“Here!” Letha calls down to her dad. What she’s waving in her hand—offering—is a tube of something. After-bite cream, lotion, Jade can’t tell.
Letha makes to lob it down once, twice, so Theo Mondragon can get in sync, and then she lets it drop, plummet end over tiny end. Theo Mondragon snags it from the air like the athlete he had to have been at one point.
He nods thanks, already applying the cream, and then Mars Baker is leaning out over the railing on the deck below her.
With an over-under shotgun he’s just now swinging shut.
Letha leans out and over even farther to see him but he’s not looking up at her, just down to Theo Mondragon.
“This is what you should have had,” he says, snapping the shotgun up so he can track a duck flapping low across the water. He fake shoots it, doing the recoil and everything.
“What’s for dinner?” Theo calls up to them, as if he wasn’t just on a killing spree.
“Not duck!” Tiara answers.
“Duck, duck, right,” Jade says to herself, lowering herself down below the level of the window so Theo Mondragon won’t accidentally clock her on his walk up the pier.
He hooks the gas mask on a rack, twists his hoodie around his neck after this hard day’s work, and saunters up into the yacht like nothing’s wrong with the world. Nothing at all.
Moments after he’s gone and nobody’s at the rail, Shooting Glasses’s body doesn’t bob up to the surface, perforated fifty times over, blood staining the water.
Probably because he’s nailed to the bed of the lake.
SLASHER 101
Okay, for My Bloody Valentine‘s or just even only for Valentine but also to make up for my perfect gag for the year book crew, which if you didn’t see it but only missed my presence, was 6 FAKE hypodermic needles superglued to my forearm Dream Warriors style, with each one labeled Algebra and English and P.E. and the rest, including of course HISTORY, but to make up for the quiz that day, I’ll pay you back and more with a little insight into how there’s not enough slow motion in the whole world really for when the final girl finally stops running and turns around to fight this unkillable killer, and also WHY he’s so nice slash mean to her.
Emphasis on the “slash” there.
First you have to imagine what’s in her head. She’s been watching her friends and family and pets all get killed, and THEN she has to run down whatever hall it is they’ve all been put in in various and many jack in the box contraptions.
At some point this final girl has to realize that this is all about her, don’t you think? That her friends and family and pets would all still be alive if this slasher had only STARTED with her instead of cutting his way closer and closer to her. So she feels guilty like maybe she’s sort of the killer herself, like this bodycount is maybe HER bodycount.
What I’m saying here, sir, is that she’s been groomed to become her secret and best self. The slasher COULD have started with her easy. The slasher doesn’t HAVE to start at the outside edges but CAN just walk right into the center, apply blade, deed done, go home now, story over.
But that wouldn’t be enough. Not even close.
The slasher cycle is a dance, see? Imagine a dance floor in a high school gym, the lights are down, crinkled paper everywhere, spiked punch, fancy handed down jackets and dresses, shoes it’s impossible to even walk in, I know you’ve chaperoned some. Now who the slasher WANTS to dance with is this one quiet girl way on the other side of the gym floor, but he can’t cross to her yet, instead he has to work his way across TO her, dancing with this person and then that person, the back of his hand sometimes touching the final girl’s sleeve during a slow song, their eyes locking like fate, but he’s waiting for the last dance, sir. The slow （MOTION） one. That’s the one that matters. You don’t go home with who you dance your 3rd dance with. You go home with who you’re holding hands with when the music’s over.
But it’s not love, don’t let me get you thinking that. And it’s not hate either. It’s deeper than both of those.
My theory or thesis from many viewings and more knowing is that the slasher has the kind of eyes that can recognize which girls have a final girl hiding inside them, which is why he targets them LAST. But is it really to kill them? I don’t think so, sir. I think the slasher’s life of revenge is a life of pain and misery, and the slasher knows that no ordinary person can end that. Only a very very certain kind of girl can. Only a final girl. But not in her current state or form. No, the slasher first has to help her TRANSFORM, which involves killing all her friends and family and pets, everybody except Dewey pretty much, because Dewey’s basically unkillable.