Final Girl University Sophomore Year: Survivor's Guilt

The Freshman Year course of Final Girl University was all about The Classic Slasher Films: Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Black Christmas, Halloween, Friday The 13th, Nightmare On Elm Street, Child's Play, Final Destination, Scream, and Alien. Nine classics from the 1960s-1990s, and a meta commentary from the 90s, written by one of the creators of the classics from the 80s. Mostly we dealt with normal people who found themselves in a horrifying situation from realistic encounters with unbalanced people to supernatural nonsense involving possessed dolls and dead child killers with powers over dreams. But at the end of each movie, at least one person lived.

The easy way to craft Sophomore year would just be to throw Psycho 2, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, the Black Christmas Reboot, Halloween 2, Friday The 13th 2, Nightmare On Elm Street 2, Child's Play 2, Final Destination 2, Scream 2, and Final Girls at you. But I'm taking this educational opportunity seriously.

This "year" of horror will focus on people who've survived a major unexpected trauma and how they handle it, whether it turns them into killers or saviors. Yes, there will be sequels in this season, but we'll also meet new characters, and we'll skip over some films. Some because they're bad, and nobody should be forced to watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 or Halloween 2 without getting paid for it. But some of the part 2s will show up in future "years", so don't worry if your favorite sequel doesn't show up on this list. It might make the next one. 

1. Friday The 13th Part 2

We'll start off simply. At the end of Friday The 13th, a single survivor was rescued from Crystal Lake by the local police force. She asked what happened to Jason (who was not the killer in the movie), and nobody knew what she was talking about. They had found the actual killer and all the dead bodies, but the franchise superstar seemed like it might have been a dream. Buuuuuuuuut, of course it wasn't. In this movie, we finally meet the unstoppable force, Jason Vorhees. While he does have a scene with The Final Girl, most of this movie concerns a new camp that opens up on the other side of Crystal Lake. If they'd just stayed on their property, perhaps the lusty teenagers could have been shooting a porn instead of a horror movie. Alas, a couple of them sneak over the line to the old camp, and Jason unleashes Hell. This is a surprisingly good 1980s sequel as it sets up a bunch of tropes, but mostly avoids them. Every time I was pretty sure I knew what was going to happen, I was wrong.

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2. The Burning

We're going to stick with summer camps for a bit. This time we deal with different kind of survivors. We open with a scene where a group of campers and counselors seek prank revenge on a terrible counselor, but it goes awry and horribly burns him. He never fully recovers but he survives, and first seeks revenge on the general world that won't accept him, and then finds one of the prankers has grown up to work at a summer camp, and he sets on his path to revenge. There are lots of butts and boobs, and also Jason Alexander is supposed to be one of the campers, but I spent the entire movie assuming he was a counselor because he looks so much older than the rest of the cast. It's a somewhat typical morality horror where people who do bad things get their comeuppance, but also a bunch of innocent kids are just destroyed. It's not super thrilling until the final sequences, but once it gets going, it's great

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3. Sleepaway Camp

If you don't know the massive spoiler in this film, don't look it up. This is about a child who survives trauma, becomes introverted, and then is sent away to a camp where they have trouble fitting in with the other kids. It's not long before people who who act cruelly start getting killed off, and it seems ridiculously easy to guess who the killer is. There are some very odd 80s dream montage / flashback  sequences that briefly confuse the narrative but this ends up being a really interesting character study, and unlike the last two movies, the actors who play the campers are actually kids

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4. Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

Don't worry, we'll get to part two during Junior Year, but it's almost non-canonical. This film focuses on a group of kids who've been institutionalized for sleep related issues. Guess what, they all grew up on Elm Street, and their parents were part of the posse that killed Freddy Krueger. But unlike the generic teens from the first film, everyone in this group has a power that keeps them from getting killed. One of the psychiatrists in charge of studying the group reluctantly hires a young dream expert to try and connect with the kids, and, oh shit, it's The Final Girl from the first film! This is actually a much better film than the first one. The acting is better, the death scenes are more creative, and Freddy Krueger gets better one-liners. 

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5. Candyman

We go from a movie about being attacked in dreams, to the first Woke movie of the entire course. Candyman is about gentrification and urban legends. The protagonist tries to debunk the sillier part of an urban legend she's researching, and everything goes horribly, horribly wrong for her. Like Sleepaway Camp, and The Burning, she becomes a Final Girl during the course of the film, and then has to try and overcome her trauma. It's probably the best written movie of this Sophomore Year.​

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6. Child's Play 2

Actually better than the original, this is a well-paced thriller. Not a cinematic triumph by any stretch but a prime example of 80s horror that's campy and unrealistic but not unbelivable and cheap. ​

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7. Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter

And speaking of campy....eh?  Eh? We return to Crystal Lake for the second time this semester. Why? Because there's a slight shift in tone. We start off with a historical recap of the first three movies, even though we've only seen the first two. The third movie isn't bad, but doesn't really fit into the cirriculum. Plus, this movie starts with them finding all the bodies from the third installment. We meet a bunch of new characters who vary slightly from the template of the first two movies, but only slightly. Then the movie really focuses on the Don't Fuck Or You Die trope with some fine ridiculous acting. There is a death scene near the end that takes so long that I'm not sure I'm not still watching the character yell "He's killing me. Ahhhhh. Run. Run. He's killing me. Ahhhhhhh."

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8. Aliens

Neither Sigourney Weaver nor John Hurt can catch a break. I always imagine how perfect an experience this would be if there were no more sequels to this. It's great to have three sequels in a row that improve upon the originals. This will ... not be a trend, unfortunately.
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9. Final Destination 2

We pick up soon after the first film as we learn which person from the original cast survived when a new crop or idiot teenagers accidentally escape Death and begin being hunted down in creative fashions. This is a fun sequel, and stays true to the heart of the original film.

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10. Scream 2

I debated beginning Sophomore Year with this, as one of our survivors from the original film gets super meta and lists the rules for how to survive sequels in horror movies. Then the film goes down the list of tropes and destroys them. It's just as meta fun as the original, and is also actually thrilling. And it's a nice way to see off some of our familiar faces, as Junior Year is mostly invested in the parts of slasher franchises that go off the rails and tell different kinds of stories.