The Chthulu and The FInal Girl

Meredith Drum / USA

Arizona State University

meredithdrum.com

The Chthulu and The Final Girl is an animation about gender and power in horror films. The piece troubles the genres’ normalization of hierarchies of physical and psychological dominance. Rebellion against normative morality, particularly by women, is violently punished in horror, yet it is the final girl who emerges alive and strong at the end. Alongside the cinematic, Donna Haraway’s writing also influenced the animation, particularly Haraway’s détournement of the cyborg and the cthulhu. Concerned that the name Anthropocene is ineffective, Haraway prefers the term Capitalocene, which commences with early global markets and trade routed. And as a more expansive and livable term, she posits the Chthulucene. With the later she is overturning, or defiantly misusing, Lovecraft’s racists and misogynistic cthulhu to theorize a giant and powerful feminist science and science fiction to re-think, re-tell, re-world our possible future.