October is a month dedicated to all things spooky. It’s a month to put together last-minute Halloween costumes, make room in your closet for your favorite fall items, and binge-watch horror movies. With horror movies, we’re all familiar with the final girl trope. The final girl is the sole survivor left at the end of the movie. In every final girl trope, she is left deeply traumatized by the ordeal or confronts the killer. As we enter a new age of horror movies that have become more diverse, the final girl trope has become more prevalent. In this article, I explore the history of the final girl and how our favorite female heroines originated.
the origins of the trope
The term “Final Girl” was first coined by Carol Clover, a film scholar, in her essay “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film” published in 1987. In the essay, Clover describes the final girl as someone who starts off as innocent and virginal but slowly transforms into a monster to defeat the killer in the horror movie. The final girl is someone who suffers the worst imaginable and manages to survive. In Clover’s definition, the final girl is someone who is nerdish, boyish, not sexual and who is able to relate to the younger boys in her audience.
The first example of a “Final Girl” is Sally Hardesty from the 1974 film “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” She embodies the traits Clover describes in final girls, as she dresses more modestly than her friend Pam throughout the entire movie and serves as the complete opposite of her friend.
Another earliest example of the “Final Girl” is Laurie Strode from the 1978 “Halloween.” Laurie is presented as a nerdy, shy, studious teenage girl in the first movie. She prioritizes her grades and stays in the background. As the movies continue, Laurie eventually loses these traits as she is forced to undergo a transformation to confront her killer.
An interesting aspect of the “Final Girl” trope is that it usually involves the “Death by Sex” trope. In contrast to the nerdy, virginal traits the “Final Girl” embodies, the female characters that die before her usually have one thing in common: they all had sex. If a woman has sex in a horror film, that is a big indicator she is about to get slashed and diced. This is a problematic trope in horror as it implies that the final girl only survived by preserving her virtue. It also ends up slut-shaming the female characters before her.
A film that reinvents this trope is the 1996 “Scream” with Sidney Prescott. Sidney Prescott deviates from the “Final Girls” before her as she has sex with her boyfriend and ends up becoming the sole survivor at the end of the movie and continues to survive all the way up to the recent movie.
the reinvention of the final girl
As we enter into a new age of horror that has become more diverse, one thing has remained constant and it is the “Final Girl.” Now, the “Final Girl” is allowed to deviate from the nerdy, shy persona that was emphasized in earlier final girls.
My favorite film that reinvents the “Final Girl” trope is “Ready or Not” which stars Samara Weaving as Grace who must engage in a deadly game of hiding and seek with her new in-laws who are trying to murder her. Another recent movie is the “Fear Street” trilogy on Netflix which follows the main character Deena in her effort to free her town Shadyside from Sarah Fier’s curse and save her girlfriend Sam.
I love how movies today are reinventing the “Final Girl” and allowing the trope to change. She has remained the iconic female character who goes through hell and back and ends up on top.
