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This month, Decider is going to celebrate Halloween by honoring horror movies, and in particular, the characters who manage to outlast, outsmart, and outrun the baddies: the Final Girls. In the past, we’ve highlighted the iconic “Final Girls.” Characters like Laurie Strode and Sidney Prescott; the ones who survived the odds to inspire generations of horror nerds. This time, though, we’re going to look at the modern horror muses who are subverting and reinventing the genre with their performances.
This week’s Final Girl is Victoria Pedretti.
NOTE: spoilers for The Haunting of Bly Manor and The Haunting of Hill House ahead!
THE FINAL GIRL:
Victoria Pedretti as Dani Clayton in The Haunting of Bly Manor, a sweet governess dealing with a group of dastardly ghosts in an English country house…her thrilling follow up to Nell Crain in The Haunting of Hill House.
THE KILLER SHE EVADED:
Uh…yeah…she, uh, didn’t actually evade the killer. Let’s get to that…
WHY SHE SLAYS:
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In the last two years, Victoria Pedretti has come to be the face of horror on Netflix. Although she played a supporting role in 2018’s mega hit The Haunting of Hill House, she arguably stole the show. Hill House‘s creator and director Mike Flanagan brought Pedretti back for his followup series, The Haunting of Bly Manor, only this time as the lead.
Here’s the funny thing about both Flanagan shows: Pedretti’s character doesn’t survive! In Hill House, Nell Crain is haunted to the point that she is killed by suicide. Her own spirit lingers, though, to torment her surviving family members. In The Haunting of Bly Manor, Pedretti’s character stands up to some of the more cruel ghosts of the house, but is ultimately felled by the Manor’s original ghost, the Lady of the Lake. She is able to fight back against the ghost’s initial attack, but in the end, she offers herself up as a sacrifice to sooth the spirits. She takes Flora’s place as the Lady’s victim. And later, she saves the lives of everyone else associated with Bly Manor by giving herself over, body and soul, to the house’s unquiet spirits.
Pedretti is the anti-final girl. She doesn’t live. However, we’re still obsessed with her because she’s so damn good in both series. She’s the one we’re rooting for, thereby making her eventual demise all the more awful.
HER BEST MOMENT:
Oh gosh, Pedretti is so good in both Haunting series. There’s the moment in the funeral home where her corpse falls out of the coffin in Hill House, her iconic ghost scream in that series, and her closet freakout in Bly Manor. But the true moment that makes her an iconic horror heroine is when she saves Flora from the Lady in the Lake.
Pedretti’s Dani could have survived the horror show of the house. She chose instead to save the day. Sure it’s an unconventional way to be a “final girl,” but she’s the one who finally fells the “boss.”
