Grady Hendrix’s Final Girl Support Group (2021) is a love letter to the golden age of slasher movies. This episode is essentially a love letter to the author—even if we do have our crusty quibbles about a few bits. We talk about the difference between metafiction and nostalgia, Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, murderabilia, Final Girls as a concept, and a little background on how you might end up in UC Berkeley’s Rhetoric department.
We recommend pairing this listen with Peaches Christ and Michael Varrati’s third episode of their podcast, Midnight Mass. It covers Friday the 13th and features interviews with the final girl star of that film, Adrienne King; as well as a great interview with Grady Hendrix.