When you think of a final girl, who do you think of?
Laurie, Sydney, Nancy, Max if you’re cool like me and love The Final Girls? Maybe even Taffy, if you’re big brained enough.
While all of these final girls are great, today I want to talk about the final girls that aren’t. These final girls are flawed, they hurt people in their effort to not survive, but simply not be alone. In many eyes, these final girls are more villains than heroes. The audience is not meant to root for them, but to empathize with their journey instead, recognizing the loneliness and heartbreak the character feels on a more magnified scale. It is with this idea of a final girl that I would like to discuss the character of Kat/Joan, the ultimate survivor of The Blackcoat’s Daughter.
The film consists of two stories and three timelines; the first timeline takes place at Bramford, a boarding school during winter break. Two students are left behind, Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton). While the two students are being cared for by two nuns, audience then cut to the second timeline, where Linda and Bill, two parents, are driving up to Bramford during the winter. They pick up a silent hitchhiker named Joan (Emma Roberts).
In the first timeline, Kat appears sickly after receiving a phone call, behaving erratically and violently. When Rose attempts to speak with her, Kat says she believes her parents are dead and she’s all alone. While at breakfast, Kat curses at the nuns and becomes ill before the nurses instruct Rose to clear the driveway as the headmaster is coming to visit. We then see the headmaster arrive with two policemen to the nun’s quarters, which are stained with blood. The second timeline shows Bill and Linda bonding with Joan, over dinner sharing that they are actually Rose’s parents, and they are visiting the school as this is the ninth anniversary of their daughter’s death. Joan excuses herself from dinner, and goes to the bathroom, where she giggles to herself in her reflection at the mention of Rose’s name.
The stories then come together for the third timeline. We see the phone call to Kat, where it is a demonic entity telling her that her parents are dead and she must kill everyone. After she gets sick at breakfast, the nuns receive a call that Kat’s parents have died and the headmaster is coming with two police to collect Kat. Kat then murders both of the nuns and Rose, decapitating them and bringing their heads to the furnace as a sacrifice. She is sent to a mental health facility, where they perform an exorcism on her. We see the entity, whom she begs not to go before it disappears. It is then revealed that Joan is Kat, having escaped the mental facility. Once they arrive at Bramford, she kills Bill and Linda and decapitates them, bringing their heads to the furnace in order to bring the demon back. However, nothing comes, and Joan walks into the blood stained snow and screams.
Kat/Joan, who I will be referring to as Joan throughout the rest of this analysis, is far from the only villainous final girl, but she is unique in her motivations. From the jump, Joan is seen as awkward. Her family is incredibly religious, and she is very quiet, anxious and uptight. Rose, who gave her parents the wrong pick up dates to ensure she wasn’t pregnant, finds her offputting and unlikable from their very first moments together. Joan is isolated, literally and emotionally, from everyone around her, with her only comfort being her parents coming to get her. She tries to be nice to Rose, but they can’t seem to connect. She also seems very uncomfortable when Rose sneaks off with her boyfriend, afraid of being alone.
Plagued by nightmares and premonitions and warnings of her parents untimely demise, Joan only draws further into herself. Joan’s awkwardness, otherness, and failure to belong even with one other peer immediately makes her sympathetic but also creates anxiety for the audience. Be it they see themselves in that, or they know people similar, the character of Joan is one that can never truly belong, no matter how much she would like to. Like other final girls that are othered, Kat is also a victim to circumstance. Much like Cassandra in Greek mythos, these characters are written off as crazy when they try to warn others of impending doom, or point out there is a killer amongst them. Kat tries time and time again to express the impending doom, but she does not know how to effectively warn others or express her anxiety, instead just stating she believes her parents are dead. This only makes Rose uncomfortable and does nothing to potentially save her, the nuns, or even Joan herself. What distinguishes Joan from other final girls is her resignation as opposed to the usual willingness to protect.
This impulse, again in an unusual subversion of the trope, is only found in preserving her relationship with the demon, or the only thing still in her corner. While the entity took away what she loved most, it in essence replaced them through possession, thereby guaranteeing Joan would never be alone again. As the demon gets exorcised from her, Kat tearfully begs it to stay – a glimpse of humanity in a character we just learned cut three people’s heads off while expressing no remorse about doing so. And while audiences could initially write off this behavior as a side effect of the possession, when see her engage in the same behavior later in order to bring the demon back. Bill and Linda could have been a connection for Joan as, unlike others, they expressed concern for her and Bill in particular expressed real empathy. However, Joan rejects this human connection and instead kills them both to appease the demon. When this fails, Joan is alone in the snow, crying as she finally processes how alone she is. Her desperate attempts to bring the demon back have failed. Her final girl arc is unique as Joan is desperate not to be the final girl, not by saving others, but by desperately trying to preserve what she deems to be the only connection she has left. Her fixation blinds her from the relationship she could have had with Rose’s parents.
Joan and The Blackcoat’s Daughter are a dark take on grief and loneliness and the desperate measures people will take to ensure company. While Joan is a final girl, I believe her motives and desperation to avoid the title make her one of the forgotten ones. While there will always be a thousand Lauries or Sydneys, final girls portrayed like Joan are a tough sell. They are relatable, but they aren’t anything to aspire to. You cannot franchise Joan or build a sequel. On the opposite end of the spectrum are final girls like Taffy from Lisa Frankenstein, who overcome their fears and hurt with love, yet similarly these characters complete their arcs within their films and find closure in their completion. Taffy is easy to love and root for, while Joan simply is not. Yet we love every final girl in the Cinema Cemetery, so it felt natural to include Joan in the roster.