As long as horror movies exist, we’ll never really see an end to final girls. Nor does writer Josh Eiserike want that to happen. He just loves seeing them turn the tables, as we all do. In The Very Final Last Girls, Eiserike with artists Z. Crockett and Andres Barrero even lets a boy be a final girl. The only qualification to be one is to have survived a massacre — and not just those caused by crazed masked killers.
Megan Williams survived a zombie attack. When she wakes up at a survivors’ camp, she discovers that “metaphysical phenonomena” come in many different forms. Fellow campers endured an invasion of pod people, a slasher in the woods, Satanic cultists, and a psychic warlock. The camp head, Dr. Black, lived through what looks suspiciously like a Brian De Palma movie decades earlier. The evil might not be connected, but the traumatized children now are.
But they’re also modern teens, which means instead of being terrified, Megan is angry. She can’t strike back at the zombies that overran her small Colorado town, but she can make sure nothing will get too close to her. Except something is closing in on the camp, and despite the adults’ best intentions, it may be up to the very final last girls (and a boy) to stop it.
Their backstories may look a little familiar, though the creative team gives an original spin on the classics. A couple would have made fun stories on their own, but they make this one that much richer. Crockett and Barrero clearly relish putting their spins on a variety of monster types, while Eiserike helps give them personality. While Grady Hendrix’s excellent novel The Final Girl Support Group mined similar territory, it was more of a legacy sequel to recognizable but disguised slasher films. This graphic novel focuses on the Final Girls in the immediate aftermath; less on the trauma and more on the thrill audiences get from these stories.
The great thing is there’s room for both, and both are great reads. There’s no such thing as a “final” statement on Final Girls. As the long life of horror film franchises prove, we haven’t gotten tired of the scares — and the fun — yet.
Fanboy Planet is an Amazon affiliate. Purchases made through links on this and other pages may generate revenue for this site.
