The "Final Girl" Trope and its Role in Horror
One of the most distinctive film genres is horror. Known for its jumpscares, gory effects, and suspenseful plots, horror movies can both enthrall and alarm viewers. Horror as a genre consistently brings out the best in movie-making magic, whether it’s by making the viewer feel as though they too are being watched by a serial killer or by prompting a visceral reaction from the viewer when their favorite character turns out to be the antagonist.
Horror movies first became popular in the 1920s and 1930s, a time period which became known as the golden age of horror. The golden age saw many classic horror movies produced, which can be divided into two categories: the silent films and the talkies. Notable silent films of the time include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu, both of which were among the first films to intentionally unsettle viewers. Then, with the advance of technology, the latter half of the golden age of horror gave rise to notable talkies and monster movies, such as Frankenstein, The Mummy, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
In many of these horror films, a “Final Girl” is the lone female survivor. This trope comes into play most commonly in slasher films, a subgenre of horror in which a killer stalks and murders a group of people with sharp tools or blades. Some films that revolutionized the slasher genre and the Final Girl trope include Scream, Halloween, and American Psycho. However, this trope, although prevalent in many horror classics, has been criticized for its perpetuation of the patriarchy and its putting-down of women.
The Final Girl trope was first coined by film critic and professor Carol J. Clover in her 1992 book "Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film." This identification of such a trope was the result of an analysis of high grossing and popular horror films from the 1970s and 1980s in which a final female protagonist is the only one left standing following a confrontation with the antagonist in some sort of life-or-death face-off. It was through this analysis that the subliminal messaging of misogyny in the Final Girl trope became a topic of conversation within the film community. To break down this trope, it’s important to note that the “final girl” is characterized by a few key traits:
Firstly, the protagonist of the movie often goes by an androgynous name. Final girls such as Laurie Strode in Halloween, Sidney Prescott in Scream, and Jess Bradford in Black Christmas, all bear this defining trait. The idea behind the naming of these characters was that choosing a unisex name for the protagonist would emphasize the character’s own agency, ultimately allowing the audience to view the Final Girl as a survivor and not as a victim.
A second defining characteristic of a Final Girl is that they embody purity and innocence, often abstaining from drugs, underage drinking, or sex. This trait was heavily emphasized in slashers from the 1970s to the 1990s in order to appeal to male audiences as well as female ones. To ensure that all audiences empathized with the protagonist, the Final Girl needed to reject complete femininity and find power in her detachment; this idea is highlighted by the aforementioned unisex names of these main characters.
This innate purity that a Final Girl embodies implies that they are the “right” woman. Because they reject notions of femininity, they “deserve” to live, as opposed to the other hyper-feminine, promiscuous girls in the film. This idea reflects the 1900s psychological concept of the “Madonna-mistress complex,” in which a woman’s sexual expression and agency are limited by their categorization as either pure and therefore good, or promiscuous and therefore bad.
The last thing needed in a Final Girl is a sense of intellectual superiority compared to other victims. A Final Girl spends the entirety of the film noticing things that other characters fail to grasp, and takes note of any threats around her. This keen sense of awareness is what leaves her as the sole survivor of the film. But even with this high intellectualism, there are still limitations placed on a Final Girl’s agency.
Oftentimes, no matter how smart a Final Girl has been and how far they’ve gotten, the protagonist undergoes some sort of masculinization at the end of the film in order to reinforce male identification with the main character. Whether this masculinity comes from wielding a masculine symbol of power, such as a machete or butcher knife, or from being rescued by a male after her own energy has run out, the Final Girl trope is a projection of the patriarchal values of the time: the impure girl will be killed, while the pure, or “right” girl, will adopt and embrace some form of masculinity to survive.
The Final Girl, originally created in an attempt to invert masculine and feminine stereotypes, actually ends up reinforcing them. So while the Final Girl trope is built to allow all audiences to connect with and empathize with the main character of a horror film, the idea itself instills harmful connotations of what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal society. This trope villanizes one version of femininity while moralizing another, effectively commenting on what kind of person deserves to be a Final Girl and in turn, a survivor.
Although modern takes on the Final Girl trope have attempted to reverse this kind of commentary by allowing the protagonist to keep her femininity and indulge in things once considered promiscuous, underlying themes of misogyny and femininity may still be present. In attempting to remove this subliminal messaging altogether by discussing all types of femininity without some sort of consequence—in this case, murder—the question becomes whether or not the Final Girl trope is even applicable to the modern horror genre. Whether this new direction of horror gives rise to a novel trope or perpetuates the Final Girl trope is left to be seen in the making and production of horror movies within the context of our modern era and society.