Kill your boyfriend

It’s no secret that the horror genre has been historically unkind to women, with no end of instances where they’re demeaned, humiliated, or abused by the men who are supposed to love and believe in them. But when Justice bites, she bites hard, and I can think of nothing quite as satisfying as watching a mistreated girlfriend go on to slay in the final act while her horrible boyfriend gets brutally shoved into his own grave.

And if she’s the one who puts him there? Even better.

 

Die, Die, My Darling

Is there a difference between ‘killing your boyfriend and ‘letting him die’? When Wendy and Danny (The Shining, 1980) run through the Overlook’s ice-slick hedge maze, they aren’t trying to kill Jack. But from the moment Wendy limply swung that baseball bat at her disturbed husband on the hotel stairs, it became clear that – for Danny’s sake, if not her own – she was prepared to let this man die if she had to, no matter how much she may not have actively wanted him dead.

By contrast, when Dani (Midsommar, 2019) stands at the head of The Hårga’s table, adorned in a pyramid of flowers that all but encases her, she watches her archetype-typical horrible boyfriend Christian be sedated, shoved into a bear carcass, and burned alive for the sake of purging the evil from a community she wasn’t (previously) a part of. Though she doesn’t hold a knife to his throat, I would argue that Dani kills her boyfriend as actively as if she had; it’s the smoke of her own despair that she sees being cast into the skies above her as her boyfriend burns, the final farewell of the man she trusted to take care of her, and who in return belittled her traumas and treated her like a problem to be dealt with.

In the same way that Dani is an active participant in Christian’s death by choosing him to be burned, I believe that Grace (Ready or Not, 2019) actively kills her husband, Alex, by damning him to his fate. Knowing what’s to come, Alex brings Grace to his wealthy family on their wedding night, where she’s invited to play a deadly game of hide and seek. It’s revealed throughout the film that this is to stave off a family curse, and Grace must die in this ritual to appease dark forces. Initially, Alex does attempt to help his bride as she outsmarts his family, but when he realises that she (unsurprisingly) won’t trust him again if she survives, he decides to participate in the ritual and hunt her himself. Grace kills only the enemies necessary to ensure her escape, but it’s this escape that results in the bloodsoaked finale of the film, wherein Alex and his family explode at sunrise, proving the curse to be real. Though Grace wasn’t to know, for certain, that her survival constituted Alex’s death, she persisted regardless, any hesitation she might have had in the face of his potential demise ebbed away by the selfishness of him treating her as disposable. She doesn’t put a gun to his head or tear his heart out with her bare hands, but Grace sacrifices Alex as surely as he was going to sacrifice her – it’s an intentional “me vs you” that subverts the game she was tricked into playing.

Ready or Not reverberates similar tones to You’re Next (2011). This feature’s awful boyfriend, Crispian stages a home invasion designed to kill his parents so he can access his inheritance early. Knowing this is going to happen, Crispian still invites his girlfriend, Erin, along. The cruellest part of Crispian having Erin within 100ft of this crime is that he doesn’t prepare her, and leaves her fighting for her life against what she believes to be unknown masked assailants. Erin kills some of these invaders in the process, making her transformation from bystander to killer a direct consequence of Crispian’s own actions. While Crispian claims to Erin that he never meant for her to be targeted, it’s hard to consider a reality where that wouldn’t be the natural outcome. In Ready or Not, Grace’s killing of Alex is a necessary byproduct of her survival, but You’re Next sees Erin kills her boyfriend self-indulgently, in a rage that can only come from finding out you’ve been betrayed. Watching your husband and his family explode because you’ve outsmarted them is satisfying, but personally stabbing your boyfriend in the eye and the neck for unnecessarily endangering you is downright delicious.

So, as we proceed, there is a distinction to be made between ‘killing your boyfriend’ and ‘letting your boyfriend die’. The former is born from rage; it’s knowing that you loved someone who betrayed you, and wanting to watch them bleed for it. It’s not being able to rest until you know the feeling of their viscera slipping over your hands. This type of rage is a thing with teeth, transforming a victim into the hand of Justice itself, allowing her to wield the blade of fate as she wishes.
 

He had it coming (probably)

Throughout horror history, women have been the victim of violent men for little more than plot progression and the classic, misogynistic joy of watching a woman suffer. Yet as Dani causes her emotionally-manipulative-at-best partner’s skin to melt into a burning bear carcass, many audiences argue that his death is an overreaction to his crimes.
I disagree.
Perhaps Christian’s ending isn’t universally morally sound, but it’s justice in the specific circumstances of Dani’s decision. This remains true with The Love Witch (2016), as it’s revealed that occultist Elaine murdered her ex-husband -  who was also emotionally abusive - and continued to perform magic to make men fall in love with her to their ultimate demise. From the perspective of Elaine, who’d been starved of love from someone she trusted to care for her, pushing men to the point of fatal obsession was a choice made from necessity, not cruelty. Even as she stabs her ultimate love interest, she does so because he tells her that nobody will ever love her enough – and still, as he lays bleeding before her, she daydreams of their life together, because all she wanted from him was to be loved. Was murder an overreaction? Perhaps. But as mentioned earlier – to kill a boyfriend is an act of rage that cannot be contained, a reaction to the systemic chipping away of a woman’s psyche in a society that forgives endless microaggressions. Who ever said the person dying from a thousand cuts had to be the one who received them?

When Katie (Paranormal Activity, 2007), possessed and angry, throws Micah’s corpse into the camera at the end of the film, there’s little doubt that he has it coming, despite the potential for false equivalency between murder and his belittling behaviour. But did she not tell him throughout the hour and a half preceding that he should not provoke the malevolent spirit she feared was taking over her home and mind? Perhaps it could be argued that Katie being possessed makes her not solely responsible for Micah’s death, but I could equally argue that it was her own rage that spurred the spirit into its final, murderous act; two beings sharing one body, boiling with the same rage at being disrespected. Without the possession, Katie likely wouldn’t have murdered Micah – but without Katie’s rage at being dismissed, the spirit may, perhaps, have spared him too.
Following the thread of supernatural happenings adding credence to boyfriend-killing, in Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), the reality of if Jessica was ever in any real danger from the supposed vampires around her is left intentionally ambiguous. What we know is that, in the mind of a protagonist who is known to be mentally vulnerable, she was in real danger; a belief that is not assuaged by her husband, Duncan, moving her to a secluded farm where she knows nobody else and must rely on him for everything. Whether the antagonist, Emily, is a vampire or not is also, to me, beside the point – Jessica’s husband was seduced by her regardless, and if Jessica’s subconscious was creating a supernatural fantasy to help her cope with this infidelity, I can’t say I blame her. Nor can many audiences blame her for killing her husband as he attempts to foil her frantic rowboat escape, earning a sharp oar to the face for his trouble.
Even if he wasn’t a vampire as Jessica suspected, and the whole thing really was a delusion, Duncan at the very least enacts coercive control over his wife and takes advantage of Jessica’s fragile mental state. That, by the conventions of this essay, makes him prime boyfriend-killing material.
And if he was a vampire, then Jessica did nothing wrong even by universal morality standards. Since the ending is left ambiguous, I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt.

 

The concept of killing your boyfriend in the name of Justice is one that is so pervasive, the Scream franchise did it twice. In the original 1999 film, it’s unnerving to know that it was Billy who killed Sidney’s mother and tried to do the same to her a year later, but the insult that accompanies injury is how he dismisses, belittles, and lies to her throughout the film. Knowing that Sidney’s life is in danger, that the paranoid puzzle pieces she’s assembling are real, Billy twists the truth and distorts her reality. This is perhaps in part to evade capture, but the smugness with which he sucks his corn syrup-covered finger in the film’s climax reveals to the audience just how sadistically erotic it is for him to watch her spiral into delusion and panic at his hands: the ultimate horror movie being played out just for him. While Stu perishes as a result of a TV dropped on his head – arguably, killed by his real love, as opposed to the girlfriend Billy murdered in the garage – Sidney gets the killing blow on Billy as she shoots him square in the face following his final scare, uttering the line “not in my movie” in an iconic display of final girl agency. But like Elaine and Dani, killing her boyfriend is a temporary relief for Sidney. The source of her pain has been sacrificed in the name of Justice, but this only unravels several more instalments of her trauma being reproduced by eager fanatics, taking her from one powerless situation into another.

This train of thought leads us into Scream V (2022). Enthralled by the promise of recreating his favourite horror franchise, Richie casts Sam as Sidney’s replacement in his ‘requel’, feigning his love for Sam and acting as a protector throughout the film – a stark contrast to Amber, his accomplice, who gives ‘villain vibes’ the whole way through. With Sam’s familial connection to Billy matching Sidney’s to her mother, the MO is near-identical, though Richie’s eventual death is far more brutal than Billy’s 25 years previous. Filled with the rage of being used, manipulated, and betrayed, Sam repeatedly stabs Richie and slits his throat – though she does mirror Sidney’s final shot to the head to prevent any final scares. While the difference in the brutality of Billy and Richie’s murders within the same franchise can be reduced to 2020s audiences having stronger stomachs, I believe that there’s something to be said about the line of boyfriend-killing final girls that preceded Sam. The Scream universe has always reflected the tropes of popular horror, cleverly winding genre motifs throughout the films’ plots. Bearing this in mind, I don’t find it surprising at all that Sam felt enough anger to rip her boyfriend apart as she killed him – she was killing on behalf of Rosemary, Dani, Katie, Erin, Elaine, Grace, Wendy, Tatum, and Sidney. Sam didn’t just kill her boyfriend – she killed the legacy of all horror’s manipulative and abusive boyfriends. Good for her.