Graphic Content: Sacred Lamb by Tim Seely and Jelena Ðordevic-Maksimovic

Ever since the final girl trope was born in the slashers of the 70’s and 80’s, critics have tried to understand its impact. Its steady evolution from victim to vanquisher, from scream queen to badass heroine, shows that horror, like any genre that lasts through the decades, can evolve. Women might still be stalked through their own horror movie scenario, but now they are at least self-aware enough to make smart decisions and even fight back against their attackers. Such are the final girls who live in and are trapped by Sacred Lamb (also, it’s a trade paperback by writer Tim Seely and illustrator Jelena Ðordevic-Maksimovic).

 

Sacred Lamb is the place social media influencer Kellyn West finds herself after killing her stalker. She is sent to Sacred Lambs, a sort of Final Girl witness protection program, in case her stalker is the kind of killer that repeatedly rises from the dead and refuses to stop adding to their body count. Kelly and the other women at Sacred Lambs are told they are being kept within Sacred Lamb’s walls for their own good. Then, it appears that a horde of killers are indeed rising from the grave, and Sacred Lamb may soon become a slaughterhouse.

There are a lot of stories featuring final girls, and even ones where final girls push back against the trope. Seely’s story, however, is the most obvious metaphor for this trope, where women are literally being imprisoned and being told that it’s to protect them and everyone around them. However, the story can be hard to follow since the women, especially as they are drawn by Ðordevic-Maksimovic, feel interchangeable. But this isn’t necessarily a deep-thinking comic; Ðordevic-Maksimovic’s art might not offer similar faces, but it also has a grittiness that lends itself to the story, one soaked in blood and with a few sharp edges, particularly a sheriff’s armchair psychoanalytic analysis of the killers and victims in his midst. This book isn’t slasher perfection, but it’s good for those intellectual horror nerds who don’t mind an occasional, decadent descent into slasher nostalgia.