In the wake of the massive success of films like Obsession and Backrooms over the summer, it seems as if every studio in Hollywood is suddenly gung-ho on attempting to find the next new horror craze that is already out there in pre-existing materials and snatch it up in the name of turning it into a smash-hit movie.
This has manifested in big-name talents attaching themselves to similarly viral horror materials, such as Zach Cregger with the Siren Head movie or Steven Spielberg with the Mandela Catalogue adaptation, but it’s also resulted in several high-profile horror novels from the past decade getting bought up and greenlit as adaptations. Recently, we saw this with the Michael Bay-produced and David Lowery-directed The Fisherman. Now, the trend is extending with an adaptation of The Final Girl Support Group, to be written and directed by Christopher Landon.
The Final Girl Support Group is a 2021 horror novel written by Grady Hendrix. Upon release, the book was a hit, adding to the author’s status as a beloved horror creator. Hendrix was also responsible for cult horror hits, such as My Best Friend’s Exorcism in 2016. Outside of the literature world, he also served as a screenwriter on the 2019 horror-comedy Satanic Panic. All of this to say, Hendrix is intimately familiar with the horror genre and its trappings, which is what made The Final Girl Support Group such an incisive take on one of the genre’s oldest tropes.
The book is about a bunch of ‘final girls’ forming a (you guessed it) support group. The hook of the novel is that all of the girls in this group are essentially ‘real-life’ analogs for icons of horror movie history, insinuating or straight-up saying that many of the most popular horror slashers of the ‘70s and ‘80s (Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, My Bloody Valentine, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc.) were ‘fictionalized’ accounts of what really happened to these characters. So it’s essentially a superteam of horror heroines having to face off against metaphorical and literal ghosts of their past, just through a lens of obfuscation and heavy meta commentary.
Christopher Landon is an ideal choice for this material, as the filmmaker has long excelled at blending horror, comedy, and heart in exceedingly affecting and often metatextual ways. Landon is the filmmaker behind movies like Happy Death Day, We Have a Ghost, and Drop. The real canary in the coal mine here is his 2020 film Freaky, which tackled the slasher genre in a similarly adoring-yet-irreverent way and was a stone-cold banger. If you haven’t seen Freaky, I can’t recommend it enough; it is essentially Freaky Friday meets Friday the 13th (and was even initially titled Freaky Friday the 13th) and it is hysterical and horrifying in equal measure. The opening sequence of Freaky is the best Friday the 13th film of the past several decades, easily, and more than assures me that Landon is more than equipped to tackle this material.
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