Mother Horror and Final Girl Theory
“Final Girl Theory” is a fictional story about a fictional, cult-classic movie called Kaleidoscope. The narrator is addressing the audience with a high level of knowledge about the film. At first, it’s almost documentary-like in tone but later, this changes.
John Meagher’s reading is perfect- he has an urgent, almost excited way of engaging with the text that demands rapt attention.
The author, A.C. Wise, does an amazing job with the descriptive language as the narrator translates, cinematically, what is happening on the screen. The specific details like how many minutes into the opening scene we are, lend themselves to the authenticity and believability.
The audience immediately forgets this movie is not real.
Wise builds an entire universe around this movie Kaleidoscope. It’s fanbase call themselves ‘Kaleidophiles’ and they manically obsess about the film frame by frame, deconstructing it in order to study every second, every line, every breath. The story descends into fan theories expressed in reddit-forum style.
Why?
The extreme nature of the violence.
It could be real.
When you discover in the first few minutes why the fictional movie is called, Kaleidoscope, the scene in which it derives its meaning…it will get your attention and quicken your pulse.
“Remember: The viewer is complicit. They agreed to everything that follows and that split second between silence and sound, between sob and catch of breath–they can’t turn back. Not that anyone really tries.”
I am honestly blown away by A.C. Wise’s storytelling. I purposefully chose Final Girl Theory to get an introduction to the author’s work before I invest in buying a few short story collections available.
Best. Introduction. Ever.
This story is visceral, captivating, and imaginative. I could ‘see’ every detail so vividly in my mind, I feel like Kaleidoscope is real; it exists, the obsessive fanbase exists. She exists.
Those beads…
Those shards of glass…
The carnival scene…
That ending!
I listened to this story twice. Everyone does. “Don’t let them tell you otherwise.”
About the Authors
Sadie Hartmann
Sadie Hartmann is known as Mother Horror on social media. She writes horror fiction reviews and other content for Cemetery Dance and SCREAM Magazine as well as Goodreads, Amazon, Instagram and other social media platforms & publications.
Sadie is a horror fiction advocate and an Active, voting member of the Horror Writers Association and the co-owner of a curated, horror fiction, monthly subscription package called Night Worms.
A.C. Wise
A.C. Wise’s latest publications are the novellas Grackle, and Out of the Drowning Deep. She is also the author of the novels Wendy, Darling, and Hooked, and the short story collection, The Ghost Sequences, among other works. She’s won the Sunburst Award, and been a finalist for the Nebula, Stoker, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Locus, Aurora, Shirley Jackson, Ignyte, and Lambda Literary Awards. Along with her fiction, she contributes regular review columns to Locus and Apex Magazine.
