Masters Thesis

"Hell is a Teenage Girl": Monstrous [Im]Perfection in Contemporary Horror

This thesis examines the monstrous female characters and horror archetypes in Stephen Graham Jones’ short story, “So Perfect,” his novel The Last Final Girl, and the Hollywood film Jennifer’s Body. In particular, this thesis aims at defining a subgenre, the high school mean girl narrative, that fuses the conventions of American Gothic, horror, and high school narratives. The “mean girl” character type is exaggerated and becomes monstrous. The monstrosity in these texts critiques the social pressure that adolescent girls face to adhere to an unattainable physical “ideal,” image, or reputation. The desire to achieve the unattainable results in monstrous identities. This thesis also explores the conventions of the slasher subgenre of horror as it pertains to the monstrous mean girl narrative. The final text discussed, Jones’ The Last Final Girl provides a critique of social pressures in a slightly different way than the other texts discussed. In “So Perfect” and Jennifer’s Body, the monstrous mean girls obsess over the perfect body, but in The Last Final Girl, Lindsay obsesses over the perfect “final girl” identity. In addition to literary analysis of the three target texts, this thesis also provides an overview of horror, American Gothic, and monster theory.

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