My Heart Is a Chainsaw

As Jade draws closer to discovering the truth behind the deaths in Proofrock, she confronts other, more mundane forms of social violence. Unlike the violence of a slasher, the Founders cause harm more subtly through their manipulations of the local economy, their destruction of the landscape, and their performative sympathy that conceals a lack of empathy, mirroring the historical tensions between Race and Indigenous Identity. As Jade seeks to unravel how the Founder’s capitalist violence can fit into the framework of a slasher, she hints that true slasher plotlines rely on an empathetic connection between the killer and the final girl. While the Founders can kill, they lack the emotional connection that Jade posits is key for a slasher antagonist.

Shooting Glasses’s story about the fate of Greyson Brust reveals the first instance of violence by the Founders. After a co-worker is injured due to an unexpected cave-in on the construction site, Deacon Samuels pays off the other workers so that they will not create any bad publicity for the development. Shooting Glasses feels guilty, as though he essentially sold his friend’s life for $800. Deacon Samuels represents an opposite to Mr. Holmes, seeking to cover up history rather than reveal it as he tells the construction workers, “Every house has a story, right? That it’s not always important that everybody know every little part of it. What you don’t know, it doesn’t matter so much” (215). His order that the cave be filled in with concrete seems to have been the event that triggered the return of Stacey Graves, linking his self-interest to the murders that come after.

The Founders are skilled at constructing a rhetoric of false compassion and fake protection. As Jade watches the memorial slideshow in honor of Deacon Samuels, she finds herself being nearly convinced by their words, particularly when they announce a memorial scholarship that will pay for any Proofrock high school graduate to attend college. Samuels gives off the appearance of being a good neighbor, talking about his plans to support local businesses and enrich the local economy. The other Founders claim that “he didn’t want to be a siphon on the community, but a reservoir the community could draw from” (240), figuratively positioning themselves as feeding the town’s water source rather than draining it. However, the text subtly references the ways in which the Founders’ rhetorical claims are showmanship rather than genuine. Jade reminds herself during their rehearsed speeches that many of these wealthy families have scandalous histories—the tech billionaire has been stealing user data, and one of the wives famously was accused of murdering her boyfriend. Jade concludes that “any violence they do, it’s with keystrokes” (242), clearing them of involvement in the slasher crimes, but not exonerating them morally.

When Jade finally penetrates beyond the façade of Terra Nova, she discovers the final link between the more distant violence of capitalism and the gory, intimate violence of a slasher. She crosses the lake and goes to spy on the construction zone, noting the strange falseness of the houses when she is up close:

It reminds Jade more of a cartoon than a gated community: the outlines of the houses were there all along, all they needed was some great hand to tip a bag of ink over into the chimney, to let color leach down all the lines, find all the corners, fill in the windows (264).

This image of the half-built houses as cartoons emphasizes the unreality of the image that the Founders seek to create about themselves. The picture is further disrupted when Jade sees Theo Mondragon murdering the construction workers with a nail gun. Jade eventually realizes that these murders are also motivated by self-interest and self-protection; Theo shot down Mr. Holmes’s plane and realized that the construction workers were witnesses that he would have to pay off. The isolation of the property and the signal jammer installed for privacy assist Theo in the crime, implying that the capitalistic drive to protect one’s financial interests creates both literal and emotional barriers that cannot be breached between the Founders and the working class.

While the violence that Theo Mondragon commits against the workers is motivated by a lack of empathy, Jade’s “Slasher 101” interludes hint that the antagonists in slasher movies share an empathetic connection to the final girl. She argues that slashers recognize girls with the potential to defeat them and, seeking to end their miserable life of revenge, intentionally help to transform the girl by targeting her friends and family, creating a moment where she finally snaps. This emotional connection between the killer and the final girl, Jade imagines, is the true reason why a killer wears a mask. While the mask hides the identity of the antagonist from the audience, Jade imagines a different internal motivation for the antagonist:

[T]hat super slow motion moment at the end when this bookish reserved quiet girl finally stops in all the swirling madness and blood and tears, turns around with a machete or a chainsaw or just even only her hands like Constance from Just Before Dawn, and she’s screaming with rage, this is why slashers really wear masks, sir. It’s so you won’t see them smile (281).

This image foreshadows Jade’s emotional connection to Stacey Graves, the real killer, and Stacey’s final moment of peace when Jade pulls her under the water. Unlike the self-centered violence and lack of connection seen in the Founders, the violence of slasher movies is a form of intimate understanding between two people who have experienced injustice. This emotional dance between slasher and final girl furthers to connection between Justice Versus Revenge.