How The Final Girl Trope Has Evolved: From Elm Street To A Vet School In France
Picture this. A young girl, probably blonde, running through the woods or her local suburbia in a tight tank top and some shorts, maybe even just some skimpy underwear. There’s a menacing, dark figure following her, walking much slower than she is running, but somehow still steadily closing the gap between them. She screams, he stays silent as he pursues her relentlessly. He pulls out a knife and as he finally reaches her, he buries it deep in her gut. Blood gushes out as she is penetrated by his knife again and again. She dies and he goes off to punish another victim. So far, so slasher.
What if I told you all those generic slashers actually hide a hugely empowering element? Between all the slashing, stabbing and other horror movie stuff, a single character challenges the viewer’s assumed male gaze. Enter the Final Girl- a well-known trope in horror films, especially in the slashers of the 80s. You know most of them: Ripley from Alien, Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street, Laurie from Halloween and Sydney from Scream. They, and all their sisters across horror franchises, are the only ones capable of defeating the killer, the almost or completely supernatural entity that haunts them and their communities. Their resilience and virginal power allow them to push the blade into the killer’s own gut and stop the madness. The events of the film help them realise their own (feminine) power and potential, fulfilling it and enabling them to act as a saviour for their community, after the authorities have failed.
What Is A Final Girl?
“She is the one 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.” This is how Carol J. Clover describes the typical Final Girl in her book “Men, Women and Chain Saws”, published in 1992. Clover is the godmother of the term Final Girl. She criticised the Final Girl trope heavily as ultimately an oppressive one, but the trope has offered a female hero on screen in a genre mostly aimed at men. Male audiences have been forced to identify with a female hero instead of a male. Women were finally allowed to exist as something other than a victim or a lover, they had purpose and their own stories and inner lives. It’s like we’re actual human beings! Not only that but the final girl, and female characters overall in these films, were usually much more competent than their male counter parts. Male characters, such as the mandatory boyfriends and law enforcement, were usually expendable, unmemorable and simply stupid. However, the final girl usually had some masculine qualities to separate her from her promiscuous friends and to further connect her to the killer, most prominently her unisex name (Sydney, Laurie, Ripley) although there are many examples of feminine names such as Sally and Nancy. The Final Girl refuses to participate in the hedonistic lifestyle of her friends, which included sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. She’s the ultimate goody two shoes.
To fully understand and appreciate the Final Girl trope, we must examine the killer too. The usual slasher film villain is a male killer with almost supernatural abilities. He seems to appear out of thin air in the most (in)convenient times. The killings act as a substitution for sex for the killer as he penetrates the pretty girl with a big knife. The killers are often sexually repressed, which is why they seek to punish the sexually active teens, especially women. Laura Mulvey argued in her now infamous essay from 1975 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” that women must be punished or saved (married) by the man for the narrative to be satisfactory for the audience who assume a male gaze during the film. While Mulvey’s theory held water at the time of publishing, we have moved away from the oppressive narratives. Today’s Final Girls defend their right to express their sexuality while still defeating the bad guys, just like their 80s sisters did, but even more ferociously. The stakes are much higher in today’s films as it’s not only a battle of survival but to preserve one’s femininity and sexuality, of true freedom.
But Not All Final Girls Are Cool
As fascinating and positive as the trope is, there is some room for criticism. Especially in the slasher, the Final Girl’s power exclusively depended on their moral purity and sexual inexperience, almost a lack of sexuality. Many Final Girls were also killed off in the franchise’s next chapter, like in the case of Alice from the original Friday the 13th. She survives her terrible ordeal at the hands of Jason Vorhees’ mother Pamela, only to be killed off by Jason himself in the sequel. What a bummer.
Laurie Strode, the iconic heroine of Halloween is a questionable Final Girl as she doesn’t defeat the killer on her own. She simply escapes Michael Myers long enough for Dr. Sam Loomis to shoot Michael. The Halloween franchise differs from Friday the 13th and many other horror franchises by allowing Laurie to survive film after film. In a franchise that started in the 70s, it was only in Halloween: H20 in 1998 that Laurie killed Michael Myers herself. This was later revealed to be a paramedic rather than Michael Myers and Laurie herself was killed off in the next installment. Its most recent entry premiered in 2018, with Jamie Lee Curtis returning to her role as Laurie who is now a boozy, gun-toting badass grandmother we all wish we had. In the film, Laurie once again tried to kill Michael herself, but it was left unclear whether she was successful, further keeping the franchise as well as the character of Laurie, alive. Importantly though, in the later years of the franchise, Laurie was allowed to finally kill, or at least try, Michael on her own, by her own hand. She is the one who lights the match in Halloween (2018) with full intent to destroy the monster.
Slasher films are also filled with women who die at the hands of the male killer. The viewer is forced to sit through at least an hour of women getting slaughtered before we get to the good Final Girl stuff, where she kicks butt. We can argue that the Final Girl, who early in the film seems to realise there is something wrong before anyone else, but remains passive, is only there to relieve some of the guilt from the audience. They’re allowed to find pleasure from watching pretty girls killed, but it’s all fine because there is one character who seems feminist and we identify with it. The Final Girl is almost too pure, she holds an impossible standard for women, dooming the rest of us to die as unworthy. Her innocence is almost offensive, but thankfully times have changed.
A New Era Of Final Girls
Let’s look at the final girls of today. Slasher films have had to make way for new kind of horror. Recent horror films such as The Witch, It Follows, Raw, A Quiet Place, Revenge and Hereditary have thrilled both audiences and critics. We are currently living in the golden age of modern horror films with new horror films spewed out of the system tirelessly, but with fresh and exciting results. Horror film has become the new auteur genre as films like The Witch and Hereditary have proved. And the final girl trope is more alive than ever.
Julia Ducornau’s Raw is a French horror film centred around a young girl who attends a veterinary school her whole family has gone to. A strict vegetarian, our protagonist Justine finds herself craving meat. At first, it’s raw chicken from the fridge at night. Next, she’s chewing on her sister’s severed finger. Coming of age has never been this tough. She might not have a bloodthirsty killer after her, but there is a monster at work here and it might be Justine herself. She fights her sister Alex throughout the film, whether it’s about a dress or the hunt for human flesh – the two sisters can’t seem to agree on anything. Things come to a disturbing climax after Alex chomps down on Justine’s roommate, killing him. Although Raw isn’t a slasher, but a coming-of-age film with some added cannibalism, Justine is a new kind of Final Girl. Justine’s Final Girl moment isn’t with an external killer, it’s an internal one she has to defeat. She has the choice to give in to the beast within and kill her sister in revenge, but she chooses to spare her and turn her in to the police. The real Justine stands alone in the end, only to find out she is part of a long line of female flesh eaters in her family.
The Witch and It Follows offer a different kind of Final Girl, one tied to both scared of and feared for her sexuality. In The Witch it’s Thomasin’s budding sexuality, or perhaps her brother’s impure thoughts that cause the family to descend into madness. In It Follows, having sex gives you a deadly curse, like the worst possible STD, although director David Robert Mitchell has denied the allegory. In both films, the answer is engaging in sex or accepting one’s sexuality. The Witch ends with a naked Thomasin floating in the air with other witches and the ending of It Follows implies that there is no cure for the curse, you simply keep passing it back and forth by having more sex. The Final Girl in both, Thomasin and Jay, is a partly masculine character saved by their own femininity. Jay by accepting her sexuality and Thomasin for finally giving in to the desires and pleasures of life. In the 80s, both these girls would have been toast, but times have changed and it’s time to move on.
Revenge As The Ultimate Final Girl Film
Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge is your classic rape-revenge story. Filled with gloriously gory images and plenty of nudity, Revenge might not at first seem like a progressive take on the final girl trope.
Look deeper though, small details reveal it to be quite interesting, someone might even say feminist take on the age-old structure and gender politics. The crucial difference between Revenge and most other horror films that use the Final Girl trope is that we are introduced to a female protagonist who is sexual by nature and shown enjoying sex. Historically, it’s precisely one’s sexuality and sexual desires that have lead them to die gruesomely at the hands of the killer. And there has lied the trope’s biggest issue: a virginal hero is awarded and celebrated while her sexually active friends have been punished for their sex drive and naked trysts in the dark.
There are two big turning points in Revenge for our Final Girl Jen. First comes after the rape, when Jen’s boyfriend pushes Jen off a cliff and she is penetrated by a tree. She’s presumed dead by the men who then leave. Jen wakes up and panics, because she sees a tree sticking out of her belly. She manages to set the tree on fire to free herself and finally emerges from the flames like a phoenix, reborn after her trauma.
The next big moment comes after Jen does some gruesome self-surgery in a cave after smoking peyote to ease the pain. She cauterises her wounds with a scolding hot beer can sleeve, branding herself with an image of an eagle spread across her belly. When she comes to and leaves the cave, armoured with weapons, the camera once again glides over her body. This time it’s not lusting after her body, but admiring it. Jen’s skin isn’t smooth and flawless anymore, it’s filled with scars and fresh wounds, bloodied and torn to pieces and then put back together. The hunted has become the hunter, men beware.
Final Girls Are So Fetch
Why should we care about a trope that was huge 30 years ago, but barely resembles its original form today? In 2017, three of the highest grossing films featured a female lead (Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Wonder Woman, Beauty And The Beast), but in 2018 none of the Top 5 films feature a clear female lead, unless you count The Incredibles 2 which at least momentarily lifts Elastigirl as the lead superhero, but also makes a point about how her home descends into chaos without a woman as the head of the household. We should champion and support films that feature women more prominently and horror films have done this from the beginning. Although the trope is problematic, it has the power to be a truly effective and progressive way to make more room for women on the big screen.
The Final Girl trope allows for women to take centre stage and kick butt, something that a lot of other genres are lacking. The Mission Impossible franchise has reached it’s 6th installment and Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise have just signed on for another two installments. That’s 8 films centred around one man, who possesses very few interesting qualities but just keeps getting dropped into mildly interesting situations. Horror offers the possibility of female-led franchises and Final Girls provide an interesting gateway to them, especially if we allow them to flourish as sexual beings and keep fighting the good fight; the one over their bodies, image and freedom. The trope isn’t progressive or feminist because of its existence, but because of how much we have learned from it and how we have corrected past mistakes within the genre.
Who’s your favourite final girl? Is the trope still relevant and more importantly, is it empowering to women? Let us know in the comments!
Does content like this matter to you?
Become a Member and support film journalism. Unlock access to all of Film Inquiry`s great articles. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about cinema - get access to our private members Network, give back to independent filmmakers, and more.
