The First Girl

The first victim in Black Christmas (2019) is dragged through the snow after she dies with her arms above her head. She creates an angel imprint in the snow as she dies and as the killer removes her from the scene, the movie, and the fictional frontier-land she could not survive. The Final Girl survives, but the first woman to die in a slasher dies a horrible death in order to make a point. That point--that the savages have breached the civilized community's boundaries--is the first shock that the audience experiences in a number of horror films. In A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), that first death, when the character Tina is viciously killed by Freddy in her dreams, is often analyzed as a problem of morality. Tina had sex with her boyfriend and that is why she was the first to go. I argue in my work that Tina's relationship with her (outlaw) boyfriend is woven into the way she's dispatched as a threat. Your teens, your youth, the innocence of your (white-settler) community, are all going to be threatened by the savage dreamscape, where you have to 'go a little mad' to learn to navigate that alter-Native reality.

This is a snippet of the kinds of arguments I make in my upcoming book. My point (as I re-watch A Nightmare on Elm Street and cringe at Tina's awful death) is that gender as a concept and gender-based analyses, need to be rooted in settler colonial studies. Meaning shifts, but also the ways that Indigenous worlds are subsumed in horror and obscured, can also be un(re)-earthed.

Sources:

Carol Clover. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. (Princeton University Press, 1992).

Craven, Wes, dir. A Nightmare on Elm Street. New Line Cinema, 1984.

Takal, Sophia, dir. Black Christmas. Blumhouse, 2019.