Horror films defined much of my adolescence. I related strongly to the heroic final girls that graced the screen of every Wes Kraven and John Carpenter film and modelled a lot of my own behaviour from them. Spending time studying the slasher genre and its cultural significance has put my "undying" love for these films in a bit of a bind. I began questioning the role they played for young girls like myself and subsequently their popularity. I roll my eyes at modern remakes of classic slasher flicks, but why?
The horror genre has seen a rather strong rebranding in recent years, with significantly more diverse casting and direction in the indie subcategory but the heroic white heternormative final girl is a mainstay. In order to truly delve into the perpetuation of this character, her villain, the marketing and the audience appeal of this I became her, our titular final girl.
Becoming the writer, director, actor, marketer and distributor of the film franchise "Dead Horse" I left myself with more questions than answers to my original curiosities. My peers watched every week as a new Dead Horse poster was released and slapped on top of the old one, watching the character grow with the franchise. My peers were rooting for her to become the masculine heroine we are familiar with. I play with the tension between high art and low art, our understanding of tropes within the horror genre and the entertainment value of art in Dead Horse, as I exhaust myself marketing it, the audience asks me for more.