Final Girl

At the end of a horror movie, after the savage slaughterer has been shot in the testicles, electrocuted, and finally beheaded, a lone heroine remains in the aftermath known as the final girl. She is the one who discovers the dismembered bodies of her friends, and is terrified and tortured for the entirety of the film. Eventually, it is the final girl who manages to find the strength to challenge and defeat the killer herself, and by the last act halts the sanguinary cycle...unless of course, there's a sequel.

Recently, I've started to wonder if being the final girl in a petrifying picture show isn't that far off from dealing with the residuum of a volatile relationship. Often, both scary movies and the bombshell breakdown of a courtship can result in scars, trauma, and the urge to check under one's bed for monsters, or in some cases, between the sheets.

Perhaps dating isn't very disparate from the drama in a slasher flick. Traditionally, there's a chase, an ephemerally false sense of security, brief nudity, a diabolical master plan, and ultimately a broken heart, and/or severed limb. Meanwhile, family and friends watch the plot unfold, as moviegoers often do, but in lieu of yelling, "Don't go in there!" or "Aw bitch gonna get killed!", they reserve their comments to, "I hope this one works out", or "Uh oh, you sound excited about him...", followed with the fretful "fffffff" sound which occurs when someone sucks air through their teeth, to further emphasize a disquietude.

Of course, just as the audience of a frightening film can surmise that a homicidal hobo is lurking in the bushes, or that the protagonist's seemingly angelic boyfriend is in actuality the bloodthirsty butcher, some non-objective onlookers in my life have the ability to recognize the red flags of a potential beau of mine. Unfortunately, like the oft ignored, kooky psychic cinema character who spouts prophecies of doom, sometimes we don't heed the messenger when blissful ignorance is the more attractive option.

One of the most notable scoundrels I've encountered to date (pun intended) is as follows:

Roy* and I had been dating for two months before he and I engaged in the dreaded discourse about past relationships. When he mentioned an ex-girlfriend named Amy, he became extremely emotional, and revealed that he would never fully heal from the fact that she had been killed in a car accident years prior.

Since going steady with a veritable widower was uncharted territory for me, I was unaware of the proper protocol when I found myself continuously compared to a dead woman. From the fetching fashion in which she would dress, to the fact that she could bowl a 110, I was in a constant state of competition with a corpse. "Amy would never mind when I smoked cigars, are you sure it bothers you?", "Maybe you could learn how to give a good back rub...Amy took a Shiatsu class". "It was really sexy when Amy would dress up like a Storm Trooper for me".

As soon as Roy was accepted into a grad school program upstate, he decided not to continue our relationship in a long-distance form, and gradually our communications ceased. One morning, after months without contact from the bloke, I opened my front door and found an envelope sitting on my welcome mat. As I retrieved the purple parcel, I discovered a small tear in the pouch opening, along with a handwritten note from my neighbor, Marni.

Meredith,
Sorry I opened your letter, it had my house number on it, and I saw it addressed to "M", so I thought it was for me.
Sorry about that.
Marni

I opened the flap and removed the typewritten letter:

Dear Meredith,
I hope you are well.
I wanted you to know that I never had a girlfriend named Amy. I made her up because I wanted to seem less happy-go-lucky and more experienced. I was a virgin when we met, and I never felt like myself, but now that I have the Lord to guide me, and a new wife, I wanted to make amends.
I hope your days are as bright as the stars,
Roy

I inspected the envelope, hoping to ferret out some proof that the entire epistle was a gag or a hoax, but no traces could be found. Not only had I been hornswoggled into believing this guy's ghost stories, but the cherry-on-top remained in the idea that my neighbor had presumably read the contents of his manic message. As time passed, the initial shock of the letter wore off, but the selfish and apathetic actions of this man still gives me the heebie-jeebies on occasion.

Nevertheless, whether he was bullied by his classmates, fell in love with a woman who cruelly rejected him, or perhaps received only evil juice and Yoo Hoos through the placenta, at the turning point in a horror movie, the motive for the psychopath's killing-spree is uncovered. However, reality serves to be more frightening when men and women who appear content in continuing in their harmful behavior towards others survive in complete oblivion to it. Ultimately while they progress through life, with a growing number of broken hearts and hurt feelings mounting behind them like the body count in a snuff film, these folks never fully realize that one day they will be at the mercy of the final girl.

*names have been changed, but incurably, the past remains the same