If you and your buddies were being hunted down by a psychopathic serial killer, who do you think would be most likely to survive? Is it the physically imposing jock who’s always in a fight, or the loner bad boy who could plow the killer over in his muscle car? How about the snobby rich kid with the massive mansion everyone could hide in? Nope! Your best bet is the shy, skinny girl who’s never held a weapon or thrown hands in her life.
The concept of horror cinema’s “final girl” was first coined in 1992 by film professor Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women, And Chainsaws: Gender In The Modern Horror Film. However, the term quickly escaped the pages of feminist academia and became a well-known trope among even the most casual of scary movie fanatics. That’s because these women show up everywhere–especially if you’re a follower of the slasher subgenre.
Although the term “final girl” was coined in the ’90s, its tropes had become well-worn as early as 1980. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has one. So does Halloween, Alien, Friday The 13th, A Nightmare On Elm Street, Hellraiser, Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, You’re Next, and X … all of them use this well-worn but effective convention.
So, what exactly is a “final girl”? What made them a cornerstone of early slashers? And why, both literally and as a decades-spanning cliche, do they simply refuse to die?
What makes a great final girl?
Clover summarizes the final girl as “the one [character] who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and her own peril; who is cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise and scream again. She is abject terror personified.” All true, yet most importantly, she’s the girl who survives to the end and escapes and/or defeats the killer–until said killer inevitably returns for a cash-cow sequel, but that’s a topic for another day.
Clover came up with the trope specifically in reference to the slasher genre, which ruled the late ’70s and early ’80s. The first examples are Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Jess Bradford (Olivia Hussey) from the lesser known but equally influential Black Christmas. Those roles were echoed by Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in Halloween, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien, Alice Hardy (Betsy Palmer) in the first Friday The 13th, and so on.
The defining trait of the final girl is her innocence. She’s young and pretty, but– unlike her drunken and sexed-up pals, who are destined to join a serial killer’s body count—she indulges in no taboo behavior and is either a virgin or uninterested in sex. She also doesn’t have a male savior to rely on until the very end of the movie, hence why somebody like Lila Crane (Vera Miles) from Psycho doesn’t fit the parameters.
Final girls beat the odds—and the killer
The final girl is the ultimate underdog. Just look at Halloween’s Laurie Strode. She is a docile, teenage babysitter who somehow has to elude Michael Myers, a faceless murderer whose strength and ability to stab people out of nowhere border on the superhuman. On top of that, she has to protect two children, Tommy and Lindsey, from Michael’s rampage. Those seemingly insurmountable odds make Michael and Laurie’s closing game of cat and mouse all the more tense. The gender and age differences only add to how predatory and inhuman Michael seems. Plus, Laurie is still acting selflessly to protect two other, even iller-equipped people. That is heroism in its simplest, basest, yet strongest, form.
The evolution of the final girl as slasher films became self-aware has been fascinating as well, giving the trope a generation-transcending life. In Scream, audiences were conditioned to believe that Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) would be the protagonist. She was young, blonde, attractive and played by a big-name star. Oh, and she was the only person on the poster! But then she dies before the opening credits roll. Similarly subversive was Allison (Katrina Bowden) from Tucker & Dale Vs Evil. The final girl of that 2009 horror-comedy was a quick-witted psychology student who goes against all slasher cliches by falling in love with the hillbilly her friends mistook for a serial killer.
Are final girls defined by victimhood or strength?
Although the “final girl” was first characterized more than three decades ago, there’s still plenty of discourse around what these characters are supposed to represent. Are they powerfully feminist figures that defy their predators, or are they victims defined by their screaming and virginity? Well …
Clover didn’t think the final girl was feminist. “To applaud the Final Girl as a feminist development […] is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking,” she wrote. She viewed the character as someone given the “privilege” of surviving because of what male filmmakers liked in their women: attractiveness, virginity, no taboos, and so on.
However, that was in 1992. For 1996’s Scream, final girl Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) became a more confident and assertive character as the film progressed. Although she starts as the timid virgin, she transforms into a one-liner-spouting, gun-toting badass: “Not in my fucking movie,” she quips before blasting lead between the eyes of her boyfriend-turned-serial killer. And by the time of Scream 3 in 2000, Sidney has hardened even further, staring down the killer with the line, “It’s your turn to scream, asshole.”
Meanwhile, in X, it’s the killer who’s driven to madness by sexual repression, envious of final girl Maxine’s (Mia Goth) youth and freedom. At this point, the final girl has evolved into a complex and increasingly self-aware character. Gender and sex are inherently a part of her identity, but in the right hands, she can say so much about both of those things. How malleable she is, and her nonstop underdog status, means that she deserves her exalted place as a horror movie cornerstone.