Not Your Final Girl Podcast: Two Wrong Turns Don’t Make A Right Turn

Comicon is proud to announce our new partnership with Ariel Dyer and Candace Sluder. Hailing from Bakersfield, CA, Ariel and Candace produce a biweekly horror podcast Not Your Final Girl, part of the Morbidly Beautiful Network, which we will be featuring every other Monday. 

Dyer and Sluder bring a badass female perspective to a genre that has a tendency to forget they even have females in their audience. 

The ‘final girl’ is a well worn horror trope. She’s a heroine or a survivor left at the end of a horror movie. The one who defeats the villain or escapes, and is left standing, by skill or by dumb luck, at the very end of the film. She’s the witness, wrapped in a blanket, sitting on the curb next to an ambulance, telling her story to the police, who have arrived in time to save her.

Ariel Dyer and Candace Sluder are not (your) final girls, just trying to make it to the end of the film. We look forward to joining them on their biweekly forays into horror cinema. 

On forming the podcast, Dyer says

We talk about a broad range of horror movies but part of the goal was to bring female perspective to it, not as if there aren’t women who like it, but we want to prove that there’s lots of us and we aren’t connected. We want to change that.

Sluder adds

You should keep liking the stuff that you like. There’s a million weirdos out in the world, so you’ll find someone who likes the same thing and wants to talk about it.

Without further delay, here’s this week’s episode:

Show notes:

Not Your Final Girl is catching the zeitgeist with this one. In this episode, Candace and Ariel talk to writer and graphic designer Julie Manaay about early 2000’s slasher powerhouse and undying franchise, Wrong Turn (2003) – as well as its socially conscious-ish reboot, Wrong Turn (2021). We learn many important lessons in the process, such as the names of the mutant cannibals (Three Finger, Saw Tooth, and One Eye), the difference between a story credit and a writing credit, and the correct pronunciation of Dushku.

Remakes are always fun to talk about (even if they’re not technically…. good), so let’s get into one of the weirder original/remake pairs we’ve come across. We’ve got low rise jeans, Wicker Man (2006) style folk horror attempts, bad (but effective?) small team tactics, a woke mountain cult, explosions, and characters who have seen horror movies but still make all the worst decisions. Stick with us, listeners, we have been hiking more than once and would never put your chair into poison ivy.

Julie Mana-ay (pronounced Ma-na-eye) Perez is a Kern County native and is a graphic designer and writer for The Bakerfield Californian and Bakersfield Life Magazine. She loves all things spooky — from horror films to true crime podcasts and watching her Sims characters die.

Movies Discussed: Wrong Turn (2003), Wrong Turn (2021)

Comicon thanks Not Your Final Girl for allowing us to premiere episodes of their podcast. The full archive can be found on Morbidly Beautiful’s official website, morbidlybeautiful.com.