What is a final girl?

What is a final girl?

The final girl is a horror movie trope, specifically drawn from slasher movies. The final girl is the woman or girl who, at the end of the film, is alive to confront or be rescued from the killer. The term was coined by Carol J. Clover in her 1987 article “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.”

Often, when one thinks of this horror movie trope, one simply thinks of the last woman or girl left standing. However, when Clover wrote her article, she laid out specific parameters to outline who is and who isn’t a final girl.

Who is a final girl?

Clover specifically studied the slasher films of the 1970s and 80s, and she put forward the following definition of a final girl:

1. She is the last living member of a group of people picked off by the killer
2. She has some sort of moral superiority over the rest of the group, refusing vices like sex and drugs
3. She has a final confrontation with the slasher, where she either defeats him or is rescued by someone like the police

As you can see, Clover’s definition has much more of a narrow scope than a lot of common, modern usage. Clover draws a line between “female survivors” and final girls. By her definition, Lila Crane from Psycho is a female survivor, due to her lack of moral purity. 

Why are they girls? According to Clover, movies with “final boys” or men would not be successful because as everyone around them is killed, the final girl experiences abject terror, which audiences would find off putting in a man or boy. However, this terror is transformative for the final girl, so it is necessary for the genre to work. When she survives, the terror she experiences “purges” her of less desirable characteristics.

What are some examples of final girls?

So if Lila Crane doesn’t make the cut according to Clover’s definition, who is? Here are a handful of examples.

• Sally Hardestry from the 1974 film Texas Chainsaw Massacre
• Ellen Ripley from the Alien franchise 
• Sue Snell in the 1976 film Carrie 
• Nancy Thompson from the 1984 film Nightmare on Elm Street
• Sidney Prescott from the Scream franchise