“The fact that she is still alive at the end of the movie does not make her a victorious heroine.”
(from the Wikipedia entry for “The Final Girl Trope”)
The golden age of slasher films and daytime soaps. The crochet and ashtray decade. A time when paper mills still run. Field trips to nuclear power plants. Saturday mornings with cartoon sticks of dynamite. Stranger danger and milk cartons with missing kids. A kind of hysteria.
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For the pitchfork to have meaning, a monster just outside the frame.
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Warnings from fathers about the length of shorts and skirts. About shaving legs and wearing mascara. About boys our own age. Not the wolf in grandma’s bed. Wide human grins with canine teeth in the living room. Laps we’re forced to sit on.
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Flickering lights the clue. A predator is near. Around each corner. In every back seat. Desolate country roads. The camera in our sweaty faces. Grainy close-ups of our ankles, which means the killer waits under the bed. Trap after trap. Scripts that never consider our survival.
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What not to do: stray, attract attention, be like Red Riding Hood. Or Hansel and Gretel. Careless.
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Our duty to be vigilant. To ward off. Always on the verge of a misstep. Foolish if we find ourselves in a predicament. Better to keep quiet and get over it. Never wise to cause a fuss when we have it so good.
Author of the popular poetry blog Good Universe Next Door, Carolee is a writer and artist living in Upstate New York. Her work has received recognition from Sundress (Best of the Net 2018), the Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize (semi-finalist) and the Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize (finalist) and has been anthologized in The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy alongside a line-up of highly celebrated poets, including former U.S. Poets Laureates. She has an MFA in poetry from Ashland University and works full-time as a writer in social media marketing.