My Heart Is a Chainsaw

The conclusion of My Heart Is a Chainsaw sees Jade emerge as the unexpected final girl, whose emotional drive to protect innocence allows her to defeat Stacey Graves when Letha cannot. Jade has felt strong protective instincts toward others, particularly young women and children, throughout the novel—saving Misty Christy’s daughter from the bus and following Letha because she fears that her own father will hurt her. During the July Fourth movie at the lake, Jade sees Shooting Glasses saving some of the Founders’ children from the yacht, motivating her to try to intervene and protect him from Theo. When Jade finally confronts her father, she turns this protective instinct toward herself: “‘[T]his is for you,’ Jade tells her eleven-year-old self, a completely weird thing to say, but she’s got to say something” (367). The novel’s final image of the mother bear defending her cub sums up Jade’s character arc: Her wish that her own mother would have saved her from her how father has transformed her, allowing her to fully embody Maternal Protectiveness and become the protector that she wished she had.

Jade’s trauma manifests as powerful defensive strength, allowing her to defy forces that are physically stronger than her. Letha is a highly athletic person, but “even her final girl strength isn’t enough” (369) when Stacey Graves breaks her jaw. Jade must find another way to defeat the ghost and instead draws upon her empathetic connection to the murdered child. She imagines herself as Stacey, another part Indigenous American girl seeking maternal love, seeking refuge in an underwater cave: “Because it’s the water coming up over her, not her trying to get under it, and because she’s wedged so tightly in her mother’s embrace, Stacey Graves is able to go under at last and be with her mother, which is all she’s ever wanted” (371). While Stacey walks on top of the water because she is a witch, Jade understands that she wants to be under it, finding the refuge and protection of a burial place. When she pulls Stacey under, physical violence transforms into a gesture of physical comfort:

Jade pulls her deeper, deeper yet, until they reach a still point and Jade can hug Stacey to her, hug her tight with arms and legs, caging her, her small body bucking and writhing at first, but then, gratefully and by slow degrees, stilling, stilling enough that […] is that music Jade’s hearing through the water, or the end of the movie? (380).

The ambiguity surrounding the music suggests that they might be hearing Ezekiel’s dead churchgoers, or that the sound is only the music of Jaws finishing on the surface, but it also signifies at a metatextual level that this is the end of the conflict and the resolution of the novel’s story.

However, Jade not only becomes the final girl at the end of the novel. She also transforms into a killer, taking on the role of both tropes, just as Mr. Holmes noted was typical in the rape-revenge subgenre of horror. When Jade murders her own father, she is seeking vengeance for a past wrong, and her reputation suffers for it. She realizes that her years spent as a social outcast, pulling macabre pranks and getting into trouble, will make the people of Proofrock assume that she is the murderer. She reflects, “Theo and Letha weren’t framing Jade, Jade’s been doing that all on her own, all these years” (385). Because Tiffany Koenig has captured a video of Jade killing her own father, without any context as to why, she is forced to flee into the woods and take shelter at Camp Blood, conflating Justice Versus Revenge.

Jade’s reputation as a “monster” parallels the film that has been playing in the background throughout the massacre: Jaws. In Jade’s final “Slasher 101” paper, she offers an atypical analysis of Jaws as a slasher film, rather than just a monster movie. She writes:

The great white attacking Amity Island could have been AT the Indianapolis, and because we didn’t know radiation shielding the same back then, maybe it even got some glowing green atomic rays in it, making it big AND smart. Even smart enough to cross over half of the world and come to get revenge on a sailor soldier who escaped its teeth in 1945 but is now spreading word of sharks’ lifeless doll eyes, making everybody just shoot sharks on sight, when really they just want to swim and eat fish and stuff (330).

Rather than a mindless animal, Jade ascribes agency to the shark, imagining that it seeks Justice Versus Revenge for the harm done to the reputation of its species. Jade has also been persecuted and directly harmed by the way that residents of Proofrock have disregarded her for her social class, Race and Indigenous Identity, and family reputation. As she tries to scream for help during the movie, the Proofrock residents are singing along too loudly to hear her, prompting Jade to think, “isn’t this where she’s always been? Way on the outside, everyone deaf to her cries? Deaf when she cried?” (354-55). The neglect that she has suffered as a child in Proofrock and the negative reputation that her response to trauma has created put Jade in the position of the shark—persecuted until she must seek justice on her own terms.

My Heart Is a Chainsaw reveals the way in which hero and villain can share similarities and how visual narratives and rhetoric can distort perceptions of who is good, pure, and worthy, versus who is evil, frightening, and malevolent. Jade’s ending casts her in several roles of the traditional slasher film, indicating that these divisions are not as clear as they seem in fiction.