The Final Girls

Max loses her mother in a car crash and three years later attends a special screening of Camp Bloodbath, the 1986 slasher her mother appeared in. When the cinema catches fire she and her friends fall into the film and have to obey the rules of its loop. For Max that also means seeing her mother again. Todd Strauss-Schulson directed. Taissa Farmiga plays Max and Malin Åkerman plays her mother. The director described the genre in his own words as a combination of three sources: Pleasantville, eighties horror and Scream. It was shot in Louisiana on a 4.5 million dollar budget. The studio asked for a PG-13, so the team had to keep the gore to a minimum despite the slasher premise. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 76 percent, the consensus saying it offers an affectionate nod to slasher tropes while adding a surprising layer of genuine emotion. It played SXSW and won the Audience Award at the Stanley Film Festival along with a prize at Sitges. Who it is for: viewers who like horror that plays with its own genre and mother-daughter stories. Who it is not for: anyone wanting hard horror. Because of the PG-13 there is almost no blood in it.