Lindsay King-Miller’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
Here at the Final Girl Groves Retirement Home, we provide top-quality live-in care, recreational activities, and social opportunities for Final Girls in their senior years. If you’re a smart, resourceful, pretty-but-not-too-slutty woman who has survived brutal serial killers, zombie attacks, vengeful spirits, and the return of secrets from your own dark past, we believe you deserve to spend your golden years in peace and tranquility. Facing off against machete-wielding psychopaths is a young woman’s game. Relax and let us take care of you!
Final Girl Groves is a sprawling one-story facility designed with your comfort in mind. There are no basements, attics, or unused storage rooms, as those can attract dust bunnies and poltergeists. Every residential room has at least two exits in addition to a window. Rooms feature ample storage space in the form of a generous bookshelf and chest of drawers, but absolutely no closets. Our telephones do not accept calls from blocked numbers or anyone using a voice changer.
The land now housing Final Girl Groves has never been the site of a mass burial, a human sacrifice, or a child disappearing under mysterious circumstances. Although this area was once heavily forested, no local legends ever spoke of an old woman living deep in the trees, sometimes emerging in the form of a crow or a wolf.
We offer our residents a variety of recreational activities to choose from. Keep your body active with Hand-to-Hand Cardio and Light Weapons Training, or indulge your artistic side by creating a scrapbook of all your horrifically murdered friends and loved ones. We have visiting clergy of every major faith on a rotating schedule to perform services, offer counseling, and remove demonic possessions and curses. Non-denominational exorcisms are available on the second and fourth Wednesdays of every month. Specially trained trauma counselors are also available twenty-four hours a day, and are always on the lookout for signs of depression, anxiety, or insomnia, which can surface in Final Girls even decades after their third or fourth sequel. Please let us know if you’re experiencing sleeplessness, loss of appetite, or sudden bursts of Latin speech while bleeding from the eyes.
Animal therapy is available, and many residents report that forming a nurturing bond with a dog or cat provides a sense of safety and stability. Don’t worry – when they’re not with you, our therapy animals are boarded behind bulletproof glass in rooms that can only be accessed by retina scan. We’re not going to let what happened to your last pet happen ever again.
Since most of our residents have no living friends or family, visitors to Final Girl Groves are few and are subjected to extreme scrutiny. No distant relatives of your vanquished enemies will be allowed within 150 feet of the doors. Also, no reporters interested in getting the truth about “what really happened,” and no enigmatic strangers with no legal existence before last year. We all know how reboots get started!
All of our staff undergo thorough background checks to ensure that they were never the sole survivor of a fire, nor bullied so badly as children that they were forced to seek gruesome revenge. None of them have a shadowy family connection to an unspeakable secret. They do not know what you did last summer.
Our premises are kept in pristine condition by a dedicated team of maintenance workers who clean and air out rooms, check walls for the bodies of teenagers who went missing in the 1950s, and make sure no dolls or picture frames have moved from wherever you last put them. They also look for shadows on the wall cast by no visible object, and anything that could be used to gouge out your eyeballs. Your comfort comes first! Weekly inspections guarantee that the water heater will never be tampered with so as to scald you alive.
We are especially proud of our developing Final Girls Mentor Program, the first of its kind, which pairs veteran participants with youth in our community who are at risk of becoming Final Girls. Potential Final Girls are identified based on grade-point average, hair color (no blondes), modesty of dress (no one who wears stilettos to high school is going to survive a prom night bloodbath), and propensity to hang out with other wisecracking, photogenic teens who will get killed first. The Mentor Program not only gives our residents a sense of purpose, which can alleviate mental health issues and even slow the progression of senility, but results in significant increases in positive outcomes for teenaged participants — such as keeping cell phones fully charged at all times, making improvised weapons from common household items, and running out the back door instead of up the stairs. With programs like this, we hope to dramatically increase the percentage of Final Girls who make it to the end of their franchises.
If you have any questions, we are happy to set up an informational meeting or a tour. Join us at Final Girl Groves Retirement Home and make the end of your life count! We’ve been waiting for you a long, long time.
Illustrator: Matt Lubchansky makes comics and occasionally leaves his apartment in New York. His work includes Please Listen to Me and New Amsterdam Mystery Company. He’s on Twitter, and doesn’t expect you to get his name right.
This sounds just like my kind of retirement home.
Agreed
If it is, what on earth happened to you?
I’m not a reporter or anything, I just want to know what really happened that day…
Yeah, that’s what the last reporter said. They’re out back, under the maple tree, second stone from the left.
On-site burial? What is wrong with you, you know that’s against Final Girl regulations! Jesus, sometimes it’s like you want to be haunted by the vengeful dead press.
how are dead press compared to dead pres[idents]?
Advantage, though: when their grave is suddenly, mysteriously empty (dunh-dunh), you know right away. You plant the stiff somewhere off-site and ask someone to check on the grave once in a while, your grave-checker will be the first to get kakked and you won’t know about it until someone else buys it. It’s a hassle.
Well obviously the grave checkers are a well-trained staff of at least five people who know well enough to never, never split up.
The mausoleum (off-site, naturally) is also monitored by CCTV around the clock by a professional security service.
The bodies of all wronged persons are given proper burials according to their personal religious beliefs to prevent restlessness. When allowed by those conditions, bodies are cremated to further reduce the risk of wandering.
You literally do have a pamphlet, don’t you?
But if I told you, then you’d know.
And we can’t have that, can we.
TBH I agree 100%. Nothing technically horrific has ever happened to me, but in my twilight years I would really appreciate being coddled and comfortable and swaddled in the truth that nothing technically horrific can EVER happen to me for the rest of my life.
Yessssss
My interest is piqued, but sadly I don’t think I qualify. I’m blond.
Oh well. I’ve made my peace with the fact that I’m not the final girl. I’m the monster.
Or the slut! See, blond girls have options these days.
I believe, if sufficiently wise-cracking, blondes are eligible to apply for the Slayer Exemption.
The final girl IS the monster
I assume the Home’s library is regularly scrutinized for texts in Latin or in Gothic print (or–shudder–both).
As long as they don’t forget ancient Sumerian.
I want to see this read as an orientation video by Jamie Lee Curtis.
Would contribute to this kickstarter.
But how is the cell reception? And should dolls even be allowed on premises at all? And the phone lines: are they secured behind walls, not exposed and easily visible, and coated with adamantium in order to resist being cut unexpectedly? Do you have generators? And back-up generators? And back-up back-up generators? Does the mentoring program provide instruction in hot-wiring cars? And driving a manual transmission?
Really, I think the most important question here is: Will I be permitted to create a cabal of my fellow Final Girls who will, at the proper time, when the Blood Moon once again rises from its nest of bones, as was prophesied, spring forth from our retirement and wreak havoc and bloody vengeance upon the world which has ignored our warnings and mistreated us for so long?
There’s a sensitivity course called “Stabbing Up” that members of vengeance-oriented groups are required to complete – intersectionality, anti slut-shaming, that sort of thing. There’s a seminar and a few online modules, nothing too burdensome.
Three backup generators, PLUS solar panels and battery storage, PLUS a couple of windmill generators.
The post is really funny…
but those pictures! A+ terrifying.gif work, Matt Lubchansky.
I would A+ watch a movie about the surviving Final Girls of horror franchises.
It could be a horror movie or not, maybe just like a slightly bitterwsweet dramedy? Whichever.
I want Seanan McGuire to write this novel.
she would do an amazing job. Someone should link this to her on Tumblr.
Maybe just like a mystery series where Jamie Lee Curtis and Heather Langenkamp solve crimes and are utterly unimpressed by any form of human evil.
“Oh god, the killer removed the eyes of all of his victims and arranged them in concentric circles by Pantone shade!”
“What, again? Also, look, he’s mixed his hazels in with his true browns. Way to not consider light sources, jackass.”
Police Chief: “This is the worst serial killer imaginable!”
Jamie Lee Curtis and Heather Langenkamp share a wry, long-suffering look.
Jamie Lee Curtis: “Sure, buddy. Whatever you say.”
Coroner: “I’ve never seen anything this horrific in my career, and I’ve seen some pretty gruesome ones.”
Heather Langenkamp: “Look, I’m sure this is very upsetting for you. Why don’t you just go over there and sit down for a minute? We’ll let you know when it’s ok for you to come back.”
http://threatquality.com/2015/09/29/comic-book-pr…
With, I’m assuming, full acknowledgment to Ms. King-Miller for writing this post in the first place.
well, I put the link to the article right there; is that not sufficient diligence?
I just like for men to be extremelhy clear when they’re expanding on the ideas of a woman. Bit of a hangup of mine.
Okay, well. I guess if this ever goes past “a blog post that no one is even going to read”, I will make sure to arrange a “Special Thanks for the Genesis of this Idea” credit.
I was thinking a TV show. The Golden Final Girls.
oops, actually wait I just realized that this idea is completely amazing. Like, a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but it’s all girls who survived franchises with horror-movie monsters? And they fight and catch monsters, but also — maybe more importantly — provide support to the survivors of traumatic monster experiences?
Who would be better equipped to do that?
oh, dang, if I could draw I would make that comic book in ten seconds
I hope that Ellen Ripley counts as a Final Girl, and teaches the improvised weapons course.
She definitely counts, she’s mentioned in Carol Clover’s essay on the subject that popularized the term.
Our no-fraternization policy assures that you will never succumb to the temptation of a roll in the hay with the twinkly-eyed one of the pair of hot drifter brothers staying at the nearby motel while allegedly traveling on “the family business.” In fact, to avoid potential problems, we have arranged to zone against motels in a twenty-five-mile radius.
You literally do have a pamphlet, don't you?
http://threatquality.com/2015/09/29/comic-book-pr…
well, I put the link to the article right there; is that not sufficient diligence?
Okay, well. I guess if this ever goes past “a blog post that no one is even going to read”, I will make sure to arrange a “Special Thanks for the Genesis of this Idea” credit.
This is WONDERFUL.