The classic slasher genre is experiencing a small boom right now. With Violent Night and Halloween Kills dominating the box office, fans are clearly excited for more masked killers with knives chasing powerful heroines on screen. The trope of the "Final Girl," or the last female survivor of a slasher movie, has become as well-known and popular as the slasher killers themselves; fans rank their favorites and fight for which Final Girl is the definitive survivor. In 2021 the novel The Final Girl Support Group was published, uniting homages to the iconic final girls of classic slashers to fight off a new threat years later. This novel could be the ultimate movie crossover if Hollywood takes advantage.
The Final Girl Support Group is set in 2010 and follows six homages to classic slasher survivors: One apiece for Laurie Strode from Halloween, Nancy Thompson from A Nightmare on Elm Street, Sidney Prescott from Scream, Alice Hardy from Friday the 13th, Sally Hardesty from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Denise from Silent Night, Deadly Night. The latter is the novel's protagonist, renamed "Lynette," and the novel follows the formed "Final Girl Support Group" as they are targeted by a mysterious killer who seems to be killing them off, much like a slasher film.
The Ultimate Slasher Team-Up Is Waiting for Hollywood
A film version could theoretically unite all of the iconic Final Girl actors onscreen for the first time, reprising versions of their iconic classic roles for the ultimate showdown. Jamie Lee Curtis has certainly not shown reluctance to reprise her role as Laurie Strode in multiple different franchise reboots and sequels. Heather Langenkamp has also expressed some interest in having one final showdown with Freddy Kreuger, though admittedly, the novel's version of Nancy is portrayed as something of a pain, which could be alienating to the iconic actor's role, considered by some as the greatest Final Girl of all.
Adrienne King, who played Alice Hardy, did voice the novel's audiobook. It could be difficult for her to reprise her role in the film since, in the novel, the "real" survivor of the camp massacre is an African-American woman recast as white in the film, something over which her character sues. Nonetheless, fans might certainly be excited to see Adrienne back. While sadly, the original Sally Hardesty actor from Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Marilyn Burns, passed away in 2014, Sally was also played in the remake by Olwen Fouéré, who could also reprise her role for the film and play "Marilyn," Sally's homage, thus named for her late actor.
What Could Prevent The Final Girls Support Group From Forming
While Neve Campbell has recently backed out of reprising her role as Sidney in the latest Scream film, there could still be a chance to have her return to play the novel's version of the character for the film. That would leave Linnea Quigley to step into the role of the novel's protagonist, a reprisal of her role in Silent Night, Deadly Night. While Quigley has not yet appeared in a sequel to the original, she has featured prominently in much Scream Queen media in the last decade and is appearing alongside horror icons Kane Hodder, Michael Berryman and Bill Mosley in the film Jasper. Given the recent success of the Violent Night film, fan interest in the "Santa Claus killer" story is certainly quite fresh.
While there is certainly plenty of interest and has been for decades in a slasher crossover (beyond Freddy vs. Jason), the new interest in the Final Girl trope could easily propel this novel into the ultimate crossover film adaptation. As a grand homage to the classic era of slasher cinema, the novel is clearly a labor of love; the story is a genuinely scary mystery and an interesting homage to the experience of being a "Final Girl;" it examines the dark psychology of each survivor and her experience with facing such horrors at a young age, and takes place in a universe where the slasher films are based on real-life events while commanding just as much fan-devotion as the real-world pictures. For fans excited at the prospect of more Slasher franchises getting continuations, it could be the formula for the ultimate crossover showdown.