ABC Family’s newest project in development is The Final Girls, a meta-drama about horror movie tropes featuring Jamie Lee Curtis and a cast of female leads, directed by Steve Miner, director of Halloween H20.
You probably know what the Final Girl is, even if you think you don’t. It’s the trope name for the most common character to survive a slasher film: the virginal, well-behaved girl (in contrast with the promiscuous party girl who usually gets killed off early in the movie) who turns out to be cleverer, more resourceful, or more enduring than the rest of the cast and eventually seems to have killed the bad guy in the climax (until he comes back in the next movie). It can be seen as a trope that sort of accidentally breaks gender stereotypes: yes, it’s an old fashioned idea of “ideal” femininity (the demure, virginal, studious, inevitably white, girl next door). But the conflict between horror film makers needing a protagonist who they could show in the depths of terrifed panic and their uneasiness (or their feeling that audiences would be made uncomfortable) with reducing a male character to that level of vulnerability forged an archetype of the demure, virginal, studious, inevitably white, girl next door with hidden depths of resolve, buttkicking, and a giant kitchen knife.
Jamie Lee Curtis’ turn as Laurie Strode in Halloween is one of the strongest examples of the Final Girl archetype, and The Final Girls, according to Deadline, will feature the actress putting together a team of other Final Girls to do good in the world, Charlie’s Angels style. Yes, you read that right.
Titled The Final Girls, the drama revolves around a group of girls who have, in essence, survived their own personal horror stories and are brought together by a mysterious older woman (Curtis) to channel the stress and scars of their experience for some greater good.
I’m not sure what else there is to say about the project, because that’s awesome. The project is not greenlit yet, ABC Family has merely closed on a deal for the script and Miner and Curtis’ involvement. But I don’t think I’m alone in hoping that this concept gets off the ground running, and, you know, doesn’t trip on its impractical heels.
(via Deadline.)
