Haters and gentlefriends, welcome to That Final Girl Life. It’s your favourite final girl here, taking you through The Horrors and out the other side to find out what life is really like after the movie ends.
In this episode we’ll be discussing Raging Grace. Please be aware that there will be spoilers throughout the episode.
This one's a little bit different in that it's a two-parter. I'd watched Raging Grace before and had added it to my secret Letterboxd list of potential future episodes. When it's time to record an episode I go to the list, hit 'Shuffle,' and as long as the first one that comes up is watchable somewhere that's available to me, I rewatch it and write the episode.
When the list shuffled Raging Grace at me I was pleased, because I think it's very underappreciated and it deserves more hype than it gets. Perhaps I think that because I find it relatable, which not everyone will. But anyway, I was happy to be giving it some attention. Even though Grace is in the title, I thought I'd be making an episode about her mum Joy, who is the main protagonist of the movie and is indeed a final girl in that she survives the ending.
However, as I watched I realised that Grace would also be interesting to talk about. She too survives the end of the film, and in some ways she's more of a final girl than Joy, in that she ultimately saves the day. And Grace is a child, which is interesting because the vast majority of final girls are in fact final women. The youngest so far was Mari from The Last House on the Left, who was still living with her parents, however even she is in her late teens and therefore almost aging out of childhood.
But Grace is... I'm not sure exactly, but probably about seven or eight. Very much still a child, and yet nonetheless a total badass. So we're going to talk about her here, and then in the following episode we'll talk about her mother Joy. I thought it would be interesting to look at intergenerational trauma using the dual perspective of both the child and the mother. So here we go.
In this episode I’ll be talking about intergenerational trauma, obviously, and also poverty, immigration, racism particularly of the subtle kind, the UK class system, rapists and other generically creepy men, sleepwalking, and of course, PTSD.
Ready? Climb into this nice big suitcase and get ready to be wheeled over to discuss...
Raging Grace.