X-Ray (1981), the Final Woman, and the Medical Slasher Film

This essay discusses the declining academic and continued popular currency of Carol J. Clover's concept of the Final Girl, and examines the term through X-Ray or Hospital Massacre (1981), a film of the first slasher cycle with a more mature protagonist than most. It extends Clover's ideas by showing how X-Ray is heavily concerned with medical issues, in particular the Foucauldian "medical gaze." The titular X-ray becomes a structural model for the invasive, destructive gazes deployed throughout the film, both by its villain and by the medical environment itself.