The Final Girl Support Group

Lynnette sees that four other Final Girls showed up for group: Dani, Marilyn, Heather, and Julie. Heather is complaining to Dr. Carol that there are no snacks at the meeting. Adrienne isn’t there, and they assume it’s because of the killings at Camp Red Lake. Marilyn questions whether they need the group, as perhaps they should stop focusing on the past. 

Details about the women are revealed. Marilyn married a rich Republican politician. Julia, who uses a wheelchair, married her physiotherapist, and he stole all the money she’d made through the franchise of her story. Heather is snarky and recovering from addiction. Dani announces she’s planning to stop coming to group to be home with her wife Michelle who is dying from cancer.

Lynnette assumes they’ve kept group going for 16 years because they all assume Heather would fall apart without it, but Lynnette begins to cry at the thought of group ending—it provides her only contact with other people and gives her a reason to leave her apartment. However, when Lynnette mentions the need to stay together for Heather, the room grows uncomfortable. Julia says they kept going for Lynnette, not Heather. Heather piles on, accusing Lynnette: “You’re not even a real Final Girl” (19). Just then, Marilyn finally looks at her phone, which has been ringing, and learns that Adrienne is dead. Lynnette knows this means her monster got her, and any of them can be next.

The women leave group separately. Lynnette is on high alert again. She considers, “Men don’t have to pay attention the way we do. Men die because they make mistakes. Women? We die because we’re female” (24). She believes she can be killed any day just for being a woman.

Final Girls haven’t just survived one mass murder—they’ve also lived through their killers coming back a second time. When Adrienne was a counselor at Camp Red Lake, nine of her friends were murdered the night the counselors went to the camp early to prepare for the campers’ arrival. The killer had been Bruce Volker, the camp cook, who was out for revenge because 20 years earlier some counselors were having sex instead of watching his son Teddy, who drowned. Bruce claimed the killer was Teddy back from the dead, but the killings stopped when Adrienne beheaded Bruce. Later, it was determined that there was no son named Teddy. It was Bruce, a lonely sociopath and pedophile. On her bus ride home, Lynnette grieves Adrienne, who always had time for her. Lynnette’s apartment has a cage she designed and built for extra security:

“Each of us responded to our trauma differently. Dani became self-sufficient, Adrienne got into self-help, Marilyn married up and buried her head in the sand, Heather got high, Julia went activist. Me? I learned how to protect myself” (27).

She’s focused solely on staying alive, which she believes is due to her “willpower and self-control” (28). She greets her plant “Fine,” the one thing she cares for, gets her gun, and examines her apartment for intruders.

Adrienne’s story became the Summer Slaughter movie franchise. She got back the rights to the story, setting an important precedent for all the Final Girls. All the proceeds from the Summer Slaughter movies went to the Adrienne Butler Fund for the Prevention of Violence against Women. Adrienne turned Camp Red Lake into a retreat for survivors of violence. She was generous and protective of all the Final Girls.

Now, Adrienne was seemingly killed by Bruce Volker’s nephew Christophe, who was three when Adrienne killed his uncle. Christophe was angry that his family got no money from the movies that were partly about his family. He killed the staff at Camp Red Lake, and then went to Adrienne’s house, where he placed his uncle’s decapitated head in her refrigerator and killed her with an ice pick.

Someone knocks on Lynnette’s door. Lynnette is terrified, but then she sees that it’s Julia and she decides to ignore the door, angry that anyone knows where she lives. Later, there’s another knock. Lynnette sees that this time it’s Julia and the Ghost—the killer Julia escaped, whose story became the Stab movies. Lynnette knows she has to help Julia because of an unspoken agreement between the Final Girls to be there for each other when their monsters come back.

Lynnette shoots at the Ghost, but Julia reveals that in the Ghost costume is actually journalist Russell Thorn—Julia had him dress up so Lynnette would open the door. The mesh in her cage was supposed to let bullets through, but it didn’t, so Russell is fine. Julia tells Lynnette that someone is writing a book about group, and Russell believes Christophe Volker knew about it. Julia thinks it’s Heather. A book is dangerous because it provides too much information to the monsters’ fans, who think of the Final Girls as obstacles for their heroes.

Julia is a Final Girl because her high school boyfriend and college boyfriend dressed up in the same ghost costume to kill her classmates. Julia killed them both. When she pushed her college boyfriend out a window, she fell with him and now needs to use a wheelchair to get around.

Russell opens the curtain and sees police swarming the street. Then, someone starts shooting into the apartment. Russell tries to escape, but he’s hit and goes down. Julia is hit too. Lynnette runs too. She’s ashamed to leave Fine and Julia behind.

Lynnette feels like a failure. She failed Julia and Fine, and she failed to protect herself after all her efforts. She calls Dr. Carol and asks for help. Dr. Carol picks up Lynnette in her car and takes her back to her house, where she lives with her two sons, eight-year-old Pax and 20-something Skye. Once there, Dr. Carol learns that Heather’s halfway house burned down. The authorities think Heather started the fire.

In a room in Dr. Carol’s basement, Lynnette considers who might be after the Final Girls. Final Girl fans are one possibility. But more terrifyingly, it could be all the Final Girls’ monsters: Ricky and Billy Walker, Nick Shipman, the Hansens, the Ghost, Teddy Volker, and the Dream King.