By Lillian Gren
I think we can all guess where this is going.
The list of victims includes:
A trans goth girl (Ashe),
A bisexual with the personality of a golden retriever (Job),
An anime addict (Char),
A K-Pop obsessed fangirl with horrible taste in men (Email),
My trauma dumping ground (Sahara),
Lesbian #1 (Jazz)
Lesbian #2 (Marry)
A GNC person with a Good Omens obsession to rival my 7000+ pins on Pinterest (Loon).
Another trans goth, but this time available in limited edition masc (Crow)
Oh, and myself too, I guess.
Obviously, these are all fake names, and if I need to clarify that, you would not survive any of these movies.
I’m going to rate our survival rate based on how many people would die and calculate an average at the end. I think the answer to this question genuinely depends on the horror movie and what kind it is. Half of us are already going to hell and the other half would happily jump in front of the Sword of Damocles or any vehicle moving at 50 miles an hour, so at this point, it's just a matter of choosing which way to go.
Like, if it was Silence of The Lambs? I know AT LEAST two people who might be down to eat human flesh if given the opportunity. Apparently, it tastes like pork, so who knows? Sahara would probably engage in mental warfare with Hannibal Lecter and keep him engaged, and Crow would probably give him new ideas for murder unironically. Ash would follow around Jodie Foster like a lovesick, sapphic puppy and end up killed or arrested by consequence. The rest of us would be minced meat.
Job would annoy Hannibal into eating him; if the bad jokes won’t make him snap, the amount he’d simp for Buffalo Bill might do it. The more I think about it, if he sticks to cannibal puns, he might just pull through.
Char is young and blonde with great skin, so she’d get snapped up by Buffalo Bill in a heartbeat (she’s 5’0, nothing’s gonna help at that point). Same with Jazz and Marry, right down to the height.
Email is a “Silence” fangirl so she might pull through on that basis alone, but she’s also a member of the shorter-than-a-fifth-grader club so I can’t guarantee her safety, especially when BB likes to get around.
Loon would just lie down and take any beatdown given to them (I don’t think they’re a pacifist, but I feel like they wouldn’t be an active participant in preventing their murder).
As for me? I’m a slob and a picky eater who’d get labeled as rude in a heartbeat, and we all know what happens to the rude (and we all know it involves a liver with a side of fava beans and a nice chianti).
Final toll: 8/10, because Job might run out of puns at some point and Crow isn’t an endless factory of ideas.
Friday The 13th? I think Gen Z campers in a place with no parental supervision would be enough to scare anybody. Voorhees has nothing on a person with depression and monster-I-Can’t-Say-That-Kids-Read-This tendencies. If Loon didn’t scare him off with borderline stalker behavior toward horror characters, we’d probably end up sleeping with the earthworms.
Let’s be real, nobody in this current day and age would take anybody seriously if they showed up in a hockey mask with an ice pick. Even if we did, 8/10 of us are AFAB, and we’d have to be phenomenally stupid (I mean even more so than we are) to not bring self-defense equipment. The other two can perform multiple types of martial arts. All in all, a general net positive. If nothing else, my general dislike of the outdoors might save me.
I’d put it at a 5/10 survival rate.
We’d all survive Halloween, because Mike Myers only has eyes for Jamie Lee Curtis (honestly, who wouldn’t?) unless Loon decides they want an autograph and Mikeyboy gets testy.
0/10. Definitely better odds than the rest of this list.
Scream is a bit of a toss-up because on the one hand, we’re all high schoolers with varying degrees of self-preservation, and nobody really likes us because we’re queer or BIPOC. On the other hand, we’d either send all of Ghostface’s calls to voicemail or answer them purposefully to screw with him.
If I had to pick a single person who’s most likely to survive, then probably Sahara, because she’d read the warning signs and get the frick-frack paddy-whack out of there ASAP. The runner-up is Email, who is the horror movie freak of the group, and would also know what’s up and abandon ship the minute she could.
If I had to pick a person who’s most likely to die first, it’d be Char (sorry girl, you know I love you), because her ADHD would be her downfall. The runner-up is Job for the exact same reasons.
8/10. We’re done for.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre has the potential to murder us all but I think we would survive purely on the basis that none of us would voluntarily go to Texas unless it was important. I think I’d be the last man standing regardless because a solid chunk of my family is located in the Houston area, and everybody knows y’all don’t mess with Texas, especially when we come in packs. Either that or they’d recognize me as a local and give me some of that good old-fashioned Texan hospitality. I still might die, but at least I’d die in the comfort of familiarity.
1/10, and only because I can’t read a room to save my life.
None of us would survive Nightmare On Elm Street. We’re all on meds and our dreams would only give Freddie Kruger some more material to work with.
10/10. Not great.
The Exorcist is a lost cause. We used to perform demon summoning in middle school for kicks. The only reason Jazz and Marry might survive is the fact that they’re Catholic.
10/10. None of us are religious, there will be no salvation.
With my raging daddy issues, being plopped down into The Shining would make me curl into a ball and cry, so I’d be dead first, for sure. Sahara is next because she doesn’t like to disappoint people, so she’d stick it out only to get murdered. See the last few paragraphs for what will happen to Loon. Ash might run away but I’m not sure how fast she is, so she’s got a 50-50 chance. Same with Job. If Crow can hobble his way out the doors on crutches he also might make it, but his chances are slim.
Email would probably attempt to screw Jack Torrance because at this point she only needs to see an emotionally unavailable man with severe mental damage to throw herself onto them screaming “Take me”. The chronic I Can Fix Him syndrome would not end well.
Marry knows nothing and the only thing that could save her is her girlfriend’s knowledge of the film. Other than that, she’s toast; she’d probably follow the Grady Girls to play because the girl can’t take a damn no for an answer.
Char and Jazz actually might be the only ones to make it out of this, because they know how this one goes (unlike me, the author, who has never watched a horror movie in her life, and isn’t that just dandy).
6/10, still not great, but it’s better than the rest of them.
Ashe would win at Saw. I don’t really have a basis for this, but she said it with such conviction that I’m scared to challenge her authority.
Crow might participate just for kicks, or he’d take over the maze and assume the place of Jigsaw. Char said and I quote, “I need motivation to saw off my limbs” and would happily drop an arm and a leg to win, so she might live if she doesn’t succumb to blood loss and raging infection first (does Jigsaw even sanitize after each victim?).
Email might be less or more willing depending on the body part she’s mutilating. Fingers and toes? Yeah, probably, if it helped her live. But then again she couldn’t scroll AO3 anymore or find fanart of Miguel O’Hara from Spiderverse without the suit, so she might be more unlikely to win than I originally thought.
Marry would live due to the fact that she’s a near-identical doppelganger of Jenna Ortega and nobody wants to hurt a goddess, not to mention the public backlash. For Jazz, her face is her money-maker, so if it came down to it she’d refuse and be dead on the spot. Job is a weird middle ground, so he gets a 50-50 chance. Same with Loon, except they might hack off a toe or a sliver of titty just for funsies.
As for me, my body is a temple, and like Hell, I’m gonna disrespect the goddess it belongs to. For Sahara, this sentiment is doubled.
4/10, honestly a better outcome than I was originally predicting.
We’d all form a street gang and take over America if we got plopped down in The Purge. We’re young and dumb and have nothing to lose by taking out a politician we all hate. Not only that, but Ash, Loon, Job, Jazz, Char, Crow, Email, and myself would probably be down to commit petty crimes if given free rein. There are at least two Targets in my area and I’ve got a learner’s permit; my mom might actually help me raid the store.
The only reason Sahara and Marry might be averse is purely due to the fact that they’re people pleasers and the guilt might get them in the end. Then again, Sahara did assault a kid with a water bottle in retaliation once, so maybe she’d take advantage and finally pull together that cult she’s been alluding to whenever she writes self-inserts.
3/10. Some of us may die, but that is a sacrifice we are willing to make.
In conclusion, around 6 of us will die every time and there’s a 55% chance of AT LEAST one of us dying. I did math for this. Start clapping. (Somehow this turned from a joke piece to a legitimately serious debate within my friend group, and I’m not sure how to feel about people analyzing how easy it would be to kill me in any of the given situations.)