The Final Girl: breasts, brains, and brawn

That headlining alliteration hides and promises a lot, doesn't it.

We've all seen them, been on the edge of our seats for them, nails jaggedly cut by the gnashing of our own teeth. And we've all cheered for them, right on cue, when the bad guy finally buys the farm. Well, until the inevitable sequel comes around, that is.

We all know who they are, but few probably know that the breed of resourceful women that somehow survives to the end reel and manages to outwit their nemesis actually has a name: Final Girl.

It is a common trope of the horror genre, particularly in the slasher subgenre. While everyone else around her easily falls foul of the killer's blade one by one, she has the agency and cunning to survive to the bitter end, ready for the final confrontation, where she either succeeds in bumping off her pursuer or gets rescued, usually by a man or a team of men.

The Final Girl role usually represents the morality and social aspects of an era, and though the trope became intrinsically linked to slasher movies back in the 70s and 80s, the actual term did not emerge until the early 90s. It was Carol J. Clover, a well-respected American professor of film studies, who first coined it in her 1992 book Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. This influential work was nominated for that year's Bram Stoker Award for Best Non-Fiction, in fact.

The Final Girl is lean, smart, nimble, crafty, and crucially, sexually disinterested or downright repressed. She may even remain a virgin. The sexual (or asexual, depending on how one looks at it) element sets the Final Girl apart from all those surrounding her. Indeed, her apparent lack of interest in sexuality is the one facet piquing the more conservative audience's interest, garnering their support and sympathy. She may also share a common past with the killer/s, as their lives may have intersected at some point in their respective timelines. And the Final Girl is often the story's narrator, or at the very least, the proxy through which the audience experiences the narrative.

There is also usually a moral aspect to the Final Girl, directly related to her disinterest in the sexual activity that typically leads to the downfall of all those around her. She is seen as righteous in keeping herself 'whole' for the right person, or until the right time, rather than giving into wanton sexual activity like her peers.

To better understand the issue of 'sex equals death' that can be inferred by watching these movies, one must look at the conservative view of most Americans in relation to premarital sex. Christian faith in general opposes it vehemently, and most American teenagers would be raised with the traditional idea that they should wait until their true, lifelong love interest comes along. It may sound like something from the Puritan era, but such a view remains strong in the United States today.

The seminal work Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) perfectly exemplifies this somewhat antiquated morality. Halloween is the quintessential slasher film, the movie that set the gold standard for the sub-genre. From the very first scene, in which the audience is voyeuristically made to witness the savage murder of a girl engaged in sexual activity by an unseen attacker, the idea that premarital sex is 'wrong' and will have irreversible consequences for those who dare to practice it is brutally carved into the audience’s mind with every slash of the blade. In the context of 1970s America, such an opening scene would have truly shocked audiences, and the theme of wanton violence pervades the entire movie.

To counterbalance this wrongness, the film features the all-American, morally right Laurie Strode, portrayed with delicious aplomb by a very young Jamie Lee Curtis. Laurie is modest, motherly (a theme that Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) similarly embodies in the classic sci-fi horror/actioner Aliens, directed by James Cameron in 1986), wholesome, and, crucially for her own survival, she possesses strong moral values. While her friends are off getting off with each other, she is indoors, babysitting children, as it were. Laurie is the poster girl for Conservative America, and thus she has the moral right to prevail where others who fall to temptation don’t. Most scholars agree that Laurie was indeed a virgin, thus pure and unworthy of aggression.

Seen in the context of slasher films of bygone decades, say the 70s and 80s, the 'sex equals death' axiom always rang true. Any character engaging in carnal antics soon met its doom. If you dared to get merry in your car, or inside a tent or isolated cottage in the middle of the woods, you had very little on-screen time left. The formula soon became cliched and tiresome, however, and it wouldn't be until the 90s that Wes Craven infused new life into the slasher/Final Girl concepts in Scream (1996). The movie was rightly praised for many aspects, one of them being the subversion of the Final Girl (Sidney Prescott, played by Neve Campbell) trope to enjoy sex and survive.

Besides the asexual, even virginal nature of the Final Girl, she displays traits that do not befall her peers. She is equipped with more intelligence, self-control, and the ability to think rationally, particularly when under the threat of the blade. She is not overtly beautiful, as other girls around her are, but instead sports the 'girl next door' look. And she usually has a gender-neutral name, too. It's this 'tomboyish' -boyish, in Clover’s text- slant that enables her to be more resilient, and to succeed where others easily succumbed.

When one casts a purely feminist eye on the Final Girl, she becomes a problematic quandary. On the one hand, feminists would agree that she is spared the stereotypical 'dumb blonde' role, pure eye candy both for the male cast and the audience. She is not the big-breasted bimbo whose only purpose seems to be arousing the lust of both her male counterparts, and the killer's, of course, and thus suffer a horrible fate in the hands of either.

But on the other hand, the feminist audience wholeheartedly abhors slasher films, which see them as nasty vehicles for the gratuitous objectification and degradation of women. This cohort may agree with and support Barbara Creed’s opinion in her 1993 book The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, in which she says that the avenging heroine of the slasher film is not the Freudian phallic woman whose image is designed to allay castration anxiety … but the deadly femme castratrice.

Nevertheless, the voyeuristic victimization of women is a huge sticking point for the feminist camp. They denounce the savage fates that befall women in cinema and other media, and how they are portrayed on screen. Directors of the era traditionally used the gaze shot in these types of scenes, inviting (forcing?) the audience to watch the murderous act from the killer’s point of view, thus adding to the crime’s voyeuristic nature. Such voyeur-cam, as it were, forms the entire basis for giallo, a sub-subgenre of the horror film whose origins can be traced back to the Italian cinema of the 1960s.

There is also another interesting nuance to the Final Girl in that she may just be a mere vehicle to project the male's fantasies and desires. Clover acknowledges this when she postulates that the Final Girl is not even a girl, but rather an 'agreed-upon fiction,' a vessel through which the male audience visualizes its own sadomasochistic fetishes. This is an interesting view, and one that’s particularly relevant, since the primary demographic for the slasher film genre is young males aged 15-24.

Conclusion

Feminist lore prior to the decade of the 90s tended to see females as vulnerable, as someone who needed a male counterpart to support her and get her out of trouble: the quintessential damsel in distress cliche. The Final Girl did away with this archaic concept in one fell swoop, empowering the female to fight back on her own ability, strength, and cunning, thus no longer requiring a male helping hand to succeed.

We see this empowerment time and time again, from Laurie Strode's ferocious fight against Michael Myers in Halloween to Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp)'s smart resilience in Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street 1984), to the aforementioned Ellen Ripley. Laurie first stabs Michael with a knitting needle and then turns a coat hanger into a makeshift hand-held weapon. Her will to survive is resolute. Nancy sets up a cunning and elaborate trap to lure her nemesis Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) out of the dream world, where he’s invulnerable, so he can be physically harmed. And Ripley single-handedly incinerates the Alien Queen’s nest before defeating the Queen itself in a mano-a-mano fight using a power loader on board the Sulaco's hangar bay.

No matter how one looks at it, the Final Girl is a complex, endearing, and fascinating character.