But candidly, in the most simple words I can find, I felt ashamed about being asexual (and bisexual, too). I’d pushed myself to explore sex and desire, even if it hurt me, whilst simultaneously retreating from meaningful intimacy. While the world picked apart my asexuality, my peers started asking me if it was a phase, if I’d had the right sex, and if I could love as other humans did. I was a fully-fledged eighteen-year-old who was starting to suspect she was a little bit asexual.

The Final Girl & Shameįive years later, It Follows (2014) made its debut. This was a final girl who was soft and wanted me to understand that there were different sorts of love and intimacy. She rejected the sexual norms I was being confronted with, but still explored and investigated desire in the hypersexual world she wandered through, where, for many women and girls, sex becomes currency.Īs someone at the cusp of their coming of age years, Needy gave me realisation. Needy made sense to me because she represented a sort of intimacy I’d scarcely seen anywhere else. While the bisexual in me understood I wanted to hold hands with Jennifer (and Needy, and Chip), the undiscovered asexual part of me fawned over daydreams of sandbox love and how it would last forever. She was the antithesis of the film’s titular character, Jennifer, who, for the most part of the film, was a horny and murderous succubus occupying the body of a teen girl. Needy, while not very traditional, became my first encounter with a final girl. The film, being absolutely ahead of its time, explores the facets of intimacy and power that run deep in female relationships and sexual relationships with boys and men. Months later, after eagerly awaiting its release, I finally saw Jennifer’s Body, a film about Jennifer’s transformation into a demonic succubus, and her best friend from childhood, Needy. I thought Megan Fox was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, but I wasn’t old enough to watch the film. It was kept safe from my innocent and exploratory fingertips behind a thin layer of plastic. I stared at the large poster for Jennifer’s Body (2009) outside my local cinema. When I was thirteen years old, I fell in love. The final girl gave me the tools I needed to survive. By altering my reading of the final girl, seeing her not as virginal or pure, but as an asexual presence, my world shifted.

It was because of the final girl that I, too, learned to survive a hypersexual world. Suzy is just one of the many empowering final girls rebelling and surviving throughout the vast spectrum of horror storytelling.įinal girls, while usually providing a virginal non-sexual presence for the audience to root for, navigate hyper-sexual worlds and learn to survive against the odds. You can probably see how, as an asexual person, that journey feels somewhat familiar to me. Entering a world of wicked whimsy and intimacy, Suzy navigates the dark facets of desire, but she doesn’t quite fit in. Though there are many that I gravitate toward, the one that holds the lock and key to my heart is Suspiria ’s Suzy (1977). Trigger Warning: Discussions on sex, asexuality, and desire.Įveryone who loves horror has a soft spot for final girls.

The girl who sees scents filming