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'Final Girl Support Group' and 'Witchcraft for Wayward Girls' center women in horror
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- [00:02]
Andrew Limbong
Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Grady Hendrix is one of the biggest names right now in horror fiction. His books get a ton of praise from critics, and I always see chatter about him in the movie trades about adaptations in the works. He's got a new book out titled Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, which is about four teenage girls sent away to a home for unwed mothers in the 1970s. But first, I want to play for you an interview he did with NPR back during Halloween season 2021, ahead of the release of his book the Final Girl Support Group. It's about the survivors of various horror movie franchises who, yes, happen to be women. And in this interview with then NPR host Audie Cornish, Hendrix talks about wrestling with what exactly the horror movies he loves are trying to say about the women who survive. That's ahead.
- [00:52]
Audie Cornish
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- [01:23]
Ayesha Rascoe
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- [01:57]
Grady Hendrix
Since it's the Halloween season. I'm going to start this segment with a few names you might recognize. Michael, Freddie, Jason, the classic horror movie killers. Now how about Laurie Strode, Nancy Thompson, Alice Hardy? Well, these are the names of the women, the fictional characters who are targeted in those films. Laurie Strode is the main character played by Jamie Lee Curtis in the Halloween franchise. Nancy Thompson is the teenager haunted by Freddy Krueger in her dreams in Nightmare on Elm Street. And Alice Hardy had the misfortune to be a counselor at Camp Crystal Lake. Spoiler alert. She's the lone survivor at the end of the first Friday the 13th movie, but dies early on in the sequel. All of those characters and slasher Movies in general have intrigued author Grady Hendrix since he was a kid.
- [02:47]
I really wanted to think what would happen if the worst thing that could happen to you had happened when you were 17 and you lived in the shadow of that for the rest of your life. And that sort of sent me down this rabbit hole.
- [03:00]
And that trip down the rabbit hole resulted in Hendrik's book, the Final Girl Support Group.
- [03:06]
A final girl is simply the woman who survives till the end of the horror movie.
- [03:11]
So his book operates on the premise that those women are real people who, long after the credits have rolled, are still trying to put their lives back together. To do that, six of them meet up for group therapy. Lynette Tarkington is one of them. And a brief warning here. This is going to be a conversation about horror films. And so some of the language will be graphic. Tell us about the hero, so to speak. She is a, quote unquote, final girl. She survived what kind of assault?
- [03:37]
I wanted each Final Girl to sort of be iconic for a different franchise and a franchise that we all know, even if we're not horror fans. I think everyone knows, oh, this summer camp killer. Oh, you know, the guy who killed people in their dreams. And Lynette is out of that really bottom of the barrel genre of slasher movies from the 80s, the Christmas slasher. Silent Night, Deadly Night, Black Christmas is one of those. And so Lynette was a guy dressed as Santa Claus broke into her house on Christmas Eve and impaled her on a rack of antlers. And she has lived with that ever since. And, and that was always a thing that really fascinated me about Final Girls is the ultimate faceless killer they can't escape is the forces of market capitalism. There's always a sequel. So even if you survive part one and two, they're going to get you in part three. And there's something terrible about that, to me, that you never get to let your guard down. What if there's a sequel? What if there's a reboot of the franchise? And that to me is harrowing. I can't imagine living like that. And it's funny, someone said to me, so you take this sort of jump into fantasy with this world where there are these entertainment franchises is based on murder. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's run down a list of actors who've won Academy Awards for portraying real life murderers. We live in a culture based on murder. We make TV shows about it, we make books about it. We love murder. We can't look away I don't know what to make of that, if it's good or bad, but it is such a part of our culture.
- [05:11]
You talk about a culture that is, as you said, obsessed with violence and obsessed with the people who impose the violence, but. But not the victims. So how did you think about the appetites of fans and male fans? Right. Because you're coming to this as like, as a man who was drawn to the genre. And the book really does seem to raise some questions about what's behind that appetite.
- [05:38]
Right. And you know, one of the places this book came from is me realizing that as a 48 year old dude, I love horror movies. I've watched them all my life. And so I've spent 40 years watching people get murdered for my viewing pleasure. And that's weird. Like, is that healthy? Is that not healthy? What does that mean? And so every book I write, I'm trying to sort of wrestle with some question the reader doesn't need to know, but it's the question that gets my butt in the chair every day. And with this book that was really like, what is this coming from? And what I realized is the movies that I keep coming back to, they're the ones with final girls in them, they're the ones where people manage to escape, the ones where people manage to get somewhere better. And there is something really reassuring about seeing the worst possible thing happen to someone and they survive.
- [06:30]
One of the things that startled me when I was reading it is that even though I'm reading the story of characters who are traumatized, scared, and clearly have ptsd. Right. Have taken all kinds of unusual security measures in their life as a result of what they've survived, but there were some aspects of the way that they would think that I would like. Well, that doesn't seem so strange. That's how you stay safe.
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Right.
- [06:55]
And I don't know if that's generational or what that means, but as a male writer, like, how did you think about that?
- [07:05]
It's just treating them like people and trying to think it through logically, how these women would be living in the wake of what's happened to them.
- [07:13]
Did you ever think, what's wrong with us as men?
- [07:16]
Sure.
- [07:17]
Do you know what I mean? Because you had to get into the mind of the killers also to write this book. And people who treat women as. As objects to be collected or harmed. I mean, it's really dark.
- [07:30]
Yeah. And I. It's interesting because the, the actual killers, I had to think like, in the book, who were the ones so of hunting these final girls, their issue derives so much from rage and anger at this. And I think you can't be alive in the world and not notice that we become very angry with some women for weird reasons. You know, you look at Hillary Clinton, you look at someone like Lorena Bobbitt back in the 90s, you look at these women and you think, where is this rage coming from? What is. What is this lesson our we are trying to teach them? It's so strange. So that was a very easy mindset to get into because it's one I see around me a lot, this anger at women who don't do as they're told.
- [08:21]
Before I let you go, I want to talk about sort of how this trope, so to speak, has evolved. Who are the final girls of today, so to speak? I mean, has there been any sort of shift in the approach in storytelling?
- [08:35]
Sure. I mean, there absolutely has. And one of the things that's really interesting is to see sort of the final girl of today who's cut from a very different mold. She's more of a Buffy or a Xena or a Furiosa. In Mad Fear Road, she is a woman who shows up ready to rock and roll. She can hold her own physically. She comes out of the box completely loaded for bear and ready to rumble. And that's a lot of fun to watch. But the final girls that I love are the ones from the 70s and the 80s who were just people. They weren't particularly smart or strong or anything. They survived not because they had some exceptional quality or some ability to kick butt. They survived just because they kept going. They just kept finding enough to take one more step, to climb up on one more rooftop, to hold one more door shut. And that, to me, is so inspiring.
- [09:34]
Grady Hendricks is the author of the Final Girl support group. Thank you so much for talking with us.
- [09:40]
Thank you for having me.
- [09:46]
Audie Cornish
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- [10:16]
Andrew Limbong
Like I said at the top, Hendricks new book, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls takes place in the 1970s and is about pregnant teens sent away to a home who then discover witchy powers. The book is timely considering A lot of people are worried about the future of reproductive rights right now, but it isn't preachy because in this interview with NPR's Ayesha Rascoe, Hendricks makes the point that there aren't any pure villains in his story, just people who are convinced that they're right. Here's Aisha.
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Ayesha Rascoe
Grady Hendrix's latest novel starts with the most universal of story invitations.
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Grady Hendrix
Sit, listen.
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Ayesha Rascoe
Sounds cozy enough. But then just a few lines later.
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Grady Hendrix
We'Ve been taught that the devil was the worst thing in the world. But we were too young to understand that there were worse things than the devil.
- [11:07]
Ayesha Rascoe
Now, given that Grady Hendrix's past horror novels have featured demonic possession, vampires, a haunted house, you might think that the devil will show up in this newest one, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. And you might think it's the witches who are worse than the devil. Maybe they are, maybe they're not. I'm joined now by Grady Hendricks to talk about his new book. Welcome to the program.
- [11:32]
Grady Hendrix
Thanks a lot, Aisha. Nice to meet you.
- [11:33]
Ayesha Rascoe
Okay, so set this up for us. The story starts in the early 1970s with a pregnant girl, her very angry father at the wheel. They're speeding from Alabama to Florida. Tell us who the girl is and where her father is taking her.
- [11:51]
Grady Hendrix
Her name is Neva. She's 15 and she's being taken to a maternity home in Florida. And there were about 190 of these across America in, you know, they were around for a long time, but their peak was really from about 1940, 45 to 1973 with Roe versus Wade. And this is where if your daughter got pregnant and didn't have a ring on her finger, you would send her. She'd spend the last trimester, usually of her pregnancy, in hiding, have her baby. Her baby would be taken from her and put up for adoption. And she'd return home with some kind of COVID story. You tell the family or the neighbors. Oh, she, you know, visited her aunt this summer or she went to work on her French in Chicago. And she would be expected to never talk about or think about her baby again.
- [12:38]
Ayesha Rascoe
And the girls were kept under very tight control, like the woman running the place where Neva ends up. She instructs the girls that they are not to talk about their real identities. They're given fake names so that Neva, in the book, we come to know her as Fern.
- [12:54]
Grady Hendrix
Right.
- [12:54]
Ayesha Rascoe
And they are also kept in the dark about what exactly is gonna happen to them when it's time to give birth. They're told, oh, there's no pain you'll just go and sleep, you won't remember anything. That's not true.
- [13:06]
Grady Hendrix
Yeah, well, you know, the homes, the homes were run by, you know, the Catholic Charities ran homes, the Florence Crittenden homes, the Salvation army, they were independent homes. And they all varied in how they treated the girls. I mean, you had homes that had nutritionists and obstetricians on staff who gave them classroom teach, who had social workers. And then you had homes that were almost like prisons where the girls money was taken from them, they were kept indoors all day and. But the few common things between the homes is, yes, you never used your real name, you never said where you were from, and you were kept ignorant. You know, all these girls had these due dates bearing down on them like freight trains and they were dying to know what's going to happen. And people say, oh, don't worry about it, that's none of your business. When, you know, it's kind of entirely their business.
- [13:54]
Ayesha Rascoe
There are obviously birth scenes in this book. And they are, they're not for the squeamish.
- [14:00]
Grady Hendrix
We should say, well, isn't birth not for the squeamish?
- [14:03]
Ayesha Rascoe
It's not, no, I've done it and I have to tell you, it's the best thing in the world, but it's also extremely terrifying. And so you talked about researching. Were you surprised or shocked by some of the things you learned about hospital births, especially back then?
- [14:19]
Grady Hendrix
I mean, listen, giving birth in 1970, my hat is off to any woman who did that because they should get a medal of honor. You know, I had obs telling me stories about doctors who would induce labor if their patient came in on Friday because they didn't want to mess up their weekend waiting around for her to give birth. Girls like this who gave birth, as one OB pointed out to me, would probably just be knocked out because the doctor really didn't want to mess around with them too much and have to quote, unquote, deal with them. You know, and even reading things like the Williams obstetrics manual, Guttmacher's Family Planning, which was sort of the go tos at the time, the attitude towards things like morning sickness, that's all in a woman's mind. That's just a made up problem. I mean, it really was eye opening in all the worst ways.
- [15:07]
Ayesha Rascoe
You know, the novel's going along, it's all very realistic. But then here comes this bookmobile and a mysterious librarian and this spellbook for groovy witches. You know, things do get rough. Witches are witches. They're gonna do witchy things and they're gonn. There's always a price to pay for power. But it really seems here that more of the horror in this book is the reality that the girls are living in.
- [15:36]
Grady Hendrix
Yeah.
- [15:37]
Ayesha Rascoe
What kind of led you to write this kind of story?
- [15:40]
Grady Hendrix
So when I was in my twenties, I found out that two members of my family had been sent away to maternity homes, and they were both in their 60s or 70s. I would have never talked about it. And so I was sort of thinking about that for a while and really wrestling with it and trying to figure out what was that? Like, why was this? Okay. And I read a book by a woman named Ann Fessler called the Girls who Went Away. And she lets the mothers talk about their experiences. And I mean, the fact that these were kids and they were 14 and 15 and 13 years old, and we were telling them, give up your baby, never think about it again. I mean, that's impossible for a mother to do. And just the cruelty of it really sort of made me think, there's something here.
- [16:27]
Ayesha Rascoe
Obviously, you look at this and you think about, like, what is the evil in this book? These teenage girls put into these positions to make these impossible decisions without all the information, without any real adult guidance, like, is that the real evil in this story?
- [16:47]
Grady Hendrix
You know, it's funny, I thought about this a lot, right? I write horror novels, and in writing this, I was like, well, who are my bad guys? Who are my bad guys? Be the witches. I mean, the witches are scary, but the witches are also offering knowledge and liberation. And then I thought, well, is it the people running the homes? And I thought, no, you know, the people running the homes were really convinced they were doing what was best for these girls. Is it the girl who's got pregnant? No, of course it's not these girls who got pregnant. Some of them were date raped, some of them were molested. Some of them just didn't even know what birth control was or have access to it. It's one of those stories where there isn't a villain. There are just a lot of people who were really convinced that they were right. And that conviction did so much damage to so many millions of people.
- [17:34]
Ayesha Rascoe
I wanted to ask you, is it true that in addition to, you know, being the celebrated author that you worked in the library of the American Society for, is it psychical?
- [17:44]
Grady Hendrix
Psychical research?
- [17:46]
Ayesha Rascoe
Psychical research. What is that? What was that like?
- [17:51]
Grady Hendrix
So the ASPR was founded about 1885, and it was really designed to sort of. There were a lot of mediums doing, you know, these sittings where they'd be conjuring up spirits of the dead and having seances and things. And they were like, is this real? And they wanted to investigate it in a scientific way. I just answered an ad on Craigslist looking for an office manager and wound up there. And they were like, okay, you know, one of your jobs is answering the phones. And so largely what I did was listen to people tell me these stories about their lives. I mean, they were about ghosts and time slips and haunted houses and, you know, psychic vampire things, but they were also really personal stories that were just dressed up in these Halloween costumes. I liked to talk, and it taught me how to shut up and listen.
- [18:37]
Ayesha Rascoe
Did you get any ideas from that time? And I guess if not, well, how do you come up with your ideas?
- [18:45]
Grady Hendrix
Man, they're everywhere. One of the reasons I write horror is because it's about the world around us. It's not about space or another planet or a fantasy world or the far future. It's usually about the here and now. And good God, there's so many stories, you know, if you're just willing to listen. And then once you add in that, like, you can make it not boring by throwing in a vampire or some witches or a werewolf or two. I mean, and I wish I could keep up with how many books I want to write.
- [19:15]
Ayesha Rascoe
That's Grady Hendrix. His new novel is Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. Thank you so much for talking with us today.
- [19:22]
Grady Hendrix
Oh, man, thanks so much for having me.
- [19:24]
Andrew Limbong
That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. If you want more, you can sign up for our newsletter@npr.org Newsletter Books I'm Andrew Limbong. The podcast is produced by Danica Panetta and Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Mer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Ryan Bank, Deeper Vaz, Adriana Gallardo, Lindsay Tahadi, Sarah Handel, Gurjit Carr, Fernando Naraman, Gabe O'Connor and Melissa Gray. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.
- [20:04]
Ayesha Rascoe
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