Jamie Lee Curtis (Left) as Laurie Strode, an early example of the trope Tribune Agency
Women and horror have always had a complicated relationship, but one of the most iconic tropes in horror history may be more intricate than you think: the Final Girl.
The Final Girl is a convoluted idea conceptualized by Carol J. Clover’s “Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film” in 1992. The Final Girl is the last character to survive the killer in a horror/slasher film. She looks death in the face and overcomes it by means of male intervention or her own unique agency.
In the decades since this term’s definition, its function has been widely contested by film critics, feminist philosophers, and the average viewer. Is the Final Girl a character archetype meant to be celebrated? Take it at face value. The survivor is a woman: isn’t that empowering?
Once you peel back the surface-level interpretations, you find many opposing arguments. Is the Final Girl not an extortion of women wherein their fear is a fictional currency meant to be extracted again and again by the masculine force of the killer? Clover herself called the Final Girl the personification of “abject horror” in the article “Her Body, Himself,” framing the plight of a woman in danger as a critical narrative beat.
Beyond the existence of the Final Girl, questions arise surrounding the qualifications: what makes a character a survivor? Final Girls in the golden age of slashers tend to share a few key traits.
The Final Girl usually has an androgynous name, as seen in “Halloween” (Laurie Strode), “Scream” (Sidney Prescott), “Black Christmas” (Jess Bradford), and more.
The Final Girl displays a certain degree of purity, setting herself apart from the other female characters by refusing drugs, underage drinking, or sex.
The Final Girl finds power in her estrangement from hyper-femininity, making her the perfect survivor for male viewers to tolerate in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
The most common characteristics imply that the Final Girl is the “good” woman. The “right” woman. The woman who deserves to live compared to the promiscuous, overly-girlish, and borderline amoral side characters. It reflects the Madonna-***** complex, where women’s sexuality and virtue are mutually exclusive.
There are exceptions to the rule, but outliers are not fully removed from the trope’s purpose. Jess Bradford is sexually active but survives over characters who are more vulgar, creating a meta-commentary on the “correct” type of sexuality. While “Black Christmas” is undoubtedly progressive for its time, the Final Girl idea it introduced took on a monolithic life of her own in the following decades.
The trope’s formulaic nature is purposefully crafted to induce male identification with the female protagonist. At the height of slasher films’ popularity, horror was male-dominated in both the writing room and the theater seats. To ensure audiences empathized with the main character, the Final Girl had to reject total femininity.
Before the credits roll and she is cemented as a survivor in perpetuity (or at least until the sequel), the Final Girl must undergo some form of masculine transformation. If she is passive, she is rescued by an outside male force (“Texas Chainsaw Massacre I,” “Psycho,” etc.). If she is active, she wields a phallic symbol of power (a butcher knife, a machete, etc.). If she is both, some combination is employed (the ending of 1978’s “Halloween” sees Dr. Loomis rush in to save Laurie after she exhausts her energy fending off Michael Myers).
In that vein, the characterization of the early Final Girl can read as a projection of the patriarchy; the “wrong” kind of girl will be oppressed (killed, in this case), and the “right” kind of girl will embrace masculinity to avoid (survive) oppression.
Is this the fate of the Final Girl? Must she remain pious and gender-neutral forever? Or have feminist film critics and subversive screenwriters already begun to attempt reclamation?
Modern slashers (“X,” for instance) subvert the Final Girl trope while retaining its function. The new Final Girl can be independent, unapologetically sexual, and blatantly feminine. Yet, even when modernized, the trope has harmful connotations. We’ve removed the purity culture, only to replace it with easily exploitable symbols of “liberation.”
The Final Girl still moralizes one form of womanhood and villainizes another; now, it’s simply reversed.
Reader-response theory argues that the meaning of a text is created by the audience’s relationship to the text itself. The viewer “reads” the film’s message through the lens of who lives and dies. When put in context, slashers will always comment on what type of person deserves to be a Final Girl.
Is it possible to escape this cycle of subtextual misogyny? If we remove it, is the Final Girl still applicable? If all types of femininity are reflected without punishment, can we truly call it a trope?
Only time will tell, but I urge readers to be mindful when consuming media and question every convention you’ve come to think of as “natural.” Go beyond cursory glances to analyze the archetypes you encounter.
Be an active viewer who enjoys art because you understand it, not because you take it for granted. Indeed, that is the true horror: mindlessly perpetuating stereotypes by sacrificing your critical thinking.
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