“Please don’t kill me, Mr. Ghostface, I wanna be in the sequel!” — Scream (1996)
Coined by Carol Clover in Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film, the “Final Girl” trope, simply put, refers to the last female character that faces off with the killer and survives despite possessing lily-livered qualities—naivety, purity, and timidity. If you’re a fan of slasher films, you’ve probably encountered this caricature more times than you can count. Everyone loves a good, virginal underdog!
The Final Girl will typically be portrayed as unassuming, overly friendly, and innocuous for most of the movie. That is, until she’s the last person left. Once she has to confront the killer all by herself, our sweet-natured protagonist magically transforms into a weapon-wielding badass with a mean streak. When did she learn how to use a gun? Since when does she swear?
One of the main ways the Final Girl will narrowly avoid death throughout the film while other characters run straight into it is, you guessed it, being a virgin. This will be central to the final girl’s character—by slasher rules, sex kills. How many times have you seen a couple sneak off for some one-on-one time only for one or both of them to die a gruesome death? Exactly. You’ll watch all the characters die off one by one due to their enthusiasm towards sex, drug use, and other “immoral” acts. Not the Final Girl, though. Never the Final Girl.
Despite being gratuitous in nature, ironically, the slasher genre, and the Final Girl trope itself, seem to be riddled with puritanical undertones. Feminists and film critics alike have criticized the final girl trope for reinforcing harmful notions about women and how they ought to be. Some have been more hands-on with the discourse, and in recent decades, numerous parodies and subversions of the final girl trope have popped up. My favourite, though, is far more recent.
Mia Goth & Ti West’s X premiered at SXSW earlier this year in March. X follows a group of adult filmmakers and actors in the ‘70s as they rent a guesthouse on an elderly couple’s farm and conspicuously set out to film a pornographic film.
The Final Girl in X entirely contradicts the characteristics the trope is defined by. For a good part of the film, Lorraine, nicknamed “church mouse,” is set up as the final girl. She is docile, the most sexually reserved of the bunch, and generally has a repressed nature. All in all, she’s a good girl. Good girls always survive slasher films. Right?
Wrong. Even Lorraine meets her fateful demise, and we’re ultimately left with Maxine. As the primary pornographic actor and Hollywood hopeful, Maxine has raw sexual prowess alongside confidence in her occupation and her dreams. Maxine does not follow the rules of the Final Girl trope. Yet, in all her promiscuous and defiant glory, she comes out on top.
The killer turns out to be the elderly woman who resides in the farmhouse, Pearl. While murderers in slasher films traditionally punish their victims for sexual promiscuity, Pearl’s motivation stems from her own desire for sex. Angered by her husband’s unwillingness to make love to her coupled with their young and carnal tenants, Pearl sets off on a killing spree. Pearl’s motivations entirely abandon the moral relationship between sex and sin that has been so foundational to slasher films of the past.
X does an excellent job of subverting the Final Girl trope and redefining the existential relationship between sex, sin, and youth. The prequel Pearl was recently released, and the third and final instalment MaXXXine, set in the ‘80s, is expected to come out some time in the future. Will this final movie continue to redefine how women are portrayed in horror? Only the 1980s can tell.