Last Girl Standing
A Feminist critique of horror's "Final Girls" and where they fit in the patriarchy.
“You failed, Michael... because I'm not afraid of you.”
- Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis)
There always seems to be a sort of satisfaction watching someone defy the odds and come out on top; the one which society has deemed should be the weaker of the two but is not deterred by these statistics and instead even relies on them to further fuel the fire under them. There tends to be a common rooting for the “underdog”—whether that be because they are easier to relate to, it is gratifying to see the societally superior crumble, or for whatever other reason makes them so appealing—and this sense of support transcends culture, occupying books, films, and television shows.
In the horror genre, a common instance of this lies in the Final Girl image—or the last one standing against whoever this particular film’s masked assailant is, resisting their strength and beating them at their own game. On the surface, she does not appear to be capable of doing such a thing, instead seeming like she would face the similar fate of her friends, but for some reason, she prevails.
How does she do this? Who is the Final Girl, and what allows her the ability to overpower the killer?
Through the realm of cultural studies, there are multiple ways to analyze this trope; however, it is best rooted in the feminist theory, focusing on who the Final Girl is, what exactly it is that she represents, how one may view her in the patriarchy, and what might attract someone to these films.
The Birth of the Final Girl
Carol J. Clover was the first to coin the term “Final Girl” in her essay “Her Body, Himself”—and later as a chapter under the same title in her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. As the name would suggest, this phenomenon revolves around the lone remaining survivor in the film, the one with the most screentime, battling one-on-one against the notorious killer and coming out victorious, either by way of slaying the predator in revenge or just narrowly escaping their clutches.
This victim-hero is always female:
“She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again” (Clover 35).
The Final Girl is abject fear incarnate, staring death in the face, and yet she fights back, sometimes at such a velocity that matches the killer himself.
A well-seasoned viewer of the genre would be able to point out the Final Girl only mere minutes into the film, seeing where she differs from her same-sex friends, but what characteristics define this trope? Who is the Final Girl? And, more importantly, what makes her able to survive the killer’s reign of terror?
Clover goes deep into this analysis, picking out how this character stands out against the others in these films.
One of the main aspects of the Final Girl is her sexual unavailability—read: virginity—and she usually declines any male attention, causing her to almost appear lonely and unattached. She is typically intelligent and avoids the vices that the killer’s victims partake in, like sex, alcohol, and other narcotics.
The Final Girl is very observant—almost “to the point of paranoia”—and notices the dangers and holds suspicions before her friends who, by the time they are made aware, are already too late to save themselves (Clover 39). Resourcefulness shines through as well, especially in the final moments between herself and the killer, and this, plus her aptitude, allows her to prevail.
Though not as common, there is sometimes a relationship or shared history between the killer and the Final Girl either by way of some convoluted family tree or a connection to one’s villain origin story.
When discussing the topic of Final Girls, the most classic character that comes to mind is seventeen-year-old Laurie Strode in Halloween (1978), portrayed by Jamie Lee Curtis, and although she is not the first to fit this trope, she is certainly the one to kickstart the trend. In analyzing these traits, her likeliness can almost formulaically be applied as she battled against the “Boogeyman,” Michael Myers.
A minor plot point in the film focuses on Laurie’s fears in dating, taking the brunt of the teasing from her friends who have boyfriends of their own and dodging their attempts at setting her up with male classmates. She evades these vices of sex and intimacy, focusing instead on her schoolwork, but she avoids others like alcohol, too, even as her friends bring over beers to the babysitting house. Although there is a brief moment where she smokes marijuana in the car with a friend, this appears to be her only flaw.
Laurie is highly perceptive, as she noticed Michael throughout the day, driving in stolen cars and hiding behind trimmed hedges; however, no one seemed to believe her because they lacked this sense of intuition, always being a few seconds late in catching a glimpse of the killer. Her resourcefulness comes into play when Michael has her cornered in the closet, where she thinks to snatch a hanger and twist it into a weapon, brandishing it when Michael opens the door and stabbing him in the eye.
Lastly, though it is not mentioned in Halloween, future projects in the franchise reveal how Laurie and Michael are siblings, ticking off that last box that makes Laurie the textbook definition of a Final Girl.
All-in-all, the Final Girl is depicted as “the good girl,” sticking to her studies and not allowing herself the distractions of dating, and it is heavily implied that these characteristics allow her to defeat the odds and survive. “Although she is always smaller and weaker than the killer, she grapples with him energetically and convincingly,” hence permitting her to live (Clover 40).
The same cannot be said for the killer’s victims, though, and the number of post-coital murders in the genre alludes to this distinction. In Halloween, two of Laurie’s friends face the killer after sneaking to the master bedroom of the babysitting house—the boy killed while going downstairs for a beer (another vice) and the girl shortly after in the bedroom. Though Michael does attempt to end Laurie’s life, too, he proves to be unsuccessful, and some—like Clover—would believe that these attributes act as a metaphorical shield that protects her from confronting the same cruelties as her friends.
Imagining This in a Patriarchal Lens
With this depiction of the Final Girl, there is a clear connection between that and a woman’s role in the patriarchy. Here, this cookie-cutter image of the Final Girl is laden with conservative and traditional values—pure, innocent, moral—and if these are the values that allow her to survive, what does this have to say about society?
Lana Rakow, in “Feminist Approaches to Popular Culture: Giving Patriarchy its Due,” discusses how culture can be analyzed from a feminist perspective and rooting it within this patriarchal society does precisely that, highlighting where these Final Girls fit and how they may have come to be. In this, she explains how one of these approaches—the images and representations approach—poses questions like “what kind of images are present and what do those images reveal about women’s position in the culture?” and “how do such images have meaning?” (Rakow 231).
To answer these kinds of questions, not only is it essential to recognize who the Final Girl is, but also who she is not, especially when contrasting her to the victims. It is also important to acknowledge the time that this trope thrived and what was happening then that could have influenced these ideas.
While there is an emphasis on the Final Girl being “the good girl,” as mentioned previously, where she is innocent and pure, her female friends—the victims—are depicted as promiscuous. They are not anywhere close to being nymphomaniacs but are sexually active and feel secure in their sexuality, and this alone is shown as something negative—it is implied to be what gets them killed, after all.
Why is this?
When these films really gained traction—late-70s to 80s—the opinions surrounding sex were undergoing drastic changes. A new sense of sexual liberation was underway, “which had something to do with women liberating themselves in the bedroom… but had as much to do with loosening norms around sex” (Kohn). Not everyone felt this way, though.
Many men, especially those in the male-dominated film industry, felt threatened by the women’s liberation movement and “began killing and torturing fictional facsimiles of the liberated woman, depicting her as amoral, inferior and vapid” (Pulliam). To contrast this, they then “created the idealized prototype of the Final Girl and rewarded her obedience, her purity, by sparing her life” (Pulliam).
In this perspective, it is clear that this sense of masculine anxiety arose from men believing that a woman’s role in society is to be a more conservative version of what these changes emulated—that is how she will be able to survive. Here, the traditional values of the past that come with living in a patriarchal society are being exploited to exhibit a man’s opinion of what a sexually active woman is and, essentially, what she deserves if she continues with this sense of freedom.
Another historical event could have influenced this fear around sex, that being the 1980s AIDS epidemic. Though broader in scope, with this rose a more life-or-death response to sexual intimacy—specifically towards homosexual men—and began a whole new movement of fearmongering.
“A bad reputation isn’t all that you can get from sleeping around,” one poster read from the Dallas County Health Department, intended to not only scare those who interact with it but also to “shame sexual behavior” (Geiling).
Since this epidemic took place while these horror films were released, it is not that far a stretch to claim that these scare tactics partly influenced this trope’s killing of sexually active teenagers. Many of these campaigns from the 80s made a clear connection between sex and death, similarly to how these films showcased the lone survivor of the killer as virginal.
From another perspective of how the patriarchy can be applied to this concept, there is an issue in that the female victim-hero is often masculinized. Clover expresses how “the Final Girl is boyish, in a word,” and that “her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from the other girls” (40). She also tends to have an androgynous name—Stevie, Laurie, Joey, Stretch, Sidney, Max—and is sometimes even dressed in gender-neutral clothing, further alienating her from her more feminine friends.
Like most things, this is done intentionally, mainly so that the male audience can identify with the character rather than the more masculine killer. By applying these traits to the female victim-hero, making her a bit more gender-ambiguous, men can better relate to her role in the film and root for her against the killer.
If this is the case, why not just make the Final Girl male? This poses a new set of complications, again relating to the audience’s ability to connect with her.
One of these central issues lies in how horror films have a “greater emphasis on the victim part of the story,” taking up half of the Final Girls’ victim-hero anatomy (Clover 18). In a patriarchal setting, men do not like to view themselves as victims—or, at least with this level of “weakness”—and watching a man undergo these tortures and react in the same manner as a woman might in the role would turn most of the male audience away.
In these films, the Final Girl has close-up shots of her terrified expression, her screams overwhelm the suspenseful music, she loses her balance and falls, and seeing a male character doing these same things—to a male audience in a patriarchal lens—would not be appreciated. In a sense, a statement is being made in that the audience would react better to a less feminine female character overpowering her masculine counterpart than to see a male character be victimized to such an extent as the Final Girl. To them, seeing a man in this position would break that fourth wall of film watching, detracting from the story’s overall impact.
This concept is deeply rooted in these patriarchal beliefs of toxic masculinity and the whole “real men” movement, but on the other side of the coin, it also follows the principle that a feminine-presenting woman is incapable of being at such a level of control and power to battle her assailant and win.
Escaping the Patriarchy and a Desire for Control
Putting aside these values and the inner workings of the Final Girl, there still seems to be an appeal about watching a woman on-screen taking down her assailant and coming out on top. Though there are means to speculate why the Final Girl is not a clear representation of femininity or a break away from the patriarchy, in the basic sense of this trope, there is an image of a woman overpowering a man, and that is enough to bring in views.
In this, the Final Girl is the embodiment of taking control. This is not to say that she is not a victim—the third act of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) shows just how much the Final Girl goes through—but she is able to gain a sense of power. She writes her own destiny, outsmarting and outwitting the killer, and it is in this, she achieves victim-hero status.
To tie this back into the patriarchy, by definition, there is a clear lack of control in the women under this rule. They are expected to squeeze themselves into these predetermined roles and accept this fate, and being able to watch a character on the big screen defying these rules can almost be an empowering moment.
This line of thought is similar to Janice Radway’s analysis of romance novels and the women who read them. When discussing the act of escapism, it is just as essential to examine the escape from as it is the escape to, and Radway ponders on what this from might be.
She never does reach a substantial conclusion as to why a particular group of women were drawn to this genre of literature—“Although I think each view accurately captures one aspect of the phenomenon of romance reading, none can account fully for the actual occurrence or significance of the event as such”—however, there remain means to speculate, especially when balanced in these patriarchal systems (Radway, Conclusion 210).
One major way to poke at this is through traditional values, where women are expected to practice the role of devoted wife and dutiful mother—the “caretaker,” of sorts. The content of these novels allows for this study, whether that be the heroine’s ability to transform her husband into someone more emotionally cognitive or the passion between these couples that women feel may be lacking within their real-life relationships. In this, these women rely on the nature of reading to escape to these worlds of unrealistic fantasies, doing so to satisfy their desires of breaking the chains that bind them to the patriarchy.
In terms of Final Girls in horror films, this same act of escapism can be applied. Here, the audience has “a chance to see a heroine who, after being chased by a male oppressor, turns out, and fights him” (Wijaszka). Those in the audience may feel drawn to these films for that exact reason—this is something that many female audience members may feel is not present in their everyday lives, so being able to see it in a film, they can almost insert themselves into the narrative and gain something from it.
There is an opposing view to this claim. As Radway also expresses in her writing, the act of reading romance novels—or in this case, watching horror films with female leads—may be escapism enough. The content of these forms of media has no real effect, coining the reading itself as a “declaration of independence,” where women can temporarily refuse “the demands associated with their social roles as wives and mothers” (Radway, Introduction 261).
Though this is still deeply ingrained in the patriarchy in that there remains something to escape from, it detracts from the importance of the Final Girl symbol and what she represents in the context of these films. Female viewers are not necessarily drawn to these films because they can watch a woman doing something that they feel is missing in the society that they inhabit—overpowering this sense of masculinity that could, in a sense, represent the patriarchy itself—but for the simple fact that spending those 90-odd minutes in front of a screen allows them a temporary break from their everyday lives.
This also ties into the concept of control—or lack thereof. While he does focus more on one’s shopping habits, John Fiske’s “Shopping for Pleasure” provides some analysis on the control factor.
In this, he expresses how the consumption of material objects can offer this sense of control—the process of selecting an object to buy, the power dynamics between shopper and salesperson, exhibiting an air of financial security—and it satisfies their need for it.
“Consumption, then, offers a sense of control over communal meanings of oneself and social relations, it offers a means of controlling to some extent the context of everyday life” (Fiske 25).
Those who may feel they lack this control in their lives are typically from lower-class, marginalized communities, including women, and seek out these situations where they can briefly escape this grim reality.
To tie this to the concept of horror films, this “consumption” can also be the consumption of media—these films—and how not only can one control what they watch, but also what is to gain from it. As mentioned previously, seeing a woman coming out on top against her assailant can act as a moment of empowerment for the female viewer, and finding this sense of control in one’s life through a screen can be just as beneficial to one’s self-confidence.
Where Final Girls Are Now
The Final Girl has undergone some changes throughout the years, countering her Halloween equivalent.
One of the first deviations from this role came in Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), where Sidney—the Final Girl—actually has a sex life, disbanding the previous vows of celibacy and pureness. There remain lingering aspects to the original trope, though—Sidney is a “good” teenager, she has a connection to the killer, she seems to be the only one truly concerned about the staggering rise of murders—but unlike the films from before, her losing her virginity is not a death sentence, and she manages to survive the entire franchise (so far).
In another more recent film, Happy Death Day (2017), this phenomenon continues to mutate as Tree is also “no stranger to truancy or sleepovers with her male peers” and is “definitely not nice” (Wijaszka). She is still resourceful, though, and in the end, is able to sever the time-loop she found herself in and win against the baby-masked killer.
Like most things, it would seem that this trope has evolved with the times, altering what it means to be a Final Girl and where this character fits inside the patriarchy.
Despite there no longer being many rules to define what makes a Final Girl, what she represents—for the most part—remains the same. With the idea of sex somewhat losing its taboo status, these female victim-heroes can better represent what the modern woman acts like, liberating her from those characters of the past.
Unfortunately, many aspects of day-to-day life are still deeply rooted in patriarchal systems—gender pay gaps, a lack of women in authoritative positions, the “pink tax”—and the image of the Final Girl still defies and stands starkly against this reality. She can still be a figure of resistance and empowerment for female viewers, and although she may have stemmed from the male-dominated film industry’s fears of women’s liberation, she is no longer defined by these “good girl” traits but by her strength and intelligence.
The days of a woman’s pureness acting as her shield of protection are in the past, leaving this new version of the Final Girl in her place. She instead relies more heavily on her own power to overcome the killer, thrusting her in the limelight, and though it may still be ill-advised to deem her a feminist icon due to this rocky upbringing, the Final Girl—at the end of the day—is still a woman overpowering a man, and that alone can be inspiring.
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Press, 2015.
Fiske, John. “Shopping for Pleasure: Malls, Power, and Resistance.” Reading the Popular, Unwin Hyman, 1985, pp. 13-42.
Geiling, Natasha. “The Confusing and At-Times Counterproductive 1980s Response to the AIDS Epidemic.” Smithsonian Magazine, 4 December 2013, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-confusing-and-at-times-counterproductive-1980s-response-to-the-aids-epidemic-180948611/.
Kohn, Sally. “The sex freak-out of the 1970s.” CNN, 21 July 2015, https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/21/opinions/kohn-seventies-sexual-revolution/index.html.
Pulliam, Grace. “Opinion: The ‘Final Girl’ horror trope is rooted in misogyny, needs to be examined.” Reveille, 4 April 2020, https://www.lsureveille.com/opinion/opinion-the-final-girl-horror-trope-is-rooted-in-misogyny-needs-to-be-examined/article_1e500d66-751c-11ea-8f2c-c334fec136a9.html.
Radway, Janice. “Conclusion.” Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, U. of N. Carolina Press, 1984, pp. 209-222.
Radway, Janice. “Reading Reading the Romance (Introduction).” Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by John Storey, 5th ed., Routledge, 2019, pp. 253-268.
Rakow, Lana. “Feminist Approaches to Popular Culture: Giving Patriarchy its Due.” Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by John Storey, 5th ed., Routledge, 2019, pp. 228-242.
Wijaszka, Zofia. “A Final Girl Trope in Horror Films: Then and Now.” In Their Own League, 8 October 2019, https://intheirownleague.com/2019/10/08/a-final-girl-trope-in-horror-films-then-and-now/.