Final girl

Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, the final girl of Halloween.

The final girl is a trope in thriller and horror films (particularly slasher films) that specifically refers to the last woman or girl alive to confront the killer, ostensibly the one left to tell the story. The final girl has been observed in dozens of films, including Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, Final Destination, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and its remake, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Hellraiser, Alien, The Strangers, The Ring, The Grudge, and Terror Train. The term was coined by Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Clover suggests that in these films, the viewer begins by sharing the perspective of the killer, but experiences a shift in identification to the final girl partway through the film.

History

According to Clover, the final girl is typically sexually unavailable or virginal, avoiding the vices of the victims (sex, narcotic usage, etc.). She sometimes has a unisex name (e.g., Teddy, Billie, Georgie, Sidney). Occasionally the Final Girl will have a shared history with the killer. For example, in Halloween II, Michael Myers is revealed to be the brother of Laurie Strode and in Scream 3 the killer is revealed to be Roman Bridger, half-brother of sole survivor Sidney Prescott. The final girl is the "investigating consciousness" of the film, moving the narrative forward and as such, she exhibits intelligence, curiosity, and vigilance.

One of the basic premises of Clover’s theory is that audience identification is unstable and fluid across gender lines, particularly in the case of the slasher film. During the final girl’s confrontation with the killer, Clover argues, she becomes masculinized through "phallic appropriation" by taking up a weapon, such as a knife or chainsaw, against the killer. Conversely, Clover points out that the villain of slasher films is often a male whose masculinity, and sexuality more generally, are in crisis. An example would be Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Clover points to this gender fluidity as demonstrating the impact of feminism in popular culture.

The phenomenon of the male audience having to identify with a young female character in an ostensibly male-oriented genre, usually associated with sadistic voyeurism, raises interesting questions about the nature of slasher films and their relationship with feminism. Clover argues that for a film to be successful, although the Final Girl is masculinized, it is necessary for this surviving character to be female, because she must experience abject terror, and many viewers would reject a film that showed abject terror on the part of a male. The terror has a purpose, in that the female is 'purged' if she survives, of undesirable characteristics, such as relentless pursuit of pleasure in her own right. An interesting feature of the genre is the 'punishment' of beauty and sexual availability, sometimes expressed as "Sex = Death".

The film Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) explains and talks extensively about this popular horror film convention (although in the film, it is referred to as "survivor girl"), even using it as a major plot device.

Examples of final girls

Before the release of Alien 3, Clover identified Ellen Ripley from the Alien franchise as a final girl. Elizabeth Ezra continues this analysis for Alien Resurrection, arguing that by definition both Ripley and Annalee Call must be final girls, and that Call is the "next generation of Clover's Final Girl". Call, in Ezra's view, exhibits traits that fit Clover's definition of a final girl, namely that she is boyish, having a short masculine-style haircut, and that she is characterized by (in Clover's words) "smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance" being a ship's mechanic who rejects the sexual advances made by male characters on the ship. Ezra notes, however, that Call fits the description imperfectly as she is an android, not a human being.

Christine Cornea disputes the idea that Ripley is a final girl, contrasting Clover's analysis of the character with that of Barbara Creed, who presents Ripley as "the reassuring face of womanhood". Cornea does not accept either Clover's or Creed's views on Ripley. While she accepts Clover's general thesis of the final girl convention, she argues that Ripley does not follow the conventions of the slasher film, as Alien follows the different conventions of the science fiction film genre. In particular, there is not the foregrounding in Alien, as there is in the slasher film genre, of the character's sexual purity and abstinence relative to the other characters (who would be, in accordance with the final girl convention, killed by the film's monster "because" of this). The science fiction genre that Alien inhabits, according to Cornea, simply lacks this kind of sexual theme in the first place, as it has no place in such "traditional" science fiction formats.

Laurie Strode (from Halloween I, II, and H20) is another example of a final girl. Tony Williams notes that Clover's image of supposedly progressive final girls are never entirely victorious at the culmination of a film nor do they manage to eschew the male order of things as Clover argues. He holds up Strode as an example of this. She is rescued by a male character, Dr. Samuel Loomis, at the end of Halloween. He holds up Lila Crane, from Psycho, as another example of a final girl who is saved by a male (also named Sam Loomis) at the end of the film. On this basis he argues that, whilst 1980s horror film heroines were more progressive than those of earlier decades, the gender change is done conservatively, and the final girl convention cannot be regarded as a progressive one "without more thorough investigation".

Williams also gives several examples of final girls in the Friday the 13th franchise: Alice in Friday the 13th, and the heroines of Part II and Part III. (He observes that Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter does not have a final girl.) He notes that they do not conclude the films wholly victorious, however. The heroines from Parts 2 and 3 are catatonic at the ends of the respective films, and Alice survives the monster in the first film only to fall victim to "him" in the second. The final girl in Part 2 is carried away on a stretcher, calling out for her boyfriend (which Williams argues again undermines the notion of final girls always being victorious). Moreover, Ginny's adoption of the monster's own strategy, in Part II, brings into question whether the final girl image is in fact a wholly positive one.

Other characters identified as final girls include Sally Hardesty of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Nancy Thompson of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer as subversion of the "final girl" concept

Buffy Summers, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is not an example of a final girl, but rather Joss Whedon's conscious reimagining of the final girl for young female audiences, in the view of Allison McCracken. The pain, fear, and suffering of the final girl are not ascribed to Buffy, but instead given to Angel, a male character. Jason Middleton concurs, observing that there is not the mixed genderization of the Buffy character as there is with a final girl. Although Buffy performs, repeatedly, the final girl's task of finally killing off the monster of the story, Buffy is a cult heroine rather than a final girl. Middleton draws attention to Whedon's explanation of how the Buffy character was conceived: He felt sorry for the character of "'that blond girl' who would always get herself killed" in horror films, and envisioned a "beautiful blond girl" who would walk into an alley, stalked by a monster, and trounce him. In light of this explanation, Middleton argues that the prototype for Buffy, "the beautiful blond girl ... who always gets herself killed", does not fit the final girl mould, since a final girl does not get killed. Moreover, Clover's definition of a final girl as boyish, not sexually attractive, favoring "practical" clothing, and not sexually promiscuous, and often having a unisex name, does not match Buffy. Buffy is a cheerleader, a "beautiful blond", with a name that, Middleton observes, could not be more feminine. She gets, in Middleton's words, to have sex with boys and still kill the monster.

Middleton argues that the closest match to the final girl convention in Buffy is, in fact, the character of Willow Rosenberg. She has the detective-like curiosity ascribed to the trope. She is adept with technology, and thus has the mechanical-mindedness of the trope. She is not as conventionally attractive as Buffy. She (at least in early stories in the series) does not date. And she even has the androgynous name associated with the final girl trope, with many of her fellow characters calling her "Will".

Buffy is, in the words of Jes Battis, "subverting" the final girl trope of B-grade horror films. Feminist media and cultural studies scholar Mary Celeste Kearney notes that the character of Buffy in the 1992 film precursor to the television series (as well as Louisa Pierce, the protagonist in The Next Karate Kid) was limited in its expression of female empowerment on screen, since she learned her combat skills and moral sensibility from an older man, and primarily used her physical powers for the restoration of order, rather than for adjustment of her personal life.

In the middle 1990s, the trope of the final girl in horror films was "resurrected, reshaped, and mainstreamed". Kearney points to Sidney Prescott (in Scream I, II, III and IV) and Julie James (in I Know What You Did Last Summer and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer) as examples of this along with Natalie Simon in Urban Legend and explicitly links these changes to Buffy.

See also

• Feminist film theory
• Scream queen

References

Bibliography

• Battis, Jes (2005). "What It Feels Like for a Slayer: Buffy Summers and the Paradox of Mothering". Blood Relations. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-2172-5. 
• Clover, Carol J. (1992). Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-04802-4. 
• Cornea, Christine (2007). Science Fiction Cinema. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0-7486-1642-8. 
• Ezra, Elizabeth (2008-04-02). "Uncanny Resemblances: Alien Resurrection". Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Contemporary Film Directors. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-07522-3. OCLC 171049674. 
• Harper, Jim (2004-05-01). "The Heroine". Legacy of Blood: A Comprehensive Guide to Slasher Movies. Manchester: Critical Vision. ISBN 978-1-900486-39-2 
• Kearney, Mary Celeste (2002). "Girlfriend and Girl Power". In Gateward, Frances K.; Pomerance, Murray. Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice. Wayne State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8143-2918-4. 
• McCracken, Allison (2007). "At Stake: Angel's Body, Fantasy Masculinity, and Queer Desire in Teen Television". In Levine, Elana; Parks, Lisa. Undead TV. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-4043-0. 
• Middleton, Jason (2007). "Buffy as Femme Fatale: The Cult Heroine and the Male Spectator". In Levine, Elana; Parks, Lisa. Undead TV. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-4043-0. 
• Rogers, Nicholas (2002). Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  — Professor Nicholas Rogers discusses how the "final girl" aspect of the Halloween films undermines "the misogynist thrust of slasher movies".
• Totaro, Donato (2002-01-31). "The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror". OffScreen. ISSN 1712-9559. http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/final_girl.html. Retrieved 2010-12-07. 
• Tropiano, Stephen (2005-08-01). ""Like Totally Serious": "It was the bogeyman"". Rebels and Chicks: A History of the Hollywood Teen Movie. New York: Back Stage Books. ISBN 978-0-8230-9701-2. OCLC 69423080 
• Williams, Tony (1996). "Trying To Survive On The Darker Side". In Grant, Barry Keith. The Dread of Difference. University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0-292-72794-6. 

Further reading

• Starks, Lisa S. (October 2002). "Cinema of Cruelty: Powers of Horror in Julie Taymor's Titus". In Starks, Lisa S.; Lehmann, Courtney. The Reel Shakespeare. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. pp. 128, 134–136. ISBN 978-0-8386-3939-9. OCLC 49383749 
• Ndalianis, Angela (1998-12-01). ""Evil Will Walk Once More": Phantasmagoria—The Stalker Film as Interactive Movie?". In Smith, Greg M.. On a Silver Platter: CD-ROMs and the Promises of a New Technology. New York University Press. pp. 93–112. ISBN 978-0-8147-8081-7 
• Jim Harper (2004). "The Heroine". Legacy of Blood. Critical Vision. pp. 31–39. ISBN 978-1-900486-39-2. 
• Driscoll, Catherine (2002-08-15). "Distraction: Girls and Mass Culture". Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture & Cultural Theory. Columbia University Press. p. 232. ISBN 978-0-231-11912-2. OCLC 47790838 

External links

• Essay: Is the Final Girl an Excuse?
• Teenie Kill & The Final Girl: Gender and the Slasher Film
• Final girl at TV Tropes
• Gender Roles within Scary Movies by Alex Boles