47 – Grady Hendrix and Final Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Hello fellow horror-fiends. This week we’re going retro, to the heyday of horror, when men wore masks and women checked basements in their negligee. 

Our guest is Grady Hendrix, a writer perpetually interested in taking tropes, only to stab them, kill them, and resurrect them as something new. He’s done it with exorcisms, vampires, the devil and … erm .. IKEA.

Now he’s taking on the slasher and his counterpart, in The Final Girl Support Group. A novel that takes the bloody, weary body of the female heroine, and gives her the chance to kick the hell out of the monster chasing her. It’s meta, funny, wry and ironic – but it’s also a story with heart. I enjoyed it immensely.

Grady and I talk about our favourite slashers (and final girls), why we’re obsessed with nostalgia, what it means that we enjoy films about killing women, and I – once again ­– give away too much of my own psychological frailty. This time it’s my all-consuming terror of Freddy Kruger.

This is a book and conversation that will REALLY please the true horror lovers.

Enjoy! 

The Final Girl Support Group is published July 13th by Berkley in North American and Titan in the UK.

Books mentioned in this episode include:

• Paperbacks From Hell (2017), by Grady Hendrix
• We Sold Our Souls (2018), by Grady Hendrix
• The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (2020), by Grady Hendrix
• Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992), by Carol J. Clover
• The Last Final Girl (2012), by Stephen Graham Jones
• Final Girls (2017), by Riley Sager
• The Tribe (1981), by Bari Wood
• When Darkness Loves Us (1985), by Elizabeth Engstrom

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Thanks to Adrian Flounders for graphic design.