Escaping Racial Stereotypes in the Escape Room Franchise

In my first post, I asked you to think about your favorite horror movie. I bet you that the sole survivor of that movie was a woman. Well, I want to issue another bet, double or nothing. The person that survives is a white woman. If I am wrong, let me know what movie you’re thinking of. I would love to watch it. In this post, we will be talking about final girls of color and the racial stereotypes that have become associated with them. 

Horror has a long standing history of killing their characters of color, quite brutally and swiftly. So much so that a common media trop is the “black dude dies first,” referring to the regular occurrence of a character of color dying early on in a film’s runtime. This trope arose from filmmakers having a token minority in their project to check a box, but limiting their role by killing them off as soon as possible. Tropes like this in horror are an extension of society’s beliefs of who they believe is worthy of life. The United States of America is built on racism, bigotry, and patriarchy, so anything that threatens those systems is disempowered. Hence for a long while in the media, women were seen as sexual objects and not fully fleshed out characters, Black people were not given roles and white people used Blackface, and LGBTQ+ characters were villainized. 

In this new age of horror, characters of color are surviving at higher rates than before. They are not killed first, and some are not killed at all. They become final girls. In recent years, Zoey Davis (Taylor Russell) from the Escape Room franchise has cemented her place in final girl herstory, surviving not one, but two movies. 

For those unfamiliar with the Escape Room franchise, each movie follows six individuals as they fight for their lives while solving puzzles in escape rooms. The threats in each room are very real as the contestants brave the freezing cold, quick sand, lasers, and so much more. Like a mix of Squid Game and Saw, the escape rooms have spectators who bet on the contestant’s lives. The contestants are acquired to adhere to a theme that most entertains the spectators. In the first movie, all of the contestants were lone survivors of a tragedy. As sick as it sounds, the spectators wanted to know if luck had anything to do with their survivability. In the second movie, a la The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the gamemaster gathered people who had survived and won their escape rooms to compete again in a “tournament of champions.”

We follow Zoey, the sole survivor of a plane crash, as she gets thrust into this escape room. Well, thrust isn’t the right word because she goes under her own free will after some false advertising and encouragement to take risks from a professor. Zoey is very smart, like quantum physics level smart, but timid as she attempts to navigate the rooms with five strangers with clashing personalities. Her intelligence is her superpower, and it allows her to come up with innovative solutions to keep surviving the rooms. This combats the Strong Black Woman stereotype present in the media. In this case, strong refers to physical strength. Black women who ascribe to this trope have unreal strength and do not have the same fears or weaknesses of other women. This trope dehumanizes Black women by forcing them to be superwoman and everyone else’s savior. In the first half of the first movie, Zoey is told to calm down multiple times by the men in the room. She wasn’t being erratic and she’s arguably the most rational and smartest of them all. There is a common stereotype about Black women that blows completely normal behavior out of proportion to label them as out of control. In order to navigate through society, Black women have to police themselves to seem calm and collected to a white majority. Zoey fell victim to this trope because she was not antagonizing anyone. She was trying to find clues and solve the puzzles with the same level of enthusiasm and urgency as everyone else. 

In these films, Zoey is a multifaceted character. For most of the movie, Zoey is a docile nerd. She doesn’t fight with her fellow contestants like the others. However, in the first film, she reaches her breaking point and snaps. She smashes all of the cameras to send a message to the watchers and risks her life. Zoey also grows attached to her fellow contestants and truly mourns each one after they die. At the end of the day, Zoey’s razor sharp wit keeps her alive, allows her to outsmart the gamemasters, and become a final girl.