How Fede Álvarez Fails His Final Girls
Fede Álvarez carved out a place for himself in the horror genre with his successful 2013 Evil Dead remake. The widely lauded film features 70,000 gallons of fake blood and a compelling cast of characters. That includes Mia, one of the most memorable final girls of the mid-aughts. He followed Evil Dead up with Don’t Breathe, a subversive home invasion film centered around Rocky, a troubled young woman, and her friends. In 2021, Don’t Breathe got a sequel that also focused on a young girl and her traumatic journey. On the surface, each of these films appeals to our love of the final girl archetype. Unfortunately, Álvarez’s exploitive use of final girls fails these women by using their experiences to develop men’s narratives while depicting gratuitous and unnecessary violence against them.
In Evil Dead, much of the film’s success is owed to the character and portrayal of Mia, especially in the absence of the franchise’s beloved original final boy, Ash. The character of Mia needed to be charismatic enough to win over skeptical audiences, strong enough to survive, and believable enough to carry the film through its most horrific and emotional crescendos. Jane Levy was certainly up to the task. She deftly navigates buckets of blood, emotional exchanges, and some narrative missteps carried forth by Fede Álvarez as director.
The horror genre is no stranger to exploiting their final girls. In fact, it’s often par for the course. The stereotypical slasher film has never claimed to be rooted in feminism, as they typically favor the killer’s perspective. But Evil Dead and the Don’t Breathe movies, were marketed as somewhat feminist vehicles. The women are intelligent, powerful, complex, and incredibly messy. And the care put into developing them makes the mishandling all the more frustrating.
Mia and Evil Dead
In an episode of Bloody Disgusting’s The Boo Crew podcast, Diablo Cody touched upon her involvement in the film’s script. “I got a call from Sam Raimi. […] He asked me to do something that I do in a lot of movies, where it’s uncredited. I go in, and it’s usually an underwritten female character, and I try to make her a little more interesting,” Cody explained. Filmmakers calling in writers to improve scripts is commonplace. But this could be indicative of Fede Álvarez’s difficulty in appropriately prioritizing and developing Mia’s character. This coupled with Álvarez’s gleeful inclusion of the infamous Evil Dead tree rape scene is the first of many instances of mistreatment.
Of course, the tree rape scene was also in the original film. But Sam Raimi himself expressed remorse over the graphic nature of the original scene. Raimi’s regret provided the remake the opportunity to right some of his wrongs, but this was not the case. Despite the Evil Dead remake’s stance to stand apart from its source material, the rape scene was reimagined and revamped for contemporary audiences. The intentional inclusion of the rape is a needless act of sexual violence. It did nothing to innovate or evolve the story. Mia had already struggled to regain her autonomy and agency throughout the film.
Mia is a prisoner throughout Evil Dead. First, she is stripped of the same agency afforded to her friends as she’s in the throes of drug addiction. Next, her concern over the cabin’s creepy basement and relics are dismissed as withdrawal-induced hysteria. When Mia asks for help, her friends and brother refuse to leave the cabin. While these decisions lead to the deaths of those around her, Mia’s imprisonment and lack of autonomy force her to endure the most trauma of them all. She is pushed to reconcile with the very real effects of a physical withdrawal. Then she’s possessed, raped, killed, resurrected, and debilitated.
By subjecting her to actual rape in addition to possession, the metaphorical counterpart of rape, the filmmaker is reinforcing malicious violence against a character who had already earned her stripes while carrying the entire film. It suggests that while Mia’s victory over the Deadites is well-earned, Fede was more interested in punishing than empowering her. Whether intended or not, the punishment and assault of women for shock and entertainment value continue in Don’t Breathe and its sequel.
Rocky and Don’t Breathe
Don’t Breathe is a unique take on the classic home invasion plot, driving the audience to sympathize more with the criminals than their victim. The film follows Rocky, also portrayed by Jane Levy. Rocky is a young woman working to escape an abusive home life and her two friends as they attempt to rob a man’s home. The Blind Man, a veteran, is hiding more than just riches within the confines of his house. He gives Rocky and her crew a deadly run for their money. The first act of the film dedicates a great deal of time making Rocky a sympathetic character doing bad things out of sheer desperation.
It works hard to establish Rocky as a complex and intelligent woman. That’s where the extent of Fede’s feminism ends. The only other female characters are either dead or being held captive and sexually assaulted in the Blind Man’s basement. The film’s most consequential reveal is when Rocky and her friends discover that the Blind Man has a young woman chained up in his cellar, whom he uses as a human incubator. In a shot that Álvarez has expressed a deep sense of pride and amusement in, the blind man loads up a turkey baster with his semen to inseminate the woman against her will.
The infamous scene beckons the camera to linger on the dripping turkey baster, cementing the scene as an intentional shock and awe moment that capitalizes on the captive woman’s pain. It also hints at Rocky’s future, should the Blind Man be successful in subduing and capturing her. There is a moment in which the Blind Man is indignant and insists that he is not a rapist. But this declaration is bookended by his intent to and the actual rape of the woman he is holding hostage.
This woman in the Blind Man’s basement is not a final girl, as she succumbs to fatal injuries. But the context of her situation suggests that the film is more interested in benefiting from the commoditization of female empowerment than telling stories that support it.
In the final cut, Rocky survives her encounter with the blind man. But not without first experiencing the threat of rape and witnessing her friends get murdered. Rocky’s decision to rob a man in the first place is indubitably wrong. However the trauma she endured is punishment enough. In the film’s original script, Rocky didn’t meet the same fate. She was initially supposed to get trapped in the basement and never be discovered by law enforcement. While this change to the film is a welcomed one and by far the right choice, it doesn’t change the fact that the film uses the appeal of a final girl while diminishing the lives of any other female characters.
Fede Álvarez smartly leveraged the talent of Jane Levy to bring two of his flagship final girls to life. Both Evil Dead and Don’t Breathe owe much of their success to Jane Levy’s ability to bring her otherwise tortured and two-dimensional characters to life with empathy, complexity, and an earnestness that can’t be written.
By Don’t Breathe 2, Fede seemingly dropped Rocky’s survival story in favor of writing a redemption arc for The Blind Man, a known rapist. The omission of Jane Levy from the Don’t Breathe sequel is a moment of weakness in the thinly veiled attempts at exploiting a final girl. It tells audiences that Don’t Breathe was never about Rocky, despite her being the most compelling element of the story. Instead, the story was always meant to be about finding creative ways to make a bad man a more sympathetic character. These directorial choices are a betrayal to his final girls, Jane Levy, and the viewers who love them.
Phoenix and Don’t Breathe 2
The thematic thread of female loss of autonomy only continues in Don’t Breathe 2. This continuation of the Blind Man’s story, again includes female characters as either collateral damage or pawns in a misguided attempt to redeem the Blind Man, an established rapist and murderer. Years after the first home invasion, the Blind Man stumbles upon a young girl in a house fire.
He takes her home, names her Phoenix, and raises her as his own child. Over the years, he develops an intricate story about her upbringing, lying to her about her family life. After she is abducted from his home, the Blind Man sets out on a mission to rescue Phoenix. The Blind Man’s fight to rescue Phoenix from a greater evil is intended to be an undeserving man’s hero’s journey.
There are more female characters in Don’t Breathe 2 than in its predecessor. But aside from Phoenix, the women are either evil and brutally murdered or good and brutally murdered. These are all strong women, smart women, broken women. But they drive the plot forward only to be met with graphic deaths. The character of Phoenix is an interesting paradox when it comes to the final girl archetype. As a tough, resourceful, and precocious child, Phoenix has the makings of a final girl. Despite this, she is never able to fully realize her potential as she is a minor with no autonomy, being fought over by two men who think of her as their property.
By the end of the film, Phoenix’s arc only serves to exonerate the Blind Man of his crimes. Phoenix tells him that she can and wants to save him, that he deserves his life. This case of Stockholm Syndrome, thinly veiled as the ultimate act of forgiveness, fails to make Phoenix an empowered individual. Instead, it makes her the vehicle through which the Blind Man becomes a figure worthy of love. It is victimhood perpetuated by the film’s half-baked philosophy that audiences can root for anyone under the right circumstances.
Fede Álvarez is responsible for putting a handful of some of the most memorable final girls on our screens. Mia, Rocky, and even Phoenix are forces to be reckoned with. But the disrespect of the final girl trope tarnishes the very reason we love final girls. Final girls, at their heart, are beacons of hope. In the works of Fede Álvarez, however, they are the embodied exploitation of women’s pain for profit, for entertainment, for a few gasps in a crowded theater. The women in his films are never free. They’re always governed by something, or someone else. From drugs, to demons and men, he doesn’t let them ever fully escape. For Álvarez, real redemption and unabashed freedom are luxuries reserved for men, whether they deserve it or not.
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