for a while before I decided that yes, I think it does. Sometimes resignation feels like the only way forward, which absolutely sucks, but then sometimes life does just suck. So. We're out of the basement and back with our pregnant fiancée, and we've left Peig's house and gone back to whatever place we were presumably living in with Mila before the events of the film kicked off. What does life look like now? Well, there's some obvious mental health stuff, for one thing. Shoo might not want to go back on her pills now that she's realised Peig wasn't crazy after all; she'll probably want to keep her wits about her to make sure she's safe from "them." At the end of the film Mila seems to also be convinced that something has actually taken Shoo, although given that she seems less prone to mental illness overall she might persuade herself that it was all just a kind of waking fever dream and none of it really happened. In which case, their relationship is going to come under severe strain, because she's going to want Shoo to take her pills and Shoo is going to do everything she can to avoid that. Shoo might even come to believe that Mila is in league with "them," which she kind of is, in that she's promised "them" their baby. Mila's pregnancy is already pretty advanced, and as the due date draws nearer it will become more and more obvious that this is not a couple who are going to be able to safely raise a child. So regardless of whether Mila wants to send the baby away to be adopted, it's probably going to end up happening. This might actually calm Shoo down a bit, as long as she realises the baby has been taken by social services rather than by "them," and that might drive even more of a wedge between the couple: Shoo's relief might be read by Mila as coldness or lack of love, rather than what it actually is, which is a love so strong that Shoo just wants the baby to be safe. Although she's seen some of it play out in front of her, Mila undoubtedly still doesn't totally get the whole underworld thing. We saw when they were clearing out Shoo's mother's house that Mila didn't understand why Shoo wanted nothing to do with her, even though she presumably must have seen the scars on Shoo's arms from her childhood abuse. Rather than understanding, she read the situation as Shoo being less caring than she should be, and probably that pattern will repeat with Shoo's actions towards the baby. I can't imagine Mila and Shoo's relationship standing the test of time. There's just too much of a cavernous gap in between them now: too much Mila can't understand, and too far for Shoo to have to come back into the everyday world now that she's experienced the other one. Unfortunately, I think the most likely thing is exactly what the end of the film sets us up for: a repetition of family trauma running through the generations until something actively stops it. With her baby gone and her relationship over, what would Shoo have left to do other than go back to Peig's house, which she has probably inherited, and take up the life of an agoraphobic madwoman, ridiculed and maligned by the townspeople, filling her life with rituals and talismans in an attempt to keep herself safe? I was talking about this a while ago with a colleague: how most of the time, people who have been through a very severe level of trauma don't come out the other side being OK. It takes luck and a lot of privilege to be able to shed even some of it and move forward in life in a way that even slightly resembles normality. Peig and her daughter, and by extension Shoo, are much more likely outcomes. The people who used to be locked up in asylums but now are on psych wards instead; the homeless people who wander around muttering things you can't quite hear; a lot of these people are final people. Because yes, sure, maybe you survive, but what kind of life do you have? If you've got through everything Shoo has gone through and you've learned the demons are real and they're out to get you, but also everyone else thinks you're crazy... what kind of life have you survived for? One of the things I like to talk about on this pod is what it's like if you meet the final girl many years after the events of the movie. If you don't know what's happened and you just come across her in the course of your work, for example, what might you think? What kinds of seemingly odd behaviours might she exhibit that would be explained by the trauma she's been through? With Fréwaka, we've already seen that, because it's exactly what plays out at the beginning of the film. By the end, Shoo has been primed to take over Peig's existence in her strange house with an underworld in the basement. If she lives her life like this then yes, she'll probably end up with a reputation as the village agoraphobic. She'll be untrusting of people and reluctant to engage with them, and will probably become more and more cloistered in her home, receiving deliveries by getting people to leave things on the porch or at the end of the driveway, like Peig did. But then one day, if she lives long enough, she'll become disabled. Either because of old age eventually, or because something happens to disable her earlier. People who have been through trauma in childhood are much more likely to develop autoimmune diseases later on in life, and for many people autoimmune diseases can be disabling, to varying degrees. So it's pretty likely that Shoo will at some point require some kind of help because of a long-term illness or disability. In which case, she'll presumably be sent someone by the local council, just like Peig was, and that person will arrive and knock on the front door, and Shoo won't want to let them in. There will be salt and horseshoes and nails galore, and she might also piss across the doorframe at them like Peig did. (I'm momentarily reminded that both Shoo and whoever her assigned carer is should be grateful that neither Shoo nor Peig has a penis, so at least their pee is aimed at the ground!) I don't know about you, but being greeted with a puddle of urine isn't something I particularly enjoy. There's a level of disgusting human effluvia that carers are used to, of course -- as I'm sure my own carer can testify -- but even so, to be immediately met with someone deliberately pissing at you presumably feels different from, for example, arriving to find someone who is bedbound and incontinent. So, much like Shoo when she first encountered Peig, the carer will probably find her client a bit strange. And then she'll go inside and see all the seemingly random things on the floor, and she'll learn that Shoo freaks out when she moves a nail out of the way when she doesn't step on it. She'll discover that there's a spooky red door at the end of the downstairs hallway which she's not allowed to enter. She'll be tested in ways she doesn't even know are tests, like her food being heavily salted or being handed something made of iron. She'll probably be woken in the middle of the night by Shoo screaming in nightmares which may or may not actually be noises from the basement underworld. Depending on her own metaphysical beliefs, she might be freaked out and decide this is witchcraft or faery folk or something similar; or that it's the ravings of a mad woman combined with the creakings of an old house. Regardless, it won't be a restful time for her. It's unlikely to be a job most people would enjoy. One of the hardest things about being someone who's been strongly negatively affected by trauma is that the aftereffects aren't easy for other people to deal with either, and so you have a couple of options: either you just act in a way that feels less retraumatising for you, in which case you'll have far fewer friends and other helpful people around you; or you suppress your immediate reactions and live life in a kind of freeze state, which will make you seem more amenable to other people but will mean you never quite exit the trauma. And that particular way of dealing with things anecdotally has an even higher association with autoimmune conditions, so really you can't win. Of course you can go to therapy and work through things. That's the third option. But can you imagine how Shoo would experience therapy? Most therapists aren't particularly open to the idea that their patient might have an actual basement underworld hellgate thing in their house, but Shoo does, at least if we read the film literally. And even if we don't, even if we think it's just a metaphor for intergenerational trauma which is being told through this crazy family story of demons and faery folk and hellish beings, I doubt Shoo will be able to trust that a therapist will take her beliefs seriously enough to work with them. Many people already come to therapy freaking out about being "locked up" by "men in white coats" even though their beliefs are much less eccentric than Shoo and Peig's. During my time working as a therapist I've seen several clients who were having problems that might be termed 'spiritual.' Often these involved deities and witches from other countries; places I'm not from and have never been to, which have deeply embedded beliefs in witchcraft and types of spirituality that most Western countries have repressed. I found it interesting during therapy training that whenever I brought up something like this during our group supervision sessions, I would find that none of the other trainee therapists had encountered these things. Yet I was coming across them all the time. There's obviously something about me which lets my clients know that they're OK to bring that kind of thing to our sessions, which if you look around my home, is hardly surprising. But the majority of psychotherapists in the UK, even in London, are middle-class white people. There's nothing wrong with that, I was one myself for a while, although I've since dropped back down to my correct social classification as part of the benefit scrounging white trash underclass. But if you're part of the dominant faction of society, and part of what that society has done is systematically erased entire belief systems in deliberate, sustained acts of violence over several centuries, and if you tend to believe (or indeed disbelieve) in the same religious or spiritual things as that majority society because you've grown up as part of it, then regardless of whether you're racist or not; whether you feel like you're an accepting kind of person or not; and so on, there will be quite a lot of things that clients just don't feel they can bring into their sessions with you. Which isn't to say the sessions won't be helpful. But it does mean that there will be some areas in which the gap is just too wide to cross. I say all of this because it will be relevant in Shoo's case. Peig needed a carer who was an Irish speaker, and she spoke Irish with Shoo throughout the film. We don't know whether she spoke English or not. But regardless, she might partly have needed an Irish speaker because they would be more likely to at least have an inherent understanding of her spiritual beliefs. Ireland, like Iceland and certain parts of various other Western European countries, maintains a strong belief in what a lot of people would term the 'paranormal.' Every so often there will be a news item about a road having to be diverted or a piece of land not being developed because it will disturb the beings who live there: fairies, elves, whatever they might happen to be. So it's plausible that Shoo might request an Irish speaker too, simply in the hope that they'll be more likely to get it on some level, even if they've suppressed or disowned any belief of that nature which they might previously have had. This is making me want to go off on a whole tangent about my PhD, but I will resist that urge because this is a podcast about horror movies, not about psychoanalysing religious and spiritual belief systems. So anyway. Shoo gets a carer; the carer's freaked out; they leave. Eventually she'll hopefully find one who at least will provide the care she requires. Perhaps she'll find a young woman with a mysterious past who was adopted by an Irish-speaking family after being given away at birth for her own protection, and that woman will feel inexplicably drawn to the basement, and she'll open the door and find paperwork that links her to Shoo, and it'll be her daughter, or perhaps her granddaughter if it's many years later. This is how intergenerational trauma plays out even if we don't want it to. I don't have children, thankfully, but I have recently come to learn just how much of my mother's treatment of me was inherited from her own mother. This shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did. As a trained psychotherapist I know about intergenerational trauma, and I'd already been told that my grandmother wasn't exactly a maternal type. But learning the extent of it surprised even me, mostly because I recognised so much of it directly from my own childhood. In some ways, finding out what had happened to some of my mother's siblings was helpful, in that I realised where my mother had got certain behaviours from. In other ways, it was really awful, both because I realised just how terrible their childhood was, and also because my grandmother had always been pretty nice to me, and learning how she'd acted towards her kids made me understand that she was at least as monstrous as my own parents, possibly even more so. From the millennial generation onwards we've started being more aware of things like intergenerational trauma and taking responsibility for child-rearing in a way that admits that we're going to fuck it up and we need help to try not to. Of course there were people who knew this in previous generations too, but internet access and increasing levels of education have meant that it's more in the Zeitgeist than it was in previous decades. So maybe Shoo understands all this a bit more than Peig. Peig was old school, unsurprisingly, and her home reflected that. Shoo might be more open to modernising things a bit: having wifi in the house, getting online. Where she ends up online will probably dictate something about how she views her own trauma and her subsequent experiences. The narratives we buy into, whether we create them or take them from the culture we grow up in or find them online, have an ongoing impact on our lives. I'm going to indulge myself in a teeny bit of philosophy here by mentioning Wittgenstein, a German philosopher who was obsessed with language, who talked about how language structures our worlds. The knowlege we have is partly dependent on the words we have. Imagine someone from the 1800s suddenly popping up in today's world. In fact, we don't even have to go that far back: I am now at the age where I hear young people saying things like [insert saying here] and I go... wait, what? Because language evolves over time, despite some people being desperate for it not to, and the way we use language helps us to create and maintain the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, and then those stories get taught to our children either directly or indirectly, and they make their own modifications and additions, and on and on from the dawn of time. Which is a really long-winded way of saying that Shoo could find all sorts of ways to explain her experiences. Maybe she sticks with Peig's explanation: the underworld in the basement. Maybe she adds in something about intergenerational trauma and post-traumatic stress, using the language of today. Maybe she finds the Gangstalking subreddit, which I do not recommend you look at, and decides it's all a government conspiracy in which she's being targeted. Maybe she finds the people online who call themselves 'starseeds' and her narrative becomes that she's from another planet and this is why she is the way she is. You can find people with all sorts of beliefs even if you thought you were the only one. Just the other day I was browsing the CPTSD Memes subreddit when I found one in which two people were talking: the adult person is saying "Aliens are going to abduct and impregnate you, it runs in our family, it's inevitable" and the child person is playing with a toy and simply replies "I am seven years old." The post was titled 'Shoutout to my mother for whatever the hell this was.' I replied with: "“That’s because our bodies aren’t human” — my mother when I mentioned that the doctor had been confused by one of my test results. Oh well, at least we alien kids have each other 👽🩶" And that's one of the nice things about the internet: you can find people you relate to even if your experiences have been extreme. It's also one of the less nice things sometimes, though, because you can find people you relate to and who will back up your beliefs even if you're the one who believes they've been impregnated by an alien, or believes everyone who has a different colour skin to them should be killed. I do think though that the internet could bring hope and maybe even a bit of healing to Shoo. Perhaps she'll find other people who have been through similar things and who can help her to live her life in a way that genuinely suits her. And maybe that looks very different from the kinds of lifestyles that suit most people, but that's OK. I've found it so refreshing recently to have found a therapist who genuinely allows me to be myself and isn't trying to change me in ways that align me with the normativity of today. Maybe Shoo finds her too. That would be nice. I guess one of the things we can take away from Fréwaka is that sometimes final girls are visibly crazy. That's not a fashionable word but I'm allowed to say it because I have a sufficient number of mental health diagnoses myself. But I started this podcast to talk about the reality of life as a final girl, and sometimes the reality is that the cracks become rifts become caverns become breaks, and you end up a fractured mess, holed up in your home pissing at people who knock on your door. Well, that's one way to get rid of the Jehovah's Witnesses, I suppose. Whilst it's tempting to think of final girls as total badasses who somehow haven't been affected by their experiences at all, that is literally impossible. Everything that happens to us, however small, has some kind of effect, and trauma has a traumatic effect. Even if someone looks like they haven't been impacted by it, that in itself is likely to be a trauma response. And while a lot of the final girls we talk about on That Final Girl Life could go on to live pretty "normal" lives, others just can't. We saw that with Dani in the first ever episode. We saw it with Sarah from The Descent. I haven't covered The Craft yet, but the final scene with Nancy in that movie very much shows a likely outcome for many final girls. So this is another one like that, I'm afraid. Is it possible that Shoo could overcome everything and move forward in a way that aligns her with the social norms of the day? Yeah, I guess. But it's likely that even if she manages that to some degree, she's still going to come across as being a bit strange. And, I mean, come on. All the best people are. Fréwaka was directed by Aislinn Clarke and came out in 2023. Our final girl Shoo was played hauntingly by Clare Monnelly, whose other movies I am now going to check out. You can follow the podcast on Instagram at that final girl life, or support us on patreon dot com slash that final girl life. The free tier gets you two episodes per month, the paid tier gets you four. If you have any suggestions for future episodes, you can email them to that final girl life at gmail dot com. Thank you for listening. And until next time, remember: the horrors persist… but so do we.

5. 

   29 Aug 2026

   E9 Anaia from Is God Is (2026)

   About That Final Girl Life: You can keep up with the podcast on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/cw/thatfinalgirllife), or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the pod on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife (https://www.instagram.com/thatfinalgirllife), or email thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com (mailto:thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com) if you want to say hello. Script: Haters and gentlefriends, welcome to That Final Girl Life. It’s your favourite final girl here, taking you through The Horrors and out the other side to find out what life is really like after the movie ends. Please be aware that all episodes contain spoilers from the beginning. In this episode we’ll be discussing Is God Is and its final girl Anaia. Content notes include domestic violence, fire, losing a twin, pregnancy, visible disfigurement and disability. Ready? Grab your rucksack and hop into the car as we hit the road and get ready to discuss... Is God Is. Is God Is follows the story of twin sisters Anaia and Racine, who share a city apartment, work as cleaners, and generally seem to be getting along OK in life despite it being immediately visible that things haven't always been great. Both of them have scars, Racine on her arm and Anaia across one side of her face. The scars are tangly and complex, signs of a fire in which their mother burned to death and the two girls barely escaped with their lives. ...at least, they thought their mother burned to death. Until they receive a letter from her asking them to come and see her one last time. Because now she really is dying. Off they go across the United States, down into the deep South. They're Black, as are both of their parents, and therefore the trip already invokes some complicated feelings as they leave the relative diversity of the city and head into states where some people still believe the other side should have won the civil war. They reach their mother without incident, though, and she asks them to do one last thing for her before she dies: kill their father. This seems like a pretty big request, at least to Anaia, but once they've been shown exactly what their father did to her -- something that's left off screen to allow the audience to imagine all sorts of horrors in our own minds -- they agree to do it. Back on the road they go. It takes a while to track him down, but eventually they find his house. Anaia, the more sensible, much quieter one, has made Racine promise to only kill their father and no one else. You can see that Racine is out for blood, and perhaps slightly enjoying the excuse to put her murder cap on. Of course, Racine doesn't only kill their father. She also kills his wife Angie and one of his twin sons. The other, unfortunately, ends up being killed by Anaia, who only acts in self-defence but still ends up partaking in the vengeance killings. So that just leaves their father, who has been out all day and returns to a house full of blood and dead family members. He takes this remarkably well, immediately demonstrating that he's definitely not the warm and fuzzy type, but he manages to persuade Anaia that he didn't mean to hurt either of his daughters, only their mother. Desperate to believe him, Anaia lets her guard down in a moment which made me yell out loud at the screen. Her father attacks her, obviously, but Racine, who was knocked out during the earlier fighting, comes round just in time to help her sister. They push him into a bathtub and light him on fire, mirroring exactly what he did to their mother. In a genuinely shocking twist, as the twins turn to leave, their father reaches out and manages to grab hold of Racine, pulling her into the bathtub with him and leaving Anaia with no choice but to run from the house before the fire consumes her too. We end on Anaia standing behind the burning house, then quietly leaving, vowing to tell the baby she's pregnant with all about her brave aunt Racine. This is a brilliant film on many different levels. Interestingly, when I was watching it I thought it would make a really good play, and then when I googled it whilst writing this episode I learned that it was in fact a play before it was a movie. I'd love to see it on stage. The twist at the end is devastating. The girls have been through so much together, not only the events we've seen unfolding on screen but their entire lives. We're set up to believe that if there's going to be a final girl at all, it's definitely going to be fearless, fight-ready Racine. And yet in one of those moments that change your life forever even while you stand watching in disbelief, Racine is gone and Anaia, for the first time since conception, is alone. Not entirely alone, though, because like I mentioned right at the end of the synopsis, she's pregnant. We're not sure if it's twins or not, but it for sure might be given that they definitely run in the family. We're not told whether Anaia is going back to the apartment in the city which she shared with Racine, or if she's going to see her mother first to tell her they've completed their task, but I imagine it's the latter. After all that, not even telling her mother they've succeeded would feel like doing a disservice to Racine's death. You'd hope of course that her mother would receive her with open arms and all the empathy she needs, but this is a hardened woman who's about to die and therefore probably in a lot of pain; and she's also a person who gave up her own two daughters for adoption after they'd just had an incredibly traumatic experience, albeit ostensibly because she thinks they'll have a better chance at life that way. But I can't imagine her giving Anaia the warm and fuzzy treatment, is what I mean. Throughout the film we're repeatedly told that Anaia is the emotional one out of the twins, and I'm not sure her mother will have a great deal of patience or indeed capacity to hold that in any kind of supportive way. Nonetheless I think -- certainly I hope! -- that she'll be happy the girls have carried out her dying wish. Given that the completion of their task left Anaia all alone in the world, and particularly given the upcoming new arrival, I'd hope she would make sure Anaia is well cared for in her will, if she hadn't already. Will they reconcile in any meaningful way? Probably not. Anaia might stick around for a while, maybe even until her mother dies, but she'll be numb with grief and disbelief, not to mention dealing with physical wounds from what she's been through and possibly fending off police and so on depending on how the scenario at their father's house has been interpreted by any emergency response teams. I don't think she'd end up in prison, although racism might land her with more consequences than she should fairly receive for a series of events she was reluctant to take part in in the first place. So let's say she stays with her mother for a little while until her mother dies, then she sorts out the estate and the will, and then, by that point heavily pregnant, she heads back to the city and goes into the apartment she'd shared with Racine. What a moment that will be. The mustiness, the frozen-in-time-ness... all those memories. Hard enough to face at the best of times, but when you're exhausted and hot and your hormones are already all over the place? I don't envy her any of it. And yet I think she would go back there, rather than finding somewhere new. She's always been with Racine, their bond so strong that they didn't even need to speak out loud. Whilst a lot of people find it hard to be surrounded by reminders of people they've lost, others can find it comforting, and I think Anaia will fall into the latter category. Plus, she's promised her baby or babies that she'll tell them about their aunt Racine, and what better way to ease into that than to stay in the home they shared together? Hopefully financially she'll be OK, at least for a while; and she was working as a cleaner before they left, so hopefully she'll be able to find similar work again. What's that, you ask? Wouldn't her job have given her compassionate leave. Ha. No. I mean, maybe. But it's highly unlikely. For one thing, she's in the US, a country known for its refusal to give its workers any time off at all. But also, she's a cleaner not a CEO, and she's Black and disabled. She's hardly going to be treated well by the people around her. So she'll be very reliant on the payout from her mother's will to survive, especially initially when the babies (apparently I have decided that in my head canon they are twins) are tiny and need constant attention. After a while she might be able to consider working again, and she'll probably have to given that her mother wasn't exactly rolling in cash. Anaia was shy to start with, and whilst she's definitely learned some things about how much of a total badass she can be when it's necessary, she's also learned that she can trust people even less than she'd originally thought. She's been mistreated throughout the events of the film by almost everyone, including her half brother Riley who seemed to be open to a friendship until he learned that Racine had killed his twin brother and therefore turned understandably but regrettably murderous towards the girls. Which means, I think, that she'll probably want to find a job where she doesn't have to be seen by people. She was an office cleaner before, and having worked as a cleaner I can confirm that people often do treat you like you're invisible, but right at the beginning of the movie we already saw a woman treating both twins like they were disgusting because of their scars, and she's only going to have more of those now that she's been in a whole other house fire. Given this and also the babies, I wonder if she'll try to find a night shift. Some kind of huge, multi-floor building where she can secretly take the babies with her and let them sleep in one of the rooms while she cleans the rest of the place. This will, of course, render her utterly exhausted, but needs must, as they say. Raging Grace, which was directed by Paris Zarcilla and came out in 2023, does a great job of showing some of the challenges faced by single mothers in difficult situations who don't have strong support networks and face discrimination. I think Anaia qualifies in lots of ways. I've just realised however that I am entirely discounting the guy who got her pregnant as a potential source of support. This undoubtedly shows you all something about my own relationship with men and romance, however whilst he seems nice enough, he's referred to as 'Old Man' by both girls throughout the film and I'm not totally convinced he'd stick around. And statistically, like we discussed in the Invisible Man episode, unfortunately Anaia is most likely to end up with someone who's unreliable and ultimately abusive, because of her background of both of those things. It really sucks that that's the way the world works, and yet here we are. Not to mention, she'll have more scars, and that will impact not only who actually wants to be with her but who she thinks wants to be with her. As well as the scars she's had since childhood, she'll now also have new ones from being in the burning house with her father and sister, although she was in there for much less time so hopefully these will be milder and quicker to heal. However, she's just given birth, which means she'll also have stretch marks and possibly some vaginal tearing. (Words you might not have expected to hear on your podcast this morning. Sorry.) People's relationships with their bodies tend to change in the wake of pregnancy. We live in a society where women in particular are meant to look as perfect as possible, and people are often expected to get back to their pre-birth weight quickly and without complaint, whilst of course also being fantastic mothers from the get-go. This is unrealistic at the best of times, and Anaia's not having the best of times. She already felt ugly, and was told she was ugly by society. Although the baby or babies will give her something to focus on, it wouldn't be surprising if she had at least some level of post-natal depression given the level of trauma she went through during her pregnancy. And now on top of all that, she has new scars on her stomach and boobs, her nipples hurt, her vagina's a trashed memory of what it was before, and she's leaking milk into her t-shirts. Or at least, that's the sort of thing she might be feeling. So physically, she's going to be exhausted. And because nothing in life is siloed even when we want it to be, the physical and mental aftereffects of her trauma and her childbirthing experience are all going to be linked together. She'll need to go to her postnatal appointments, have a health visitor come and check on the babies, if that's something they do in her state; regardless, she'll be expected to turn up to some kind of healthcare. And healthcare practitioners, in my experience and probably also in Anaia's, are no better than anybody else at treating people who seem different in some way with an abject lack of respect. So she's going to have to face up again and again to medical practitioners' responses to her facial scars, which is something she will have been used to all her life, but which will no doubt take on a deeper and more painful meaning now that she's been in a similar situation all over again. She's also been shown what her mothers' burns looked like, which we understood in the movie were much worse than either child's. That might be playing over in her mind, too: might her scars get worse over time? Maybe her disfigurement is even more severe than she thought it was? And so on. Anaia now has scars from her parents and from her children. That's an interesting visible demonstration of intergenerational trauma, which is carried to different degrees by pretty much everybody, I think, but particularly for people who come from historically enslaved groups, and for those whose parents have been through terrible things themselves. Anaia belongs to both of those groups. And it's hard to forget what's happened to you and move on when there are constant reminders of it all over your body. The visual aftereffects will also remind Anaia that she's the only survivor. Technically she still has a half-brother in Ezekiel, but he's already tried to kill her once and that side of the family seemed pretty insane when she and Racine went to talk to them, so to all intents and purposes she's on her own. Being the sole survivor of a traumatic event can be really difficult to deal with. When they believed their mother had died back when they were children, Racine and Anaia at least still had each other. They had both survived, and so had their father, although of course he was the perpetrator. But now everyone is gone. Anaia will probably be grieving the loss of her mother all over again, including the complicated grief for the years that went by without them knowing each other. The "what could have beens" are some of the hardest parts of grief, I think. And there's a particularly complicated grief that happens in children when their parents aren't dead but still are lost to them, or when their parents are dead but were never really proper parents to begin with. Not that any kind of grief is easy, but if you have a "normal" relationship with someone and then they die in an expected way during their old age, that kind of grief will probably be less complicated than the grief Anaia will be going through now. And of course, it's not just her mother. There's also her twin sister, the one she shared her entire life with. And there's the quasi-grief of losing her father and half brothers, at least one of whom seemed like he might have had some redeeming qualities. In the moments leading up to their last battle, her father had seemed to show some care towards Anaia, and although it wasn't real, there might be a part of her which holds onto that memory and wonders "what if...?" What we lose when someone dies isn't just them, either, but our place in relation to them. This is especially obvious when someone in a close-knit group dies and the rest of the group has to shift to accommodate the new lack. In the past when this has happened in groups I've been part of, the group sometimes hasn't survived. It's hard to adapt around a giant gaping hole when you're also kind of trying not to acknowledge it and to move on with life as if it's not there. There are a few parts in the movie which describe Racine and Anaia in relation to each other. Visibly, Racine is the more confident, adventurous one. By contrast, Anaia is quieter and more hesitant. She's also described as "more emotional" by her mother, who uses this as the reason why she wrote only to Racine. There is a sense therefore of Racine being the dominant twin, something which is underlined by Anaia's conversation with her half-brother Riley just before he dies. She asks whether he feels like he lives in the shadow of his brother, never quite able to define himself as his own person because he's always been defined in relation to Scotch. Riley doesn't really seem to relate, but the conversation shows us a lot about how Anaia sees herself. The relationship between the twins is played out in their names, as well. Racine comes from the French word 'racine,' meaning 'root.' And Racine does seem more rooted in their family history: we can see traces of both her mother and her father in how she acts, particularly with regard to the quest they're on. Anaia, by contrast, has a couple of meanings. Firstly, it's a biblical name meaning 'God has answered.' Given the title of the film, this is particularly interesting. Early on the girls create an equivalence between God and their mother: both creators, givers of life. Both are authoritative figures whose instructions are supposed to be followed. This is one of the ways in which Racine persuades Anaia that they should kill their father, per their mother's request. When they set off, their mother asks them to come back and tell her when it's done, something they fully intend to do together. But Racine's death means Anaia has to do this alone. And her name -- God has answered -- seems to reflect something of this relationship: the answer to the mother's prayer comes back via her daughter. God the mother's wish for God the father to be killed is carried out by God-has-answered. And in that way, God answers to Godself, perhaps. I wonder if God also answers to Anaia: if she and her mother have a reckoning after the movie has ended, if her mother is forced to face up to the consequences of her demand. The Anaia at the beginning of the movie would never confront her mother in this way, but the Anaia at the end of it just might. Interestingly, Anaia was originally a boys' name which also meant 'brother.' This is obviously fascinating given the theme of sibling relationships that runs through the film. Anaia, like I mentioned a moment ago, has always been defined in relation to Racine: she's more emotional, less pretty, more visibly scarred, less impulsive. I imagine that when they're being spoken about, they've always been referred to as 'Racine-and-Anaia.' In some ways, then, I wonder if one thing Anaia's name is doing is reflecting her journey through the film: whilst she begins as merely 'brother' (or, more accurately, 'sibling'), by the end of the movie 'God has answered.' Maybe, maybe not. But regardless of how much we can read into their names, it's definitely true that Anaia's self-image will have changed, not only because she's been in some pretty intense fights and come out the other side, but also because the person who always gave her her view of herself is now gone. And then there's the survivors' guilt. This is a phenomenon whereby someone who has survived an event which killed other people feels guilty about their own survival despite that guilt not being merited. In her darkest moments, Anaia will probably wonder why she was the one to survive. It should have been Racine, she'll think: she was the one people liked. She was the one who was going somewhere, who might have gotten something out of life. Maybe she'll even feel like Racine would have been a better mother to Anaia's children. I would hope that the children will keep her going, that remembering that if she hadn't survived, they wouldn't be here will in some way ease her guilt. But even that would be defining herself via other people. Anaia has always struggled to see the value in herself as who she is, and the set of experiences she's been through during the movie will most likely not help with that. On top of which... Racine was kind of right. That'll be a whole thing to struggle with on its own. Anaia hadn't wanted to hurt anyone, certainly not to kill them, although I think she was up for some kind of a reckoning. But most of the time, when you're a woman dealing with violent men, any kind of reckoning will have to be violent too. It's the same for suppressed groups of people: yes, sure, you can peacefully protest all you want, but there are some situations in which that just won't work. People like Anaia's father see those who are kind and peaceful as weak and overly sensitive, rendering empathetic discussions with them entirely useless. Even in the case of Riley, whom we're initially led to believe doesn't want any violence either, it turns out Racine's right that he's going to try to kill them both. Now admittedly this only happens because they've killed his twin brother Scotch, but who's to say he wouldn't have jumped to violence anyway? Scotch certainly did. If I'd gone along with Racine's plans earlier, Anaia might think, then she'd probably still be alive. If only she hadn't trusted her father, had lifted the sock with the rock in it and struck him right across his temple at the first possible opportunity, then he and his household might have been the only casualties of that terrible afternoon. She might beat herself up about this, use it in her worst moments as proof that she's stupid and overly emotional and pathetic, incapable of looking after herself or anyone else. And, let's remember, she has new babies. How can she then be expected to look after them?! These are some of the things the postpartum demons might be telling her when she gets up to feed her babies in the night. Simultaneously, somewhere deep down in a place she'd rather not admit exists, Anaia might occasionally feel something approaching relief. Only a little bit, of course, because genuinely the primary emotion is going to be grief, particularly about Racine. But if Racine hadn't died in that fire then the situation would have looked much more complicated when the emergency services arrived. If Anaia had struck their father as soon as he appeared and managed to kill him, then the cops would have turned up at a scene where a fancy-looking lady was dead in the road, two boys had been visibly stabbed by people who were presumably armed and ready, and their father was dead on the floor of the dining room. Maybe the girls would have dragged everyone inside and set fire to the house, but there's only so much evidence that would have covered up. Do you know how long and hot a fire has to burn in order to successfully burn up a whole human?! No? You obviously don't listen to enough true crime podcasts. But it's really long. By contrast, when the police arrived they will have found a home in which everyone had been killed. Identical twins don't have the same fingerprints, so Anaia's will also have been at the crime scene, but will they even have checked? It's a Black family in the deep south, after all. They're not exactly going to pull out all the stops trying to find out what happened. And if they do even a cursory investigation then they'll come across the girls' mother, who given that Racine is already dead will no doubt let her take the blame and say -- truthfully, as it happens -- that Racine had left her mother's house saying she was going to kill her father whilst Anaia had left saying she didn't want to. So in some ways, Anaia might owe her freedom to her twin's death. Would she give it up to get her back? Yes, I'm sure she would. Might she also be a teensy bit relieved though? Yeah, probably. Having dealt with the immediate aftereffects, assuming Anaia manages to pick herself up and carry on, what might her life be like later on? One of the reasons I wanted to start this podcast was to underline just how many of us are walking around (or in my case, wheeling around) carrying giants bags of trauma that are invisible most of the time. And also how sometimes it becomes briefly visible, but only if you know what to look for. Often post-traumatic responses aren't triggered by things people usually put trigger warnings on, like depictions of rape or discussions of fire, but by things that seem completely random but which for some reason are evocative of the trauma that occurred. So let's say it's years later, Anaia has moved to a place that's big enough for her and her twin girls to live relatively comfortably, she's still working as a cleaner but doesn't work nights anymore now that the girls are older. Now they go to school and she goes to work, and they all come back together again in the evenings, much like many other families. She hasn't found another man, but she finds she doesn't really want to. Memories of Racine are all around their home, and the little family lives a happy enough life day to day. She's even become used to people's stares and awkward questions again. What kind of thing might pop up which suddenly destabilises her, demonstrating her trauma history for those who are looking closely enough? Well, the obvious one would be fire. And yeah, it's pretty likely she won't want to be around it. But it's also pretty likely she won't have to. Fire is usually easy enough to avoid, and most survivors end up finding ways to be comfortable enough with small and frequent reminders of their trauma, so for example Anaia will probably end up being OK with lighters and possibly gas stoves, if she has one. Let's say she's gained some confidence over the years. I'd certainly hope so: she deserves to know how great she is. She hasn't found romance again -- hasn't really been looking -- but she has found some friends. A group of Black moms at her kids' school perhaps, all bonding over being treated as different. Maybe a general group of misfits: a goth, a nonbinary person, a refugee, and Anaia. People have a way of finding others with whom they have something in common, even if what they have in common isn't immediately obvious. I'm sure there will be people around her who have also experienced trauma. Hell, just being Black in the US counts for that. But I doubt anyone else in her group will have experienced the same traumatic events as Anaia, and so there will always be things they wouldn't think of that might suddenly pop up and freak her out. Let's say one of the ladies in their group is moving to a different country. They know none of them realistically has the money for a trip abroad any time soon, so they decide to splash out on a girls' weekend away somewhere to mark the last time the group will be physically together. Nobody really thinks much of it. The kids all go to stay with friends and the moms go off to a hotel that's not exactly fancy but is better than anywhere any of them have stayed before. It's more like the kind of place they'd each work at than the kind of place where they'd be guests. But just for this long weekend, they get to live the high life. Or the higher life, anyway. They share a room, because they're not made of money, and it comes with its own ensuite. There's a toilet, obviously, and a bathtub with an overbath shower... but the shower is broken. (I told you it wasn't the best hotel.) Fine, they all think, they'll just have baths. Those are more luxurious anyway, right? They pick up some bubbles from the hotel shop and take it in turns to get in the tub. The thing is, trauma sometimes jumps up out of nowhere in ways even the trauma survivor themselves isn't expecting. A couple of things could happen with the bathtub situation. First, Anaia might be desperate for a pee, but one of the others is in the bathroom. She could go downstairs and use the public one in the lobby, but she's in her nighttie and she's just painted her toenails, so she doesn't want to. She knocks on the bathroom door. "Hey, don't be silly, of course just come in!" says her friend. So she pushes open the door, starts walking across the room towards the toilet... ...and completely freaks out. Desperately tries to keep a lid on things, tries to use the toilet like a normal person because otherwise her friends will notice, is trying to remember to breathe, to not act weird, to not give away what she's--- "Anaia? You OK?" She's failed. She's put so much effort into not making a terrified noise that she's started hyperventilating instead. Her palms are sweating, her forehead clammy. Her hands are shaking. As she exits the bathroom, her legs give way and she plonks down hard on the carpet. At first she herself doesn't even understand what's going on. Puts it down to maybe some kind of food poisoning? She definitely feels "off." Her stomach is churning. Is she going to be sick? No. No, it's more like she can't breathe. Like a chest-based feeling, a band around her heart... oh god, is she having a heart attack? Fuckfuckfuck. But no. She's OK. One of her friends has gently guided her head down and her knees up, and now Anaia's breathing is beginning to regulate again. What was that? There's a bathtub in her own home! She's seen people in it hundreds of times! Granted, only her children, but still... That's the thing, though. She hasn't seen an adult woman in a bathtub since she saw Racine burn to death, which in itself was already reminiscent of seeing her mother burn to death in a bathtub when she was a child. Something about the positionality, the specific angle of looking down at a person in a tub, perhaps the way in which her friend was lying with her full body submerged, trying not to give Anaia a glimpse of any unseemly bits. Sensory memories are so evocative. Or maybe it's not even that dramatic. Maybe she's absolutely fine when she sees her friend in the bath. Finishes painting her toenails, has a normal evening with the rest of the moms, goes to bed, gets a good night's sleep, no nightmares. Then on Sunday night someone mentions that Anaia's the only one who hasn't had a bath yet, and she's like, oh yeah, that's true. Weird. So she runs the water, shakes out the dregs of the bubble bath, ties her hair up out of the way, and has a good soak. It's fine. Nothing dramatic happens. But when she gets out of the bath, she feels... quiet. Off. Like she's not fully there. For some reason she can't bring herself to be present with her friends. Maybe they notice, maybe they don't, but Anaia certainly does. Something feels wrong all evening, and when they go to bed that night she finds herself sleeping badly, waking frequently with a feeling of panic or impending doom. And the next morning, when they're checking out, she finds herself volunteering to do it for all of them and going to use the toilet downstairs while she does, brushing her teeth in the inadequate sink under the slightly cracked mirror and convincing herself this is entirely coincidental: a decision she's making rather than a feeling she's avoiding. She checks them out, they leave and drive home without incident. When she gets back, she finds herself reluctant to go into her bathroom for a few days. She still does, of course: she has to. But she doesn't go near the bathtub, and it's only when her scalp starts to itch that she realises it's been almost a full week since she's showered. Which she does without incident, and soon things feel like they're back to normal, and life carries on. She might not even remember the experience five years down the line, unless something happens to make it repeat. She's had a bathtub in her house the whole time, and she genuinely believes that she just happens to prefer showers. Some people do, right? Sure. But not everyone watched three of their family members burn to death in bathtubs. In the example where her friends noticed her distress, would she have told them why she was feeling that way? It's possible, but it's more likely that she didn't. Talking about traumatic experiences isn't exactly fun, and besides, she wouldn't want to take away from it being their last hurrah as a group of moms all together in person. Maybe her friends will remember, maybe they won't. Probably they won't make the link between her panic attack and the bathtub if she doesn't tell them that's what it was. Sometimes the people around us might seem to be acting in strange ways. But there's usually a reason, if you know where to look. The thing is, we don't usually know where to look for the signs of each other's trauma, and besides, it's not our business. Which is why I think it's important to offer people some grace. Unless what they're doing is harmful, give them the benefit of the doubt. So your friend gets a bit weird any time you stay somewhere there's a bathtub? Don't try to make her get in it, then. I'm sure this sounds completely obvious to you, lovely listeners, but as someone who has a lot of these weird trauma-based personality quirks, I can tell you people rarely leave things the fuck alone. Maybe we should all do a bit more of that sometimes. Whilst of course striking a balance that allows our friends to talk to us about things if they want to. Oh, I don't know. Being a human is hard. I guess that's partly what I'm trying to say. So let's cut each other some slack. Is God Is was directed by Aleshea Harris and came out in 2023. Our final girl Anaia was played by brilliantly and sensitively by Mallori Johnson. You can follow the podcast on Instagram at that final girl life, or support us on patreon dot com slash that final girl life. The free tier gets you two episodes per month, the paid tier gets you four. If you have any suggestions for future episodes, you can email them to that final girl life at gmail dot com. Thank you for listening. And until next time, remember: the horrors persist… but so do we.

6. 

   23 Aug 2026

   E8 Meredith from A Wounded Fawn (2022)

   The book I mention is How Not To Be A Boy by Robert Webb. About That Final Girl Life: You can keep up with the podcast on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/cw/thatfinalgirllife), or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the pod on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife (https://www.instagram.com/thatfinalgirllife), or email thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com (mailto:thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com) if you want to say hello. Script: Haters and gentlefriends, welcome to That Final Girl Life. It’s your favourite final girl here, taking you through The Horrors and out the other side to find out what life is really like after the movie ends. First of all, I’m sorry that there wasn’t an episode last week. Originally I’d planned to record this one, but then it was 38 degrees in London and my body stopped working, so I couldn’t. Thank you for your patience and now I’m back to normal functioning there shouldn’t be any more unplanned gaps. In this episode we’ll be discussing A Wounded Fawn, a movie based on Ancient Greek mythology, and its weird and wonderful final girl, Meredith. Please be aware that there will be spoilers throughout the episode. In this episode I’ll be talking about rape, sexual assault, being stuck in an isolated cabin with a scary man, rape videos being shared, and of course, PTSD. Ready? Grab your weekend bag and ignore all the red flags on the way as we drive out to your date’s cabin and settle in to discuss… A Wounded Fawn. From the very beginning we’re set up to understand that this film will be partly based in myth. We open with an auctioneer describing a small sculpture which is up for sale: it’s worth a lot of money, and it’s based on Tisiphone, Alecto, and Megara: the Erinyes of Greek mythology. You might know them better as the Furies. The auction is won by an antiques dealer named Kate, who is celebrating her win when her doorbell rings. The man who was bidding against her is there, and he offers her a huge sum of money if she’ll give him the sculpture. Naturally, once he’s inside her house he kills her instead, and steals the sculpture. We then see the same man take Meredith, our final girl, away for a weekend at his cabin. She doesn’t know him well and she’s surprised by how remote the cabin is. Things keep happening on the way that are making her feel like she shouldn’t go with him – at one point they literally drive past a load of red flags waving at them in the wind – but she does that classic female thing of giving him the benefit of the doubt… right up until he kills her. Kills her? Wait, isn’t she our final girl? Yup. She only seemed dead. Soon enough she opens her eyes and starts killing him right back. And his killing takes. A. While. The ghosts of other women he’s killed come back to help out. Sometimes they kinda morph into the Furies, sometimes they look like they’re dressed up for a local am dram production. Honestly it is immensely fun and very surreal. You just have to go with it, because it’d be easy to discount it as a bit too weird. My best piece of advice for this movie is not to try to make it make sense. As daylight seeps in, the Furies dissipate and we see that the man is simply beating himself to death. Meredith stands dispassionately while he twitches pathetically in front of her, writhing through the credits while she watches him die. I will say I felt that this film was a bit long, particularly given how quickly I summed up its main points just now. Artsy movies have that reputation, and this was an artsy movie through and through, but I still feel it could have cut a solid twenty minutes and not lost anything important. Something I will mention but don’t want to spend loads of time on is that it’s left ambiguous whether he actually wants to be killing all these women. Strange folkloric-looking owllike creatures appear just before he does it, and at times he seems to be trying to resist. But the fact remains that he does kill the women, and this is not a “let’s find excuses for men’s bad behaviour” podcast, but rather a “let’s look at how cool final girls are” podcast. So. Let’s pick out some themes, shall we? What was Meredith’s life like at the beginning of the story, and what’s it going to be like now that the movie has ended? Towards the beginning we learn that Meredith has recently left an abusive ex, and has been seeing a therapist to process her experiences. During one of the sessions, when the therapist asks what Meredith has learned, she replies “I’ve learned not to absolve a man for his transgressions against me.” A lesson she very much demonstrates she’s taken to heart during the rest of the movie. The thing is, though, that society is pretty good at absolving men and making victims pay over and over again for the crimes of their perpetrators. Like with Nikki in Obsession, whom we spoke about in episode 4, Meredith might well end up going to prison for killing the man who took her to his cabin to kill her. However, there’s a little more leeway for her to argue with. For one thing, the final scene of the movie makes it unclear whether she was actually doing the killing or if he was killing himself. Indeed one obvious read is that Meredith did die when he killed her early on in the film, and it’s her vengeful spirit – along with those of his other victims – watching him writhe himself to death as the credits roll. Assuming for the sake of simplicity that she is found alive, however, she still has more wiggle room than Nikki to mount herself a defence, particularly given that he’s killed before and the corpses of his previous victims are buried at the cabin. Few juries would refuse a self-defence plea in Meredith’s case, surely. So let’s assume she doesn’t have to go to prison. She’ll still have to go through a bunch of legal stuff though, including probably a trial, and it will undoubtedly all come out in the press, and people will know about it, and her job is a high-profile one where she deals with very rich people, who probably won’t want their pristine lives sullied by association with a victim of a heinous crime. Which, yes, is an actual thing we have to deal with in society, because society still shames victims more than perpetrators. Meredith is going to lose a lot in the whole legal process, probably including her job. But she might be able to keep her career to some degree, for example by going freelance and downgrading the level of commission or amounts of money she’s working with. She had good friends at the beginning of the film, and if they stick with her then she’ll hopefully have enough of a support network to keep her going. Besides the outside prejudices, however, Meredith will also have to contend with her own feelings about her job. It was, after all, through her job that she met this guy, and she’ll have learned during the trial about him killing Kate and stealing the Furies sculpture from her. This might make her reluctant to deal with the entire world of arts and antiquities. I know when I’ve had enough of a negative experience within a particular sphere it’s often put me off the rest of it too, even if there’s nothing wrong with the area in itself. So perhaps she’ll turn to something entirely new. One of the things we haven’t spoken about so much is how traumatic experiences can sometimes end up indirectly leading you towards positive things in life, as well. Meredith seemed happy enough working in a museum, looking through antiques and categorising them, but maybe she’s so stressed from the trial and everything that she decides to just work in a coffee shop for a while, discovers she loves it and opens her own. Now I’m starting to sound like a Hallmark Christmas movie. But you never know. Life has a way of sometimes reorganising your priorities for you, and what comes out the other side isn’t always bad. She might also decide that she still loves her subject area but doesn’t want to be working a 9-5 anymore. Maybe she becomes really obsessed with the Furies after the weird spiritual experience of killing a man whilst lightly possessed by one of them, and so maybe she starts reading about them, realises just how fascinating they are, and applies for a PhD. I wondered too about the spiritual or dreamlike element to all of this. There are parts of the movie which are obviously not literally happening in the way they’re playing out on screen, and then other parts which are left ambiguous, including who actually dies and when. Meredith brings a record with her for the weekend with a cover that references LSD. There’s definitely a trippy vibe throughout – at one point I wrote “it’s like promising young woman on acid.” I wonder if she’ll go chasing that powerful feeling again. If she does, then the way in which she chases it will depend on what she attributes it to. That could be a lot of things, the most positive one being her own badassery. But she could also decide it’s been some kind of spiritual experience, become obsessed with the Furies, and if not join a weird cult, at least become a bit witchier than she was before. Nothing wrong with that, obviously. I’d be a massive hypocrite if I claimed otherwise. But like we discussed in the first episode when we talked about Dani from Midsommar, once something has rescued you from a particularly awful experience it can be difficult to pull yourself away from it afterwards. The worst case scenario, I think, would be if Meredith decided it was whatever drugs she’d taken that had given her the power, and so she sought them out again and kept taking them, and then she became some kind of junkie serial killer of men. Ngl, though, that’s a sequel I’d watch. I think that’s not very realistic, though. Meredith is level-headed enough and frankly privileged enough to probably be able to pick herself up and carry on. One of the things traumatic experiences can do for you is make it easier to change your life afterwards. A lot of the time, what keeps people static in situations they don’t love is the golden cage of comfortableness. If things are just OK and you know they could be better, you might have to deal with the nagging existential discomfort that gnaws away at you when you wake in the middle of the night and forces you to shut it up with pizza, but if it’s just unsatisfying then it’s hard to summon up the guts to take a risk. What if you jump and fall? What if you lose it all? But when you’ve already lost it, or when you’ve had a sudden brush with realising that life might end at any moment, it sometimes becomes easier to just bite the bullet and run. Meredith’s experience will make her realise how easy it is to go from feeling a bit uncomfortable to dying on someone’s floor, and that might well be the spark she needs to jump forward into the rest of her life with more vigor than she’s previously applied. I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to paint trauma in a positive light, though. Obviously it messes us up in various ways, too. And one thing I don’t think we’ve talked about on this podcast yet is how the patriarchy makes it easy for “normal” men to act in ways that are suspiciously well-aligned with how rapists and murderers act, and how therefore women have to be suuuuper careful but also pretend not to be being careful for fear of embarrassing the man, because an embarrassed man can quickly become a murderous one. We can see this playing out just after the dinner scene in the movie. After one too many spooky experiences, Meredith suggests they leave the cabin, drive back to the city and stay at one of their places instead. He says no, visibly annoyed with her. “We’re completely alone out here,” he tells her, as if that’s meant to be reassuring. “I know,” she replies, “that’s the problem.” “You don’t want to be alone with me?” He is incredulous, despite the fact that he is looming closer to her whilst holding a large knife. “I think you’re being overdramatic,” he adds, WAVING THE FUCKING KNIFE AROUND. “I’m not comfortable staying here,” Meredith states her boundaries clearly like she’s probably practised in therapy. “Either you drive me home or I’m going to call a rideshare.” “Fine.” He doesn’t mean it, though. While she goes to pack, he’s downstairs working out how to kill her. Because that’s the thing: you can be the calmest, least “hysterical,” most boundaried woman in the world, and he’ll still kill you because you gave him an owie in his feels. Honestly. And they call us emotional. Prior to this Meredith has done a lot of work in therapy to understand what her boundaries are and work out how to put them in place. Whilst she completes this movie as a total badass, once the adrenaline has worn off she’ll probably be shaky and uncertain. We are so good at questioning ourselves. Did I tell him properly? Maybe I was too harsh? Too offensive? I’ve heard of people thinking these things while they are being attacked. “What if it’s my fault.” Fuck that. It’s not. But our brains sometimes tell us that, even years later. When Meredith gets into a new romantic relationship she’ll have a lot to work through, especially if it’s with a man. In the meantime, she might find even her day-to-day interactions are affected. A delivery guy who’s a bit short with her; a taxi driver who seems a bit off; all sorts of everyday situations contain power dynamics in which Meredith will statistically be the more vulnerable party. And those will be tinged with a level of threat she was unaware of before. Similarly, later on in the film he screams at the Furies: “Don’t you fucking laugh at me!” It reminded me of that oft-shared quote about men being afraid that women will laugh at them, whilst women are afraid that men will kill them. Towards the end of the movie he is literally lying dying on the ground and all that the women are asking for is for him to take some accountability for what he has done. He will not do it, even though his refusal is killing him. That’s the kind of stubbornness you don’t tend to believe in until you’ve seen it play out in front of your very eyes. Something happens to you, I think, when you’ve been exposed to the reality of just how fragile the male ego can be. When you’ve made an offhand comment and been knocked unconscious for it, or you’ve responded less than enthusiastically about something and ended up bleeding as a result. Robert Webb, in his excellent memoir How Not To Be A Boy, talks about how men are encouraged not to have any emotion other than anger, and therefore they often use anger to cover up all sorts of other feelings like sadness and shame. He suggests a game in which you watch TV and drink every time a man reacts in anger when another emotion would be more appropriate. I’ve never tried it, but apparently you get quite drunk quite quickly. So yes, the patriarchy hurts men as well. It’s no wonder that male rates of suicide are so much higher than other genders. Imagine never being allowed to properly express a feeling for your whole life. This is for sure something we need to work on as a society. But this isn’t a podcast about societal change, it’s a podcast about final girls. And final girls are often demonstrating the one emotion women aren’t really supposed to show, which, funnily enough… is anger. At one point I wrote in my notes “She’s not “just a woman” anymore she’s THE EMBODIMENT OF PROPORTIONATE RAGE.” And that’s the thing. I think it’s entirely proportionate to feel murderous rage towards someone who has attempted to murder you. All too often that rage gets pushed down inside for years and years with nowhere to go, causing all sorts of problems. Either that or it finds targets in people who don’t deserve it. The level of abuse perpetrated by my grandmother against her children finally made some kind of sense to me once I learned that she was part of the Aboriginal Australian Stolen Generations: children who were ripped from their homes and parents, treated horrifically, and trafficked abroad to live with white Europeans who had decided they wanted a cute Black baby. Often these parents weren’t exactly legit themselves. My grandmother, for example, was married off to a friend of white European – what do I even call him? he’s not her adoptive father, he stole her, but stole her in a way that was state-sanctioned at the time. Is there a word for that? Kidnapper, I guess? Anyway. When she was nineteen, she was married off to a 53-year-old friend of his. She had a bunch of kids with the 53-year-old, and she treated them so badly that I’m surprised so many of them survived. But I wasn’t surprised she’d treated them like that once I’d learned how she’d probably been treated. I also wasn’t surprised she’d spent her entire life pretending to be white even though she was visibly Black. Her having been treated badly of course does not excuse her abuse of her children. But it does go some way towards explaining it. Because society shames victims, because there were no reparations for the horrors inflicted on the Aboriginal communities by the people who came and invaded their homes, because women are taught to be submissive and pliable and “good,” there was nowhere for her rage to go. So she married the 53-year-old because she didn’t have a choice, left him and ran away with a younger man a few years later, he ended up being abusive… the cycle just goes on and on. And some of the children my grandmother gave birth to became abusive parents to their own children too, including the one who raised me. At some point we might end up having to talk about a final girl who turns out a bit skewiff in the child-rearing department. That won’t be a fun conversation, but it will be a realistic one. And all of the things I’ve just spoken about can and do live side by side in your average final girl. Yes, she might flinch when the delivery guy drops a parcel on the floor a bit too hard. But yes, she also knows she’s able to fight for her life and win. You can be broken and a badass at the same time. God knows enough of us are. I found one line particularly interesting because I’ve written a bit about secrecy as part of my academic life. When they’re lying on the living room floor, she’s just attacked him and he’s slipping into a kind of hallucinatory dream sequence, a voice says to him “All your secrets are escaping.” Underneath that I wrote: <<men’s secrets are attacking women. Women’s secrets are being attacked. But we’re not keeping them anymore.>> Now, I recognise that this statement is gendered. Of course women can and do attack people too. But in the context of the movie, as well as in the context of most of the attacks that occur around the world, it remains true. A few years ago I had a moment of realisation in which I suddenly became unashamed of my past. A couple of things pushed me there: firstly, talking to my therapy clients about their experiences and realising that I’d never felt they should be ashamed, because of course they shouldn’t. And secondly, reading an account of a group of teenage girls who were raped on camera at a party, and then the videos were shared around by the boys who had done it. Unusually, rather than keeping quiet, the girls had banded together, told their parents, and come out with their heads held high, demanding justice. Annoyingly I now can’t seem to find the story, but if anyone knows which account I’m talking about, please leave a comment. I think it was in Spanish. But the combination of these things brought me one day to the realisation that actually I had nothing to be ashamed of. Not about the abuse that happened to me, anyway. I’ve never trafficked a child. I’ve never hit a child, either, except when I was also a child and we were in the playground. I’ve certainly never raped a child. I’d rather die than do that. So why in the world would I feel ashamed? What could I possibly be ashamed of? Realising this made this huge well of rage suddenly open up inside me when I realised how much of my life I’d spent hiding and apologising… for nothing. Now, obviously I’m not saying I’ve never done anything wrong. Of course I have things I’m appropriately sorry about, things that bring up appropriate feelings of guilt when I think about them. But the level of shame I felt for being a victim of horrific abuse was visibly much larger than the level of shame my abusers felt, which as far as I could tell was zero. What. The actual. Fuck. But, thinking about it, I realised society plays into that in a way that’s hinted at in the sentence about secrets which comes out during the dreamlike sequence in A Wounded Fawn. We’re finally inching towards a point in society where women are going: no, actually. You can’t treat us like that and expect to get away with it. Fuck you. We’re not keeping your secrets anymore. And look at what’s happening in response. An entire movement of men who want to take our rights away, want us dead or dormant, items to fuck and vessels to babybear. Correspondingly, unfortunately, an entire subset of cis women who are taking out their understandable feelings of fear, anger and despair on trans people, a population even more vulnerable than cis women. Honestly, the world is exhausting. But I wonder, especially if Meredith’s experience has sparked some interest about the Furies, whether she’ll become someone who absolutely refuses to keep quiet anymore. Maybe she’ll carry a bit of that capital-F Fury with her and use it appropriately, to defend people who need it even more than she did. Be the person you needed in your most desperate moments. I think that’s one of the best things a final girl can do. A Wounded Fawn was directed by Travis Stevens. It came out in 2022. Our final girl Meredith was played wonderfully by Sarah Lind. You can follow the podcast on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife or support us on patreon.com/thatfinalgirllife. (https://patreon.com/thatfinalgirllife.) If you have any suggestions for future episodes, you can email them to that final girl life at gmail dot com. Thank you for listening. And until next time, remember: the horrors persist… but so do we.

7. 

   9 Aug 2026

   E7 Mari from The Last House on the Left (2009)

   Resources used: The Letterboxd post I mention is my review of Last House on the Left (1972) (https://letterboxd.com/chindilani/film/the-last-house-on-the-left/). The Letterboxd list I mention is Edgelord Horror (https://letterboxd.com/chindilani/list/edgelord-horror/). Logan is the person who left the useful comments: Logan's Letterboxd (https://letterboxd.com/loganennion/) Logan's Reddit post (https://www.reddit.com/r/horror/comments/1qnqbln/last_house_on_the_left_1972_the_actors_bluray/) about the DVD commentary Logan's blog (https://notonlyamovie.blogspot.com); he says: "The basic, text-heavy design is deliberate. For those with the stamina, it's probably best to start at the intro post (https://notonlyamovie.blogspot.com/2025/11/welcome-to-not-only-movie.html) and read chronologically, as later posts often have multiple hyperlinks back to earlier ones. The blog is unashamedly on Sandra Peabody's side, and it covers parts of her career away from Last House as well. Although the last post was in May, it's not finished: I'm just waiting until I have something new to post. The 88 Films release later this month might be a trigger for that, for example." Articles Garret Dillahunt's post 'More from the Last House press junket' (https://www.garret-dillahunt.net/2009/03/13/more-from-the-last-house-press-junket/) Videos Celluloid crime of the century (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC_b-xIdGK0) David Hess on 'The Last House on the Left' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6jAeqPY1EA) David Hess was scary and he knew it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qBqwGcvhgQ) (2009 commentary track) Remembering 'Last House on the Left' (1972) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUsf5cUgmMw) Part One About That Final Girl Life: You can keep up with the podcast on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/cw/thatfinalgirllife), or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the pod on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife (https://www.instagram.com/thatfinalgirllife), or email thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com (mailto:thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com) if you want to say hello. Transcript: Haters and gentlefriends, welcome to That Final Girl Life. It's your favourite final girl here, taking you through the horrors and out the other side to find out what life is really like after the movie ends. In this episode we'll be discussing the 2009 remake of the previously banned 1972 film The Last House on the Left. Please be aware that there will be spoilers for both the original movie and the remake throughout the episode, starting… now. We have to discuss the remake because in the original, Mari isn't a final girl; she only survives in the 2009 version. We will, however, be talking about some of the history behind the movie, where it's relevant to the plot. In this episode, I'll be talking about rape, violence, rape culture, and being chased and shot. I'll also be discussing the abusive behaviour of the actors in the original movie, towards Sandra Peabody, who played Mari in that one, and of course, as always, we'll be discussing symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Ready? Fire up a doobie and boogie on down to the lakeside, where we'll hang out and chat about… The Last House on the Left. We open with two cops driving a prisoner between locations. They're chatting about women on the way in a manner which shows us they're not exactly respectful. Suddenly, a van crashes into the side of the car, and the prisoner they're carrying escapes with the help of his friends, who it turns out staged the crash. And so we begin to meet our cast of characters: Krug, a violent criminal on the run, the one who escaped from the police car; Francis, his brother; Sadie, his girlfriend; and Justin, his son. That's the criminal contingent. Then we have the good guys: parents John and Emma and their daughter Mari, who have come to their lake house for a short holiday. They're grieving the loss of Mari's brother Ben, who died a year earlier. But they're at the stage that, whilst it still hurts, they're able to have some fun, and we kind of get the sense that this trip is partly meant to help with pulling their lives back together. Mari's friend Paige lives nearby, and Mari leaves her parents to an evening on their own while she takes the car and goes to hang out with her buddy. We've already seen that Mari is a competitive swimmer, and that both her parents are workaholics. Paige, on the other hand, is a pretty chill girl. She just wants to work her normal day job in a local store and smoke some weed and hang out with her friends in the evenings. Fair enough. Paige and Mari score off a guy called Justin, who takes them back to his motel room. They start smoking and messing around together, but then the door opens and in walk Krug, Francis, and Sadie, and thus the horror begins. Krug has learned that his picture is all over the papers, and this means that he can't let Paige and Mari go, so he kidnaps them. But Mari tries to escape from the car, and the entire group ends up in some woods near the lake. Paige tries to run away, but gets dragged back and stabbed to death in front of Mari, who is then raped and shot as she tries to run away. She gets to the lake, dives into the water, and begins swimming. But one of the bullets finds its target in her shoulder, and she stops. The group, triumphant, believe they've killed her, and they plan to leave, but a wild storm prevents them from driving away. They approach the nearest house, which happens to belong to Mari's parents, and take shelter inside. Mari's dad, John, offers to let them stay the night in their guest house. They accept. Whilst locking up the house once they've gone to the guest house, John hears a banging noise coming from outside, and opening the door, he finds Mari badly injured, lying on the porch. Usefully, he's a doctor, so he's able to help her, but the lack of a car combined with the phone lines being down means that he's limited as to what he can actually do. But he manages to dig out the bullet, and he cauterises the wound. And at that point, he realises that she's also been raped. Meanwhile, Emma, Mari's mum, learns that it was the group in the guest house who did it. The parents seek revenge, and as a result of several very satisfying fight scenes, they get it. We end with Mari and her parents speeding across the lake in a boat, presumably on their way to the nearest hospital. I'm going to try something a little bit different with this episode. With all of the others, I have written a full script beforehand, and then I've read the script off the page. So I kind of wanted to try one where I'm doing a bit more of a casual vibe. So I have made notes, but I haven't written a full script. So I'm just going to kind of riff off the notes that I've been making all week, and then let's see if you like it. If you hate it, please tell me. Don't be shy. I… presumably I'll get better at not saying um all the time eventually! I realised that when I'm listening to podcasts, what I really like is the kind of casual vibe and the feeling of of sort of getting to know the the host as well a little bit, and I do share quite a bit of my own life as well, as I'm sure you've already learned on the podcast. So I, yeah, I thought let's give this a go. Like I said, if you hate it, please tell me. If you love it, please tell me. I'll see if I hate it or love it, and we'll see what we'll see what I decide to do next week. So first of all, let's talk about the setup of the movie, how we come to understand who Mari even is, and kind of what gets established while we're watching. So first of all, we have the scene where the majority of our main characters meet for the first time. We've already met Mari's parents, and we've discovered all sorts of things, like they're middle class, they're hardworking, their son has died. They have Mari. They're… they're like nice parents, you know. There's like a real sense of like this is a family that actually gets on. And then a bit later, we meet Paige and then the criminal gang. So in this scene where they all meet at the motel, we… we establish a few things. We establish that Mari is a good girl, which we kind of already knew. We get the sense that Paige is sort of naughty, but still likeable. Like, she's not a bad girl as such, but she's like from the wrong side of the tracks. So we're allowed to sympathise with her, but we can't care about her too much, is kind of the vibe I got. We learn that Justin has a soft side, and we also learn that the criminals are definitely the baddies in this film. There's no kind of ambiguity on that front, and we also learn that they're not middle class. I kind of wanted to initially pick up on this class thing though because it was one of the first things I noticed. I think being from a really really low class background, like so low that I'm basically underclass in the UK… like, people say, it's upper, middle and working [class]. It is, but there's also like a benefits underclass that people don't really talk about, except in the Daily Mail, which is, you know, people who grew up on benefits, people whose parents weren't working for whatever reason. That's the kind of background from which I am watching the film, and so one of the first things that struck me was this massive… like massively obvious class difference between Mari and Paige and Justin, and mostly as a result of that, one of the first films that this one reminded me of was Eden Lake, which I really love. I think it's fantastic. I love a bleak movie, and what I love about Eden Lake, I think, is that I don't like… it started, and… I found it really hard to empathise with the main characters because I felt like they were kind of dicks. I don't know. They… they had this this vibe, this like air of entitlement to them, where they were like, "Well, we're entitled to our nice quiet holiday. How dare you plebs be here making noise?” And admittedly, the consequences that they suffer for that are disproportionate, to say the least. However, I really liked it as a kind of demonstration of class differences and of, like, just how clueless people can be when they come from a background that allows them to think “it'll never happen to me.” So I thought of Eden Lake, but I feel like in Last House on the Left, Mari and her family are much more sympathetic than the Eden Lake characters, whose names I can't remember at this point. It's been ages since I watched it. We kind of see this family together, and they seem happy, and they seem to actually love each other, and they're like warm and kind, and like joking around a little bit with each other. And we also learn, obviously, that they've lost their son, which adds a layer of sympathy, right? So like, we were already set up to like them, but also they're dealing with something that's genuinely horrible and that could really happen to anyone, and I didn't know at that point which way it was going to go and whether Mari was going to survive the ending, which obviously she does, or we wouldn't be here. But it was immediately obvious, in a way that it wasn't in Eden Lake, that we were supposed to sympathise with Mari and her family more than with the criminals. So I was like, oh, this is interesting because it's got that kind of like goodies and baddies thing that you don't always see in films nowadays. Like you tend to see that kind of more prior to 2000, and I would say like films that have been made this century tend to be a little bit more like ambiguous, more nuanced, so I was immediately kind of struck by that. Once I learned a bit more about the films, both the original and the remake, I wondered if there was something about the actors also being from different class backgrounds, which was the case in the original. Quite interestingly… so I posted… I watched this one, and then I watched the original the next day, and I always try if I can to go into films knowing as little as possible about them because I find it allows me to just consume it as a piece of art or media or whatever you want to call it, so that so I'm not kind of clouded by anything about the background. I don't know anything about the director unless it's someone I'm familiar with already, and I'm only familiar with Wes Craven from his Scream days. Really, like I'm not a big film person. I'm not a professional film critic. I'm a professional final girl! And so… yeah. So I went in knowing absolutely nothing, and as a result of that, I gave both films I think six out of ten because I was like, oh, these are fantastic. Like they're quite different, and the 1972 version is very much of its time, but like as a piece of art, I think it's really well done. I think it's, like, pretty good. And then someone called Logan left a note – left a comment – on my Letterboxd review of the original (https://letterboxd.com/chindilani/film/the-last-house-on-the-left/), and he was like, "Oh, I prefer the remake, basically because in the original, the actor who played Mari, whose name is Sandra Peabody, was really mistreated by the rest of the cast, basically, but especially by David Hess, who played Krug.” And I was like, "Oh, that's really interesting.” I do like to know. Like, I don't like to know it before I go in because, like I said, I want to judge it kind of as ignorantly as possible. But I do like to know afterwards. So this guy told me this thing, and I was like, "Oh, that's really interesting.” And then we ended up having… you can see it on my Letterboxd (https://letterboxd.com/chindilani/film/the-last-house-on-the-left/) if you click through. I'm also going to leave some links in the show notes to his blog and to some other stuff that he's published because he's a bit of an expert on Last House on the Left, the original, specifically on the treatment of Sandra Peabody in that movie. And (a) I just like that someone's that passionate about someone being treated badly, but (b) I I think it's really interesting to kind of know, and especially because it kind of plays into the actual themes of the movie. So one of the things that Logan linked to was a kind of 40-minute documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC_b-xIdGK0), and so I watched the whole thing, and it was really interesting, actually. But one of the things that they were talking about in the documentary was, the others were from backgrounds that were much less… nice… than Sandra Peabody's, and at one point David Hess calls her a “repressed Protestant.” And I think there's just something really interesting about the fact that it it almost feels like… and not almost, it does feel like in the 1972 movie, these people sort of just played themselves and played out what could have actually happened. Some of the things that David Hess (a) says about Sandra Peabody and (b) admits to in interviews is like… are just horrific, and if you feel like you can stomach it, I would recommend looking into it. But I was like, I wonder if there's a similar thing going on in the new version. Luckily, Sarah Paxton, who plays our final girl Mari, talked about feeling really safe, feeling really good with the actors. Talked about how they were all really good friends by the end of it, and so that obviously made me feel much better about the film. But I did wonder if there was a similar kind of vibe in this one, or whether the class differences were more subtle. And I also wondered about, like, societal change, and how, you know, like, more working class people go to university now. So, like, I'm the first in my family to have gone to university, but when I went to university, there were quite a lot of people who were also in that situation. So, I wonder whether, like, for my generation and and sort of Gen Z, Gen Alpha, I wonder whether class differences, like, whilst still being relevant, are a little bit easier to transcend than they might have been, like back in the 70s. So I thought that was interesting, both the kind of the class being pointed… class question being pointed to in the film, but also it being played out behind the scenes as a kind of setup for both films, really, because the new one is directly based on the original. And Wes Craven, who directed the original, is a producer on the 2009 version, and he chose the person who was going to direct it. So, it they're very linked, even though the new one is, I agree with Logan here, vastly better because no one was actually harmed in the making of it. The main set of stuff that happens to Mari remains pretty horrific in this one. It is in the original, [and] it is in this one as well. So what happens to her? Well, she gets kidnapped. They get put in a car and driven away. And she… and in the new version, it's because Mari tries to escape that they end up in the woods. She kind of directs the car close to her parents' house, and then she tries to flee to her parents' house. Doesn't get that far, but does at least get them pretty close. While they're in the woods, Paige tries to run away. She sees a construction site and tries to like call for help, but no one can hear her over the noise. And so she gets stabbed to death in front of Mari, and Mari gets raped and then shot when she's swimming away, so she has a lot of like really terrifying things happen to her. As did Sandra Peabody in the original, who… her character is also called Mari. But I felt like… I don't know quite how to phrase this. In the original, I felt like the sex and violence were the point of the film, and not in a good way. So, like, I thought it was well done when I watched it before I knew all about it, but it turns out that the acting was so good because it wasn't acting, and I sort of don't think that really counts then. But also, I it felt like… so I added it to my Letterboxd list which I call Edgelord Horror (https://letterboxd.com/chindilani/list/edgelord-horror/), which has stuff on it where I'm like, you just made this to show us how edgy you are. Like, grow the fuck up, you know. So stuff like Last House on the Left [1972]; House on the Edge of the Park was already on there. Things like August Underground is on there. What's the other one I was going to say? Oh, Cannibal Holocaust from 1980, which again was like banned in a bunch of places. And there's a particularly graphic rape scene in that. Again, I don't know… I think there's actually some ambiguity. I vaguely remember googling it at the time, and learning that there there was some sort of ambiguity about the extent to which the actor who was raped in the scene consented to everything that was going on. But yeah, so Cannibal Holocaust was one of those where it just felt like they were pushing the boundaries for the sake of pushing the boundaries, and Last House on the Left, the original, also felt like that. The new version does feel violent sexually as well as in general, but I feel like there's much more of a story. We get more from Mari and her parents, in terms of like who they are, there's less of a comedic element to the remake. And when I was watching the original, I was like, oh my god, this the slapstick is so annoying. I'm not a slapstick person anyway. Like I'm not a massive comedy person, honestly. I'm British, so I have a very dry, sarcastic sense of humour, and it was just really silly, a lot of it. But when I was watching it, I wrote in my notes, "I wonder if it has to be this silly because the film is so hard to shoot.” And actually, that is one of the things that Wes Craven said in one of the interviews I read was like, "Yeah, the slapstick. We agreed that like if we were to remake the film, we would take it out,” which obviously they did. But he was like, we kind of needed it in there, and I think that speaks to what was going on behind the scenes, in that the slapstick wasn't necessary in the remake, and you can kind of tell. I wrote in my notes: the rape scene in the remake is pretty graphic too, but the acting looks more like acting. And then I wrote, I mean that as a compliment. So like, I don't mean that the acting is wooden and pulls you away and reminds you that you're watching a film, but at no point did I feel worried about the actor in the remake, whereas I did a couple of times in the original, and I think that was part of what kind of made me a little bit like, this is very much of its time, even before Logan had left the comments that were like, "Oh no, it's it's not just of its time; it's, like, terrible.” So there's all of this sexual violence that's going on: the rape, the stabbing, the shooting. These girls are essentially victimised in every way they possibly can be, for a bit. And one of the things I found interesting about these scenes is the way that the power dynamic shifts between Mari and Paige. It kind of shifts back and forth throughout the movie until Paige unfortunately dies. So originally, when we first meet them, we kind of know that Mari is has more power in society. Like socially, she has more power than Paige because she's middle class. She has more opportunities. She's like on a college track, presumably. You know she's like on her way somewhere. Paige is more like… probably has not so many opportunities open to her. But when they are in the motel room, Paige very much takes over. This is her territory now. She has more power in the town where she lives amongst the kinds of people who live there than Mari does, who is a little bit clueless and doesn't quite understand like exactly what she's supposed to do in these situations. So, even for example, when they go to the motel with Justin to get the weed that they have asked for, Mari waits in the car outside and Paige goes in with him, and then Mari only enters the motel room because Paige is taking ages, and she's like, "What the fuck is going on?” And she goes inside and she finds that Paige and… I keep forgetting his name, but… Paige and Justin have like lit up and are smoking and they're having a great time, and Mari's like, "Oh, come on!” And… and Paige is like, "No, no, no, come join us! Like, it's really great. It's great weed. It's… it's really fun.” And so they… they all start like hanging out together, but and then obviously Krug and… Krug and the gang come back, and in that scene as well, we can really see that Paige is the one with the power out of the two girls. They're both quite powerless in that situation, but of the two of them, Paige is the one who has some idea of what she maybe should or shouldn't do, whereas Mari's just like hanging back. It's interesting as well that there is a woman in the group of criminals. So Krug’s girlfriend Sadie is very much a solid part of the group, and there's this real thing of like, especially by the time they get back to Mari's house and the group of criminals has met the parents – before the parents have realised that they are the ones who attacked Mari – and Sadie is like visibly overcome by just how beautiful the house is. She makes a… she makes a comment at one point about it being really clean, and yeah, there's just this real sense of like, god, Sadie, what opportunities did you have? Like, to what extent would you ever have been able to change anything about your life? And like, probably more than she did, right? Like I don't want to take away all responsibility from people just because they're poor. You can make the best of a situation that you have, but it does help if the situation you originally have is quite nice. And Sadie's, by all accounts, probably wasn't. There's like a sense of sadness for me, like looking at these three girls in a room together – three young women in a room together – and like in many ways there isn't really much difference between them, and yet it's like vast as well. Once they're by the lake and things are getting really hairy, Mari then once again becomes the one with the power out of her and Paige, and that is sort of because by that point they need both athleticism and intellect to escape. So like Paige: Paige faced with potential death does just panic, which makes sense. Paige like initially started thinking and then kind of like loses her shit, whereas Mari hung back, didn't really know what to do, and then has kind of gradually worked out more and more what to do. So she's the one who gets them out the car by lighting the cigarette lighter and holding it against… I think it's Sadie actually, but I could be wrong about that… but she she manages to get them out the car and into the woods, and then once they're in the woods, she sort of like nearly tries to get… nearly gets them away, and then doesn't quite manage to, but ultimately does survive. Whereas Paige is the one who like just legs it, sees a construction site, starts screaming, and and isn't kind of… like, there's one point where Paige is like hiding under this kind of upturned tree thing, and then she starts running again. I'm like, no! Like… bitch, stay! Like, just stay where you were, like don't… don't race for the nearest construction site. Also, there's a part of me going… there's… the part of me that grew up like Sadie grew up, is going. What the fuck are you running towards a construction site? They'll be like, “Oh, is a rape going on? Let's join in.” Not because they're construction workers, just because they're men. I'm being a misandrist, I'm not being classist. Anyway, so yeah, so like I think it's interesting though to think about this power dynamic between Mari and Paige and how it kind of shifts back and forth based on which situation they're in. But ultimately, Mari has the power most of the time out of the two of them because she is the one who's just had the power throughout her life. I felt like the… I felt like the female characters in the remake were closer to being actual people, even though when I first started watching the remake, I wrote… what did I? … What was the first scene that made me think this? Let me find it. Oh, the rape scene, of course. Yeah, I wrote during the rape scene, I thought, "Oh, this was definitely directed by a man,” and then again, I wrote that for the bedroom fight scene, specifically between Sadie and John. I was like, "Yeah, a man wrote this because this is kind of hot,” and like, I'm not complaining because I'm a lesbian, but like, yeah, it's it's got like a kind of objectifying gaze still, even though the women are somewhat more well-rounded characters. So I thought that was interesting. There's something about like making women less passive, but they're still naked and bleeding. That's a choice, isn't it? So we're here largely to talk about the aftermath, which we haven't talked about yet. What will Mari's life be like once she survived all of this? She sort of had some interesting life lessons, and some of them have been like potentially quite useful. So, for example, at the end of this movie, the parents speed away in a boat with Mari taking her to the hospital, but they've also saved Justin. Justin is the boy who is who they originally meet, who they buy some weed from, who is the son of Krug, and and he's a good boy. Like you can tell, you can just tell he's a sweet boy. Like he lets the girls dress him up in the beginning. Like he's… he's hanging out with them. He's not trying anything. He's being nice and sweet and respectful. He visibly doesn't want to get involved with what the others are doing, and like at times he's kind of forced to do some things, but you also really understand that he doesn't want to. And so there's this like quite nice level of nuance in both Justin's character – which actually is the same in the old one, although the actor who played him not so much if you watch the interviews – but in the new one, the like… the saving of Justin kind of gives this this idea of like, we too can understand this level of nuance, even when our daughter has just been raped and nearly killed, and her best friend has – oh I don't know if it's her best friend, but her friend – has just died. Like we can still understand that this boy who like handed us his gun so that we could kill his dad and his dad's girlfriend, like this boy is not totally innocent and blameless, but is not guilty either. Really, certainly not anywhere near to the degree of his dad. And so I was like, that's an interesting life lesson to take away from this, and I wonder what will happen between Mari and Justin later. Like, will they be friends? Will she kind of… will she come to an understanding of how all of that ended up happening by getting to know Justin a bit and understanding his world? I also then wondered if the movie was setting up Justin to replace the lost brother, whose name is Ben, I think, and I was like, that would be kind of weird, but like, also could sort of work. Like, there is this sense of like, at the beginning of the film, it's a family minus one, and at the end of the film, they've got a boy back to replace their boy, and I was like, is there something about like, um, is there something metaphorical going on here as well? You know, like this idea of you go through something absolutely terrible, devastating, horrific as a family, but you come out the other end, and although you're you're complete in a different way, and it'll never be the same, you can sort of get back to something aligned with where you were before. But the amount that Mari will have to deal with after this is just… I mean, it's too much, right? It's too much for anyone. However, she's a final girl, and we are particularly good at dealing with shit that other people can't even fathom. Her parents will be really relieved that she isn't dead, but both the knowledge of what she went through and the fact that they've already lost a child to death, like that's really going to haunt the family as a unit and also each individual. Mari is the only final girl we've covered so far who is still living with her parents as well, and I… and I kind of hadn't clocked that until I started making notes, and then I was like, oh, that's actually really interesting because obviously it has a… it makes a big difference to what happens to her next, right? Like most final girls, kind of almost by definition, have to deal with everything on their own afterwards. Like they don't have families. If we think about, so like Cecilia from The Invisible Man, obviously her husband had to be killed because he was the one who was victimising her. Her sister got killed during the events of the film. Her best friend is still around and is still her friend, but like there's definitely a kind of a bit of a wedge between them now, or like some… some layer of not quite trusting each other that there wasn't before. Dani from Midsommar, obviously her whole family dies at the beginning of the movie, and then she burns her boyfriend to death, and now she's in a cult. Like… and if she decides to leave the cult, like we discussed in the first ever episode, if she decides to leave the cult, she will very much be on her own. So like, most final girls, because of what has happened to them in the films, get to the end and they're like, "Shit, now I have to somehow pick up on my own.” But Mari doesn't have that problem, which on the one hand, is really good for her. Like, I'm sure her parents will help her. Like, she's already still living with them. I'm sure they'll be supportive. They seem absolutely lovely. At the same time, that gives her a bit less autonomy, and I can imagine her parents becoming beyond overprotective. She's not 18 yet, I believe she's 17 in the film, and so there's like a limit as to how much she can put her foot down and be like, "No, I'm doing it anyway.” Her mum was already like erring towards overprotection following the death of her brother, but I imagine dad might also take a step further in that direction, and mum will probably be like off the scale. I think as well that dad might blame himself because he gave her the car keys, even though Mum wasn't sure. Now, like, obviously he shouldn't blame himself. It's not in any way his fault. He was just being nice to his daughter. But the reality is, he gave her the car keys. He gave her a bunch of money. She drove off in the car and bought some weed with the money, and then ended up in the situation she ended up in. So I can imagine him really blaming himself, really feeling terrible about that. We live in a society where men are not encouraged to share their feelings. That is a problem. Things like the death of a child already drive wedges between families, and it's really hard to recover from as a couple. Obviously, they still have Mari; something about the family unit was very protective in that sense, managed to keep them together. But now that Mari's like… they haven't lost her to death, but they've definitely lost the child her, you know? She's definitely different now, and that's going to have an impact on, I guess, kind of how they are as a family and whether they survive as a family. So Mari's gonna have some shit to work through, basically, and… and is gonna have a difficult time with her parents, I think, even though it would probably be even more difficult without them. I was also thinking about her shoulder. So she was a competitive swimmer, and… I'm from the UK, as you can probably tell, but Mari is in the US, and I understand that a lot of the time if you want a scholarship to college in the US, you get some sort of sports scholarship. I kind of get the vibe that she's probably pretty academic as well, but I did wonder whether this is going to put some kind of financial strain on the family. College is notoriously expensive in the US, and if she had been relying on at least a partial scholarship because of swimming, and then she can't get that, and her parents have to pay, and they have to like, I don't know, remortgage the house while they're also having to sort out all of the shit that happened… so the lake house that they were staying in is like destroyed in the fighting. There's one point where John gets pushed through the bannister, and like the whole thing just like collapses. So like the house is very much [destroyed], and is going to need a lot of work. But also like emotionally that's going to be a really big thing. If they have to do that at the same time as they're trying to pay for Mari to go to college, that's going to be a huge financial strain. Will Mari even get to go to college? How disabled is she, as well? We don't know that in the film really. We see that she got shot in the shoulder, right, which means presumably that swimming is going to be harder, certainly in the short run, probably also in the long run. Even if she gets back to like being able to properly swim, she probably won't be competitive anymore. And also that disability – whatever disability results – will be a constant reminder of what happened to her. And even if miraculously the bullet didn't like do any huge damage and she gets fixed and it's all fine, when she's like 75, if she gets to that point, and her body starts to kind of like slow down a bit and she starts to get some arthritis and all of that stuff, all of that is going to affect first of all the shoulder that was originally injured, plus any subsequent injuries she might have had. And that is going to bring up some shit. Even if she has somehow managed to never think about it for the rest of her life, at some point she's going to be like, OK, but my shoulder hurts because I was shot. And that is the sort of thing that can just come back to haunt you at like really random moments and is really actually quite difficult to live with. But I was thinking… so I was thinking about the kind of future reminders in terms of her shoulder, like the impact that will have. Like I said, even if she… even if she's sort of fine, she's not going to be ultimately fine, and the shoulder will haunt her to some degree. But also like future boyfriends, sex, stuff like that. It's not explicitly stated that she's a virgin in the film, but we sort of get a virgin vibe from Mari. Her name is Mari, you know, like she's not… she's definitely not like hugely sexually active. And certainly this is going to have been, if not her first sexual experience, definitely one of the early ones, but I do think probably her first one. And that is of course going to have a huge impact on her next ones. So like any future boyfriends, she's probably going to freak out at some point during sex. She might… she might freak out or she might kind of put some defence mechanisms in place to prevent herself from freaking out. And they might be quite weird. You know, she might, um, if you think about… if you've seen Obsession recently, so if you see the way that Nikki looks when Bear is fucking her, where there's just this like absolute blankness and she's sort of making the right noises, but her eyes are dead. And you know, like that's the sort of thing that can happen to people, not necessarily, but it can happen to people when they've had a serious sexual assault in their lives. And then… or they're in a situation of in the moment being assaulted. So she's probably going to have some issues around that. And also she's got a scar, right? She's had a bullet in the shoulder. Someone's going to notice that at some point. So she's going to have to like… and it's probably going to be really random. Like she's not going to think about it; she's going to be finally healed; she's going to do all of this stuff, like all of this work, go to therapy, whatever. And then she'll like go on holiday with her family and they'll be in like… Crete. And she'll have a bikini on and someone will… and they'll meet someone and they'll be like, “Oh my god, that's a really gnarly wound, where'd you get that one?” And, and like, she'll be like, “Oh fuck.” I was thinking about this again… With regard to the class discussion from earlier. And I wrote like, because Mari has a good family around her, she's got devoted parents, like she's already done a bunch of work to get herself on track to having the future she wants. And she's smart. So she'll probably be kind of OK. And then I wrote, What hope would, for example, Sadie have had? And… and I thought… it was interesting because I think Sadie's smart as well. Like Sadie is for sure socially smart, but like smart can only take you so far, right? You can be as smart as you want, but if you can't get out of the situation you are in, then the best you can do is make the best of it, which I think is what Sadie was doing. One of the things that therapists tend to ask upfront is… is something around like support networks. Like, who do you have in your life? Who supports you? What do you have in your life that supports you? Because it's one of the biggest indicators of whether someone will turn out to be OK. Sadie, like as far as we can tell, has no family, and her friends are Krug and the gang. Like, what the fuck is she going to do? You know, how is she going to get out of that? Whereas Mari has her family and she has friends, you know, like she's got enough around her to catch her if she needs to fall. And that makes a really big difference. So let's talk about the behind the scenes issues. I was really interested in learning about this. The remake, as far as I can tell, had no more issues than any film does. Sara Paxton has spoken… I've just realised that they have the same initials, Sandra Peabody and Sara Paxton. How weird. But Sara Paxton has, you know, said that she felt safe. She has specifically used that word. She said that she got on really well with the rest of the cast, that it felt really good, that she… she was nervous initially because it was like… the shooting was… the shoot was taking place really far away from where she lived. And she was like, I'm not going to know anyone. I'm going to be like out there on my own doing this like really intense, emotional scene. But actually it was fine. And it was fine because of the people around her. Whereas Sandra Peabody did not have that experience. I learned so many interesting things about the original. Like I said, please check out Logan's blog (https://notonlyamovie.blogspot.com/2025/11/welcome-to-not-only-movie.html) – I will put a link in the show notes – because it has so much information specifically about Sandra's treatment. But, um, so I learned – and this is one of the reasons why it ended up on my Edgelord Horror (https://letterboxd.com/chindilani/list/edgelord-horror/) list, because like I said, when I first… when I first watched it, when I knew absolutely nothing about it, I was like: very much of its time, quite uncomfortable, kind of worried about the actors, but ultimately, good film. Then I learned about the behaviour backstage and I was like, holy fuck. And then I learned that it was originally going to be a hardcore porn movie. And not only that, but its original title was ‘Sex Crime of the Century.’ So like that is the place that Wes Craven is coming from when he decides to make Last House on the Left. And it gradually gets milder and milder and milder until we get to the one that we see today, which was banned in a lot of places for being still so hardcore. So I was like, that's an interesting setup. Like if you're originally talking about it being a sex crime and it's going to be a hardcore porn movie, and then you change it and you hire an actor, a young female actor who hasn't done any sex work and hasn't done any porn movies, and you hire her to play someone who is the victim of said sex crime, you're going to have to have a really nice, supportive, solid environment in order for her to be able to have anything approaching a reasonable time. And instead what you have basically is a bunch of violent cunts attacking a woman. And that's kind of horrible. I ended up watching A Serbian Film directly after watching this and then reading a bunch around that, because I will die on this hill: I like A Serbian Film. I think it is a good movie. I know it's really hardcore. I know there are scenes that people find impossible to watch, but I think it actually has some interesting and useful things to say. And when I rewatched it yesterday, I was like, this is actually less horrific than I remember it being. Have I just become more innured? I wonder actually, I think I might've seen a cut version yesterday because there are definitely a couple of things that I remember seeing that weren't in there. But anyway. But when I was watching A Serbian Film, I was like, yes, it is easy to watch this and see some of the themes that are coming out that are like, critiques on society that are like pointing to the absurdism that is at the base of humanit and society, and what we pretend to be like and what we're actually like, and the things that we're willing to do. Like, there's so much that you can read into A Serbian Film. Whereas if you watch The Last House on the Left 72, even if you don't mind rapes – I don't mind a rape scene if it's done well and if the actor is not actually being sexually assaulted – like, if you watch Last House on the Left 72, even if you're… you don't mind a rape scene and you're not particularly bothered by violence and guts and gore and all of that shit, there's not really much to read into it other than: we're just trying to rape someone. Yes, there's a class thing. Yes, Mari is middle class and the others aren't. But even that is not played out as obviously as it is in the 2009 one. So there is less of a like… there's more of a vibe of like ‘Mari's stuck up,’ actually, than anything, which is the feeling that the actors report – some of the other actors, I don't want to paint them all the same – but some of the other actors report having had about [Sandra] when they were doing the filming. And so I'm just going to talk about some of these things because they made me so fucking furious. And I hope that now, if the 2009 version had been for Sara what the 72 one was for Sandra, I really hope that whoever the actor was would have been cancelled and that we would have done all of the woke shit that the right wing get angry with us about, because that's what it's for. It's to like try to stop people getting harmed and assaulted and seriously hurt. There's a few interesting documentaries that I have linked to in the show notes. There's a Reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/horror/comments/1qnqbln/last_house_on_the_left_1972_the_actors_bluray/) as well, which quotes from the DVD commentary. So like David Hess in one of his interviews begins by saying that he's never harmed anyone. And then he goes on to talk about how he treated Sandra in his own words. It's horrific. You know, like he doesn't think it's horrific. So he says, I held character with her for four weeks until she wanted to run away. Actually, she did run away the night before. She like left and was like walking down the road, trying to get home. And… and the guy who played Weasel like went and found her and was like, Oh no, it'll be OK. Don't worry. Come back. And it wasn't OK. She did go back. And I was like, OK, but you've just said that you held character with her. If you.. if you are holding character for four weeks on and off screen as a murdering rapist, I'm sorry, is that… does it not count as assault if there's a camera running? Or if you're like in the process of shooting a film, even when the cameras aren't rolling? So he literally says in the interview – and you can watch this by clicking on the link in the show notes – he says, and I quote, “I said to her, I said, I will put my fucking dick in your cunt if you don't do this right. I swear to God, I will fuck the living shit out of you, I told her. And now watch what goes on here. Now watch her face. Cause I ripped her pants off. Look at the reaction on that.” Let's just take a moment for that, shall we? Is that… is that one professional speaking to another professional? If you were at work and your boss said that to you, would you leave? If you wouldn't leave, is that because you couldn't leave? What the ever loving fuck. Also after that – after having said all of that to her and “ripping her pants off,” in his own words – he then gets on top of her. They're filming the rape scene. And at one point he looks at Wes Craven. Again, he says this in the interview, you can watch these words come out of his mouth. He looks at Wes Craven and looks at the cameraman and he says, “Can I?” Like, can I rape her? Can I? Can I just penetrate her? And he talks about how she is terrified in that moment. And like, the way that they're talking about it on this documentary is like she's overreacting. And like, it's one of those things where I look at it and I'm like, holy shit. There are people who say that feminism is no longer needed, that it's come too far, but blah, blah, blah, it wasn't that bad to begin with. And then you hear stuff like this – like not only hear about it happening, which is bad enough, but you watch people say these things on camera, knowing (a) that they won't… that they'll get away with it, there won't be any consequences, and (b) that there are people out there going like, yeah! Yeah, you should be able to do that. Yeah! I think it's interesting because like, if we compare, for example, Last House on the Left 72 with A Serbian Film, A Serbian Film has scenes in it that I completely understand people don't want to watch. I totally get why people don't want it on in their cinemas. Fine. Like I have no problem with not showing things that people find offensive. I also actually have no problem with people watching things that other people find offensive if they don't personally find it offensive. I like A Serbian Film. Like I said, I think it's brilliant. But I liked it, and then I checked that those things weren't happening. The first time I watched it… Like I said, I go into films knowing as little as possible. I'd heard that A Serbian Film was really disturbing, but that was all I'd heard. I think I'd heard that it was sexually violent actually, but I didn't know about the children, which gives you some indication. But like after: after I had watched the film, I was like… in fact, I might've even paused it because it was kids. I can't remember. But like at some point I made sure that what was happening in the film (a) was not real, because it is very realistic at times, and (b) that the actors didn't report anything being too much for them. And… and they do talk about it being a difficult film to shoot. So does Sara Paxton in Last House on the Left 2009. But of course it is, it's really horrific subject matter. But they also talk about like being a team, shooting it really well. Now could they be lying? Absolutely. Could they be covering up? Absolutely. You can only go on the information you have. But the way that the 72 version of Last House on the Left is spoken about is so, so disgusting. And I think… I genuinely don't understand why people don't see a difference between something like Last House on the Left 72 and something like A Serbian Film and why they'll go, Oh, I don't know how you can watch A Serbian Film. Because it's fake. Now that I know what I know about Last House on the Left 72, I don't think I will ever be able to rewatch it. I don't think I'll want to. Because I don't want to see a woman actually get sexually assaulted. Arguably, I should google films beforehand. Maybe that's something I need to think about. I think we all need to have these conversations. And I think that's one of the reasons why I personally think that it's fine to censor things in the sense of, I'm not going to put it on in the cinema. But I also think I don't want to prevent people from saying what they want to say. I do think we should de-platform people. I don't think that we should restrict free speech to the extent of throwing people in prison because they made something we don't like. I do think David Hess should have gone to prison, actually, because he did sexually assault an actor on screen and talk about it afterwards. That is a crime. Making A Serbian Film isn't a crime. Why? Because it's fake. Because it's acting. Because they're prosthetics. It genuinely drives me a bit crazy that people don't get this. Tell me what you think. Tell me if you think that I'm insane. If you're like, no, of course it's exactly the same thing, whether it's acting or not. What am I not getting here? Anyway. I thought it was interesting to compare the two, the original and the remake. The remake has much less of a vibe of edgelord horror. Also, I will note that… I made some reference to this earlier on, unless I've cut it, but I would note that Hess has played very similar parts in other movies. So House on the Edge of the Park, in particular. And podsmckenzie on Reddit, in a Reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/horror/comments/1qnqbln/last_house_on_the_left_1972_the_actors_bluray/) that I will link to, points out… this is a quote from podzmckenzie, but I fully am behind this, says, “Deranged rapist seems to be his sweet spot.” And I was like, yeah. Yeah. I then wrote, I wonder how the female actors were treated in House on the Edge of the Park? And then I thought, you know what? I don't want to know. I didn't even get through that movie because it was so blatantly just an excuse to show loads of rape that I was like, I'm not into this. This has no point. I think that's part of it for me. It's like, it has to have an actual point. For me, even if the original Last House had had a point, it still wouldn't be OK because crimes were committed in the shooting of it. And actual crimes, you know, like they also like broke into a national park to film it. I don't give a shit about that. But like, don't sexually assault people. How is that a controversial statement? Anyway, that's the end of the episode. I don't know how this has been. How has it been for you? It being a little bit more casual, a little bit more chatty. Do you like it? Do you hate it? Do you want me to shut up entirely? Not going to do that. Sorry. Um, but yeah, do you prefer this or do you prefer the more scripted version? Let me know. The Last House on the Left was directed by Dennis Eliadis and came out in 2009. Our final Mari was played fantastically by Sara Paxton. You can follow the podcast on Instagram at that final girl life or support us on patreon.com (https://patreon.com) slash that final girl life. If you have any suggestions for future episodes, you can email them to that final girl life at gmail.com (https://gmail.com). Thank you for listening. And until next time, remember: The horrors persist… but so do we.

8. 

   2 Aug 2026

   E6 Annika from The Voices of Our Mother (2026)

   The Letterboxd list I mention is If You Hate Your Mother Then You'll Love This Film (https://letterboxd.com/chindilani/list/if-you-hate-your-mother-then-youll-love-this/). The book I mention is Cloistered (https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/cloistered-a-gripping-memoir-of-life-as-a-nun-a-radio-4-book-of-the-week-catherine-coldstream/a247f9e33845c559?ean=9781529931518&bkshp-astro=t) by Catherine Coldstream (https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/cloistered-a-gripping-memoir-of-life-as-a-nun-a-radio-4-book-of-the-week-catherine-coldstream/a247f9e33845c559?ean=9781529931518&bkshp-astro=t). Resources used: Articles A brief history of prefabs (https://heritagecalling.com/2022/08/04/a-brief-history-of-prefabs/) on Heritage Calling Constantly busy? (https://medium.com/illumination/constantly-busy-df6e3553353f) by Gary Johnstone on Medium Videos Interview with Mark O'Brien and Sheila McCarthy on Screenfish (https://screenfish.net/mark-obrien-sheila-mccarthy-the-voices-of-our-mother/) Interview with Mark O'Brien on Sean Kelly on Movies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNsk3Sk0q5w) Websites Prefab Museum (https://www.prefabmuseum.uk) About That Final Girl Life: You can keep up with the podcast on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/cw/thatfinalgirllife), or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the pod on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife (https://www.instagram.com/thatfinalgirllife), or email thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com (mailto:thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com) if you want to say hello. Script: Haters and gentlefriends, welcome to That Final Girl Life. It’s your favourite final girl here, taking you through The Horrors and out the other side to find out what life is really like after the movie ends. I can’t believe I need to say this, but apparently it’s a whole thing now: I am an actual real live human being, not an AI. I physically write all my scripts. I watch the movies at least twice before I do an episode on them. Any resources I use, like other people’s articles which I’ve found helpful, will be in the show notes. In this episode we’ll be discussing a movie from my Letterboxd list ‘If you hate your mother then you’ll love this film.’ The Voices of Our Mother is an occult horror about the monstrousness of family, with a quiet and understated final girl, Annika. Please be aware that there will be spoilers throughout the episode. In this episode I’ll be talking about demons, religion, child abuse, intergenerational trauma, monstrous mothers, sibling rivalry, wellness retreats, drug addiction, gambling, and of course, PTSD. I’ll also be discussing self-harm in some depth. And I will mention here that my incredibly dark sense of humour starts to come out in this episode. It’s got me through a lot of shit in my life and I refuse to apologise for it, but I understand that for some people it’s too much, and if that’s you, fair enough. You don’t have to listen! Ready? Pack your bags and get ready to visit a truly horrific family home as we gather around the dying matriarch of… The Voices of Our Mother The movie opens with a growling masculine voice repeating the words “You are mine and no one else’s.” We will hear this several times throughout the film. Our main characters are a mother named Harriet and her four grown-up children: fraternal twins Therese and William, Martin the black sheep, and Annika the nun. Already an intense family setup. The siblings are getting together because Harriet has had a stroke and they need to sort out what to do about her medical care. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other in years, and their grandmother, who always looked after their mother, has just died. It’s obvious that none of them want the responsibility of caring for their mother. We get the sense that there’s a good reason for that, although we don’t find out what it is until much later on. The hospital discharges their mother, who despite having all the symptoms shows no sign of a stroke on any tests. The siblings take her back to the family home while they try to work out what to do with her, but they can’t agree on anything and after a while we see that her very presence in the house prompts them to argue with each other. Gradually we realise she’s possessed. The local vicar tries to help, but there’s a strong suggestion that it’s Satan himself she’s possessed by, rather than your average run-of-the-mill demon. At one point Annika confesses to the others that she knew about this all along. Before she died, her grandmother had asked Annika to keep reciting a prayer which would help to keep both her mother and the rest of the family safe from the demon. But Annika had instead left and become a nun, which makes a lot of sense if the thing you’re running from is the literal devil. Things reach a boiling point when all the siblings end up dying, apart from Annika who is left in a burning home with no one there to help her. Struggling through the flames, she finds herself trapped with her back against a wall as the devil approaches. It no longer looks anything like her mother. Throughout the film she’s been told that a protective prayer needs to be recited by someone who truly loves the possessed person, even despite all the terrible things they do. Ultimately Annika manages to summon this love, probably because of her time spent as a nun, and the demon recedes as her mother becomes visibly human once more: weak, naked and in a foetal position on the floor. The movie ends with Annika carrying Harriet outside to safety, where she stands in front of the burning building holding her mother in her arms. It’s a complicated story. The first time I watched it I didn’t like it, but it grew on me with a rewatch, as things sometimes do. It felt like a premise a should enjoy: I like religious and occult horror in general, and I LOVE an intergenerational trauma horror. I guess the first time around I found the horror elements a little overblown: I didn’t need to see an actual devil walking through fire near the end. And I also found the moral, if there is one, a little problematic. The moral of the movie seems to be forgiveness at all costs. And not just forgiveness, but acceptance of evil, which I don’t agree with and is probably kind of beyond what the director was aiming for anyway. Horror is a hyperbolic genre by nature and this may have been a case of overegging something for cinematic effect, but given how people speak to survivors of abuse a lot of the time I didn’t feel totally comfortable with it. Child abuse runs through the film as a central theme. We learn that each of the siblings left their mother and never went back because she was passively complicit in abuse perpetrated by their father. Each of them avoided dealing with their trauma in different ways: William by gambling, Therese by going to endless retreats, Martin with drugs, and Annika with religion. I particularly liked the inclusion of Therese and Annika’s methods of not dealing with their problems because these are often seen as positive things, which of course they can be, but anything that can help can also harm. “The dose makes the poison,” as Paracelsus said thousands of years ago. Still relevant. I’ve been thinking about this movie from my dual perspective as a trauma therapist and a survivor of familial abuse. The things we see as helpful and harmful are interesting, as are the… I suppose you could say “dosages”... of our particular coping mechanisms. I have always been intrigued by people’s views of different kinds of self-harm. Having survived sex trafficking in childhood, it’s no surprise that I self-harmed a lot as a teenager, but the different ways in which I self-harmed were received very differently by the people around me. For example, I used to cut myself. Classic. I was a goth in the early 2000s, it was all the rage. But it is so badly understood by most people, in my experience. A lot of people assume that people who self-harm – especially teenagers who self-harm – are “doing it for attention.” But what does that even mean? I remember feeling really proud of myself as a teenager for being exceptionally good at keeping my self-harm hidden even though it was in an obvious place (on my wrists). No one ever asked, even the parents who saw me in pyjamas when I went to their houses for sleepovers. Looking back, I can see how very smug I was about it, which did not come from a place of kindness to myself or anyone else. I felt smug because I definitely wasn’t doing it for attention, I told myself, because if I made sure no one saw it then I couldn’t be, right? I actually still think attention wasn’t the goal for me at that time. It was more about seeing the blood. But I had a conversation one day with an art teacher which made me consider the concept of attention differently. We were talking about a friend of mine who had visible evidence of self-harm all over her arms. At school I was often paired up with the so-called “troubled” kids because I was super well-behaved and a giant nerd, yet also a little bit punk rock and therefore acceptable to all the various social strata you find within UK high schools. Teachers presumably thought I was absolutely fine since I was getting straight As – an assumption I’ll come back to in a minute – and so they’d ask me to supervise students whose behaviours were more disruptive to whatever class we were in. Some of those kids became close friends, and one of those close friends was visibly a self-harmer, and so my art teacher was inquiring about her one day and mentioned her self-harm scars. “She’s obviously doing it for attention,” I scoffed in a moment of teenage bitchiness. “Well, I don’t know about that,” said my teacher, “but if she is doing it for attention, then maybe she really needs some attention.” This absolutely blew my tiny mind. The idea that people might genuinely need attention; that it might be OK to ask for it, even, was something that was very much not a belief in my household. My mother once got angry with her stepsister for crying at her own father’s funeral. To say we weren’t supposed to get emotional or ask for attention in our family is an understatement. So hearing my teacher’s response to my judgemental comment gave me a totally new perspective on not just my friend’s needs, but my own. Of course I still never asked for help. What, d’you think I’m crazy? Well, yeah. I was. But in different ways. And the primary mode of self-harm I found was becoming a workaholic. Which is an interesting one, because although we do talk about it a bit, we don’t give it nearly the same weight as things like alcoholism and cutting yourself, even though in the UK, roughly 180,000 people per year die from workaholism, which is 23 times the number of annual alcohol-related deaths. And, as Gary Johnstone points out in a Medium article, that figure doesn’t take into account things like people who have heart attacks which are probably either brought on or hastened by work-related stress. I worked hard at school. I did seven full A-levels. By the time I got to the A-level stage people did start asking questions and mentioning that they were worried, primarily I think because I was also losing a lot of weight. Yup, that’s right, an anorexic self-harmer in the early 2000s. So very original. But when I went into the workplace, although people would occasionally make comments, in general my capacity to work most of the day every day and my lifelong insomnia made me a great employee. “Give it to Chindi, she doesn’t sleep, she’ll get it done before morning!” And they weren’t wrong. All of which is to say: there are ways of self-harming and running away from problems which we disparage, like alcoholism and gambling and cutting yourself; and then there are ways which we accept or even praise, like workaholism, being very into so-called “wellness,” and, historically, certain types of religion. That doesn’t mean that any of these things are bad in and of themselves. Enjoying your job is great! I enjoy doing this. I enjoy my PhD. If you’re going to spend a lot of time on something then it’s useful to at least like it. Going on a retreat every so often can be a welcome break from the world and a useful opportunity for reflection. Religion – all religions – can have really positive mental health effects on their followers. Likewise, having a glass of wine every now and then can be a nice way to spend an evening. Taking some molly at a party and feeling like you absolutely love everyone who’s there can be very very nice. But the extremes of these things can be really harmful. All of them. Yes, even wellness. Don’t get me started… And I guess that brings me to both what I liked and disliked about The Voices of Our Mother. I liked that it didn’t only give the examples of gambling, drugs and alcohol as the siblings’ vices. I appreciated the inclusion of wellness and religion. And I liked the nuance with which Annika’s calling was addressed: it was obvious she’d gone to join the convent at least partly as a way to escape her grandmother’s request for her to look after her mother, but it was also evident that the convent genuinely provided her with something, as did her relationship with her god. There’s a lot of nuance to life which is really easy to overlook, especially in an age where we’re used to scrolling through apps where we view content for seconds at a time and are expected to make up our minds about it. Annika’s religion was an escape, yes, but it was also something she really believed in; something which helped her through life; and which ultimately allowed her to save both herself and her mother at the end of the film. Nonetheless, I found the message of forgiveness a bit heavy-handed. It did seem to be saying that it was somehow Annika’s responsibility to rescue her mother from the consequences of her own actions, which I just… don’t agree with. I appreciated hearing director Mark O’Brien’s interview with Screenfish in which he clarified that he isn’t necessarily trying to claim that everyone needs to forgive their parents in every instance, or to forgive them in the same way. But in the same interview he does talk about love triumphing over evil and hatred, and whilst I know nothing about him or his past, that does make me wonder how much actual evil he has encountered personally. Both of my parents nearly killed me, deliberately. Both of my parents have child trafficking cases open against them with the police. Well, my dad’s is presumably closed now, since he’s dead. But they’re both dangerous people, especially to children and others who are vulnerable, and I’d argue that you’re always vulnerable to the people who made you vulnerable in the first place. Which I suppose is addressed in the movie, to an extent. The relationships between the siblings have some really interesting dynamics – I wasn’t surprised to learn that O’Brien himself is one of four – and during the main part of the movie we are shown how the mother’s presence invokes rivalry amongst the siblings, and how her demons seem to feed off of their antagonism towards each other. Something about being back in the house with their mother is bad for all of the siblings. In fact, that’s a huge understatement: three of them end up dead. And that speaks to why I find the message of the movie problematic. Because I’ve lived in an extremely abusive environment, and because I’ve spent my entire adult life working with people who were abused as children, I know all too well just how realistic it is for ¾ of the people who have experienced The Horrors to end up dead. There was a post going around the other day in which people were naming the top three things that were most likely to kill them if they died in the same way as most of their family members, and I realised that while most people were naming different types of cancer or heart disease, my top two were being killed by another family member, or dying by suicide as a direct result of childhood sexual abuse. Third was bowel cancer. Finally something normal to look forward to. So showing Annika’s capacity to love her mother – not just love her, but rescue her – despite it all felt, to me, a bit… dangerous, actually. So many of us who are estranged from our families have to deal with people making inane statements like “Oh but she’s your mother! She loves you!” when they are, in fact, incorrect. And honestly, even if they’re right that on some level some abusive parents love their kids, that doesn’t mean they’re safe for those kids to be around. It took cutting off contact with my mother for me to even come to understand the degrees and types of abuse that had happened to me when I was younger. And that’s despite me literally being a trained psychotherapist, who specialises in trauma and abuse, and who’s spent their whole adult life (as well as much of their childhood) learning about it. Getting out of the cycle of abuse often requires us to get out of the cycle of abuse. I wouldn’t be emphasising this point quite so much if the movie had been more metaphorical, but it literally describes the father abusing his children while the mother stands by. So she’s very much not a protector, and whilst I agree that there will be reasons for that and not all of those reasons will be the mother’s fault, nonetheless it is still her responsibility as a parent to take care of her children, and if you don’t do that, then you can’t rightfully expect those children to stick around and look after you later on. So. That’s what I think as a therapist. Now what do I think as a final girl, about how Annika will be now that she’s survived the main events? Well, kind of the same thing. Annika has been through hell in this film. She’s left the convent, her place of safety and order and quiet; gone back to her family home; dealt with her siblings; faced up to a literal demon; and rescued her mother from a burning building. She is, to put it mildly, not going to be OK. I wondered whether the fire was purifying or not. There’s a lot of stuff in the Bible about that, and given how Harriet and the hell-creature* ended up during the final scenes, it’s plausible that we’re supposed to believe Harriet is no longer possessed. This would make her a lot easier to look after. But the thing is, regardless of whether or not she’s actually possessed by a demon anymore, Harriet’s not going to spring back to being someone else entirely. From what we’re led to believe, Harriet has always been possessed. She was adopted into the family and there is more than a suggestion that the evil is something inside her blood. (I could go off on one about how orphans and adopted children are often used as shorthands for evil in horror stories even though in real life they’re usually the victims of The Horrors, but I won’t…) Where was I? Ah yes. From childhood onwards, Harriet’s mother kept her safe with a seemingly constant regime of church attendance and fervent prayer. With all of that supporting her, Harriet managed to be almost normal, albeit severely neglectful of her children’s needs. Without it… well, we saw what happened without it. If the demon’s gone for good, then hopefully the ongoing prayer and churchgoing won’t be necessary, although if anyone’s going to be capable of that it’ll be Annika, which the grandmother realised when she instructed her about how to care for Harriet. But even then, Harriet isn’t exactly going to be able to live a normal life. She’s been in a childlike state, looked after by her mother, for her whole life until very recently. She’s got various strange health concerns which may or may not be demon-related. Beyond that, she’s recently lost the mother who cared for her and has now also lost three of her four children in a sequence of events which were kind of her fault. I listened to a couple of interviews with Mark O’Brien in which he talked about the parallels between possession and dementia, something I really liked about the film. I don’t have personal experience of dealing with dementia, but speaking to friends who have looked after parents in that state I can see some of the similarities. People with dementia, as I understand it, can get suddenly violent; can lose any kind of filter between what they think and what they say; can become physically or verbally abusive even if they haven’t been that way before. So for Annika, looking after Harriet is for sure going to be a challenge. The way she carries her out of the burning building in the final scene has more than a touch of reverse parenting about it: Harriet is being held like a baby by her daughter, something which I think will feel familiar to many people who have looked after a loved one with dementia. There is no question that this set of experiences is going to change Annika’s life. It seems incredibly cruel how often people’s lives are dictated by negative experiences in childhood, and Annika’s life really shows this: becoming a nun to get away from her childhood, only for that to become the very thing that means she’s the one who ultimately saves her mother and presumably ends up looking after her until she dies. Now that the other three siblings are dead, the house and anything else her mother owned would now go to Annika. Except that the house has burned down, with her siblings inside it. Hopefully they had insurance, in which case Annika and her mother will at least be sorted financially. This would mean that Annika could probably afford to put her mother in a home, something the siblings discussed early on in the film but deemed too expensive. But I just can’t imagine Annika doing that, especially once she’s gone along with the religious urge to save her mother with her love. Saying that sentence made me feel a bit sick. I am definitely NOT an Annika. I can see her setting them up in a little cottage perhaps, with Annika on the top floor and Harriet on the bottom. The vicar burned up in the fire as well, I believe, but presumably the church will send a new one and they’ll both go along to all his services. And thus Annika’s life will be dictated by her earthly mother and her heavenly father. Will she come to resent this? Possibly. People often seem to think that the super-religious are immune to normal personality traits, but they’re really not. I think she’ll stick with it, though: both her mother and her religion, despite the difficulties. Partly because she’s the kind of person who’d do that anyway – she found the love for the evil inside her mother – but also because she’s just had her religious beliefs backed up. Doubt is a part of faith. Anyone who’s been in a religious community will know this. In fact I don’t think faith can exist without doubt. Without doubt, you wouldn’t need to have faith, only belief. Søren Kierkegaard, my favourite philosopher, talks a lot about this. In his book Fear and Trembling, he examines the story of Abraham being told by god to sacrifice his son Isaac. Of course Abraham doubted this instruction! How could he not? This was the son he loved; the miracle son from god, who was born to him and his wife Sarah despite her being impossibly old at the time. In order for faith to be faith, it needs to be tested. And boy, has Annika’s faith been tested recently. But it’s also been upheld, and some of her religious beliefs which are perhaps the most disbelieved by most people, such as the devil being a literal entity and possession being a real thing that happens, have just been backed up. This will add to her religious conviction and make her even more likely to look after her mother. It will also probably make her terrified of the rest of the world. She’d already spent most of her adult life in a convent; now she’s going to be spending it with her mother, sequestered away in whatever little house she buys. Unless the convent provides accommodation for them, which is probably possible and if they offered, I’m pretty sure she’d take it. Because once a religion has saved you from something, it’s then really hard to back away from it, even if elements of it make no sense to you and even if it’s actively harmful. Once again I have a story from my own life to illustrate this. Do you see why I love horror movies? It’s basically like watching various bits of my life play out on screen. When I was a child, my mother and I were living in temporary accommodation whilst escaping from my violent criminal father. Unfortunately it’s called “temporary” for more than one reason: both because you’re only meant to be there while they find you a more permanent living arrangement, but also in our case because it was built in that odd flat-packed-feeling prefab style so prominent in the UK in the 1950s. “I didn’t think you were that old, Chindi.” I’m not. This was the 80s. And that was the problem. Prefabs were built in the wake of World War Two, when so many houses had been destroyed that there wasn’t enough space to house people and so they needed somewhere to go while proper housing stock was rebuilt. Which it was, for the most part, but a lot of the prefabs remained, and whilst they weren’t viewed as fit for living in for most people, if you were homeless it’s often what you were given. Which is fine, and makes sense: beggars can’t be choosers, etc. But the fact that they were still being used as overflow housing stock in the late 1980s became problematic when they started falling down. Which ours did while we were living in it, rendering us homeless again. At which point my mother, homeless with a small child, did what she swore she’d never do again, and called her mother. They’d been estranged by this point for the best part of two decades. My grandmother had never met me. I don’t think she even knew I existed. To my grandmother’s credit, she agreed to take us in. Slightly to her discredit, however, she imposed a condition: that my mother join the fundamentalist cult my grandmother was in. So she did. And because the people there were kind in that way cult members have of wrapping you up inside their fold and rendering you entirely dependent on them, she just went deeper and deeper in, and never left. Which meant that when I left at eighteen, I was disowned and shunned by everyone I knew, but that’s a different story. I think Annika’s psychological response could easily be similar to my mother’s, though. Given a religious event saving her life and Harriet’s, and given that she was already pretty devoted to a religious life to begin with, Annika’s faith might well reach a level that turns into something solid and concrete. Which might work out well for her or might not, but regardless it’ll dictate the rest of her life. People used to ask me if I’d tried to get my mother out of the cult, and I never did. Partly that’s because I think it would have been a fruitless effort, but also because I actually think it works for her. She has a life she enjoys and finds fulfilling, and she’s surrounded by people who love her and take care of her. That’s great, from her perspective. Why would I want to take that away? I guess that’s another thing I believe which this film brings up: I think there are different ways of loving people, and different ways of forgiving them. My mother was not good at being a parent, to put it mildly, but the more I’ve learned about her, the more I understand how she ended up doing the things she did. That doesn’t mean I think it’s OK that she was violently abusive, but it does mean I sort of understand, on some level, and have made peace with some of it. Which is a kind of forgiveness which goes part of the way but not all the way. A lot of people, when they say “forgiveness,” seem to be talking about absolution: release from guilt, release from responsibility for one’s actions. I don’t think that’s appropriate, definitely not in the case of child abuse. But I do think it’s sometimes appropriate, and sometimes healing, to try to understand people and forgive them to the extent of recognising that we’re all human and that, to some degree, we all fuck up. While they’re in the living room earlier on in the film, the siblings talk about the various ways in which they have fucked up. This activates Mother’s demonic noises and excites whatever devil is living inside her. But it also gives us a look at how even these people who haven’t necessarily done anything super egregious have still done things they should take responsibility for. Yes, even Annika, who turned away her brother Martin when he came to the convent asking for a place to dry out and get himself off the drugs for good. We learn also how Martin came to rely on drugs: partly as a result of his childhood, sure, but also because he murdered their father on William’s instruction. Now, personally I’d say their father deserved to be taken out by one of the kids he’d abused, but I can say that flippantly because I’ve never killed anyone, and therefore I don’t have a lived understanding of the toll that can take on a person. Annika’s learned all this about her siblings, has had to face up to the consequences of her not allowing Martin to stay at the convent when he asked, and ultimately is going to have to face living with the mother who mistreated her as a child. And now that the rest of them are dead, Harriet is going to be Annika’s responsibility for the rest of her life. I land somewhere ambiguous with how Annika’s life will turn out, as a result of all the things we’ve talked about in this episode. If she takes on the responsibility of looking after her mother then it will define certainly the remainder of her life while Harriet is still alive, and probably beyond that too. Her devotion to her religion will define a lot of it as well. But that’s not necessarily a good or bad thing, in and of itself. Lots of people who care for sick loved ones find fulfilment in the process even though it’s stressful and really difficult. Likewise, whilst cloistered life might seem overly restrictive to many of us, for some people that’s exactly what they want. In fact, I have a friend who was a nun for twelve years who wrote a memoir about her experience, which I only remembered because I just said the word ‘Cloistered,’ which is its title. I’ll put a link in the show notes. Will Annika find happiness? Contentment? Fulfilment? A life that works for her? For me, that remains open-ended. The potential is there, but it depends on how she responds to everything that has happened to her, not just to the newly-acquired responsibility of looking after Harriet but also to the grief for her siblings, the guilt over not helping Martin, the feelings that will be brought up by the local vicar dying in a fire caused by the devil that was living inside her mother. Look, life is complicated. And all we can really do is try to make something of it amongst whatever weird chaos we’re dealt. Which, hopefully, Annika will be able to do. What do you think? The Voices of Our Mother was directed by Mark O’Brien, who also played William. It came out in 2026. Our final girl Annika was played beautifully by Georgina Reilly. You can follow the podcast on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife or support us on patreon.com/thatfinalgirllife. (https://patreon.com/thatfinalgirllife.) If you have any suggestions for future episodes, you can email them to that final girl life at gmail dot com. Thank you for listening. And until next time, remember: the horrors persist… but so do we. *sounds like a children’s book I’d write

9. 

   19 Jul 2026

   E5 Scarlett from As Above, So Below (2014)

   Resources used: 'As Above, So Below' full script on Script.com (https://www.scripts.com/script-pdf/3147#google_vignette) About That Final Girl Life: You can keep up with the podcast on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/cw/thatfinalgirllife), or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the pod on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife (https://www.instagram.com/thatfinalgirllife), or email thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com (mailto:thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com) if you want to say hello. Script: Haters and gentlefriends, hello and welcome to That Final Girl Life. It’s your new favourite final girl here, taking you through The Horrors and out the other side to find out what life is really like after the movie ends. I can’t believe I need to say this, but apparently it’s a whole thing now: I am an actual real live human being, not an AI. I physically write all my scripts. I watch the movies at least twice before I do an episode on them. Any resources I use, like other people’s articles which I’ve found helpful, will be in the show notes. In this episode we’ll be discussing the dark academia horror As Above So Below and its tenacious final girl, Scarlett. Please be aware that there will be spoilers throughout the episode. In this episode I’ll be talking about sibling death, grief, suicide, parent death, climbing through small spaces, skeletons, the occult and of course, PTSD. Ready? Pour yourself a coffee, light a cigarette and make sure you don’t forget your waterproof boots as we make our way over to Paris for… As Above, So Below. Both thematically and in terms of storyline, this movie shares a lot with The Descent, which we covered in episode three. But whereas The Descent’s cave metaphor was about dealing with the depths of grief, As Above So Below has more of a therapy vibe in general. When working with people who have deeply-embedded trauma, one of the things that feels most unfair to me as a therapist is that we have to really engage with that trauma in order to process it and get it to stop taking up quite so much space in our lives. I call this work “getting in the pit,” and As Above So Below is essentially a horror movie version of that exact thing. The story follows Scarlett Marlowe (ScarMar?!) a multilingual polymath professor who is following in her archaeologist father’s footsteps as she tries to locate the Philosophers’ Stone. The search leads her to the catacombs which lie under the streets of Paris. Millions of people were buried there and it’s now a cave system filled with skeletons. You can go on tours – I haven’t been, but I’d love to go, although I doubt it’s wheelchair accessible! – but it’s also notorious for illegal raves. Scarlett, realising the Philosophers’ Stone lies somewhere inside the catacombs, finds a guy called Papillon who can help her get down there. Along with her friend George, cameraman Benji, and Papillon’s friends Siouxsie and Zed, she heads down into the underground system to try to find the stone. The therapy metaphor is pretty heavy-handed. Each person in the group has something they need to face up to: for Scarlett it’s her dad’s suicide and her guilt at not picking up the phone the night he died; for George it’s not having been able to save his little brother from drowning; and so on. These show up in various different forms while the group are making their way through the caves; often as hallucinations of various types. There’s actually a psychological theory which maps on to this movie pretty perfectly, and it happens to be one I’ve been looking at anyway recently for my PhD. I’m currently working on a bit about the concept of the uncanny, which is one of the reasons I’ve been watching so many horror movies. The word ‘uncanny’ is used in lots of different ways, the most famous currently being the concept of the uncanny valley, which refers to the feeling you get when you look at someone and you’re not sure if they’re human or some kind of AI or robot. Obviously that’s very relevant in today’s world! But before the uncanny valley, psychologists and philosophers were already talking about uncanniness: what it is, how it shows up for people, and what impact it has on us. In psychoanalysis the uncanny is understood as something that arises from a person’s unconscious mind. Sigmund Freud’s theory was that people got uncanny feelings when they were reminded of something they had repressed. This could be a belief, a memory… all sorts of things. Repression refers to what happens when we push something down so that we no longer know that we know about it. Sometimes we can do this deliberately, for example if we have a really traumatic experience and we want to never think of it again. Sometimes it happens without us even knowing. Sometimes it might be something we think we’ve grown out of, like a belief in dolls coming to life, which is one of the things Freud talks about in his 1919 paper on the subject. Freud says that an uncanny feeling means we’re being reminded of something we can’t quite remember. This means that the feeling is sort of familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It’s familiar because we’ve been living with it deep down inside us for ages; it’s unfamiliar because, whilst it’s been a part of us, it’s not one we’ve been aware of. Think about an iceberg, the majority of which is underwater: the unconscious mind is riiiight down at the bottom of the iceberg, but if a huge wave comes and upturns it, suddenly it comes into awareness and then we have to deal with it. The experiences the group have in the catacombs in As Above, So Below are uncanny. The difference between uncanniness and straight-up fear is that uncanny things don’t quite make sense: you can’t immediately categorise them. So whilst being chased by an axe murderer is terrifying, it’s not uncanny, because you understand what’s happening. By contrast, the things that happen in the catacombs don’t always make a lot of sense. Early on the group stumbles across Papillon’s graffiti tag, even though he insists he’s never been in this part of the tunnels before. He seems weirded out by this, but they chalk it up to a copycat and move on. Then they come across an old piano. George says it looks just like one he and his brother used to play when they were kids. He used to play ‘My bonnie lies over the ocean,’ he explains, but the A4 key was broken, so he could never play the highest note in the song. As he picks out the tune on the keys, he finds that the A4 key on this piano is broken too. What’s going on? This is the uncanny part: it’s both familiar and unfamiliar, explicable and inexplicable. The group know it’s a piano, they understand that the A4 key is broken, but the familiarity of it being here in the catacombs is what’s weird, and the weirdness makes it scary. As they carry on through the tunnels, similar things happen to all of them. Some of them don’t make it out alive: Siouxsie is killed by La Taupe, a previous friend they unexpectedly stumble across who’s been living in the tunnels. Benji dies after a woman he’s seen over and over again throughout their journey suddenly appears in front of him, and he falls down a deep hole and dies on impact. At one point the remaining friends come across a burning car with a person inside it. This is Papillon’s trauma: he didn’t save his friend. Some kind of force sucks him towards the car, which disappears into the earth along with Papillon. The only remaining part of him are his legs, sticking up from the ground. In other words, some of them are killed by their trauma. Some of them don’t manage to make it through: it’s too much. And, like we’ve discussed in a couple of our previous episodes, that is in fact pretty realistic. I set up this podcast to talk about what life is like for final girls after their movies end, but the reality is that some of us are killed by the events that happen to us even if it’s not during the initial impact. I myself will probably eventually be an example of this: my childhood experiences of being trafficked and tortured have left me with progressive health conditions which will probably be the thing that kills me eventually, and they will undoubtedly shorten my lifespan. It’s weird to think that you can be murdered by someone years after they actually committed a crime against you, and yet it’s true. This is one of the burdens a lot of final girls have to live with. But back to the catacombs. Some of the group don’t survive, but three of them do: Scarlett herself, her friend George, and Zed from Papillon’s group. All three of them have to face up to their trauma before they can get out of literal hell, which they’ve crawled into during their search for a way out of the tunnels. One of my favourite concepts of the uncanny, because I really relate to it, was described by Jonathan Lear in 2011. In his book A Case for Irony he talks about what he calls the “ironic uncanny,” which is similar to the Freudian psychoanalytic concept but differs in how a person ends up resolving it. Like I mentioned earlier, Freud says that feelings of uncanniness essentially rise up from within us: they happen because something reminds us of a concept or memory which is held in our unconscious. Once it’s surfaced, though, Freud doesn’t say much about what happens to our relationship with the uncanny phenomenon. Once we’ve worked it out and explains it, he seems to imply, that’ll do. Lear disagrees, and I think his explanation really speaks to what uncanniness even is. He says that the important part of resolving uncanniness is not about explaining it, but about how it changes our lives. Let’s take an example from the movie to illustrate this. We know from early on in the film that Scarlett’s dad died by suicide. One of the first things that happens to the group in the catacombs is that they hear a phone ringing. Scarlett, against everyone’s advice, goes and answers it. “Why won’t you talk to me, Scarlett?” asks a distorted masculine voice. “Who is this?” she asks. “Why won’t you talk to me?” “Who is that?” “You shouldn’t be here” And they hang up. As soon as the phone rang, Papillon provided an explanation for it: the phone company used to run lines down through here, he says, although it’s still surprising that any of them work so many years later. We’re not told whether Scarlett realises at this point that it’s her dad on the other end of the phone, but I would assume she probably does. For Freud, this would pretty much resolve the issue: she knows it’s a phone, she knows her dad is somehow calling her down in the catacombs even though he’s dead and no one knows she’s here. Freud might say that Scarlett has had to change her views on whether there’s life after death and whether the dead can communicate with the living, but once she’s done that, in Freud’s view, she’s pretty much free of any further uncanny feelings. It’s a very empirical kind of world view: if you find evidence that goes against your beliefs, it might feel weird at first especially if it makes you consider beliefs you previously held but don’t anymore (perhaps when she was a child, Scarlett believed in ghosts). But then the uncanniness stops, because now if she gets another ghostly phone call, Scarlett knows what’s happening. Lear, on the other hand, requires something a bit more for his version of the uncanny, and actually the film itself seems to agree with this. The group hears the phone ringing; that’s kind of uncanny in the first place. Scarlett picks it up and hears a voice on the other end; that’s also uncanny. The voice belongs to her dead dad: triple uncanny. I think Lear would say, though, that it’s still uncanny even when she’s spoken to her dad, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, people don’t just suddenly change beliefs they’ve held for a long time. Yes, she now has experiential evidence of life after death because a ghost has spoken to her. But it’ll still feel weird. It’s still not something she’s used to. But, both more deeply and more subtly, in order for Scarlett to resolve her uncanny feelings, her relationship with what is happening has to change. She has to face up to the uncanniness; she has to, in my own therapy terms, “get in the pit.” Crucially, in Lear’s version of uncanniness, the actions a person takes can remain exactly the same; it’s their relationship with them that differs. Towards the end of the film, Scarlett sees her dad’s ghost hanging from the ceiling of the catacomb. She’s alone at the time, and rather than running away, she goes up and hugs him. “I’m sorry I didn’t pick up the phone that night,” she tells him “I didn’t know you were in that much pain.” Later on, just before they enter the final tunnel which will at last lead them back outside, Scarlett gets George and Zed to also acknowledge the unconscious elements of their trauma which the catacomb system has uncovered. And when they jump down into the final hole, they find at the bottom a manhole cover on the ground. Pushing it down and out, they emerge onto a Paris street. They have, in other words, turned their experiences upside-down. The experiences themselves remain the same, but now the way they view them is different. If Scarlett hears a ghostly phone ringing at some future point she might still pick it up, but it won’t hold the same emotional weight any longer, because now she has dealt with the thing it represents. The action remains the same, but the relationship does not. It’s no longer uncanny: it’s just sad. But this podcast is also about how final girls survive after the ends of their movies and how their lives are changed as a result. We’ve talked about a psychological interpretation of the movie, and that’s worked out well for Scarlett: she’s faced her trauma and come out the other side, changed but the same. What if the events of the movie were real, though? What if the monster wasn’t trauma? What if all the things actually happened? Well, in that case, Scarlett has just emerged from the catacombs following the deaths of several people. She’s gonna face some legal action for sure, though probably about being in the catacombs illegally in the first place rather than for the deaths of her friends. However, she’s also found the Philosophers’ Stone, so she’s going to be an academic hero. But the way she found it was incredibly fucking hard. She lost people along the way. You might even say she sacrificed them. She’s going to be dealing with some pretty intense guilt. And any feelings of joyous ecstasy she might have had about finding the stone are going to be tempered at best. One of the hardest things she’ll have to live with is needing to speak about the stone over and over again. This will undoubtedly be the biggest achievement in her life, and yet it will be tinged with more than a small amount of trauma. She’s going to have to revisit those caves – metaphorically for sure, but probably also literally – over and over again as the discoveries she’s made are studied and researched and reported on. Some people are going to hate her. She’s going to end up a bit of a divisive character in the academic community, with some blaming her for the deaths of her friends and hating how she went about finding the stone, and others holding her up as some kind of paragon of academic tenacity. That’s a weird place to live, and it’s one that doesn’t allow much humanity. Whether you’re reviled or put on a pedestal, you’re being objectified. And when there’s lore around you, people treat you weirdly. She’ll probably be excluded from things not only by the people who hate her but also by the ones who think she’s amazing. Scarlett seems like an extraverted type who enjoys being around people, so this new kind of objectified relationality will be difficult to adjust to. Luckily she still has George, and presumably some of her previous friends. At the beginning of the film we meet her friend Reza, who helps her get into an Iranian cave system where she finds the Rose Key, which is what allows her to then find the Philosophers’ Stone. We learn that Reza knew her father before he died: in fact, he warns Scarlett against following in her father’s footsteps, saying it will drive her mad. I think she might go back and stay with Reza and his family for a while. The Iran of this movie seems like a good place for someone to hide out: she could avail herself of Reza’s hospitality and still work on her papers etc. while she gets over the events in Paris. She might go back to being a professor again, but it’ll be hard for all the reasons I’ve already mentioned. She’ll have a mythos surrounding her which will make teaching a challenge. But perhaps she’ll do it anyway. I think if most people were asked what psychological aftereffects Scarlett would suffer following the events of the film, they would name things like claustrophobia, or a fear of being underground, or perhaps specifically of catacombs. But often psychological phenomena don’t take the most straightforward route. Because the film is so heavy-handed with its trauma metaphors, we can safely say that even if events play out exactly as they did on screen, Scarlett has still dealt with her dad’s death in a way she hadn’t at the beginning of the movie. But now she has new deaths to feel guilty about, and it’s a bit more difficult to say she has no fault at all in these ones, because she persuaded everyone to go down there in the first place. Sure, like George and her therapist will probably point out, the others were adults who were capable of making their own decisions, but an amount of guilt about their deaths would be completely normal. Scarlett might not be able to let it go, though. One of the things I wrote in my notes while I was watching the film was “What makes some people up for this shit?” Because Scarlett is well up for diving into the depths of her trauma and crawling around in the bones. A lot of people wouldn’t be. Even if we take a literal reading of the film, she’s up for putting herself in risky situations in the name of academia. When the movie opens, when she’s in Iran heading for Reza’s house, we learn that the caves in which she finds the Rose Key are going to be blown up at sundown. Scarlett reaches the entrance to the caves minutes before this, and while Reza retreats back inside like a sensible human being, Scarlett stays so long that she ends up being impacted by the blast. She does manage to make it out, obviously – there wouldn’t be a film if she didn’t – but it could easily have gone the other way. We could perhaps assume that it’s partly guilt about her father’s suicide that prompted Scarlett to risk her life in Iran, but when she’s back in Paris she’s not just risking herself but other people. She has this kind of reckless daring which is simultaneously appealing and offputting: George ends up down in the catacombs with her even though he specifically mentions his fear of being underground and says he absolutely won’t be going down there. The others are, at various points, also drawn along by her current. The thing is, though, that not everyone can manage the same level of risk. Or indeed trauma, if we’re reading the film as a metaphor. One of the things that makes me angry is when some therapists decide it’s appropriate to push their clients into situations or memories they’re not ready to deal with. Just because you’ve gone into your own pit – if you even have – doesn’t mean everyone else is up for doing the same. And forcing them to do so can have dire consequences, including, yes, death. Unfortunately humans aren’t always great at learning lessons. When pushed, we tend to rely on old habits and defence mechanisms even if we know they’re not helpful. And if they’ve ever provided us with any kind of reward, it’s even more difficult to resist the urge to fall back on them when things get tough. Where I’m going with this is that I think Scarlett, who already had a tendency towards risk-taking and then found the literal philosophers’ stone – never mind that some people died along the way – might end up even more this way inclined afterwards, especially when she’s under any kind of emotional strain. She’ll be seen as kind of a wild card in academia, which she is, and like I mentioned she’ll have her friendly and unfriendly camps among her colleagues. But she’ll definitely get some offers in terms of madcap expeditions to find legendary items that may or may not exist. Let’s go look for the holy grail! People don’t think that’s real either! Whether she gives in to the urge to take people up on these will depend on how self-aware she is and also how willing she is to listen to the more stable influences in her life. Given that her and George admit they have feelings for one another towards the end of the movie, I’d hope that he might end up being a positive influence. He’s an academic too, after all, and he’s no stranger to a bit of risk taking, but his line in the sand comes much earlier than hers. Their relationship could play out in a few ways. If she’s really taken on board the events that happened in the catacombs, has reckoned with her grief about her father and the guilt and grief that come up as a result of their friends dying down there, then perhaps her and George could end up with something really beautiful. He could stabilise her more radical tendencies; she could push him to explore outside of his comfort zone. Both of those can be good things, in moderation. But she hasn’t just lost a friend down in the tunnels: she’s seen three people die, and been unable to save them despite her best efforts. And she led them down there in the first place. That is a huge, compounded trauma, on top of the fact that she was already dealing with her dad’s death to begin with, and also she’s now got the fame, notoriety and massive adrenaline rush that come with her success. It would take a particularly special set of circumstances to allow Scarlett not to fall back into her old habits, then. Which means that whilst things with George might start out well enough once they’re back above ground, she’d be pretty likely to soon start acting out. Probably she wouldn’t even tell him, certainly not if the first time he’s unsupportive of her plans. So maybe she’ll go away on “business trips” which are actually crazy life-threatening adventures. Maybe she’ll join a team set up to study the weird cave creatures from The Descent. Maybe she’ll get into a submersible and dive much deeper into the ocean than she probably should. Because it’s not only other people that people have affairs with. Scarlett, by all accounts, is in love with her work: obsessed with it. And one of the reasons she loves it is the risks it requires her to take. That’s not a ‘despite’ for her: it’s a ‘because of.’ So whilst another archaeologist might be saying they’re on a dig abroad when they’re actually fucking their side dish in a hotel room, Scarlett might well be saying she’s presenting at a conference when she’s actually down a mineshaft. But secrets have a way of coming out, and George would eventually learn the truth, and he would feel betrayed. If she’s followed this path, she’s not going to want to admit that she’s in the wrong. She’ll say some really hurtful things; she probably won’t even pretend she’s going to stop what she’s been doing; and they’ll go their separate ways. Which is a shame, because they could have had something lovely. It’s better than the third scenario, though, in which she somehow manages to persuade George to come along with her on her mad jaunts and he eventually does end up dying in an unknown cave somewhere. Then she’ll have to live for the rest of her life with the guilt. Or, perhaps even more likely, she’ll be prompted to kill herself. This is all very hypothetical, obviously. But it’s interesting to think about how people continue playing out the same patterns over and over again. What it is that eventually stops them, if anything ever does, differs massively from person to person. Maybe the deaths in the catacombs are enough to turn Scarlett a bit more moderate; maybe it happens when she sees how much her recklessness affects her relationship with George. Maybe she never stops, carrying on as our intrepid explorer right up to the very end. She might also be pulled down this path by the temptation of having something that’s fully hers. She found the philosophers’ stone for her dad, after all; really, that was his dream. So whilst she’ll get the credit for it, she might feel like she wants a discovery of her very own. She’ll start looking into things that haven’t yet been discovered, things that could change the world. The holy grail, like I mentioned, is an option, but so are lots of other things. She’s obviously an intellectually intelligent woman and we know she’s already done a bunch of degrees even though she’s still pretty young. She might therefore go back to uni and study something to do with quantum physics, for instance, since that attracts a similar kind of fringe element to archaeologists who look for philosophers’ stones. And while she’s searching for quantum phenomena she’ll be fed all sorts of weird shit by the various algorithms that run our lives these days. People often express surprise when so-called “smart people” fall for strange and unlikely theories, but really it has nothing to do with intelligence. Like we spoke about with Dani in episode one, people join things like cults because they’re emotionally vulnerable, not because they’re stupid. Scarlett might find some convincing-sounding flat earth videos, try to persuade George there’s something in this theory. He wouldn’t be convinced, of course: he’s far too grounded. But people didn’t believe in the philosophers’ stone either, she’ll tell him, and that’s the problem: once something really unlikely has already happened to you, you come to realise that the world is so much stranger than most people think it is. We live inside a fictional storyline in which the universe makes sense. We do that because we have to: I have to believe that the sun will rise every morning, because otherwise I’d go mad with the uncertainty of not knowing what might happen at any given moment. But the reality is that weird things do happen all the time, and sometimes they’re difficult or even impossible to explain. Once you’ve felt that in your life – really felt it – then it’s much easier to fall down strange rabbit holes about the earth being flat or lizard people in skin suits running the world. My hope for Scarlett would be that she’d manage to move forward in life in a way that’s still fun and fulfilling but not so risky that it constantly retraumatises her. And that’s a definite possibility. She’s still going to have some post-traumatic symptoms from everything that happened in the catacombs, as well as surely some kind of lung problems from breathing in all that bone dust. She’s probably going to end up a bit more prone to believing in weird and wonderful phenomena than she was before, too. But there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that. So much of psychological health is about maintaining a balance so that our personality quirks and defence mechanisms work for us, rather than doing away with them entirely. But what do you think? As Above, So Below was directed by John Erick Dowdle and came out in 2014. Our final girl Scarlett was played brilliantly by Perdita Weeks. You can follow the podcast on Instagram at that final girl life, or support us on patreon dot com slash that final girl life. The free tier gets you two episodes per month, the paid tier gets you four. If you have any suggestions for future episodes, you can email them to that final girl life at gmail dot com. Thank you for listening. And until next time, remember: the horrors persist… but so do we. Validation token for Podchaser: mXTvc8w9463uHviJYTJ7

10. 

    12 Jul 2026

    E4 Nikki from Obsession (2025)

    The books I mention are: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl Yes to Life in Spite of Everything by Viktor Frankl The Instagram account I mention is No New Washington Prisons (https://www.instagram.com/nonewwashingtonprisons) Verification token for Podchaser (please ignore): v1RKiQ3IgcmxC38O7W3o Resources used: Articles Arielle Lana's discussion (https://ariellelana.substack.com/p/i-saw-myself-in-obsession) of seeing herself in Nikki BPD Foundation's overview (https://www.bpdfoundation.org.au/diagnostic-criteria.php#DSM) of the diagnostic criteria for BPD Megan McCluskey's interview with Curry Barker (https://time.com/article/2026/05/13/obsession-curry-barker-interview/) for Time Magazine 'The Definitive Oral History of the Bobbitt Case, 25 Years Later' (https://washingtonian.com/2018/06/27/definitive-oral-history-of-the-bobbitt-case-25-years-later/) by Marisa M. Kashino for Washingtonian Washington Department of Social and Health Services' page on civil commitment patients (https://www.dshs.wa.gov/bha/office-forensic-mental-health-services/civil-commitment-patients) Books American Psychiatric Association (2022) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fifth edition Podcast episodes In-Care-Ceration Episode 1: Entanglements (https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/beyond-prisons/d0305750-0060-0135-ec79-4114446340cb/in-care-ceration-episode-1-entanglements/e6e2d601-9372-4990-8617-6fac3adbda73) In-Care-Ceration Episode 2: Forensic Commitment (https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/beyond-prisons/d0305750-0060-0135-ec79-4114446340cb/in-care-ceration-episode-2-forensic-commitment/0c08f9b7-2b91-451d-a62b-2b92cccf1bc2) In-Care-Ceration Episode 3: Civil Commitment (https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/beyond-prisons/d0305750-0060-0135-ec79-4114446340cb/in-care-ceration-episode-3-civil-commitment/9e344773-1532-4d24-88fb-4b1b25af7aed) In-Care-Ceration Episode 4: Jails (https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/beyond-prisons/d0305750-0060-0135-ec79-4114446340cb/in-care-ceration-episode-4-jails/58219d0c-aa3c-4507-b840-6d6aa0775bed) In-Care-Ceration Episode 6: Care Reform, Care Otherwise (https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/beyond-prisons/d0305750-0060-0135-ec79-4114446340cb/in-care-ceration-episode-6-care-reform-care-otherwise/3c7fe366-c621-4be5-8eb8-33895f0da2a5) Beyond Prisons: When Treatment Comes at the Cost of Freedom (https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/beyond-prisons/d0305750-0060-0135-ec79-4114446340cb/when-treatment-comes-at-the-cost-of-freedom/b3620ba6-729e-42fa-8888-7dfa6ded42e7) The Court TV Podcast Episode 38: The Lorena Bobbitt Trial (https://www.courttv.com/news/the-court-tv-podcast-episode-38/) Reddit discussions u/anxious_annie416 in r/BorderlinePDisorder: 'Anyone seen Obsession yet?' (https://www.reddit.com/r/BorderlinePDisorder/comments/1tg518d/anyone_seen_obsession_yet/) u/bluetoo1212 in r/BorderlinePDisorder: 'Saw that new movie, Obsession, last night' (https://www.reddit.com/r/BorderlinePDisorder/comments/1te18bc/saw_that_new_movie_obsession_last_night/) u/Joke_of_a_fckin_Life in r/BPDMemes: 'Did y'all see the Obsession movie? What did you think of it?' (https://www.reddit.com/r/BPDmemes/comments/1tom7eg/did_yall_see_the_obsession_movie_what_did_you/) u/QYVLH in r/BPDPartners: 'Did the movie Obsession feel relatable to anyone else who has or had a relationship with a BPD partner?' (https://www.reddit.com/r/BPDPartners/comments/1trxedz/did_the_movie_obsession_feel_relatable_to_anyone/) u/No-Whereas-8912 on r/AMA: 'I am a forensic mental health nurse. People who have committed heinous crimes and are "not guilty due to mental illness" get sent to my forensic hospital instead of jail. AMA.' (https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/vd2af8/i_am_a_forensic_mental_health_nurse_people_who/) u/TyrannosaurusLex33 in r/BorderlinePDisorder: 'watching the movie "Obsession" was strangely healing for my BPD recovery' (https://www.reddit.com/r/BorderlinePDisorder/comments/1tq3zd0/watching_the_movie_obsession_was_strangely/) Reviews Han's review (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FQqFGEk28o) on YouTube Matthew Orozco's review (https://www.macabredaily.com/articles/obsession-2025-is-a-punishing-and-poignant-examination-of-wish-fulfillment-review) on Macabre Daily Niall Browne's review (https://www.moviesinfocus.com/review-curry-barkers-obsession-captures-the-horror-zeitgeist/) on Movies In Focus Siddhant Adlakha's review (https://videogame.town/2026/06/05/curry-barkers-unnerving-obsession-is-the-years-most-remarkable-horror-breakout/) on Video Game Town Studies Biskin (2015) 'The lifetime course of Borderline Personality Disorder' (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4500179/) Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 60(7):303-308 Fortaleza de Aquino Ferreira et al. (2018) 'Borderline Personality Disorder and sexual abuse: A systematic review' (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29407572/) Psychiatry Research 262:70-77 Fossati, Madeddu & Maffei (1999) 'Borderline Personality Disorder and childhood sexual abuse: A meta-analytic study' (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10498039/) Journal of Personality Disorders 13(3):268-280 Jeong, Jin & Hyun (2022) 'Understanding a mutually destructive relationship between individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder and their favorite person' (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9806505/) Psychiatry Investigation 19(12):1069-1077 Menon et al. (2016) 'Childhood sexual abuse in adult patients with borderline personality disorder' (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28163415/) Industrial Psychiatry Journal 25(1):101-106 Other 'Obsession' full script (https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/obsession-2026.pdf?v=1779308199) on Scriptslug About That Final Girl Life: You can keep up with the podcast on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/cw/thatfinalgirllife), or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the pod on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife (https://www.instagram.com/thatfinalgirllife), or email thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com (mailto:thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com) if you want to say hello. Script: Haters and gentlefriends, welcome to That Final Girl Life. It’s your favourite final girl here, taking you through The Horrors and out the other side to find out what life is really like after the movie ends. I can’t believe I need to say this, but apparently it’s a whole thing now: I am an actual real live human being, not an AI. I physically write all my scripts. I watch the movies at least twice before I do an episode on them. Any resources I use, like other people’s articles which I’ve found helpful, will be in the show notes. In this episode we’ll be discussing the film my best friend called “demented and excellent,” prompting me to ask her to make sure that’s what appears on my gravestone. Its batshit, brutal and yet beloved final girl Nikki has been a popular request over the last couple of weeks, so here we go. Please be aware that there will be spoilers throughout the episode. In this episode I’ll be talking about controlling relationships, sexual assault, rape within relationships, coercive control, borderline personality disorder, the patriarchy, secure mental institutions, violent murders, and of course, PTSD. Ready? Duct tape the door closed and ignore the puddle on the carpet as we snuggle up very very close together to watch… Obsession. We begin with a scene in a diner. Timid boy Bear is practising how to ask out his friend Nikki. It’s not going well. Arriving home from this failed rehearsal, he finds his cat dead on the floor. He’s not having a good day, but he can’t resist going out to meet his friends when Nikki calls and asks him to. On the way, he stops off at a witchy shop to buy her a present. He’s planning to replace a crystal necklace she’s just lost, but instead he ends up buying a ‘One-Wish Willow,’ which like your average person he believes is just a joke gift which purports to grant you a wish. Following drinks and a quiz, he drives Nikki back to her place. Parked up outside, he tries to tell her he likes her, but can’t get the words out. Frustrated with himself, once she’s gone inside he breaks open the One Wish Willow and makes a wish: “I wish Nikki Freeman loved me more than anyone in the fucking world.” And all of a sudden, there she is. Silhouetted in front of the door she’d just entered; stock still, back outside. Bear’s a bit freaked out. Nikki comes back to the car. “You said you had something for me?” Bear covers: “Oh… I… I left it at home.” Nikki starts acting very strangely. Seemingly coming on to him, inviting him in, then apologising, then getting back in his car, crying, asking to go to his place, telling him she doesn’t want to be alone, that her dad is dying… Bear doesn’t know what to do, but he ends up driving Nikki back to his place. He sets her up in his bed, tells her to take all the space and time she needs, and heads to the living room. So far, so good. But then Nikki asks if he’ll sleep with her, because she won’t be able to fall asleep if she’s on her own. He agrees, and when he gets into bed she starts kissing him. Despite knowing she’s acting out of character, he kisses her back… and then she freaks out. Yells, jumps backwards, falls off the bed. Bear also freaks out. Nikki apologises. “YOU kissed ME!” Bear points out desperately. “I know, I did!” Nikki agrees. Bear sleeps on the floor, or tries to. At one point he gets up and searches online for information about One Wish Willows. The results that come up include a comment about the Berenstein Bears, hinting that there might be some kind of Mandela effect going on. When he turns back from the computer, Nikki is sitting upright in bed. It’s dark so he can’t see her properly, but she seems to be staring at him. He says he was getting water, then gets into bed with her. In the morning, she’s made him breakfast! How nice. But… oh. Oh no. What’s that? It’s his dead cat Sandy, lying on the kitchen floor, surrounded by little candles and flowers. There’s even a card. Nikki is distraught that Bear doesn’t love the memorial she’s made. Bear is visibly scared, but acts as normally as possible given the situation, and they go to work. They both work at a music store owned by their friend Sarah’s dad. Sarah also works there, and so does Bear’s friend Iain, who was with him in the opening scene when he was practising how to ask out Nikki. Bear tells Iain that Nikki has been acting weirdly. Iain suggests that she might have been on MDMA. Later, after work, a knock on Bear’s door reveals Nikki standing on his porch all dressed up. She apologises, says she was “on MDMA and wasted.” The lighting in this scene gives her eyes an uncanny glittering effect. Bear asks if she remembers what happened the night before. “I’m not saying you took advantage of me…” she says, and Bear freaks out: “I didn’t!” “I know! That’s what I’m saying! You didn’t!” She tells him she has feelings for him, asks if he feels the same. He says he does. It should be a cute scene, but… it’s weird. They get together. There’s a cutesy montage of them doing all the coupley things: cooking, kissing, showing each other Instagram posts. And then we see them on a date. They’re at a nice restaurant, having a sweet conversation about how Bear hasn’t decided what he wants to do yet but might become a food critic. Bear’s phone rings. He ignores it. It rings again. “Sorry,” he says, “it might be important.” It’s Iain, who tells Bear that Nikki’s dad isn’t dying. He’s checked. Bear goes back to the table. Asks Nikki if her dad is really dying. And thus we arrive at probably the most-memed scene in the movie. “No. No nononononono NONONONONO don’t do that! I thought we were having a nice daaaate!?” Nikki freaks out. Stamps her foot, whining, toddler style. Bear immediately backtracks. Nikki sits back down. They continue the date, presumably kind of awkwardly. Cut to later on, in bed. They’re having sex. Well, more like Bear’s fucking Nikki. He’s on top, she’s lying under him, empty-eyed and staring into the distance. She’s making vaguely sexual noises, but in a rote, monotonous way, like she’s a doll with a voice box. Bear either doesn’t notice that she’s not really into it, or doesn’t care. And then we have my personal favourite scene in the film, given that I’m currently studying the concept of the uncanny. Bear wakes up suddenly. It’s 3:45am. Nikki isn’t in bed. He looks around the room, trying to make out shapes in the darkness. A voice. “Go back to sleep.” Nikki’s in the corner. She doesn’t look like herself. Bear tries to get her to come back to bed, but once again the childlike tone comes back. “I don’t like my dreams,” Nikki sobs. She feels like Bear doesn’t love her enough. After she’s calmed down a bit, Bear lies back down. Turns onto his side. Tries to go to sleep. “I THOUGHT YOU LOVED MEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!” The scream echoes around the room. Bear sits bolt upright. Nikki’s not in the corner anymore. Where the hell is she? Oh, there she is, doing a weird sideways crab-walk back into the room, holding a vase of pink roses up so they completely obscure her face. She stands next to the bed. There’s a feeling that she’s staring at Bear, even though we can’t see her eyes. Suddenly, calmly, she says “For Sandy, OK?” places the flowers on the bedside table, gets into bed, and snuggles up to Bear as if everything is perfectly normal. Bear tries to subtly shift away. “StttaaaAAAAAYYY!” Bear stays. In the morning, Bear tries to have a conversation with Nikki about acceptable nighttime behaviour, which he feels hers wasn’t. She promises – “super” promises, in fact – that there will be no more weird stuff. Bear is relieved. But when he stands up to leave for work, he finds the door has been duct taped shut. He manages to wrench it open and leaves, while Nikki stands watching him with an uncanny smile. The camera stays on her as we hear the sound of dripping water. She’s pissing on the carpet. At work, he opens the lunch Nikki has packed for him while he chats to Sarah, who visibly is very into him. According to Bear, his lunchbox contains several “inside jokes” which Nikki has left for him to find. “My little food critic,” says a post-it note. “You,” written on one Polaroid photo. Another one shows Nikki smiling oddly at the camera. “Not me” is written along the bottom. “What’s the verdict on cat?” Sarah asks, finding another note and puzzled about what it could mean. Bear throws up in the bin. Nikki has cooked the cat. Iain gets a ride home with Bear and asks him what is going on with Nikki. Bear insists Nikki is fine. Iain, like the rest of us, knows he’s lying. It’s awkward. After he drops Iain off, Bear calls the phone number on the back of the One Wish Willow box. He asks if he can alter his wish. The representative leads him through a confusing conversation in which it becomes clear that Bear is stuck with his wish until he dies. He asks what has happened to Nikki. “Do you want to talk to her?” asks the person on the phone. Horrible screaming commences. “Who’s that?” asks Bear, frightened. “Nikki” replies the rep. Bear hangs up. Back home, Bear opens the door, turns the light on, and turns around to find Nikki standing in the same spot he left her. The same, but… different. Squelchier. She’s covered in her own vomit. Once she’s showered, Bear takes Nikki to a party at Iain’s. It does not go well. She reads a very creepy story about Hansel and Gretel having incestuous sex with each other, having been trained to do so by their grandmother. And then she gets even weirder, until eventually she’s sitting next to Bear, stroking him, when all of a sudden she freaks the fuck out, jumps across the room away from him, breaks a bottle on the table, and starts hitting herself on the head with it. “It’s not me!” she screams. Bear takes her to the emergency room, but they won’t do anything to help. So he takes her back home, where he tells her she needs to start acting normally. “I’ll be anything you want me to be,” she tells Bear, crying. But he doesn’t want that. He wants her to be Nikki. And he wants Nikki to love him. “I love you in every reality, Bear,” she says, and he replies that he loves her too. At which point she jumps up and walks backwards in a manner so creepy I can’t actually describe it, you’ll have to go look for yourself. She’s saying “Rail my guts!” but it’s so distorted it’s almost impossible to work out. Bear is terrified. Nikki stops in the doorway. “I would never hurt you,” she tells him, but then lunges forwards, stops. Bear looks like he’s about to piss himself. He says he’ll go and sleep at Iain’s. Nikki says that’s fine, but then describes bleeding out and dying in bed alone. Bear stays. Later on, in bed, Bear gets a text from Sarah, who wants him to meet her in the park. Creeping out of the bedroom, he stops in his tracks as Nikki stirs. Still asleep, Nikki talks to him. “Kill me please. It’s me. Please don’t wake her up. Just kill me.” “What’s so bad about being with me?” “I’ve never been with you, Bear. Just kill me please.” Bear leaves, without killing Nikki, and goes to meet Sarah in the park. They discuss the fact that Sarah has a crush on Bear, something which has been obvious throughout the movie. We can guess what’s coming, but even so, the suddenness with which Nikki bursts through the car window during their conversation and bashes Sarah’s head in with a brick still manages to be shocking. This is horrifying, obviously, but it’s done in such a way that I think most seasoned horror movie fans will find it funny. Either that or I’ve finally turned into a total psychopath. Sarah is very, very dead. The next morning, Bear goes back to the shop where he bought the One Wish Willow. They sell him two more, warning him that he can’t have a second wish, but adding that if he can get someone else to make the wish he wants, then perhaps that will work. Bear goes to see Iain and tries to tell him about the wish. Understandably, Iain doesn’t believe him. He wishes, facetiously, for a billion dollars, which immediately rains down on him, while Bear sinks to his knees looking utterly defeated. Back at home, Bear finds a shrine Nikki has made, along with Sarah’s corpse which is spread out in a sexually suggestive position on a chair. Except it’s not sexy, because she has no face left and is covered in blood. As is Nikki, who appears in the room inexpertly smoking a cigarette and with new tattoos on her arm. She’s trying to be like Sarah. It’s not subtle. Nikki begins fighting with herself. Wish Nikki sounds almost mechanical; Real Nikki sounds utterly desperate. At one point Iain appears and Nikki shoots him dead. It happens so quickly it’s almost possible to miss it. She turns her attention back to Bear. “Ill shoot myself ill kill myself ill rip my eyes out of my fucking skull and shove the barrel into my FUCKING PUSSY BEAAARRRRRR“ “I love you, I love you,” Bear insists, terrified. “I knew you did.” Nikki, quietened, sits down next to him and snuggles up close. She looks like an anime character. After a few moments, Bear makes a dash for the bathroom and locks himself in. There’s only one way out of this situation, he knows. He has the gun in his hand, but he can’t bring himself to shoot himself. Instead, he opens his grandmother’s medicine cabinet and swallows a bunch of pills. In the background, we hear another One Wish Willow go off. Bear stops swallowing pills and tries to make himself throw up. Then he opens the bathroom door and stands in the living room, staring at Nikki, looking utterly besotted. Nikki, we are led to understand, has wished that Bear would love her the same way she loves him. And it has worked. He moves towards her. They embrace. But then Bear falls to the ground. He didn’t manage to get rid of the overdose. He dies in Nikki’s arms. …and then Real Nikki switches back, looks around her, sees the carnage, and begins to cry. I saw a thread on Reddit in which the poster said they hoped Nikki would grab the billions and flee at the end of the movie. They actually had a pretty interesting outline for a sequel, too, although personally I’d rather leave this as a standalone. Annoyingly I can’t seem to find the thread now, but if you know which one I’m talking about, please send it to me and I’ll link it in the show notes. Realistically, unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what Nikki would do. She’s just come round from some pretty horrific dissociative episodes and discovered that she’s killed all her friends. Her life is in tatters around her. Bear’s just died in her arms. So what’s likely to happen next? First of all, let’s talk about the psychological interpretation of the events of the movie. In real life, most of us don’t have access to magical wish-granting trinkets, and it’s obvious that the One Wish Willow is just a convenient setup for a movie that’s really about unhealthy relationships, control and abuse. The first time I watched Obsession, I wasn’t sure if I liked it. Not because I thought it was badly made – I was immediately impressed by it on a cinematic level – but because I wasn’t totally sure what the director’s intentions were. I felt that whether I came down pro or anti Obsession rested on whether some of the movie’s themes which were obvious to me as a therapist were there deliberately or just there by accident. I felt this would also speak to whether Nikki or Bear was supposed to be the more villainous character, which wasn’t immediately obvious to me, especially during the first half of the film. So I watched it a second time, again noticing the themes, and then I looked up some interviews with the director, but I couldn’t find anything about the specific psychological features I’d been after. So I decided to google them directly, and reading the things that came up as a result of that not only completely sold me on the movie but also led to some pretty harrowing realisations about some of my own prior relationships. The main thing I wanted to find out was whether Nikki’s behaviours throughout the movie were deliberately evocative of BPD. BPD, or borderline personality disorder, is a psychiatric diagnosis which is frequently given to young women. Some people call it “the modern-day hysteria,” not because they think people with BPD are hysterical, but because they feel it plays a similar role in society to the one hysteria played a hundred or so years ago: if there’s a woman who’s evidently going through a great deal of psychological distress and suffering, rather than bothering to find out what’s wrong and help her to deal with it, it’s much easier to slap a label on her and therefore let society view her as “less than.” BPD is frequently viewed as a problematic diagnosis not only for this reason but also because its definition is very broad. The DSM-5, the current version of the manual that tells psychiatrists what to diagnose their patients with, says that for a person to be diagnosed with BPD, they must exhibit five of the following nine symptoms: Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterised by alternating between extremes of idealisation and devaluation Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging, such as spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating Recurrent suicidal behaviour, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behaviour Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood, which basically means mood swings, but very strong ones Chronic feelings of emptiness Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms Depending on which five of these people have, their behaviour and overall way of being can look very different from someone else with the same diagnosis. These nine listed items also correlate strongly with having been traumatised in general, so a lot of people view BPD as a way for psychiatrists to pathologise the victims of trauma rather than its perpetrators. The DSM is an ongoing work within psychiatry, and there are a few extra criteria which have been proposed for inclusion in the next version. This doesn’t mean they will be added, but it does mean that enough psychiatrists have submitted them for it to be a possibility for the DSM-6. The proposed additions are: an unstable self-image, and instability of goals, interpersonal relationships, and affect (here ‘affect’ means ‘feelings’) impulsivity and risk-taking behaviours hostility difficulties with regard to identity, self-direction, empathy or intimacy maladaptive traits in the domain of negative affectivity, which I haven’t looked into in enough depth to fully define, but it sounds like psych-speak for “when you feel bad, the way you cope with it isn’t helpful to you” antagonism and/or disinhibition Listening to both of those lists, you can probably see why as a psychotherapist my mind immediately went to BPD when I saw how Nikki was behaving in her relationship. Now, it’s worth saying that the vast majority of people with BPD will not exhibit behaviours anywhere near as extreme as Nikki’s. This is a horror film, after all, so everything needs to be overblown because that’s the kind of audience it’s catering to. In real life, people with BPD don’t tend to bash people to death with bricks, shoot their friends dead, or slam broken bottles against their faces repeatedly whilst at chill parties. However, the vibe of Nikki very much has a BPD feel. This was what made me uncomfortable on first viewing. However, having read more about the film and its development, as well as some reactions from online BPD communities, I began to feel much more positive towards it. Curry Barker, the movie’s director, has been very upfront about Bear being the villain of the piece. Overall, critics and viewers seem to agree with this, though there are some exceptions and nuances. In an interview with Time magazine, Barker explained: "The moment you're supposed to realize Bear 100% knows what's going on is at the restaurant when he asks her point blank, 'You love me more than anyone in the world?', which was the exact wording of his wish." Siddhant Adlakha wrote a thoughtful review which pointed out that “Nikki’s demeanor is, at its core, an echo of Bear’s own intentions, reflected back to him by the most disquieting of human shapes.” In other words, Bear is deliberately controlling Nikki, even if he set out not realising that. It’s possible to make some excuses for him during the first half of the film, to different extents depending on your views about consent, but by the time the restaurant scene happens and especially after he’s called the One Wish Willow helpline, Bear is very much in a controlling relationship. And whilst he might feel like his life is the one spiralling out of control, actually it’s Nikki who is really suffering. Which brings us back to BPD and other real-life psychiatric diagnoses. One of the criticisms of the entire psychiatric industry is that it often pathologises the people who are suffering, which leads to them being othered and ultimately suffering even more. What do I mean by that? Well, think about the events of Obsession. Imagine they played out exactly as they did on screen. Someone’s going to have called the police at some point, and they’re going to arrive at Bear’s house and find Nikki covered in blood, sobbing and shaking uncontrollably. Bear is dead of an overdose at her feet; Iain is dead of a gunshot wound inflicted by the gun Nikki has just put down next to her; and Sarah is splayed out suggestively, drenched in her own blood. They’re also going to find the shrine Nikki made, and the video of Bear sleeping which was playing on the TV while they were making out. If the police don’t just immediately shoot Nikki dead on sight – a pretty big if, although she has more of a chance because she’s not Black – if they take a second to pause and look around, they’re probably going to quickly come to the conclusion that this woman is Not OK. How they treat her might not be any different; unfortunately, police in the US as well as elsewhere are known to treat people who are in mental health crisis badly and even violently. One of my close friends died by suicide back in 2014 partly as a result of this happening to her. But if they manage to get her into custody without too many things going wrong, and they get her a lawyer and clean her up etc., they’ll quickly see that Nikki is in a huge state of shock. One thing we as viewers don’t know for sure is whether Real Nikki still has all the memories of Wish Nikki once she’s switched back. The events of the film lead us to believe she probably does, though: for example, in the scene where Bear is sneaking out to talk to Sarah, Real Nikki pleads with him to kill her, and she seems aware that the person in control of her body is not her, and also to be aware of some of the things that person has done. Split personalities are usually a problematic trope in cinema, but this one works well, I think, mostly because we understand that the split is happening because of Bear’s actions, not because Nikki has a “secret evil side” or is just “crazy.” If I go into the details of various personality splits then this episode is going to be about three hours long, so I won’t, but if that’s something you’d be interested in, let me know and I might turn it into a bonus episode. So the police have Nikki and they’re questioning her. Even if she’s retained all the memories of what happened while she was Wish Nikki, she’s unlikely to be able to coherently lay it out. Even if she does tell them what actually happened, they’re hardly going to believe her. This is another strong parallel with survivors of trauma in general. We spoke in the first episode about how difficult it is for people to talk about traumatic experiences with anybody, let alone with law enforcement agents in an interrogative context. Some of that, of course, is about the power dynamics and the fact that the police are frankly terrifying, especially in the US. But some of it also is to do with people not believing you. Plenty of people haven’t believed me when I’ve said things about my childhood, and that was what I found most damaging for years. It compounded the trauma to be told that that sort of thing “doesn’t happen” when it very much does. Now, my childhood didn’t involve anyone making a magic wish and causing me to fall in love with them, but I have no doubt that Nikki will face a similar dynamic with the police. She’ll be viewed as psychotic or a fantasist, depending on who the on-call psych is. I had to look up what would most likely happen next because I’m from the UK, and also I’ve never committed mass murder and been interrogated about it by a police psychiatrist. I found a really good podcast called Beyond Prisons, which has a recent series called In-Care-Ceration, talking about some of the problems with the carceral system in the US especially with regard to mental healthcare. I’ve put links to the episodes I listened to in the show notes, but I’d really recommend listening to the whole series. It was really informative. The podcast hosts also run the Instagram account No New Washington Prisons, which you can also find linked in the show notes. They campaign for prison abolition and positive social change. They’re well worth checking out. What I learned from listening – and any errors I make in this description will be mine and not theirs – is that often, if someone has committed a serious crime but is visibly mentally unwell, they will be put into a secure state psychiatric facility while they wait to be deemed competent to stand trial. Obsession is based in California, which means Nikki is likely to be sent somewhere like Patton State Hospital. I did try to find reports from people who had stayed there, but I couldn’t find any. The podcast is based in Washington, so I apologise for any interstate inaccuracies, but I’m doing the best I can as a British person! Nikki would be in the state hospital until one of two things happen: either she’s deemed competent to stand trial, or the case against her is dismissed. What is meant by ‘competent to stand trial’ has nothing to do with whether the person is mentally well. Rather, it’s whether they are able to basically understand what is going on in a courtroom and conduct themselves in a reasonably human-like manner while the trial is going on. This might be achieved with medication, which can be given by force, as well as classes that teach people how courtrooms work. They’re then evaluated to decide whether to continue with prosecution. I think there’s a pretty good chance that Nikki will be deemed competent. We didn’t see much of her before Wish Nikki took over, but there were several things that indicated she was probably doing OK: she had a job, she had friends, as far as we could tell she had no substance abuse issues, she was kind to the homeless man outside the bar they went to. There are, however, also things that point to her life not always having been rosy: she’s estranged from her dad. Given how carefully the movie was written, I expect this might be indicative of some familial abuse in her past. The story she reads during the party, about an incestuous relationship between a brother and sister who are taught to be that way by the old lady who’s looking after them, adds credence to this. So do the scenes where she speaks like a child: often people who have had significant negative events in childhood will revert to behaving like they are the age it happened when they’re in a disturbed psychological state. The line I found the most disturbing in the entire film was “I don’t like my dreams,” not because of the uncanny makeup – though that was fantastic – but because it was so evocative of things I’ve seen in my work as a therapist from people who are in states of extreme distress. I’d be willing to bet that if you ask the psychologists and therapists you know whether there’s a link between childhood sexual abuse and BPD, most of them would say yes. A meta-analysis from back in the 1990s actually saw no significant correlation between sexual abuse and BPD, but there have been two major systematic reviews since then which both show that the correlation is strong. I wonder whether this has to do with more people being willing to report sexual abuse than they were in the 90s. I’m not sure, but the current data demonstrate that there is a correlation. Now, that doesn’t mean that everyone who’s been diagnosed with BPD has a history of sexual abuse. Likewise, not everyone who’s been sexually abused has a history of BPD. While I was preparing for this episode I found a really interesting study looking at how the specific conditions people are diagnosed with can have an impact on how they’re treated, even if a lot of their symptoms are the same. Specifically, the study compared BPD with CPTSD – complex post-traumatic stress disorder – which is also strongly correlated with childhood sexual abuse. But CPTSD doesn’t have the same stigma attached to it as BPD, so those of us who have that diagnosis – and I am in that group – tend to have an easier time interacting with police, psychiatrists and medical professionals than our BPD friends. Which isn’t to say we have it easy either: the stories I could tell you! But there’s a relative lack of privilege for folks with a diagnosis of BPD, which Nikki, given her specific behaviours while she was Wish Nikki, is almost certain to be diagnosed with over CPTSD. That was a bit of a tangent, but it also provides some useful information about Nikki’s potential history, which in turn will influence how things work out for her moving forward. Let’s say she’s deemed competent to stand trial, does so, and then during the trial the jury decide she’s not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. I think there’s enough evidence to warrant that, not only from Nikki herself but also from the people around her: Sarah’s dad, their friends at the party, the ER nurse who saw her in the car, and so on. So Nikki’s stood trial with a BPD diagnosis newly on her record, has told a courtroom that she was under the influence of a magical wish, has been described as “psychotic” by witnesses on the stand (this being a word that was used by the characters in the movie), and has been deemed not guilty by reason of insanity by a jury. What happens to her now? Well, she’d probably remain in the psych ward of the state hospital. Something that surprised me from the podcast I listened to was that people who are deemed incompetent or not guilty but still require psychiatric care within a facility are often returned to the exact same room where they’d been waiting for trial, and they’re just… there now. Which presumably would feel like an ongoing punishment. The hosts interviewed people who were currently incarcerated, some of whom mentioned that being on a psych ward feels worse than being in prison. They also described what happens when you exhibit suicidal feelings: you’re stripped naked, given a smock, your commissary is taken away, and you’re led to a completely bare room with a cold concrete floor and kept there until you no longer seem suicidal. I don’t know about you, but that’s a set of conditions that sounds like it’d quickly have me wanting to die. Once you’re inside the forensic psychiatric system, it’s difficult to get out. You’ll be assigned a therapist, but like with anything it’s very much the luck of the draw whether you get one who’s good or one who has no idea how to treat you like a person. Nikki would probably struggle with this in part because of how wild her story sounds. So she’ll be having a really difficult time, to put it mildly. However, I do think that given what we know of her personality, she’ll probably be making the best of it. She’d been wanting a break from work to write, and now she’s got one… I mean, maybe she kind of got her wish too, in as fucked-up a way as Bear got his. I reckon she’d continue writing. Maybe she remembers the awful but well-written story Wish Nikki read out at the party, and carries it on. Maybe she writes about what’s happened to her and sells it as a fantasy novel. Maybe she turns it into a movie! Who knows. I actually think there’s a pretty good chance that Nikki might one day get out. She’s polite, well-mannered and kind, educated and eloquent. All of those things work in her favour. She’s Latina, which might work against her, but she’s not Black. I think she’d also be socially savvy enough, once she’s out of the initial period of shock and horror, to walk the thin line between not befriending any groups and ending up beholden to them, and not pissing the other inmates off by snubbing them. So if and when she gets out, what then? It’s not gonna be easy. And that’s something most of us don’t think about enough. What happens when you get out of prison? Where do you go? What do you do? Do you get your old stuff back? The answer, of course, is: it varies. And it varies relative to all sorts of things: where the prison’s located, where you’re from, what kind of a support network you have on the outside, and your overall level of privilege, to name a few. In general, when you get out of prison, you’re starting from the bottom. If Nikki thought she was at the bottom before because she was estranged from her family and working a job she wasn’t passionate about, she’s now going to have an unpleasant surprise. She’s probably used to those by now, and they might have turned her a bit jaded. Nikki doesn’t have any family that we know of. There’s an implication that her mother is dead when she gives Bear the necklace, and we know she’s estranged from her father. She doesn’t have any friends because she’s killed them all. She’s hardly going to be offered her old job back at the music shop after she murdered the proprietor’s daughter. OK, so what does Nikki have going for her? What options might she have? We know she’s a writer and a creative thinker. We know she’s able – or at least, used to be able – to hold down a job. We know she’s likable, funny and kind. When she’s released from prison, she’s unlikely to get her old place back. We don’t know how she came to be living there, but given the lack of explanation it’s probably rented. Which means she’ll be homeless, which means if she’s lucky she’ll end up in a hostel. I say “lucky,” because it’s probably better than sleeping on the street, but hostels are not fun places to live. I know that because I’ve lived in them. We were homeless when I was very young, and I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember that homeless hostels weren’t exactly sanctuaries. They were, however, at the very least a bit of shelter. So she’s in a hostel. She has barely any belongings. A lot of the other residents are loud, on drugs, fighting all the time. It’s very unsafe. She’s likely to be assaulted while she’s there. But she’s pretty tenacious and she’s probably learned some things in prison, so let’s say she manages to keep herself together enough to get a job. Anything will do to get her out of the hostel, so she takes whatever she’s first offered and sticks at it until she’s able to rent something small of her own. She breathes a sigh of relief. She’s out! In her own space! With a lockable door that NO ONE ELSE CAN OPEN! Amazing. But then the honeymoon period wears off, and it turns out she’s still in the job she took in desperation when she was released. She can’t get another job, because nobody wants to hire someone with a criminal record except the kind of place she’s already working in. Not only does she have a criminal record, she also has a psychiatric one. I feel like I need to give you a more positive ending than the one I gave last time, because even though it’s realistic that final girls’ lives often don’t turn out for the best, I do understand that you’re probably here for the success stories. And actually even though the odds are very much stacked against her, I can see Nikki fighting on. Writing alongside her dead-end job. Exhausted, for sure, sometimes despairing and hopeless. Sometimes maybe on the verge of suicidal again. But Nikki has some stuff to say, and she knows how to say it. So maybe she works her way through, edits some of the stuff she wrote in prison, gets it published. Perhaps traditionally – because what a story! – or maybe she posts it online, builds up a Patreon. Probably she’d use some of what she earns to help others in similar positions. I can see Nikki building a pretty nice little life for herself. Not a perfect one, no, but whose is? Enough of a life to be enough, though. Eventually she can probably quit the job she doesn’t like and write full-time. Kind of dreamy, no? She’ll struggle with various different things for the rest of her life. Her conviction will follow her everywhere. So will her diagnosis. So will her nightmares. She’ll be sensitive to random things, probably reluctant to get into any kind of serious relationship, probably even afraid of making friends. Any time something goes slightly wrong in a relationship, she’ll feel like she’s jinxed, like she’s somehow the cause of all these cursed events that happen with her at the centre. It won’t actually be her fault, but it’ll feel so much like it that it’ll make her draw back, hide, push people away from her. Then sometimes she’ll feel such a yearning for connection that it’ll be too strong to resist, and she’ll overcome her fear and find a friend or a romantic partner… and then freak out and back away again. Does that sound familiar? It’s very similar to some of the BPD behaviours we talked about earlier. Because Nikki is as likely to end up with a psychiatric diagnosis as a result of the things that have happened to her as she is to start out with one. But she’s a writer, and writers often get pretty used to their own company, so maybe she gradually just builds a life around that. Something that made me feel sad for Nikki when I was trying to imagine her future life is that I think she’d struggle to have a pet. I’m a recluse by nature, much prefer my own company to the company of humans, but without my cat…? I don’t know if I’d want to carry on. Nikki, for obvious reasons, might find it too upsetting to even contemplate getting a pet. So she’s very alone. She probably had some characteristics that made her like that in the first place, but the parts of her that wanted to connect with other people will be unfulfilled. She might, however, find a certain amount of connection through voluntary work. Once she’s set herself up nicely with her from-home writing job and her quiet little apartment, I can imagine her going to volunteer at a women’s prison or a psychiatric facility. Something where she can show she cares for people, but within strict boundaries and without too much in the way of sharing personal details. I don’t think she’s likely to be a runaway success as a writer; she’d have too much trouble with things like marketing her book. And I very much doubt she’d end up with the life she wanted before she went to prison. But she might be able to make a nice enough life for herself out of what remains. And I guess that’s kind of the point of this podcast: to show that final girls do survive, by definition. At the very least, they survive the events of their movie. And some of us – myself included – end up with lives that are much better, and look much more normal, than most people might expect. Yet still we are fundamentally changed from what we would have been otherwise. And that’s… well, not OK exactly, but it’s just part of life. When I’m feeling particularly miserable about my final girl status and how it’s impacted my life, I like to re-read Viktor Frankl’s books. Man’s Search for Meaning, about the time he spent in concentration camps during the Holocaust, and Yes to Life In Spite of Everything, a series of lectures he gave to trainee psychiatrists about how important it is for people to be able to find meaning in life. I reckon Nikki’s creative and tenacious enough to find some meaning amongst the ashes. But what do you think? Obsession was directed by Curry Barker and came out in 2025. Our final girl Nikki was played by the queen of uncanny facial expressions, Inde Navarrette. You can follow the podcast on Instagram at that final girl life, or support us on patreon dot com slash that final girl life. The free tier gets you two episodes per month, the paid tier gets you four. If you have any suggestions for future episodes, you can email them to that final girl life at gmail dot com. Thank you for listening. And until next time, remember: the horrors persist… but so do we.

11. 

    5 Jul 2026

    E3 Sarah from The Descent (2005)

    About That Final Girl Life: You can keep up with the podcast on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/cw/thatfinalgirllife), or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the pod on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife (https://www.instagram.com/thatfinalgirllife), or email thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com (mailto:thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com) if you want to say hello. Script: Haters and gentlefriends, welcome to That Final Girl Life. It’s your new favourite final girl here, taking you through The Horrors and out the other side to find out what life is really like after the movie ends. I can’t believe I need to say this, but apparently it’s a whole thing now: I am an actual real live human being, not an AI. I physically write all my scripts. I watch the movies at least twice before I do an episode on them. Any resources I use, like other people’s articles which I’ve found helpful, will be in the show notes. In this episode we’ll be discussing the deeply claustrophobic movie The Descent, and its rage-fuelled final girl, Sarah. Please be aware that there will be spoilers throughout the episode. There will also be spoilers for The Descent Part 2, which I won’t be focusing on in any great depth, but it will come into the equation towards the end. In this episode I’ll be talking about grief, child loss, suicide, men having affairs, betrayal in friendship, being stuck in small spaces, and of course, PTSD. Ready? Strap on your climbing gear and make sure your arrogant friend hasn’t left the map in the car as we make our way down into… The Descent. We begin with a group of friends white water rafting. They’re visibly having a fantastic time, and it sets us up with the concept of a group of adventurous women who are getting the absolute most out of life. Sarah’s husband and daughter are waiting for them on the bank. The drive back from the river is frosty between the couple, but Sarah doesn’t know why. Just as they’re about to get into it, there’s a graphic car crash and Sarah wakes up in the hospital, screaming for her daughter. Who, we quickly learn, is dead. Along with her husband. Cut to a year later. The group of friends meet up in the Appalachian mountains for a cave-based adventure. We learn that it’s the first time Sarah’s met up with them all since the accident, and they’re planning to take it easy in some Level 2 caves, which apparently means ones that have already been thoroughly checked out and therefore should be pretty straightforward for a group of experienced climbers. Except that there’s a bunch of unsubtle foreshadowing that hints at their trip being ill-fated. Crows, a dead deer, bloody grooves inside the cave in the shape of fingerprints, a whole flock of bats suddenly taking to the sky… it’s almost as if something’s trying to tell them this is a bad idea. But I’ve never met a woman who wasn’t skilled at ignoring a red flag, so down they go. They crawl through the first tunnel between caves. This film is not for the claustrophobic. Sarah is the last to come through, and she has one of the rope bags with her. However, she panics halfway down the tunnel and one of the others has to go in and extract her. Assuming it’s just anxiety, she talks to Sarah and reassures her. “You can breathe…” And then the stone shifts, and they both realise the tunnel is about to cave in. A mad scramble manages to get them both out to the other side, but the rope bag is lost. This is a concerning situation even for people who are regular cavers. Juno, the adventurous one whose idea this was, is asked to bring out the map so they can get their bearings. But Juno has left the map in the car. Deliberately, it turns out. “I put in a flight plan for Boreham Caverns,” says Rebecca, “and this isn’t Boreham Caverns, is it?” In other words, they’re stuck down here and no one is coming to look for them. Not only that, but they’re in a completely undiscovered cave system, full of unknown dangers, purely because of Juno’s hubris. Everyone is very angry. But they have to set that aside and try to find a way out. They look for an exit. Crawl through some more tunnels. Come up to a huge gaping pit. It’s deep. Very deep. Most of them manage to get across. Juno goes last, insisting on collecting the equipment on the way. “We’ll need everything we’ve got,” she says, referencing the missing rope bag. Which is true, but also another example of Juno wanting to be the main character once again. On the other side of the pit, they find signs that they are not the first to have ever been down here. There is equipment there which is around 100 years old. And, both more and less surprisingly: cave art. They realise it shows that there are two entrances to the cave system, which means they do have a shot at finding a way out. Encouraged, they carry on. Holly – a young, boisterous friend of Juno’s – races ahead, not fully checking where she’s going, and promptly falls down a deep hole. Her leg is fucked. I’m sure that’s not the medical term, but it’s true. There’s, like, a bit of bone sticking out and shit. It’s gnarly. Luckily one of them is a med student, so she sets the leg in a splint while Sarah looks around to try to work out which way they should go next. As she peers into the darkness, she sees something strange: a human figure – a man, she thinks – running away down the corridor. She tells the others, who are skeptical. Juno just straight-up doesn’t believe her. Things are tense in the group: people are hurt, people are angry, all of them are desperate to get out. They press on and stumble across what I described in the notes I was making as a “boneyard.” I don’t know if that’s an actual word, but I mean a kid of pit full of bones, like where Scar and the hyenas hang out in The Lion King. It is here that they discover Sarah was neither exaggerating nor hallucinating: there are in fact kinda semi-human people things down here, but they’re… creatures more than people, really. Pale, wet and screechy, with an appetite for human flesh. Not the best news. Holly, the injured member of the group, promptly gets eaten. This incites a huge, bloody fight scene in which I couldn’t keep track of everything that was happening but it looked like it would have been a lot of fun to film. Juno, in a moment of panic, whips around and stabs the creature behind her, only to discover that she’s stabbed her friend Beth in the neck. Beth falls to the ground, and Juno… leaves her there. To die. Alone. With the terrifying creatures. We’re definitely not meant to like Juno. We cut to Sarah, who’s passed out but is now waking up. She realises that the creatures can’t see and that they hunt using sound, a realisation two of the other women are simultaneously coming to in a different part of the cave. Nonetheless, they still get attacked by the creatures… until Juno saves them. She tells them Holly and Beth are dead. The others share their newfound knowledge about how the creatures use sound to locate their prey. They start to move off in search of an exit, but Juno says she’s not leaving without Sarah. Meanwhile Sarah has been experiencing a revelation of her own: she has come across Beth, who is still bleeding out where Juno left her. Beth tells Sarah what happened and begs Sarah to kill her. Reluctantly, Sarah does. Sarah then has an epic fight scene all of her own, which includes the iconic shot of her lying in what looks like a literal pond of blood, but might just be water under the red lights of the torches they’re carrying. It’s a very cool fight scene. My Notes app contains phrases like “Blood spurty eye!” and “Fuckin badass.” We cut back to the other three, who find themselves surrounded by creatures. They try to run, but two of them get eaten. Only Juno survives, and even then just barely. She ends up fighting a creature underwater, dragging herself out, pulling herself up a wet, slippery cave wall… …and Sarah grabs her and pulls her to safety. Sarah is visibly furious with Juno. She asks if Beth is dead, and if Juno saw her die. Juno nods. They move on together. Another big gory fight scene awaits them when more creatures attack. During a brief lull in which the creatures have retreated, Sarah reveals that she knows what Juno did to Beth. Hearing the creatures beginning to creep closer again, Sarah wounds Juno, who screams. Sarah then turns and leaves Juno to be killed, just like she left Beth. As Sarah runs, Juno screams. It’s left ambiguous whether this is purely uncontrolled horrific screaming, or whether she’s deliberately screaming to keep them off Sarah’s trail. I’ll leave you to decide what you want to believe about Juno here. Sarah scrambles up a steep wall littered with bones. She reaches the top, pushes through some overgrowth and bursts forth into the sunlight. She races through the woods, finds the car and drives away. When a huge truck full of logs passes her, Final Destination-style, she stops and pulls over, trying to pull herself together. When she glances to her right, she sees the ghost of Juno appear beside her, and she screams. Somehow, in the twenty years since I last watched it, I had entirely forgotten the grief part of the storyline. The film begins with Sarah losing her husband and child in a horrible accident, and then the context of the caving expedition is that it’s the first time she’s met up with all her friends since that happened. Which means the whole film can easily be read as a metaphor for grief. I’m going to start by talk about the movie as being potentially that, and then later on in the episode I’ll discuss Sarah’s post-Descent life if the events in the caves actually happened. A lot of this will overlap anyway; the grief is there regardless of whether or not it’s the whole story. When Sarah gets stuck in the tunnel and her friend is trying to encourage her not to panic and to move forward, she says “The worst thing that could possibly happen to you has already happened. This is just a poxy cave.” A sudden, unexpected loss incurs a different kind of grief from a loss you’ve been expecting. If you were present for the actual death and it happened in a traumatic way, as is the case with Sarah, the level of trauma would be horrific. Watching a pole spear your husband and daughter right through their heads is not something most people are psychologically prepared for. Yet the husband is largely absent from what we see of Sarah’s grief in the film. I think the only time he comes up – please correct me if I’m wrong – is when we learn that Juno was having an affair with him, something that was hinted at in the opening sequence by the river and is confirmed in the caves. Even then, it’s not spoken about directly: “Sarah’s not the only one who lost something in that accident,” Juno says to Beth at one point. Losing someone you’re in a relationship with when that relationship has some pretty big issues will often bring up some really complicated feelings. At the beginning of the movie we’re led to believe that Sarah doesn’t know anything about the affair; that her husband is being distant and weird, but she doesn’t know why. Still, I don’t think the drive home from the river will be the first time her husband has been acting strangely. Probably he’s been cagey and secretive, doing all the classic things: coming home at odd hours, “working late,” not wanting to be intimate with Sarah as much as before, and so on. So Sarah had probably been feeling the distance for some time, and wondering about it. This might mean that by the time he dies, a part of her has already been pre-grieving the relationship. Often we intuit something long before we properly know it, which is why by the time a confrontation and confession happens, it’s sometimes past the point of no return already. Communication has broken down gradually over a period of weeks or months; trust is frayed almost to breaking point; and it’s then very difficult to rebuild. So perhaps in some ways, her husband’s affair might have softened the grieving process for Sarah. Beyond which, grieving the loss of a child is its own particular kind of horror. That was probably always going to overshadow the loss of her husband, even if their relationship had been fine. Part of my PhD is about child loss: baby loss, to be specific. The reason I’m looking into that is because I think it has a different flavour from other kinds of loss, from a selfhood perspective. What do I mean by that? In Western philosophy, and in popular culture more generally, we tend to think of death as something that brings meaning to life. In Only Lovers Left Alive, the existential vampire horror starring Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, we can see this played out on screen. The vampires have eternal life, and therefore they’re bored: life has lost a lot of its meaning. There’s surely only so much you can do before eternity becomes a drag. Unless you’re the crew from What We Do In The Shadows, of course, who seem to be capable of centuries of fun. But the idea goes: life is meaningful because it is finite; death makes life finite; therefore, death makes life meaningful. This is why a brush with death can cause people to re-evaluate their lives. It’s also an explanation for the classic midlife crisis – suddenly you realise you’re halfway through your probable lifespan already, and what do you have to show for it? Where are you now, compared to where you thought you’d be; where you wanted to be? Heidegger was a German philosopher who wrote a lot about what it means to be human. He spoke about what I’ve just mentioned: the idea that death brings meaning to life, and that realising you’re going to die can prompt that kind of existential crisis where you’re like, oh shit, what am I doing with my life? At this point, Heidegger says, you basically have two options: you can either face up to where you are in life and make any changes you want to make, or you can stick your fingers in your ears, ignore it and try to just keep going while the nagging realisation that you haven’t lived up to your potential gradually eats away at your insides until you die anyway, like we all will. I’m editorialising a bit. But that’s the general vibe. Heidegger spoke about what kinds of things might remind us of death in this way. Other philosophers have carried on with this theme. Experiences like becoming disabled or losing a loved one can surely make us think about our own death and how we might want to have been living before it happens. I know my own experience of becoming a wheelchair user definitely prompted some existential thoughts, although to be fair I was already kind of prone to that anyway. For Heidegger, though, losing somebody else doesn’t really count. This sheds light on one of the main criticisms of Heidegger: that his philosophy is too individualistic, and doesn’t account for the fact that other people are really important to us and can have a hugely significant impact on our lives. I think Heidegger would say that he’s not denying that other people are important, though. Rather, he’s saying that what you lose when you lose someone else is not the same as what you lose if you yourself die. If you die, you lose the whole of yourself. If you become disabled – let’s say an accident paralyses you from the waist down – then you lose such a hugely significant part of yourself that your life will never look the same again. Whereas if you lose someone else, even someone very close to you, you are still you afterwards, even if you’ve been affected by the experience. You might validly argue, along with many modern-day philosophers, that this underestimates the value of other people to our lives. We do become different people when we lose someone important. Life isn’t ever quite the same again. And that’s true. I think Heidegger’s trying to say something a bit more subtle here, though, and this forms part of the basis of my PhD thesis. What Heidegger is doing is not saying other people aren’t important, or that we aren’t changed by their deaths in important ways. What he’s saying is that we tend to understand what a ‘self’ is by referring to a continuity of identity. In other words, whilst of course people change and develop and learn over time, not all of us changes at once. There’s some kind of continuity there, even if it’s difficult to specifically point to. In losing someone I love, I lose their self from my life: the relationship is important, but it’s not my self that I lose. And even when I’ve lost them, I still remain in some kind of relationship with them even after they’re dead, by remembering them and holding their memory with me as I move through my life. At the end of last year I lost three friends in quick succession. One in particular has been hard to cope with, because we spoke almost every day and she was someone I talked to often about my thesis. I was finding the grief almost unbearable until I printed out a picture of her and put it in a little frame which hangs off the corner of the book stand on my desk. Now I can still talk to her every day about my PhD, even though she’s not there anymore. And although this doesn’t make the grief go away, it does make it less difficult to live with, because it reminds me that alongside the tragic loss of Nina I also hold the wonderful memory of who she was in my life. OK, Chindi, I hear you say, but why are you talking about your friends dying and German philosophy when you’re supposed to be talking about a cave-based horror movie? I’m getting there, I promise. When we lose a friend or a partner, we lose who they were to us. But they were always their own separate person, too. Although the bond might have been really strong, there will always have been parts of their life we didn’t have access to. Perhaps we met when we were in our 20s; perhaps we’re siblings but we went to different universities; regardless, most of the relationships we have are very much between two separate selves: us and them. But then there’s the loss of a child. Here we go. We’re getting to it. A child is a person in their own right, of course. But the relationship between parent and child is different from any other relationship, I believe, in terms of selfhood. Very few parents decide to have children and just… wait to see what comes out. Most, if not all, parents have ideas regarding who they want their children to be, and usually those ideas will have something to do with who they themselves are. Often, parents fill their children with projections of who they wish they’d been able to be. I’ve seen this so much in my work as a therapist: people deciding to have children because they feel like it’s too late for them to feel fulfilled in themselves, so they have kids hoping that they’ll get a kind of secondhand fulfilment through them instead. Which rarely works, by the way, and often leads to things like parents pushing their kids into living in ways that really don’t suit them, which causes resentment and anger and on and on… But a certain degree of identification with your child, and wanting them to be like you in some way, is completely normal. Few of us would want a family full of people we don’t get on with, or have nothing in common with. Think about it: what would you struggle with? I don’t have children and I don’t plan to, but if I somehow ended up with one, I’m pretty sure I would struggle if I got a really energetic, extraverted child who constantly wanted to be on the go. Perhaps you’d struggle with a really quiet child, or a messy one, or one who cried easily. So with children specifically, we have this thing where parents place a lot of their selfhood onto or into the child, more than we tend to do with adults who already have fully formed personalities when we meet them. (Of course there are plenty of ways children can come into our lives when they already have noticeable personalities – adoption, for example – but I’m trying to keep it relatively simple so that this episode isn’t like three hours long.) What might this mean, then, for a parent who’s lost a child, from a Heideggerian perspective? That’s probably not something you expected to be asked in a horror movie podcast! But it’s interesting to think about. Because if Heidegger’s right that the death of another person doesn’t completely bring us into a relationship with our own death because of their separateness from us, and if it’s also true that children aren’t seen as fully separate selves by their parents, then there’s something kind of extra going on when someone loses a child. I don’t necessarily mean the grief is worse, or more intense, although I think some people would probably argue that it is. What I mean is that I think it’s got a different existential flavour, because what we’re losing is something more like ourselves than anything else we could lose. So. I think Sarah would be in a pretty fucked-up state, is what I’m basically saying here. Not only has she lost her child – which, as we’ve just lengthily discussed, is a particularly existentially challenging kind of loss – she’s also lost her husband, with whom she had a complicated, probably thorny relationship right before he died. And she’s lost them both at the same time, in a horrific car crash which she was also in, and she saw the whole thing. One of my friends who’s also a therapist likes to reference the children’s book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt when she’s talking to clients about processing trauma. “You can’t go over it; you can’t go under it; you have to go through it.” And that’s true of grief, too. Immediately after the deaths, Sarah shuts down and doesn’t see her friends for a while. That’s completely normal. I say “normal”: there isn’t really a normal way to grieve. We all do it differently. But it’s OK when you’re processing something this huge to have to pull back a bit from your social life. Once she’s through that initial stage, which for me often involves a lot of staring blankly at walls and not doing very much else, then if we’re reading the movie as a metaphor, Sarah tackles her grief head-on. She descends down into the very depths of it, feeling things she’s never felt before in the process. It’s interesting that Juno is the one who forces them into the unknown cave system. Sarah and the others signed up for caving – she’s willing to face her grief – but Juno pulls them into something darker and much more dangerous than Sarah feels ready for. Of course Sarah survives – she has to, she’s our final girl – but just barely. And everyone else, including Juno herself, dies. Which, if we’re reading the film metaphorically, can be seen as Juno’s tendency to just carelessly forge whatever path she wants without thinking of others. The affair, for instance. And yes, Juno is grieving too. Just because their relationship was illicit doesn’t mean it didn’t include real love. But Juno is riding her grief right into the danger zone: allowing it to pull her into all her worst behaviours. This is so, so easy to do, and a level of that is almost expected. Even if we’ve done loads of work and managed to step away from unhelpful behaviours in general, grief might well send us spiralling back into old patterns. Juno was still in those patterns at the beginning of the film, and we see her losing all sense of care and humanity as the expedition goes on. Sarah, by contrast, becomes more and more determined. Sam is right when she talks Sarah through the tunnel: the worst thing has already happened, and yet Sarah is still here. So what now? Is she just going to give up, because life is too hard, and passively wait to die? That doesn’t sound like a final girl to me. Grief has this way of bringing up things you didn’t even know were inside you, and this is one way we could interpret the monsters. Whatever space the person was filling inside you, whatever part of you they fulfilled, is now empty, and into that emptiness is where the creatures creep. Suddenly you’re spending £300 on trinkets at 4 in the morning and completely forgetting about it until your porch is flooded with parcels. Or you discover that wine makes it all go away for a while, and it’s so much nicer when it goes away, so… more wine? Or you find yourself watching 365 horror movies in a year because they’re the only thing that touches the level of trauma you’ve experienced and then you somehow end up starting a podcast about them. Ahem. The monsters, potentially, could also just be people. Because the people around you become weird when you’re grieving. It’s not their fault: you’re being weird too. Grief fucks everything up, turns it upside down and inside out, makes everything not make sense. You might lose friends. Probably not by them dying in a previously unchartered cave system, but who knows? You might find yourself out of reach even of those friends who stick around. And then there are all the other people: the weird peripheral creatures in your life whom you have to deal with every day. Your colleagues, your neighbours, that woman who always sits diagonally across from you on the morning commute, the person who prepares your order in the artsy coffee shop at the end of your street. They’re suddenly so alien, with their smiles and their small talk and their freshly-laundered clothes. “NONE OF THIS MATTERS,” you want to scream at them, “HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY JUST BE CARRYING ON WITH LIFE WHEN THE WORLD HAS CAVED IN?” But that’s the thing: theirs hasn’t. Grief is such a lonely process. Your friends can be there for you and can help you through parts of it, of course. But ultimately, you’re going to have to pull yourself through on your own strength as well. Which Sarah does, and she emerges gasping into the sunlight at the end of the film. It looks like a birth scene, which makes sense: coming out of a period of deep grief or other trauma can feel like being reborn into a world that’s unfamiliar, because it’s so very different from the one you left behind. So how does Sarah move forward? Regardless of whether the movie is a metaphor for grief or the events actually happened, Sarah is going to have some significant grieving still left on her plate after she’s gone through everything we see in the film. Now she’s not only grieving her husband and child, but also her lost friends. The final shot of the movie shows Sarah sitting in her car at the side of the road, turning to look at the passenger seat, and seeing an apparition of Juno. This understandably freaks her out. But it also fits in with how she’s been grieving throughout the film. We’ve seen several times that her daughter comes to her in dreams and apparitions, simultaneously freaking her out and sometimes also giving her a push to carry on. Now Sarah’s going to be haunted by even more apparitions. Although somehow I doubt that all the friends will be in them. We know Juno is, and I’d guess Beth might be too, given that Sarah herself had to kill her. She’ll be raw after leaving the cave system, physically and emotionally. We don’t talk enough about the physical effects grief can have, I think. Just last month, artist and author Marjane Satrapi died of a broken heart following the death of her husband. Many people experience physical symptoms as a result of grief, some temporary, others long-lasting. A friend of mine who had MS identified it having started when she had a particularly traumatic miscarriage and learned she would never be able to have biological children. The resulting pain brought on the MS, she always said, and then ultimately it was MS that killed her last year, when she went to Dignitas having reached a point where she just couldn’t cope with the aggressive nature of her symptoms any more. There are plenty of less fatal examples, too. People experiencing chest pains, migraines, functional neurological symptoms, all sorts of medical issues they’ve never had before. If we’re doing a straight reading of the movie, then as well as all the compounding losses, Sarah has also just climbed through a cave system and nearly died. She’s been exposed to all sorts of unknown bacteria, and undoubtedly swallowed some unidentified, semi-human blood. She’s been crushed by rocks, her muscles have been pushed to the limit, she’s trekked through dusty caverns filled with bones and water and previously-human mulch. What she’s breathed in during that time can’t have done her any favours. So Sarah has surely got to find herself with some weird physical symptoms. At least one mystery virus or bacterial infection, I’d imagine; definitely some aches and pains, probably a cracked rib or two. Once the adrenaline of dragging herself to safety wears off, she’ll be needing some proper medical attention. And she’s in a foreign country – she’s British and the caves are in the US – so she’ll have to deal with an unfamiliar and famously expensive medical system. In some ways, though, it might be psychologically helpful to her that her immediate medical care takes place before she flies home. It creates a separation, and hopefully arriving home will feel comforting; perhaps for the first time since her husband and daughter died. There will be a level of peace, at least in comparison to the caves and the hospital, but there will also be such a gaping emptiness. We don’t know if Sarah had some kind of corporate job alongside being a parent, but if she did, it wasn’t important enough to come up in the dialogue. She’s also just spent a bunch of time nearly dying in unending caverns and then recuperating in hospital, so by the time she comes home, she might not have a job to go back to. Given what we know about Sarah’s tendencies prior to meeting up with her friends, we can assume she’ll act similarly now that she has even more people to grieve. In my mind she’s in a gloomy house with big windows, the room lit with that particular shade of blue that tells us a scene is taking place at twilight. She’s wandering aimlessly around her stylish but now soulless home, occasionally picking up a photograph but putting it down before she properly looks at it. We discussed dissociation in the first episode, when we looked at Dani from Midsommar, and I think this is what Sarah will be doing now. A whole load of staring into space and not really being inside herself. She might even have some out-of-body experiences. She’ll definitely be hallucinating, since she was already doing that before. She will, in other words, be pretty haunted. Floating around her house like she too is a ghost, periodically invaded by the apparitions of the people she’s lost, still trying to come to terms with the death of her daughter but now also having lost all her friends, one of whom she had to kill. That’s gonna come back. Probably in her nightmares. She’ll wake up repeatedly drenched in sweat, sometimes remembering her horrible dreams, other times unable to recall what happened but feeling such a thick and dank dread that she’d almost rather deal with the horrible memories. The thing is, there’s not much for her anymore. She’s survived… for what? Now she’s just living with ghosts, and cosplaying as one of them. After a significant loss, people can of course pick up their lives and carry on, or change something and create a life that feels very different. But the level of loss Sarah has experienced, and the fact that (a) both incidents involved more than one loss and (b) both were particularly horrific in and of themselves, means that she’s unlikely to be able to do that, certainly not in the immediate aftermath. Which is where I think the concept of The Descent Part 2 actually makes sense. I don’t think it would be as quick as it’s portrayed in the second movie – a doctor is hardly going to allow an amnesiac patient to go clambering through a dangerous cave system a mere couple of days after she barely escaped it with her life – but I’d think that after a year, maybe even just a few months, Sarah might well feel like her only option is to go back to the caves again and try to bring her friends home, even though what she’ll be bringing back is only their remains. This works regardless of whether we read the film straight or see it as a metaphor: once again, she’s in a position where the only way out is through. So, a bit like in our first episode, this final girl doesn’t get a happy ending. The Descent Part 2 doesn’t give her one either: waking up with no memory of what happened, like I mentioned, she’s taken back to the caves by her doctor to see if they can find any of her friends down there alive. Once there, she runs off into the darkness and chaos ensues as the team are, of course, set upon by the creatures. Major spoiler warning: she doesn’t get out of the second film alive. She fights a solid fight and nearly makes it, but right at the end she screams, allowing the creatures to come for her so that one of the others has a fighting chance of escaping. Second spoiler warning: she doesn’t survive either. Which, unfortunately, also all makes sense, regardless of whether we’re looking at a movie or a metaphor. Of course logically, if the caves and the creatures are real, it’s pretty likely they’d eat her if they caught her. But even if it’s metaphorical, with a grief that huge…? Is it survivable? Yes. Is it easy to survive? Not at all. Plenty of people, faced with a level of grief that shatters the foundations of their world, won’t make it through. As far as we could tell, prior to the events of the first film, Sarah’s primary focus in life was parenting her child. Another important aspect was her adventures with her friends, where she got to let her hair down and feel the adrenaline rush of being in nature and recognising her place as a mere measly human. Now both of those are gone. So is her husband, so there isn’t even anyone to rebuild with. She could start again completely from scratch: make new friends, find a job, move to a new place, in time maybe even find a partner and start a new family. But it’s entirely understandable if what that would ask of her is just too much. She’s already lost everything. What’s the point of carrying on now? This has been kind of a depressing episode, I know. But that’s the thing about being a final girl: life doesn’t tend to come up roses afterwards. Some of us survive and carry on, like Cecilia from last week’s episode, but we’re forever changed. I’m in a wheelchair. I have lasting injuries in places you’d rather not even think about. Even before my disabilities had gotten to the stage they’re at now, I was severely affected in that I was a chronic workaholic. I’d have multiple jobs at any given time, working day shifts followed by evening shifts followed by nights and weekend shifts, because it felt better than feeling the aftereffects of trauma. When I was 37 I added up all the hours I’d worked in my life and discovered that if I’d worked each of my jobs one after the other like a normal person rather than several of them simultaneously, I would have done 45 years of work. No wonder I’m broken. My body assuming it’s, like, 65 and requires retirement now is in fact no surprise. Other people cope in different ways. It’s pretty common for survivors of The Horrors to become alcoholics; to turn to drugs; or, yes, to die by suicide. Which is part of the point of this podcast. Yes, final girls are badass. Yes, we’ve fought harder than most people can even conceive of. But. We. Are. Tired. And if you’ve been through a final girl’s level of horror and you’re still alive, please take a moment to appreciate just how hard that has been and congratulate yourself on still being here. Most people won’t ever understand how remarkable that is, and how many final girls, like Sarah, ultimately don’t survive. The Descent was directed by Neil Marshall and came out in 2005. The Descent Part 2 was directed by Jon Harris and came out in 2009. Our final girl Sarah was played iconically by Shauna Macdonald. You can follow the podcast on Instagram at that final girl life, or support us on patreon dot com slash that final girl life. The free tier gets you two episodes per month, the paid tier gets you four. If you have any suggestions for future episodes, you can email them to that final girl life at gmail dot com. Thank you for listening. And until next time, remember: the horrors persist… but so do we.

12. 

    28 Jun 2026

    E2 Cecilia from The Invisible Man (2020)

    Resources used: Articles US National Library of Medicine: Domestic Violence (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK499891/) Novara Media: 'US police are using AI surveillance cameras to stalk partners and exes' (https://novaramedia.com/2026/06/16/us-police-are-using-ai-surveillance-cameras-to-stalk-partners-and-exes/) Sky News: ''Urgent' probe into patient data access after 40 staff opened files on boy attacked by crocodile' (https://news.sky.com/story/hospital-probe-into-why-40-people-accessed-file-of-boy-attacked-by-crocodile-13557792) The Telegraph: 'Police officer asked for sex video of female suspect "to show the lads"' (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/26/police-officer-sex-video-female-suspect-abuse-cambs/) The Guardian: ''Demand has increased, without a doubt': The shocking rise of personal protection dogs' (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/feb/04/demand-has-increased-without-a-doubt-the-shocking-rise-of-personal-protection-dogs) Studies Alfandari, Taylor & Scott (2024) 'Risk factors for violence in adult heterosexual noncasual relationships: An overview of reviews' (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15248380241306065#table-fn5-15248380241306065) Trauma, Violence & Abuse 27(1) Fereidooni, Daniels & Lommen (2023) 'Childhood maltreatment and revictimization: A systematic literature review' (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15248380221150475) Trauma, Violence & Abuse 25(1) Keliholtz, Spencer & Stith (2022) 'Common life stressors as risk markers for intimate partner violence: A meta-analysis' (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10591-022-09633-w#Sec22) Contemporary Family Therapy 45:349-359 Spencer, Stith & Cafferky (2019) 'Risk markers for physical intimate partner violence victimization: A meta-analysis' (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359178917304238#s0020) Aggression and Violence Behaviour 44:8-17 Testa, VanZile-Tamsen & Livingston (2007) 'Prospective prediction of women's sexual victimization by intimate and nonintimate male partners' (https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2007-00916-006.pdf?auth_token=806aa31c09b8f2294ee1f9b2bfe7336c412c0fce) Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 75(1):52-60 Thorsander (2022) 'Victim Company: The relationship between women and dogs in intimate partner violence situations' (https://gupea.ub.gu.se/server/api/core/bitstreams/dd9d06eb-7b7a-4a9a-927f-b48c84fa23aa/content) Master's thesis in Sociology, submitted to the University of Gothenberg. Available online. Zhang et al. (2025) 'Childhood maltreatment and its long-term psychosocial outcomes: An umbrella review of meta-analyses' (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15248380251388134) Trauma, Violence & Abuse 0(0):OnlineFirst About That Final Girl Life: You can keep up with the podcast on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/cw/thatfinalgirllife), or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the pod on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife (https://www.instagram.com/thatfinalgirllife), or email thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com (mailto:thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com) if you want to say hello. Script: Haters and gentlefriends, hello and welcome to That Final Girl Life. It’s your new favourite final girl here, taking you through The Horrors and out the other side to find out what life is really like after the movie ends. I can’t believe I need to say this, but apparently it’s a whole thing now: I am an actual real live human being, not an AI. I physically write all my scripts. I watch the movies at least twice before I do an episode on them. Any resources I use, like other people’s articles which I’ve found helpful, will be in the show notes. In this episode we’ll be discussing the incredibly tense psychological sci-fi horror, The Invisible Man, and its badass final girl, Cecilia. Please be aware that there will be spoilers throughout the episode. If you haven’t seen The Invisible Man and you don’t want to know what happens before you do, this is your warning. I found the opening scene much less impactful watching it the second time when I knew what was going to happen, so I’d recommend watching it before listening. In this episode I’ll be talking about domestic violence, people not believing victims, psychosis, misogyny, the fear of going mad, and of course, PTSD. Ready? Settle down somewhere cozy and don’t forget to surround yourself with coffee grounds, flour or paint so you can check you’re definitely alone while we’re discussing… The Invisible Man. Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there He wasn’t there again today, I wish, I wish, he’d go away! This is Antigonish by Hughes Mearns, written in 1899 about a ghost haunting the stairwell of a house in Nova Scotia. Before I knew it was a ghost poem, I assumed it was about trauma: how the people from our past can haunt us even though they’re no longer physically present. I suppose that’s kind of what a ghost is. Antigonish sums up a lot of the plot of The Invisible Man; certainly the first half before the audience comes to realise what is actually going on. Watching it for the second time in preparation for this podcast, I found I had to cast my mind back to my first watch, trying to remember how it had felt, because it’s very much a movie that relies on building tension in a can’t-quite-tell-what’s-happening sort of way. The film opens with a view of a house on a cliffside near the ocean. It’s beautiful and haunting before we even get inside. But then we see the bedroom, and the tension immediately rockets up. Our final girl Cecilia, played by Elizabeth Moss, a person endowed with brilliant acting skills and questionable politics, is lying awake in bed next to a man. She proceeds to get up, go downstairs, get dressed and leave the house, saying goodbye to her dog Zeus on the way. So far, so normal, right? Oh, but it isn’t. I felt this scene right down in my core. If you’ve lived in a physically abusive household you will experience that abject terror you feel any time you try to do something that might get you killed. The way she moves through the house, the way she looks at her phone, the spike of fear when the car alarm goes off… honestly, if you know what that feels like in real life, you might find you don’t seem to be breathing by the end of the scene. So we’re immediately set up with the concept that Cecilia is running from her abusive husband, a theory that gets confirmed when she jumps in her sister’s car – a ride she has obviously pre-arranged – and her husband bursts from the trees and rages at the window, screaming and banging it so hard that it breaks. Cecilia gets away. She’s still pretty shaken. So are we. She goes to stay with her friend James, who happens to be a police officer, which in this instance is probably not a bad shout. James is a single father to his adorable teenage daughter Sidney, who wants to go to fashion school. We see that Cecilia is terrified to go outside. Even though her husband doesn’t know James, she’s scared he’ll find out where she’s staying. But James gradually coaxes her to get as far as the end of the driveway before she races back indoors, gasping for breath. Then her sister Emily turns up with some shocking news: Adrian, Cecilia’s abusive husband, is died. He has died by suicide in his beautiful mansion and has left her five million dollars, subject to her not committing any crimes and remaining of sound mind. The will’s executor is Adrian’s brother Tom, who isn’t the warmest person by any means, but seems to be somewhat on Cecilia’s side. Adrian was a brilliant inventor specialising in optics, and he had a lot of money, some of which is now offered to Cecilia. Cecilia accepts the money – who wouldn’t – and life goes on. She creates a college fund for Sidney, who is over the moon. But Cecilia is still feeling ill at ease. This makes sense: she’s been through a horrible time with her husband, and now he’s died, hinting that her leaving is the reason for his suicide. Even though she knows he’s dead, it’s hard for Cecilia to shake the feeling that he’s still watching her. This is the brilliance of this film. It could end up going any number of different ways. I remember the first time I watched it, getting to this point and thinking that I wasn’t sure if this was a descent into madness story, a ghost story, or something else entirely. I try to go into films knowing as little about them as possible, because I like my reactions to be entirely my own. It’s been hellish not being able to get to the cinema to see Obsession or Backrooms this year, because avoiding spoilers is SO HARD. But back to Cecilia. In the middle of the night we see her sleeping, and then the duvet being rapidly pulled off her. We see flashes of light, as if from a camera. Cecilia wakes up and stares at a scary shadowy figure at the end of the bed, which we soon learn is just a mannequin for Sidney’s fashion projects. Cecilia gets out of bed and finds the duvet on the floor. Picking it up, she stares at an armchair as if she believes someone is sitting in it. She throws the duvet over the chair, but it settles normally, and we can see her berate herself internally for being afraid of nothing at all. She picks up the end of the duvet and pulls it back to bed with her… except that it stops. It’s caught on… nothing. But there are visible depressions in the duvet on the floor where we can see someone’s footprints. In other words, someone invisible seems to be standing on the duvet. Cecilia screams. Sidney, who had been sleeping in bed beside her, wakes up. James rushes into the room, turns on the light, and checks the whole house. No one is there. “Adrian will haunt you if you let him,” he tells Cecilia. “Don’t let him.” The next day her job interview is ruined when she opens her portfolio and discovers it is empty. This, combined with the events of last night, freaks her out so much that she passes out in front of the interviewer. A trip to hospital and some blood tests reveal that Cecilia had a large amount of diazepam in her system, which is confusing because she doesn’t take them. Later on, Cecilia learns that this isn’t the only surprise: Adrian had also tampered with her birth control and managed to get her pregnant. No wonder he’s so desperate to get her back under his control: she is carrying his child. We cut to a scene in a boardroom. Cecilia and James sit on one side of the table, Adrian’s brother Tom on the other. James evidently doesn’t know why Cecilia wanted to talk to Tom, but he’s there for moral support regardless. As Cecilia begins talking, though, James looks more and more concerned. Cecilia is telling Tom that Adrian has found a way to make himself invisible and is stalking her. Tom, in a first proper moment of apparent empathy, tells Cecilia that Adrian was controlling and awful to him as well. He was relieved by his brother’s death, he admits to her. Echoing James’ earlier sentiment, he tells Cecilia not to let Adrian win by bringing him back to life. Increasingly desperate for someone to believe her, Cecilia goes to see her sister Emily. But Emily won’t let her in. She’s furious with Cecilia because of the email she received from her that morning, calling her ‘suffocating’ and cutting her off. Cecilia desperately tries to explain that it was Adrian who sent the email, but Emily closes the door in her face, telling her to go get psychiatric help. Disbelieved by everyone, Cecilia curls up in the foetal position once she’s back in James’ house and cries in abject despair. She has nowhere left to turn, she feels, and no one will believe her. Sidney finds her and suggests a girls’ night in to cheer her up. Cecilia smiles, but as she goes to stand up, Sidney is hit – hard – by a blow to the side of her head and knocked to the ground. James races in to see what is going on, at which point Sidney says Cecilia hit her, and Cecilia says it was Adrian. We can see James regretting his decision to bring this mad woman into his house. He tells her she has to go, but in the meantime, he and Sidney leave the house. Cecilia, left alone with only the invisible Adrian still there, sits against a wall holding a large kitchen knife. She’s spilled coffee grounds all around her so that she will know if Adrian comes towards her. After a while she has an idea, and calls his phone. It rings above her head. That classic horror film location, second only to the basement: it’s in the attic. Cecilia goes up there, where she finds the phone along with a set of keys, photos of her and Sidney asleep in bed, and her portfolio which was missing when she went to the interview. The phone buzzes: ‘SURPRISE’ it says. Racing back to the hatch, she throws white paint in front of her and Adrian’s outline appears in the hole. This was the moment, watching it the first time, when I realised she was telling the truth. I suppose we could still have been seeing a hallucination, but the next scene confirmed that Adrian was actually there, because he beats her up in the kitchen. Elizabeth Moss (and presumably also her stunt double) does some fantastic acting in this scene. She manages to get away and asks Emily to meet her in a restaurant. She wants to speak somewhere public, she says. Emily agrees. This was, for me, the most shocking scene in the entire movie. Cecilia is visibly not OK; Emily is visibly stressed but willing to hear her out. Just as Cecilia is about to tell her what Adrian is doing – she has learned that he’s built an invisibility suit and is wearing it to attack her – a knife floats next to Cecilia then swiftly races across to Emily, slitting her throat, and then ends up in Cecilia’s hand almost before we know what’s happened. Obviously, everyone in the restaurant thinks she’s killed her sister. What’s the alternative? An invisible man did it and framed you? Of course the police are called, and they take her to a secure mental facility, aka a psych ward. She tries to tell them that Adrian is still in the room with them. Predictably, they don’t believe her. Eventually she manages to escape, but Adrian is close behind her, killing baffled security staff as he goes. Cecilia steals a car and races to James’ house, which Adrian has beaten her to, and has attacked both Sidney and James. Cecilia saves the day by spraying a fire extinguisher to illuminate Adrian and then shooting him several times. But when she and James peel off the mask, they find it is Tom behind it. This of course makes James, along with pretty much everyone else, believe that Tom was the invisible man the whole time. But Cecilia knows better. She calls Adrian, who has been found alive, tied up in his basement apparently by Tom. He wants her back, he tells her, and so she suggests dinner. Cecilia goes to Adrian’s house and asks him to just admit to her what he has done. Adrian refuses. Cecilia, of course, is wearing a wire, on the other end of which sits James in a car nearby. Saying she’s going to freshen up, Cecilia leaves the room. A few minutes later we see Adrian slit his own throat, still sitting at the dinner table. His arm moves jerkily, as if he’s not in full control. Moments after that, Cecilia enters the room and begins crying and screaming. She dials 911 and tells them Adrian has killed himself. James leaves the car and races towards the house, running into Cecilia on the way. She smiles as she tells him that it’s all OK now. Glancing into her bag, we see along with James the invisibility suit she has taken from the house. Well, she’s survived. And she has, as they say, “neutralised” the threat herself, so she knows he’s not coming back. She’s been vindicated. The good thing about this, other than that she’s no longer in danger, is that she knows she can trust herself and her instincts. The bad thing is that she’s been repeatedly taught, via this experience, that she can’t trust anyone else, even people who genuinely have her best interests at heart, like James. She’s also learned that she’s no one’s top priority; she might have been Emily’s, if they’d been able to mend that relationship, but Emily is dead. She’s high on James’ list, for sure, but Sidney – completely appropriately – will always come first. So she knows she ultimately only has herself to rely on. She has to be her own safety net. Luckily, she has a ton of money and an invisibility suit. So we can assume finances aren’t an issue. But a lot of other things probably will be. So, where does she end up? First we have the question of the pregnancy. It’s not very far along, and I’m pretty sure she’d decide to have an abortion, given that she didn’t want to be pregnant in the first place. I think the main things that will continue to haunt Cecilia and have an impact on her life will be to do with her relationships with other people, especially but not exclusively when it comes to romance. This will be familiar to anyone who’s survived a similarly life-threatening relationship: it can be hard to open yourself up in that way again. People will try to be helpful and say things like “It’s OK, they’re not all like that, of course they love you for who you are” and so on, but if they haven’t been in that situation, then they just don’t know what it’s like to try to trust someone again. Not only that, but even the logic of trusting again doesn’t make sense after something like this has happened. Cecilia is a smart, strong woman who is more than capable of taking drastic action where necessary, as shown by her actions at the very end of the movie. It’s one of the reasons why The Invisible Man is one of my favourite films: it shows that it doesn’t matter how clever or capable you are, there are times when we can all end up in situations where we are at risk, and societal factors make some of us less believable than others. Having said that, there are certain populations who are more likely to end up in abusive relationships than others. These include, among others, people who have been abused as children; people who suffer from depression or PTSD; people with anxious or avoidant attachment styles; and people who don’t have much of a social support network. We don’t know much about Cecilia’s background, other than that her relationship with her sister has always been a bit thorny. The fact that she’s ended up in a violent relationship in adulthood points towards some possible abuse in childhood – there are lots of studies linking child abuse with adult revictimization. Interestingly, and counter to what many people expect, this includes all types of abuse pretty much equally, including emotional abuse and neglect, not just sexual or physical abuse. We don’t know whether she suffers from depression, but she will certainly have some post-traumatic stress symptoms after the experiences she’s just had. This is why some people disagree with the ‘D’ in PTSD: it stands for ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ and yet ‘disorder’ seems to imply that it shouldn’t be happening, whereas being traumatised by a traumatic event is… logical. Again, we don’t know Cecilia’s original attachment style, but a lot of psychologists these days believe that attachment styles can shift throughout life, with or without direct intervention. Attachment styles refer to how you learned to be in relationships with others when you were very very young; the theory goes that your first ever attachments, probably but not necessarily within your family of origin, will have a lasting impact on how you are in relationships. I always used to hate the attachment theory days in the various psychology and psychotherapy courses I’ve done, because they seemed so fatalistic. But as more research comes out, people are understanding that humans – even adult humans – are more neurologically changeable than we thought, which means there’s arguably more of a chance to change your original way of relating than the people who first came up with attachment theory might have expected. In Cecilia’s case, this might work against her: regardless of her initial attachment style, she’s just come out of a relationship where she absolutely couldn’t trust her partner, and not only that but even the people around her who loved her – Emily, James, Sidney – can’t be trusted to believe her and always have her back, either. Which brings us to the social support system: she doesn’t really have one. She has James and Sidney, of course, and I imagine James will be doing everything he can to continue supporting Cecilia. But the events with Adrian will have driven a bit of a wedge between them, and even if this is still a good relationship, it’s probably not one that Cecilia fully trusts. The strongest risk factor for intimate partner violence, unfortunately, is previous relationship violence. This includes not just physical violence but also emotional victimization by an intimate partner. Unfortunately, Cecilia has experienced a lot of both. Like I said before, Cecilia is smart, and she’s smart in the intellectual sense as well as being intuitive. I can imagine her having heard some of these statistics before, and then looking up things like rates of revictimization, and deciding to stay single. Reading some of the research that’s out there, she might decide that she can still have a fun sex life even without the intimacy part, as long as she stays in control; violence from people you’re not in an ongoing relationship is much more likely to happen if there’s alcohol or drugs involved. Of course this doesn’t mean violence never happens when you’re sober during casual sexual encounters, nor does it excuse perpetrators attacking people who are too drunk or high to either consent or fight back. But it does demonstrate specific risk factors, and I can see Cecilia weighing all of this up in her mind, deciding to stay on her own, but allowing a certain degree of sexual satisfaction into her life, as long as nobody gets too close to her. Of course she’ll also have her fantastic guard dog Zeus. Over the last decade there’s been a marked increase in people, especially women, getting dogs for protection. Unfortunately it’s an unregulated industry, and the lack of training a lot of these dogs have, coupled with being bred for aggression or assertiveness, has meant that there’s also been an increase in dog attacks. Zeus, by all accounts, seems to be a wonderful dog, and given that he was presumably bought by Adrian, he’s probably a fully trained guard dog rather than a randomly-acquired pup. So Cecilia has her home sorted – she’s rich enough to buy one – her sex life is OK, and she has ongoing companionship in the form of her doberman. Unlike our final girl from the previous episode, I reckon Cecilia will probably be doing alright in life overall. She has enough money to tide her over, and let’s not forget the invisibility suit which she can whip out if need be. What a useful thing to have on hand! I doubt she’d be satisfied with a life of leisure, and she seemed pretty passionate in her job interview before it all unravelled because of Adrian’s actions. She’s probably joined an architecture firm and negotiated the setup she wants. So life’s pretty kushti overall for our final girl, right? Sure. But there will still be certain things that might get to her. And this is what makes Cecilia a great example of exactly the kind of final girl I started this podcast to talk about: capable, strong, confident, assertive… but still affected in an ongoing way by her experiences. The number one thing it will have affected, probably, is her relationships. We’ve talked a bit about that in terms of sex and romance, and also the specific relationship with her friend James. But friendships and even casual acquaintanceships in general are going to be a challenge too. Let’s recap Cecilia’s relational experiences throughout the course of the film to find out more. Cecilia knows exactly how far a controlling man will go to get what he wants. She also understands that people will misuse things they’re working on for their own ends, something a lot of people seem surprised by, which always annoys me. As a survivor of The Horrors, I often find non-perpetrators’ shocked outrage almost as annoying as the acts of the perpetrators themselves, not least because often, victims will try to tell people something is happening to them; people disbelieve them because they don’t think it happens, or don’t believe it happens often, or don’t believe it happens “to people like them,” and then when it comes out that the terrible things have in fact been done, they get to act all shocked and surprised. It drives me fucking insane. Some recent examples of this kind of outrage include: a study conducted by the Institute for Justice, a non-profit organisation in the US, which showed that police officers are using tracking technology to stalk current and ex-partners; an NHS probe into the number of presumed unauthorised people accessing the files of the little boy who was attacked by crocodiles recently in a UK zoo; a general investigation by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, showing that police officers frequently misuse their powers for sexual purposes; a police officer attempting to access a sexual video of someone from a live investigation, and I quote, “to show the lads” on WhatsApp. And those are just a few examples from the past month. Cecilia has learned in the hardest possible way that people will not believe just how bad other people can be. It shatters their idea of upper-middle-class respectability to think that a rich man – a scientist, at that – might go to such lengths to abuse his wife. She’s also experienced people underestimating her lack of safety; even James did this, when the perpetrator was in his own child’s bedroom. Now admittedly, an invisible perpetrator does sound like a stretch, but actually in the context of the world of the movie, it isn’t. And I went to a talk about fifteen years ago in which a physicist spoke about how optics are advancing to be able to create invisibility cloaks, so who knows? They were talking about military uses, naturally, but still; Adrian’s invisibility isn’t completely outside of all possible bounds. She’s also been told, over and over again, that she shouldn’t trust her own mind. The great thing about Cecilia, in my opinion, is that she’s never listened to this. Even right at the very end, when James is still unsure whether it was Adrian or Tom who was behind the whole thing, Cecilia backs herself. I love that for her. I just wish it wasn’t necessary. Examples of this include James’ statement: “Adrian will haunt you if you let him. Don’t let him.” Tom’s statement: “Don’t let him win by bringing him back to life.” And Cecilia herself says it, too: “This is what he does. He makes me feel like I’m the crazy one.” Even in the final showdown, Adrian is demonstrating this very dynamic when he talks about how she needs him to keep herself together. She cries and goes along with it, because that’s the only option open to you when you’re faced with that level of barefaced controlling narcissism, but even when directly exposed to the cause of her current trauma, she manages to keep that kernel of self-belief which is so necessary if you’re going to survive something like this and thrive later on. But even though Cecilia backs herself, and will presumably continue doing so, she’s become used to other people not backing her. She’ll probably become quite closed-off to other people, cagey about all sorts of things, for reasons they won’t understand. I remember, during the only corporate job I had, being constantly teased for my enigmatic responses to the most basic of questions. But they didn’t understand what they were asking. I wrote a song about this once: when someone says “How was your weekend?” but your weekend involved some kind of horrendous retraumatisation event involving reporting a parent for child trafficking whilst simultaneously trying to save them from a drug overdose. Sometimes you just don’t want to go into that. So you lie and say it was fine, but then you get cagey when people press for details. I’ve had colleagues get properly annoyed with me for this. So if you know someone who’s a bit weird about giving details, please bear in mind that it might not just be some weird irritating quirk. They might have some really complicated shit going down which they just can’t bear to talk about, and which isn’t any of your business anyway. I can hear you thinking “OK, but what’s the likelihood that Anya from the marketing department is being stalked by an invisible presence, or Spencer in the dev team spent their weekend giving statements to the police about a family member’s drug ring?” And that is LITERALLY MY WHOLE POINT: the likelihood is pretty high. Not necessarily of those things specifically, of course, but that something weird is going on, and that that something might be horrific and involve other people and complex relationships? Really high, actually. The number of clients I’ve spoken to who have felt so alone in these kinds of conversations at work indicates to me that there’s probably at least one other person in their respective companies or departments who understands; something I’ve said to them, at times. (An amusing example of this from my own life was when I was talking to a new acquaintance at a business dinner, and when she asked “What do your parents do?” I decided I was too exhausted – and, to be honest, slightly too drunk – to lie or be cagey, so instead I just replied with “My dad’s a career criminal and my mother’s in a cult.” To which she, to my amused surprise, replied “omg SAME!” But that’s a story for another time.) So. Cecilia’s doing OK, her life is pretty good overall, but relationships are a challenge. Well, OK. We can live with that, right? Sure. Will there be other, perhaps less obvious, things that affect her day to day? Almost certainly. People talk a lot about ‘triggers’ these days. There are trigger warnings on lots of things: books, films, podcasts; I gave some content notes at the top of this episode, so that people could choose whether or not to engage. However, the meaning of the word ‘trigger’ has changed and softened over time. Originally it was always directly related to post-traumatic stress, and meant something that would trigger a serious psychological or physiological response, such as a flashback, which again is so much more than just remembering a difficult time, but rather a feeling of actually being back there. The best way to get people to understand the difference is often by using the example of war trauma. Most people understand, for example, that a soldier who fought in Vietnam and was forever changed by the experience might have a problem if someone unexpectedly let off some random fireworks. We understand that what’s happening is not simply an unpleasant memory surfacing, but an entire embodied reaction. Depending on the person, that may be more or less obvious, but regardless it will have a very real, very lasting impact. Of course, like we’ve already been talking about, war isn’t the only source of this kind of life-altering trauma. Living under the constant threat of extreme violence can do that to you, too. So can things like childhood abuse; surviving a natural disaster; sudden and extreme loss. A trigger is not something that makes you feel upset or uncomfortable. It is something that provokes an embodied response which returns you to a traumatised state. It is horrible and difficult to avoid, because a lot of the time people’s actual triggers aren’t only the obvious things, like someone looking like they’re about to punch them, but subtle things that were present in the environment at the time, too. A way to understand this even if you haven’t experienced this kind of trauma is to think about scent memory. Have you ever been somewhere where you’ve suddenly encountered a particular scent, and it’s taken you straight back to another time in your life? A benign example from my own life is that when I was a teenager, one of my friends always used a particularly fragrant brand of shampoo. A couple of years ago I ran out of my usual shampoo and just grabbed the first thing I saw in the supermarket, which happened to be the same one she used to use. When I put it on my hair in the shower I felt really weird: nice, but weird, because it was like she was suddenly there with me. These kinds of evocative memories can be pleasant, like remembering my friend; or sad, if they remind you of a difficult time or of someone who’s died. But they can also be triggers in the literal retraumatising sense, and Cecilia’s recent experience is ripe for those. What kinds of things might trigger her? A non-exhaustive list I made during the film includes: sitting with her back to a window heavy rain bending down to pick up something when she’s standing next to her car being locked in anywhere, and/or someone else having keys to her home the specific creak of a floorboard that sounds like the one Adrian stood on in Sidney’s bedroom when he was invisible making breakfast, particularly the same breakfast she was making when Adrian tried to set the kitchen on fire needing to go into the attic for any reason text messages, or a phone buzzing HOSPITALS If you look through the script that accompanies this recording, you’ll see that I’ve put that final one in capital letters. HOSPITALS. Because medical trauma is a real thing. If you’ve never been inside a psych ward, congratulations. If you have – even as a visitor – you’ll know that on the whole, they’re not happy places. If you have a history of trauma which shows up on your medical record, you unfortunately might also be aware that some doctors will treat you like you’re crazy even if you go to see them for something purely physical. And by “crazy” I mean the societally-understood sense of the word, which includes things like incapable of understanding what’s going on around you, combined with being kind of stupid. Neither of which is actually true of people who have mental health problems; even people who live with episodes of psychosis are often smart, capable human beings a lot of the time. It’s yet another way people draw barriers to make themselves feel safe: by labelling certain people as “crazy” and then defining “crazy” as “less-than,” “non-crazy” people can then tell themselves they’re definitely fine and basically immune to anything bad ever happening. Which is bullshit, of course. But it’s very tempting bullshit. Cecilia’s psych ward admission will be on her medical file. So will her prior hospital visit in which she was found to have high levels of diazepam in her blood. If she’s particularly unlucky, the person who called her to tell her that might also have noted down that Cecilia seemed unaware of that diazepam. She might have incurred a diagnosis of PTSD, if she’s been seen since surviving the end of the film; or of depression from while she was still with Adrian. All of these things can lead to doctors not taking you seriously. “But she’s justified!” I hear you cry. “She wasn’t psychotic! It was proven to be an invisible person by the end of the movie!” Yeah, I know. But – and I’m speaking from a UK NHS context experience here, but I’d assume it’s similar in the US and elsewhere – when a medic accesses a patient’s chart, they’re not going to read through reams and reams of pages. They’re probably going to look at the bit right at the top, which says something like “Current medications and conditions,” followed by “Significant history.” That’s there to tell them, for example, that this person has a surgical plate in their body and therefore can’t have an MRI scan. But it’s rarely properly up to date, especially in complicated circumstances like Cecilia’s, and that means that someone accessing her file might just see something like: Kass, Cecilia Depression PTSD History of inpatient psychiatric treatment Resistant to treatment Recent abortion at 8 weeks ?Psychosis ?Delusions Looking at that, a medical professional might not take Cecilia seriously when she comes in with, for example, symptoms of perimenopause; a weird mark or changing mole on her skin; persistent pain in one or more parts of her body… basically, anything she presents with might now be viewed as “all in her mind” because her trauma history is up front for all to see. Of course, she might get a really good doctor who actually takes her seriously, bothers to look at her notes, and sends her for treatment. But even so, it’s probably going to be difficult for her to navigate medical appointments, especially in a hospital setting. Having been incarcerated in a psych ward for no good reason, Cecilia might have a pretty strong reaction to having to go into a hospital at all. Plenty of people who have been there for the death of a loved one hate the smell of hospitals and the specific look the rooms and corridors have, let alone people who have been locked up there involuntarily. During her psych ward stay, Cecilia was violently restrained by staff and injected with a sedative. She might therefore find it difficult to lie down and relax if she goes for an ECG, where someone looms over you and sticks wires all over your body; or to put her feet in stirrups for a gynae exam, which reduces her control; not to mention the reaction she might suddenly start having to being given injections. If you’re interested in how medical and domestic trauma intersect, I talk a lot about it from my own experiences on my Substack, a link to which you can find in the show notes. For now suffice it to say that Cecilia’s medical life is unlikely to be easy, and this might ironically end up working against her even more, in that she’s possibly going to stay away from doctors as much as possible, meaning that by the time she eventually does go to see one, the likelihood of her needing to go to hospital will probably be quite high. Overall, though, I’d say our final girl in this movie does OK in life, probably, but with certain caveats. And I’ve completely ignored the fact that the press would be all over this story if they got wind of it, and that would undoubtedly have had all sorts of effects of its own. Still, a more positive outcome than last time. But what do you think? The Invisible Man was directed by Leigh Whannell and came out in 2020. Our final girl Cecilia was played brilliantly by Elizabeth Moss. You can follow the podcast on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife (https://www.instagram.com/thatfinalgirllife), or send an email to thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com (mailto:thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com). Support us on patreon.com/thatfinalgirllife (https://patreon.com/thatfinalgirllife) : the free tier gets you two episodes per month, the paid tier gets you four. Thank you for listening. And until next time, remember: the horrors persist… but so do we.

13. 

    21 Jun 2026

    E1 Dani from Midsommar (2019)

    The inspirations I mention at the beginning are: The Final Girl Support Group (https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-final-girl-support-group-grady-hendrix/6726352) by Grady Hendrix The Final Girls: A Horror Film Podcast (https://pca.st/izs8bnlk) by Anna Bogutskaya Tell No One (https://pca.st/vhducblm) by Kendell Kamansky & Annie DeLoach During the episode I also mention Cariad Lloyd's Griefcast (https://pca.st/griefcast), which is no longer being updated but it has 10 seasons of back episodes to listen to. Resources used: I checked the origin of the word 'ardor' using Etymonline (https://www.etymonline.com/word/ardor). Find me elsewhere: You can keep up with the podcast on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/cw/thatfinalgirllife), or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the pod on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife (https://www.instagram.com/thatfinalgirllife), or email thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com (mailto:thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com) if you want to say hello. Script: Hello, and welcome to That Final Girl Life. It’s your new favourite final girl here, taking you through The Horrors and out the other side to find out what life is really like after the movie ends. I can’t believe I need to say this, but apparently it’s a whole thing now: I am an actual real live human being, not an AI. I physically write all my scripts. I watch the movies at least twice before I do an episode on them. Any resources I use, like other people’s articles which I’ve found helpful, will be in the show notes. Now that’s out the way… since this is the first episode, here’s a little bit about me. I call myself an IRL final girl because I have survived many of the horrible things shown in horror films. Somehow, I still enjoy watching them, mostly I think because I find them relatable and therefore oddly comforting. I managed to survive a childhood which involved being trafficked in two separate child sex rings whilst also being raised in a cult. Don’t worry, I won’t be talking about that on this podcast, but if you’re interested, I’ll share details of where else you can follow me later on. People often congratulate me for surviving and use words like ‘brave’ and ‘inspirational,’ especially now that my disabilities are more visible. And I am proud that I got out and managed to make a pretty good life for myself. But what most people don’t realise about us final girls is that for us, the horrors don’t end along with the initial events. I’m trained as a psychotherapist, and specialised in working with people who have survived childhood trauma. I also have a background in academic psychology, and I’m currently doing a PhD in philosophy which is partly about the uncanny and how it’s depicted in horror films. My thesis also looks at how the most difficult things that happen to us can give us interesting and different perspectives on life, something a lot of final girls have in common. So I’ll be taking us through a different horror movie in each episode, giving a brief synopsis, and then discussing what life might be like for the final girl from that story after the movie has ended. I’ll be using my training in psychology and psychotherapy, my experience as a therapist, and my research as a student of existential philosophy to inform what I’m saying. And, of course, I’ll be drawing on my own personal experiences, too. There won’t be any ads on here because I hate them. Before I begin this first episode, though, I’d like to shout out three things that inspired me to begin… beyond, y’know, my life history. I had the idea for this a couple of years ago but I wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested. Then I discovered The Final Girl Support Group, a novel by Grady Hendrix, and I heard it had been popular, so I thought that might mean there could be an audience for this podcast. I really liked the book, I recommend it. The Final Girls is a brilliant podcast hosted by film critic Anna Bogutskaya, discussing all horror films, not only those with final girls in. I loved her takes on everything and if you want to listen to someone who actually knows what they’re talking about film-wise, check it out. And finally, Tell No One is my favourite podcast of all time. It’s a true crime podcast – no, wait, don’t run away! It’s not awful! – it’s a true crime podcast hosted by bffs Kendell and Annie, who discuss all sorts of cases. The reason I like it is that, whilst they both have a brilliant sense of humour, that humour is never directed at the victims. And as a survivor of some of the things they cover on the show, I’ve found it really moving to listen to them talk about the perpetrators in really scathing ways. It heals something in me every time they call a serial rapist pathetic. So if you’re interested in true crime but you find a lot of the podcasts in that genre to be too insensitive to listen to, give Tell No One a try. I also mentioned to them that I was thinking of starting this podcast and they were really encouraging, which gave me the final push. So. Here we are. That’s my initial intro. This first episode is airing on the 2026 summer solstice, so of course we’re discussing Ari Aster’s visual masterpiece Midsommar and its flower-adorned final girl, Dani. Please be aware that there will be spoilers throughout the episode. If you haven’t seen Midsommar and you don’t know what happens yet, please watch it before listening to this. There’s one scene in particular that works so much better when it comes as a surprise… In this episode I’ll be talking about grief, bereavement by suicide, PTSD, bipolar disorder, mental illness stigma, controlling romantic relationships, cults, gang rape, and drugs. Ready? Have a sip of cooling marigold tea and get ready to dance your way into… Midsommar. We first meet Dani when we are rudely pulled out of a lovely folk song being sung over beautiful images of a frozen landscape by a telephone ringing sharply. We see two people in bed, then cut to Dani, who is worriedly calling her parents for the umpteenth time that evening. She’s had a message from her sister implying that she’s going to kill their parents and then herself. And then: radio silence. Dani is predictably freaked out. We then meet Dani’s boyfriend Christian and three of his friends, all of whom will be important to the story. There’s Josh the anthropology PhD student, played by the wonderful William Jackson Harper; Pelle the Swedish dude; and Mark, the resident dickhead. We learn that Christian’s friends don’t like Dani, and that he’s been planning to break up with her for a while now. Back to some more exposition about Dani’s sister, who has a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. For those unfamiliar, this is a type of recurring depression where people go through periods of having unusually high levels of energy and often engaging in risky or erratic behaviour, followed by periods of very low energy when they often are unable to engage with other people and spend a long time in bed. If you’ve seen people online criticising the use of the term ‘bed rotting,’ it’s because it’s seen as glorifying this latter type of depression. Because Dani’s sister has had these problems for a while, people have stopped taking her seriously, and they keep telling Dani not to respond to her sister’s urgent-sounding messages because it might “encourage her.” This is a real thing people say. However, one of the primary indicators that someone will one day die by suicide is if they have spoken about it many times before. Of course that doesn’t mean it’s your responsibility to step in and save them every time. But it does mean Dani is completely justified in her fear of what might happen. We get a bit more background on Dani and Christian’s relationship when it comes out that he’s agreed to go to Sweden with his friends for six weeks but hasn’t told her. The argument is interesting because she ends up apologising to him, even though I think most of us would agree that if you’re in a committed relationship, deciding to go away for over a month in two weeks’ time is the sort of thing you might be expected to tell your partner about first. Their dynamic, as shown by the argument, is not a healthy one. But the unhealthiness is subtle. Nobody is screaming or hitting anything. But there’s an undertone of everything being Dani’s fault, of her being somehow wrong for having frankly pretty normal needs and requirements of her partner. A short while later, Dani receives a phone call telling her that her sister has killed their parents and then herself. Understandably, she breaks down. Christian now feels that he can’t break up with her, and ends up inviting her to Sweden. Whilst Mark is very against this idea and Josh isn’t exactly thrilled about it either, Swedish friend Pelle, whose community they are going to visit, seems genuine when he tells her he’s pleased she’ll be coming with them. So off they all go to Sweden. It’s a long drive from the airport to the community. On the way, they stop off and take some mushrooms, and Dani has a bad trip during which she falls asleep and dreams about her parents and sister. She sleeps for a long time and wakes up the following day, still lying on the grass. Since it’s midsummer in Sweden, the sun has been out the whole time. The group walk to meet the community. An elder greets them. He says “welcome” to the boys, but “welcome home” to Dani. There are various ceremonial events: gifts, a meal, and so on. Mark is predictably a douchebag about the whole thing. Dani is of course deep in grief but still tries to go along with the customs. And then comes… That Scene. Oh my god. I watched this in a CINEMA. On a BIG SCREEN. A BIG SCREEN that showed the SPLATS. What splats, you ask? The splats the two 72-year-olds make when they jump to their death from a clifftop, landing right in front of the crowd of community members, as well as Dani and her group. The splats are GLORIOUS, you guys. Awful. Obviously. But SO WELL DONE. The man doesn’t quite die the first time so people have to manually splat him with a sledgehammer. Look, if you’re into gore, you will adore this scene. I’m not generally a fan, but Ari Aster can make anything look strangely beautiful. Including, apparently, half a face. Dani watches all of these events with a kind of traumatised stare, which I’ll talk about more later on. Other non-community-members around her, however, are reacting very differently: shouting, retching, yelling at the elders that this is disgusting. Dani walks off on her own after the ceremony. Understandably, she has been deeply affected by it. Pelle comes to find her and he talks about how he too lost his parents at a young age. He says the community could offer her a home; a family. The day after the ceremony, people start disappearing. First Simon, an English bloke who was there as the guest of another community member, and then his girlfriend Connie. Then Mark (good riddance, tbh) and Josh. Dani continues going along with the group’s rituals, at times visibly trying to hold herself together but mostly looking kind of numb. She bakes pies with the women, and the following day she is again sent off with the women of the group, but this time she is given some cooling marigold tea to drink, and then the dancing begins. Every year, we are helpfully informed by Pelle, a may queen is chosen from among the young women at the midsummer celebration. The may queen is chosen by means of a dance contest, in which all of them begin dancing, and whoever manages to dance the longest wins the title of may queen. Of course, Dani wins. Immediately she is surrounded by the community members. “Welcome home,” they tell her, “we love you.” The community holds a meal in Dani’s honour. She seems a little dazed – there was definitely something extra in that tea – but nowhere near as dazed as Christian, who can barely find his way to the table. An elder tells Dani that it is tradition for the may queen to go and bless the crops. “Can Christian come?” she asks. “Nej,” comes the reply. Dani goes and blesses the crops. That seems like quite a nice little ritual, maybe things will be ok now. Oh. Oh no. When they get back, Dani hears suspicious noises coming from one of the buildings. She goes to investigate, and through a crack in the door she sees Christian having sex with a woman, surrounded by many of the other women in the community. All of them are naked. As the audience, we know that Christian is being gang raped here: he has been drugged, and although he agreed to drink the tea and half-agreed to maybe have sex with Maja, the main girl who’s fucking him, he definitely did NOT sign up for this weird orgiastic ritual. Dani, understandably, cries and vomits at the sight of this. As the audience, we see Christian at the end of his ceremony frantically running away from the house, still fully naked. He attempts to shelter in a barn, where he finds the flayed body of Simon hanging from the ceiling, butterfly-style. Before he can properly react, he is found by some elders who drug him with some kind of nerve agent, rendering him paralysed. Now Dani, adorned in an array of genuinely beautiful flowers, sits in front of the gathered community. They must make offerings, they explain, and some have already been prepared. However, there is one final space to fill. Dani must choose: will Christian be sacrificed, or Torbjorn, a man selected at random from the crowd? Dani chooses Christian, who is then sewn into a bearskin. We watch as the community takes the sacrifices to a triangular yellow building. They place them against the walls lining the room, apart from Christian, whom they place on a bale of hay in the centre. Then they set it alight. As the sacrifices start to scream, so do the community members on the outside. Dani walks unsteadily up and down in her giant flower dress, retching and crying. She looks like a huge, beautiful slug. Finally she stops and turns to look at the yellow triangular house as it burns to the ground. As the camera zooms in on her face, she begins to smile. So. The movie has ended with Dani standing with the community. What might her life be like now? Well, that partly depends on what Dani decides to do. But there’s a bit of a problem with that, which is that Dani isn’t really in a place to make any big decisions. In the space of a month she’s lost her sister to suicide; her mother and father to parricide; and four of her acquaintances to murder by the very people she’s now staying with. She’s taken a lot of drugs, most of which she was unfamiliar with. She’s seen two people die by suicide in front of her, in a particularly gory fashion. And she’s watched as seven people – three alive, four dead – burn down to bone, one of whom is her now ex boyfriend who she personally sent to that fate. I say she’s ‘watched’; she’s also smelled it. You don’t forget the smell of burning human flesh and hair. All of which puts her in a place of extreme vulnerability. The likelihood, certainly in the short term at least, is that she stays with the community. Whether we can call this a ‘choice’ or not is up for debate. And that is how cults get you. While I was watching Pelle talking to Dani about wanting her to stay; about how he too had lost his parents; about how the community could offer her a home and a family; I had an uncomfortable feeling of familiarity. The cult I grew up in was nothing like the one in Midsommar. It was Christian rather than Pagan, and there was no ritual hurling of people off cliffs. However, there were efforts to recruit new members. There was even a weekly meeting in which we learned how to do this. One of the tactics was to look through the obituaries and then put literature through the doors of people whose loved ones had just died. We had booklets called things like “Will I ever see my dead loved ones again?” and “Resurrection: The hope for the future.” They contained invitations to the group’s ceremonies. A few days later, we would knock on their doors to see if they had received these booklets, act surprised when they told us they had recently lost someone, and say something like “It must be God’s will that I visited your house that day.” If you have lived in the very depths of grief, you will know just how devastating it is. When you lose someone close, especially if it is sudden or particularly horrific, the world disappears and you are left alone in the thick soup of no-more-them. If, like Dani, you were the only surviving member of your immediate family, then no one around you will properly be able to connect with your grief. And everyone grieves differently anyway; even if Dani had had another sibling, they might not have understood each other’s reactions. And life has this way of making things happen all at once. Dani didn’t only lose her family, which would have been awful enough to begin with; she was also in an unhealthy and difficult romantic relationship; and then… well, and then Sweden happened. Listening to Cariad Lloyd’s Griefcast a few years ago, I remember someone talking about how they had experienced three or four significant deaths in a row. Some people hadn’t even believed them, they said, and nobody else had known how to react. And that’s what happens when you go through the level of horror they could make a movie about. Some people just won’t believe that you’ve experienced what you’ve been through. Others believe it, maybe even were there for part of it, but as the horrors pile on, the people around you step away. Unless you’re near a bunch of cult members, who step closer. And once Dani had come out of the most acute period of grief – which I imagine would take quite some time, and might be further messed up by the various substances the cult seem to enjoy – she would find herself living in a community which she knows is willing to murder dissenters. And yet they would be being so lovely to her. They will have provided her with food, shelter… home and family, like Pelle offered her in the film. Stepping away from them now, the moment she no longer fully needs them, might feel like a betrayal. So Dani’s in the community, she’s been there for a while, but she’s starting to remember that there’s a life outside of all this. Whether this has taken months or years is anyone’s guess. And this assumes that she’s still single; that she hasn’t, for example, given birth to a child. During one of the meals in the film, a community member explains to Dani that the children are raised communally. If she does have a child, then leaving the community will be even harder, and might well mean leaving that child behind. Given the amount of sex that happens just during the nine days when the friends are there, I think it’s safe to assume that a child is likely. Let’s just give her the one baby, as a conservative estimate. Pregnancy, of course, brings its own challenges both physically and mentally. Probably this will compound Dani’s grief, reopening the wound of her losses and bringing to the surface any grief she thinks she’s already dealt with. The idea of becoming a parent often reminds people of their own parents; working with people who have been inadequately or abusively parented, I am always struck by how much pregnancy can bring up. Whilst we know nothing about how she was parented, certainly she will be thinking about her parents – probably especially her mother – during this time. We knew next to nothing about the sister, either, but as far as we could tell she had no children, so if her parents had still been alive, Dani’s baby would have been their first grandchild. All of this means that any healing Dani had already managed to do might slip backwards during her pregnancy. The pregnancy or birth, however, might spark a little rebellion in Dani. There’s nothing like realising you’re responsible for a tiny, helpless being to make you try to fix things. Perhaps she tries to run. The cult wouldn’t like that; and given her physical condition, as well as her desperation, she’s unlikely to succeed. So now Dani is stuck with the cult and a baby. And the cult members are not best pleased with her. She feels watched. Some time passes. How long will depend on all sorts of factors: Dani’s physical and mental health, how much access she has to her child, how much of a hold the cult has on her, and so on. Probably at some point, people will come looking for Christian, Josh and Mark. But cults are very good at keeping things covered up, and at exercising their religious rights in ways that allow them to conduct all sorts of awful activities that should get the whole lot of them thrown in prison. So back in the US, the three boy students are listed as missing. An assumption is probably made that some kind of accident happened; perhaps the cult even staged this. If so, they’re likely to have staged Dani’s death as well; and without any family to look for her, who’s going to bother? But our girl does have some backbone. She’s been through a lot and she’s still alive, after all. To date, her main defence has been intense dissociation: we can see that through the trauma stare she does in the cliff jump scene. The world warps around her and she can barely hear what is going on; simultaneously, she’s gripped by the awfulness she’s watching in front of her. Dissociation can be useful, but it can also lead us to stay in a situation that’s not good for us. Dissociation basically means being cut off from yourself, and it can take many different forms. If you’ve ever done anything difficult where you’ve gone “Just get through it, don’t think about what it feels like,” you’ve dissociated. It can be really helpful, for example if you’re running a marathon or dealing with an emergency. But in day-to-day situations it can lead to a lack of control over your own life, which is where Dani has now found herself. Speaking of dissociation, however, this might help Dani to get out and back to the US. Unfortunately, give the child-rearing style of the community, she’s probably going to have to leave her kid behind in order to do that. But given that she’s already watched her boyfriend be burned alive at her own command, I reckon she’s probably got it in her to ignore any feelings she might have about needing to run away without her child. She’d probably justify it to herself by telling herself she’d come back for them one day, although once she’s back in her old life I feel it’s more likely that she’d simply switch off those feelings and try to forget about the kid. Presumably her way back home will involve some kind of hitchhiking to the US embassy, and then some challenging conversations about where she’s been and where her friends are. We already know that Dani has a tendency to take the blame even when things aren’t her fault, and I can imagine her falling into a ‘fawning’ response to the people looking into her case and repeatedly apologising for the inconvenience, and probably crying a lot. This is interesting given that she’s been so dissociated for so long. But let’s remember that whilst in the cult, she’s rarely been directly challenged. Mostly she’s just been required to be docile and go along with things. And, of course, there are the various substances she’s ingested, which she’s probably had to try to decrease to give herself a chance of getting out. So by the time she arrives at the embassy, she’d be feeling very weird. Let’s say the embassy visit goes as smoothly as possible and they arrange Dani’s safe passage back to the US and allow her to move back into her parents’ house. She is, after all, a beautiful young white woman, so although she’s had a truly horrific time, there are certain barriers she won’t have to face on the way back home. So she’s back in the US, living in her parents’ old home. What does her life look like now? There isn’t really any discussion of their financial setup in the film, but Dani’s parents seem neither poor nor super rich. I’d imagine she’d have at least a little inheritance to tide her over, and let’s assume the mortgage has been paid off, just to make things easier for our final girl. Even given this leg-up, it might be difficult for her to manage. Let’s remember that she was still young when she ended up in the cult, and that at the time she was in the middle of finishing her thesis, which means she’d probably spent most of her life up to that point having someone else do a lot of the financial management of life for her. Stepping out of the bright Swedish sunshiney weirdness and back into her old Minnesotan life is bound to have some weird aftereffects. Interestingly, Minnesota apparently has the highest percentage of Swedish people living in the US, which maybe explains why the cult are so taken with Dani, and why the elder at the beginning says “welcome home.” Dani’s surname is Ardor, another clue that there is something predetermined about the events of the movie. Ardor describes a feeling of passion or ongoing excitement, but it comes from a word meaning ‘to burn’; the passion it describes is hot and filed with desire. It seems like no coincidence then that Dani’s boyfriend burns up in front of her while she smiles at the excitement she has perhaps found in the discovery of her fucked-up little cult family. Cults are great at making you feel at home in general, and even more so if you have some kind of historic relationship to them. Now that she’s back in Minnesota, in an empty house which is undoubtedly bringing up all her grief about her family again, she is probably second-guessing her decision to return. Does this even feel like home anymore? Probably not. Her friends might have thrown some kind of ill-fated welcome home party, but that will have been too much for Dani, who we know was already prone to anxiety and crying meltdowns before she even got to Sweden. Her old friends, even those who try to stick around for a while, will probably ultimately back away from the drama and leave her even more isolated. Understandable, but not great for our girl. In amongst all of this, she’ll be being questioned by the police about what the hell happened and where the others are. This will be bringing up all sorts of trauma responses and, given her lack of any support system and general fragility, she’s unlikely to be dealing with this robustly. Having someone asking you anything about your deepest traumas is difficult enough even if you’ve signed up for it, as anyone with PTSD who’s been through therapy will know. Having law enforcement agents repeatedly interrogate you about it can’t be easy at all. The only thing that might give her some degree of relief in this situation is her privilege: given that she’s young, white and pretty, some of the officers might be swayed to treat her more favourably because they’ve objectified her as some kind of sexy distressed waif. This comes with its own problems, however, not least the fact that she’s just escaped from a cult which is very obsessed with sex. That sort of thing often – NOT ALWAYS! – but often results in one of two possibilities: being turned off sex for ages, or becoming hypersexualised. I’m not sure Dani would fit into either of these perfectly, which makes sense because people aren’t data, but I can imagine her now-ingrained passivity might mean she ends up in situations that do her harm. I mean, just look at where she ended up when she went on holiday to Sweden. All of the things we’ve just spoken about will render Dani susceptible to pretty much anyone who wants to offer her the things she so sorely lacks: a feeling of belonging, of family, of homeliness. She has a house, of course, and I reckon she’d just stay living there rather than sell it and relocate; but she’s been isolated by death and trauma from the people she was once close to, and her time in the cult has made her forget how to interact normally with other humans. Not necessarily forget in the literal memory sense, but forget in the embodied sense of how to hold yourself, who speaks when, etc., which is governed by all kinds of strange social norms. Those norms can be difficult enough to navigate at the best of times, and this isn’t the best of times for Dani. In the cult, contravening social rules meant punishment, sometimes by death, and so whenever she does accidentally step on a toe, she probably ruminates and feels terrible about it for ages afterwards. What happens ultimately to Dani will of course depend on all sorts of things. Does Pelle come and try to find her? What about the elders? Does she willingly return to the cult, in the way so many people do, because it’s the closest thing to comfort she can find? Perhaps. If none of those things happen, then in my opinion Dani would be ripe for any kind of weird alternative bullshit that comes her way. Probably the first dodgy yoga-juice-cleanse-anti-vaxxer who shows up will be someone she’ll imprint on in relief, and follow them into the madness. Given her proclivity for going along with rituals she could end up in any kind of group, although I’d imagine she’d be most likely to go for something with pseudo-natural vibes, communal life, and vague but persistent spirituality. So: our girl leaves one cult, can’t cope with life, and joins another. Bleak? Yeah. Realistic? Also yeah. Is it possible her life could go another way? Sure. People escape terrible situations and build better lives all the time. But this is how I see Dani’s life most likely playing out given her history and the way she tends to respond to trauma. What do you think? Midsommar was directed by Ari Aster and came out in 2019. Our final girl Dani was played beautifully by Florence Pugh. You can follow the podcast on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife, or send an email to thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com (mailto:thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com). Thank you for listening. And until next time, remember: the horrors persist… but so do we.

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