Fears: Context is key
One of the best things about working on a documentary about horror films is that i can get involved into the subject mattter more, mainly because i am a fan of that type of genre, that being said it is important to not only show your enthusiasm for the genre but to also correctly state the facts and use the correct examples and research to back it up, with that being said i strongly beleive that the main talking points of this horror documentary does not match the themes and what the documentary is aiming to do.
Our main talking point for the documentary is the recent film from A24 Midsommar (2019) a visually pleasing yet poor choice of the theory we are presenting; the final girl theory. In the film, our main character dani is slowly indocturnated into a cult as her boyfriends friends are killed off. the end of the film has dani sacrifice her boyfriend christian to the cults god in a wicker man style death pire, somehow making her empowered. without the proper context, this film is definetly not the best example of the final girl theory as for starters the reason for the sacrificing of the boyfriend is becuase he was coerced into having sex with one of the cult members under the influence of hallucinegenic drugs, making the films ending themes of female empowerement false and misleading as christians actions were not his own and was controlled into doing something that he did not want to do. on top of that, the film doesnt even resonate with the final girl theory, as the antagonistic cult arent after dani, but after the friends around her, as the goal for them was to indocurnate dani into the cult, not kill her.
For research purposes i decided to compare midsommars Dani to The Evil Dead's (2013) Mia aswell as Friday the 13th's (1980) Alice to compare and contrast the characters and to show that the final girl theory fits into these two films instead of midsommar.
Starting off with alice, she is the last person to survive the murderer, pamela vorhees as her fellow friends were killed off as she had fitted into the mold of the final girl theory. She is the more interectlally superior to her fellow campmates and also becomes very resourseful at the end of the final chase, as she hides from the killer, outwits her and finally kills the murderer becoming a monster and losing her humanity for this moment to survive. while she fitted the mold for the final girl unlike dani, what alice did lack however was a good character arc as she just happened to be the last person to survive
Mia is actually a rather an interesting take on the final girl theory as they do something quite intersting with her; by making her the antagonist for most of the film. Mia suffers from a drug addiction in which her friends and her brother take her to a cabin in the woods to help her get clean, but one of the friends aciidentally awaken a demon from a cursed book in the basement causing mia to be possessed and causing the rest of her friends to be killed and possessed by the demon book. Her brother manages to stop her and take the demon away from her until her brother is also killed, unlieashing the demon in a human form, leaving mia to fight off the creature.
What makes mia a more compelling final girl vs dani is that not only does her motivations make sense aswell as fitting into the final girl theory in the ending scenes of the film, is because she also goes through her own charatcer arc aswell has having an amazing range of practically playing every role of a horror film. An angry woman who is strugling with her drug issue as well as being angry with her brother after leaving her with her mentally degrading mother, then once the isolation sets in she starts becoming more agressive and irrational, furthermore being possessed she practically plays a 2nd character. After being possessed she then is left up to being the final girl to kill off the threat of the film. Dani from midsommar on the other hand does not have any form of motivation for any of her actions because 90% of the film she is drugged up with the cultists and 10% emotionally blackmailing her boyfriend, ultimatley making her an unintersting final girl compared to that of mia who has more of a reason to do what she is doing.
After multiple production meetings with me trying to explain this point that fell on deaf ears from the writer/producer who refused to change his point.This got me to looking at the other main clips for the documentary and managed to get some of the films clip examples changed to make sure that our documetary looks contextually sound.