What happens after the final girl survives? In Final Girl Complex, filmmaker DT Kofoed shifts attention from the killer to the person left behind, asking what it means to have your identity defined by the worst experience of your life.
Produced by Exposure Film Foundry, the short grew from a dramatic exploration of trauma and survivorship. Kofoed shot it on 100 feet of Ektachrome Super 8 for the Fortnight Film Contest, making every shot a decision with a physical cost. That constraint shaped rehearsal, production and the edit, while the filmmaker’s relationship with disability and the body gave the format a deeper personal significance.
For WAJ Magazine’s JCIFF Presents: Nightmares coverage, Kofoed discusses Jami Rohr’s central performance, Scott Baisden’s contributions on screen and in makeup effects, Karaoke Blues’ score and why each screening offers a reason to keep creating.
The Interview
What sparked the concept “Monsters make monsters”?
The tagline "Monsters Make Monsters" is a version of the adage that hurt people hurt people. I conceived the film as a dramatic piece, rather than a horror/thriller film, to explore trauma and survivorship using the genre trope of the Final Girl. Tropes have imaginative power as a shorthand between the viewer and filmmaker, and I'm certainly not breaking conceptual ground using tropes as a guidepost to related ideas. The final reveal of the monster is a rather bleak statement on the legacy of mass trauma events, and the logical end result for the character as written. I am happy to have succeeded in creating the film I set out to make, but whether I made the drama I intended rather than a genre piece is debatable.
How do you reinterpret the final-girl horror archetype?
The Girl of the film developed as a thought experiment: how would your life and personality change when you're famous for the worst experience of your life, which society acticulates is your entire identity? How would your daily routines and rituals, your relationships with others, be dictated by the fact of survivorship? By excising the killer from the slasher narrative, we're left with the broken person that remains and their unreliable, subjective experience of events.
Why shoot on Ektachrome Super 8?
This is my third project shot on celluloid, so the choice of Ektachrome was mainly my desire to shoot and learn the available film stocks, their sensitivity, dynamic range, and color reproduction. As for the decision to shoot Super 8 at all, there are both philosophical and practical reasons. As a filmmaker with a rare neuromuscular disability, my films have always focused on the body, its absurdity and failures, our inescapable mortality. Shooting on film literalizes the metaphor, as the work of art is embodied physically. This film exists as bespoke reels of film, a physical body that will inevitably decay and be destroyed by accident or the passage of time, the film will die and exist no more. In a creative landscape dependent on the infinite replication and revision of digital workflows, not to mention derivative 'generative' software, there is no fixed and finite work of art, only endless mutability and iteration. Film itself is immutable, uniquely existential, inherently embodied.
From a practical production consideration, shooting on film has multiple benefits over digital workflows. The physical limitations of 50' reels forces creative specificity beginning with the script, through the shoot, to the final edit. Every scene and shot is bound by the space it occupies, the narrative shaped by the linear measure of available film. Constraints breed creativity, and a hard limit to the number of possible shots is an ultimate constraint. A film set operates much differently with the knowledge you will typically only shoot a single take of any given shot. This speeds up production immensely, placing the emphasis on intentional rehearsal rather than theoretically endless takes, allowing us to shoot a reel a day with multiple location and costume changes. The cast and crew are uniformly hyper focused for the moment when the camera finally rolls a take, which brings its own euphoria and fun. It also ensures shorter production days, which is necessary given my own physical limitations.
How did the 100-foot limitation affect your shooting and editing choices?
This was the first film for which I shot multiple reels. Previously I worked in the Straight 8 style of single reel films shot in sequence without editing, while "Final Girl Complex" was conceived as a more traditional production to be shot out of sequence for editing in post. This allowed me to include more head and tail on shots, with the occasional second take when a shot went wrong. The final film is 80' of the 100' I shot, a level of efficiency unheard of compared to limitless digital capture. Celluloid film is necessarily shot tightly for budgetary considerations, and there is little leeway in the edit if your shot list and timing are not precise. For example, I shot exactly one unplanned insert, which luckily was the same location where I mistakenly shot a sequence too short for the dialog timing, and was able to use that single insert to retime the scene without cutting necessary dialog.
The choice of film stock also locks you into a single fixed exposure and color space, such that scenes must be adapted to your film rather than adjusting your camera settings to the scene. 100 ASA film requires a shocking amount of light for proper exposure, while the camera you're shooting with is ~50 years old with unexpected mechanical quirks and a single lens. Shooting on film has made me a better writer, director, and cinematographer, precise and focused, always intentional.
What did Jami Rohr and Scott Baisden bring to the film?
Both Jami and Scott are longtime friends from the film community who I have started working with on recent film projects. I had wanted to provide Jami a leading role, and she was the first actor I approached with the script. We discussed the character at length before she committed to the film, as I needed an actor as invested in carrying the story as I was in telling it, who also had experience working on a film set. Jami's performance is the entirety of the film, and I could not be happier with her interpretation of the character.
Scott is a multi-hyphenate artist and an asset on any project. He was also my first choice for the supporting role despite not having directed him before. The reveal in the final scene required extensive makeup effects, and he was willing to take on double duty. The scar effects turned out wonderfully, and it is entirely my own fault for lighting the set incorrectly that they are not shown well in the final film. Scott has a talent for tuning scripted dialog into speech, while Jami sticks closer to the page, and their contentious scenes together serve to stand in for the Girl's larger relation to society.
How did Karaoke Blues’ music support its mood?
Karaoke Blues faced an entirely different set of constraints in composing the score. As this was a competition film, the score had to be composed and recorded while the film was in the lab, without seeing a single frame. We wanted the score to reference the electronic scores common in classic slasher films while maintaining a modern tonality. I asked for five cues, was provided six, and used them all. I love the music, which is why it plays higher in the mix than is typical. Between the sound of the camera itself embedded in the dialog tracks, the score, and the visible film frame, the film creates a feeling of the dirty and forbidden, of something you're not meant to see.
How has your work in writing and visual storytelling shaped your approach?
I didn't set out to become a filmmaker, having a previous career as a scholar of comics, film, and modern literature. I began filmmaking after graduate school through contracted short-form documentary work, pivoting to narrative film after falling ill and losing any future as an industry professional. The first time a camera was unexpectedly placed in my hands, because "I knew more than the others," was a revelation. Having written comic scripts exclusively for others to illustrate, I could now create and frame the image for myself. It became a matter of reverse engineering the visuals I wanted into practical shots I could realize. Many of my films have begun as single images in need of a story that leads to and supports the original inspiration. For Final Girl Complex, the final scene was always the end point of the story, which the film hopefully earns.
What lessons came from the Fortnight Film Contest?
The Fortnight Film Contest is a two-week competition, just enough time to get film developed and returned before deadline. This forces a specific production timeline on the film. All footage must be shot and rushed to the lab on Monday after the competition's first weekend, with expedited processing fees to get the footage back in time to complete post-production in a few days. Pre-production must be thorough, production must remain on schedule, and you need a clear concept of the final product to complete post work on a tight turnaround. Shooting film is something of a cheat to keep the project's scope manageable for the competition, as I don't have a hundred hours of footage and dozens of takes to review.
What does the JCIFF selection mean for your next creative steps?
It's always validating for festivals to select my film. I am a purely independent filmmaker with no industry contacts or ambitions. I make films to be seen by an audience, not to further a career or get more film work. The response to my last two Super 8 shorts have been quite strong, and I will continue working with film and improving my craft. Every screening of my films is motivation to make more, an implicit approval of my method and creative choices.
Explore Exposure Film Foundry’s film portfolio.
An official selection of JCIFF Presents: Nightmares. Explore the festival and viewing details.
Cover poster design: Dax Curtis Sterner.
Watch the official Final Girl Complex teaser
