Subverted to hell and back in All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. The innocent and pure Mandy appears to be this at first, but then comes The Reveal that, the whole time, she was working with the killer, with whom she had entered a Suicide Pact. It's then given a Double Subversion when Mandy backs out of the pact at the last minute, allowing her to be the Final Girl after all.
In April Fools' Day, the cast is whittled down to two and the killer is revealed to be the secret and crazy twin sister of one of the characters. The boy gets locked in a closet while the Final Girl is left to confront the crazy twin. She backs into a room, and there are all the "dead," people, behaving calmly and casually as though nothing had happened. After about thirty seconds of her freaking out, they start laughing and explain that the whole thing was both an elaborate practical joke and a test for a "Murder Mystery," inn, there is no twin. Then they have a party. Even when you first think it's a slasher, the first female victim is the one most likely to be a Final Girl - the bookish Shrinking Violet. The actual Final Girl is shown in bed with her boyfriend, and they nearly have sex in the boathouse the next day.
When considering that the film involves a group of middle-aged adults getting killed off one by one rather than the usual group of teenagers, Julie fits the bill pretty well in The Anthropophagus Beast. While she does smoke in one scene, Julie also turns down the advances of a fellow tourist who expressed a desire to be with her so she is sexually unavailable as well. The Final Girl notion is ultimately downplayed in the final confrontation when a previous victim turns up to be alive and gives a deadly blow to the killer, saving Julie in the process.
In Absurd (1981), the last female to confront the killer is Katia, whose innocence may be justified by the fact that she was bedridden for most of the film. Katia's not really the typical leading protagonist for most of the film until the killer invades her home when she fulfills final girl duties by taking up a decorative axe and chopping his head off.
The Babysitter Netflix series:
Bee in the first film, The Babysitter (2017) is a character who seems consciously designed to evoke the image of a badass modern horror heroine, an attractive blonde babysitter who serves as a Cool Big Sis figure to the protagonist Cole...except she's actually the Big Bad who wants to use his blood for a Satanic ritual. Cole's friend Melanie, on the other hand, is a straight example, portrayed as a wholesome Girl Next Door with hints of Puppy Love.
In the sequel, Melanie turns out to be Evil All Along and became the new leader of the cult, complete with a Hotter and SexierEvil Makeover now that She Is All Grown Up. The actual Final Girl this time, Phoebe, is not at all wholesome, being a New Transfer Student who is initially presented as a "bad girl", but turns out to be a straightforward hero beneath her "alternative" fashion sense.
Blood Widow: Laurie is the only one of the group who survives the longest against the killer. Sadly, she's beaten to death at the end.
Bodies Bodies Bodies: Bee and Sophie play it straight at first glance, being the Token Good Teammates within an otherwise extremely toxic friend circle that's comprised primarily of Alpha Bitches and their asshole boyfriends, and who wind up being the only survivors of the bloodbath that goes down in the mansion (barring Max, who left early and came back at the very end).
However, it turns out that they were never in a Slasher Movie. David's death, the inciting incident of the plot, wasn't a murder, but an accident caused by his own drunken stupidity. When the rest of the cast discovered his body with a Slashed Throat and a blood-stained kukri nearby, they immediately suspected that he'd been murdered and that one of them was the killer, and all the death that followed was a result of them turning on each other. Nobody was in any danger, at least not before their paranoia got the better of them.
Bee and Sophie are also a lesbian couple, and what's more, a lot of circumstantial evidence suggests that Sophie cheated on Bee with Jordan. By the end of the film, even though they both know that the other isn't the killer, their romance is likely toast. Sophie is also a recovering drug addict, and she relapses during the film.
Subverted in The Collector (2009). Arkin is an Anti-Hero ex-con who breaks into a house at the wrong time to steal a valuable gem in order to pay off his wife's debts. While the innocent family he was stealing from is killed off one by one, Arkin survives but is captured. Not to mention being a final boy.
Played significantly straighter in the 2012 sequel with Elena, who is more of a Supporting Protagonist while Arkin is still the lead.
Subverted in Curtains (1983). After all actresses but one coveting the role of Audra are murdered, we're left with one plucky actress (Patti) who easily fits the final girl mold. The use of an Impending Doom P.O.V. makes us think Samantha truly was the killer and not just a red herring. However, in the end, Samantha only killed the director and his mistress, but it was not-so-innocent Patti who killed her rivals for the role.
Irina in the Russian horror film Deadly Still initially looks like a typical final girl, only to be revealed to be working with the main villain of the film, who is her adoptive father. While she turns against him after discovering that he killed her birth parents (the creators of the deadly Magical Camera at the center of the film, which kills anybody photographed with it), she simply proceeds to continue the experiments that both her birth parents and her adoptive father did with the camera, killing the other surviving main character and then the group of police officers dispatched to investigate the deaths.
Death Proof: Quentin Tarantino himself noted during interviews about this film that he is a major fan of Carol Clover's writings on slasher films. As such, part of the thrill of the first half involves how he consciously plays with this trope in particular: Arlene/Butterfly is set up from the beginning to be a played-straight Final Girl in a standard slasher—especially how she's portrayed as rather "apart" from her friends, and not as open in her sexuality. Alas, she ends up dying with the others—which, as Quentin anticipated, is a big shock to the audience. Not to mention that the first group of girls are slightly repressed with their sexuality, whereas the second are more open about it - and survive.
Played straight in the original cut of Deep Blue Sea, but averted in the finished cut, because test audiences found the female lead to be obnoxious and self-centered. The Plucky Comic Relief survived in her place. It should be noted that both a shark wrangler - halfway between Action Hero and Action Survivor - also lives.
Zig-Zagged in Don't Open Till Christmas. It at first appears to be Kate, a chaste woman with a personal connection to the case, but she is randomly killed off, causing the title to shift to Sherry, a stripper who appeared to be just another victim. But then she apparently gets killed, causing things to shift to Ian, a man... who also dies.
In Eden Lake, it's Jenny against Brett and his gang, but she loses to his father.
Zoey is a by-the-book final girl: she is the younger of the two women who participate in the escape room, is socially awkward but immensely resourceful, being the one who contributes the most for the participants to survive. But she is seemingly killed in the fourth challenge, leaving two men to continue. The one who ultimately wins the challenge is Ben, a smoking addict who is initially unsympathetic and serves as The Load but matures throughout the film. And then Zoey is revealed to have secretly survived and ends up rigging a game that was supposed to leave only one alive, so now there are two survivors.
The sequel, Tournament of Champions, averts the Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome characteristic of final girls. All of the new characters, including two women, are killed off, and the ones who remain standing to the end are Zoey and Ben again. They are joined by Amanda, the other woman from the first film, whose death is revealed to have been faked, meaning not only there are three survivors, but they are also all characters from the previous film.
In Evidence, there are two surviving girls... who then turn out to actually be the killers, who took turns taking on the role of the masked bad guy to throw everyone off.
Subverted in Filth to Ashes, Flesh to Dust, in that the squeaky clean Kimberly dies in the final act. The true final girl, Brit, is introduced as anything but with her insensitive racial comments hinting at a sure death. However, it turns out that Brit was a bit of an Action Survivor and was helpful to her friends in the face of danger. After learning the errors of her ways, she kills the racist bad guy with a knife to the head.
Completely subverted in the ironically titled Final Girl. Instead of the film being about a terrified girl being the last survivor of a psycho, it's about a girl trained as an assassin who hunts, baits, and kills a group of psychos.
The Final Girls: The film, appropriately, features several examples and thoroughly parodies the concept.
Paula, the original final girl of the film Camp Bloodbath. Despite not fitting the traditional ingenue mold, instead being an Action Girl who arrives on the scene in a Trans Am and wears a leather jacket and ripped jeans, she makes a point of mentioning that she's a virgin and plans to stay that way as soon as she's introduced.
Vicki nominates herself to be the final girl after Paula dies but is not eligible because being a Technical Virgin doesn't cut it by the movie's rules.
Enforced when Nancy and Max try to survive together. Max's mortal wound leads Nancy (who had sex earlier) to pull a Heroic Sacrifice, making Max the final girl. As soon as this happens, Max's wound becomes Just a Flesh Wound, and she can suddenly fight Billy with slayer-level competence.
Played straight in Frayed, where the virginal girl is the last left to confront her murderous brother in true Final Girl fashion...until it's revealed that she as well as the other victims only existed as they were presented in the killer's delusional fantasies. The real sister was a completely different person whom the brother had never seen after childhood, the 'killer' was actually framed for a murder he did not commit, and the slasher portion of the film never really took place at all.
Freaky: Millie has the makings of one, a blond, heavily-bullied and shy highschooler who overcomes her insecurities and defeats the Big Bad, but is technically not the Final Girl for most of the movie due to swapping bodies with The Blissfield Butcher. Thus, she spends the runtime as a hulking, wanted Serial Killer while the Butcher takes advantage of the situation by commencing his murder spree in her body, even giving Millie an Evil Makeover contrasting to how conservatively and rather frumpily she dresses. Further subverted in that Millie's best friends Nyla (A black woman and the only significant person of color) and Josh (A gay guy), who would definitely be the Token Minorities killed off early on in any other horror movienote Lampshaded and summed perfectly by Josh: "You're black, I'm gay, we're so dead!", survives to the end unscathed whereas Millie's tormentors and the four rich kids from the opening scene, all white, privileged Jerkasses, were brutally slain in the Butcher's path.
Though, as mentioned above, the Friday the 13th film series usually plays it straight, special mention should be made for the character of Tommy Jarvis, who manages to make it safely through installments IV, V and VI as the Tagalong Kid, Troubled, but Cute, and Zen Survivor respectively.
The 2009 remake has a Final Girl, but also has a decoy Final Girl in Jenna who is quite possibly on screen for more time than actual Final Girl Whitney until her sudden death near the end. Additionally, there is another survivor in Whitney's brother Clay.
Speaking of Jason Goes to Hell, it's arguable Stephen is more the main protagonist than Jessica.
The seventh and eighth installments, The New Blood and Jason Takes Manhattan respectively, have the male love interest survive alongside the Final Girl character for the entire final act.
In From Hell, Mary Kelly is played pretty straight as a Final Girl as she escapes Jack the Ripper and survives after all her friends have been picked off and despite the fact that the real-life Mary Kelly didn't. However, she's also a subversion in that she doesn't kill the Ripper, just manages to avoid him and, what with being a prostitute, isn't the traditionally wholesome girl either.
While Frontier(s) technically has two final girls, neither fit the wholesome image of the final girl (at least by association). Yasmine is a pregnant member of a group of thieves, and Eva is a kind but obedient member of the cannibalistic family that's killed Yasmine's companions.
Get Out (2017)'s Rose Armitage appears to have all the traits of the Final Girl at first, but it is later revealed that Rose is actually part of her family's plot to kidnap African Americans and insert the brains of family members or well-paying customers into their bodies. In fact, she plays a key role as the Honey Trap who dates and lures the victims to her parents' isolated house under the guise of introducing them to her family.
Girls Nite Out had Lynn, who looked and behaved every bit of the part as well as top billing for actress Julia Montgomery. However, this is subverted in the finale when the more seasoned actors in the cast are in the final scene while our final girl isn't anywhere to be found. Roll credits.
The slasher-satire Hack! puts the trope through the grinder. The girl so obviously the final girl ends up being an evil bitch involved in the killings, whereas the hunky leading male is revealed to be a virgin and ends up being the final boy.
Theresa 'Tree' Gelbman, the protagonist of Happy Death Day would be one of the first victims in a traditional slasher as a snooty college Alpha Bitch who is having sex with her married professor, drinks a lot, and in fact, she is quickly murdered... only to wake up in bed that same morning. Tree is caught in a "Groundhog Day" Loop reliving the same day over and over until she manages to defeat the killer and along the way, she becomes a nicer person. By the sequel, she's not only a better person but pretty badass, whose first response on hearing someone else is suffering the same fate is to pick up a baseball bat and go hunting the new bad guy.
In the gay slasher Hellbent, there's a Final Boy and his Love Interest.
In High Tension, a lesbian spends most of the film trying to rescue the girl she likes from the hands of a slasher. It turns out that her alternate personality is actually the killer, having been driven murderously insane by her secret crush. Both the killer and the final girl survive.
Subverted in the British thriller The Hole. We open with a teenage girl, who is the lone survivor of a group of four teens locked in a bunker for ten days. When the girl gives her story to the police, she appears to follow the Final Girl archetype - a studious, responsible, intelligent and more level-headed than her peers. Of course, it turns out to be a complete lie - where she's a sociopath who locked her friends down in the bunker in the first place, because she was Yandere for one of the boys. She's shown to be just as promiscuous, drug-obsessed and prone to hysterics as the other teens.
Hostel Trilogy:
Subverted in Hostel. The film's only surviving character is Paxton who is not only male but a heavy drinker and drug user who spends the first half of the film screwing anything with a pulse. By contrast, Josh, who dies earlier, is relatively innocent—although Josh's ambiguous sexuality may make him an example of Bury Your Gays.
Also subverted in Hostel Part II. Beth, the Final Girl who we've come to see as innocent and virginal, turns out to be just as ruthless and bloodthirsty as her captors. She brutally castrates her "hunter" and strikes a deal with Sasha, the club's ringleader. In contrast Lorna, the untouched Cloudcuckoolander, is the first to die and was selected specifically because she was a virgin. Her "hunter" had a Countess Bathory fetish.
Averted in House of 1000 Corpses, where the final girl escapes the killer family, but the driver of the car that gives her a lift back to town is the Monster Clown Captain Spaulding, who turns out to be part of the killer family.
Very cleverly subverted in the sequel The Devil's Rejects. By the end, Baby becomes a sort of final girl when Sheriff Wydell is chasing her. Very interesting seeing the villain become the final girl.
The Hunt (2020): Crystal is a badass, war-veteran Action Girl who completely derails the titular hunt her captors dragged her into as they wrongfully kidnapped her under the presumption that she's the backwards, drug-addicted hick of the same name. As such, she absolutely demolished them all including the Big Bad Athena, due to not giving a damn about their flimsy political agenda and leaving herself as the Sole Survivor.
Identity subverts this in multiple ways: the character set up as the Final Girl was a prostitute, thus subverting the virgin-and-pure side of things. We then find out one of the other characters believed to have died was actually still alive. Said character, who was actually the killer, returns to finish the Final Girl off. Furthermore, the Final Girl, the character that killed her and all of the other characters who didn't make it were actually the multiple personalities of a serial killer, and the whole thing was being played out in his mind. The "killing" of the characters was his real-life attempt to integrate. So, when you get down to it, there's really no Final Girl at all, and no person at the motel ever really died.
Subverted in Inside (2007). Sarah starts out as a Damsel in Distress, but she eventually graduates to Action Survivor status despite being pregnant and this close to giving birth. While she does a serious number on her attacker, it wasn't enough since Sarah still gets killed at the end.
Erica Yang, the protagonist of Into The Dark: School Spirit, is presented as a classic Final Girl: A sweet, virginal, rule-abiding, Asian and Nerdy teenager who tries to help her fellow students escape from a killer. After she takes the killer out, the trope is subverted; she reveals that she's had sex with her ex-boyfriend several times, has actively cheated on multiple occasions to boost her GPA, and really doesn't care about the other kids who died except as a means to make herself look good in the media.
Kill Theory subverts this trope when the expected final girl Jennifer stabs her boyfriend Michael in the stomach to save herself, breaking the rules and ends up being killed by the actual final girl Amber whom she had shot earlier.
Deconstructed in Last Girl Standing, Camryn starts out as the only survivor of the Hunter in the Cold Open, only to suffer PTSD hallucinations of the killer 4 years later, despite them clearly being long dead. Unfortunately, There Are No Therapists since she couldn't afford one as she lives in a crappy apartment and has a dead-end job at a laundromat. She ultimately succumbs to her hallucinations and starts murdering her new friends at the climax under the assumption that she's protecting them from the "resurrected" Hunter, prompting the police to shoot her dead to save the last victim, Danielle. However, Danielle begins hallucinating Camryn herself not long after, starting the cycle all over again.
Painfully averted in The Lazarus Effect - Eva doesn't succeed in stopping Zoe's rampage, she just had a Dying Dream that she did.
Subverted via genre shift in The Majorettes. The film starts out as a standard slasher, with both Vicky and Judy appearing to be the wholesome candidates for this trope to happen. Vicky lives with her invalid grandmother, whose caregiver — Helga — has evil intentions. Judy is the girlfriend of the true hero, Jeff. Judy ends up being the final victim of the serial killer, who gets snared in a plot by Helga when he's photographed killing her. Helga invokes the trope by ordering that he kill Vicky once she turns 18 years old so that she can secure money from an irrevocable trust. After the killer has been incapacitated due to Helga's blackmail, a local gang then kidnaps Jeff and Vicky for steering the police in their direction for potential involvement in an earlier murder. Vicky is then subsequently killed in a shootout, resulting in a devastated Jeff going all vigilante on the gang and killing them one by one. The final shots of the film have the serial killer murdering Helga, pinning his murders on her perverted son, and then watching a new batch of majorettes who may serve as potential victims for him in the future.
Margot Mills in The Menu wouldn't normally be seen as Final Girl material since she's a lad-ette who smokes, curses and wears a leather jacket. Moreover, it's later revealed Margot isn't even her real name (it's Erin) and that she's a High-Class Call Girl who Richard had carried on an affair with and who Tyler hired to be his date for the dinner after his girlfriend broke up with him. However, by the standards of the film's Eat the Rich morality, her status as a Working-Class Hero means that she's the most morally upright character in the film compared to the Upper-Class Twits around her. The Evil Chef villain Julian recognizes this when he decides to spare her and let her leave the island, his breaking point coming when Margot, who learned that he started his career as a line cook at a burger joint before he climbed the ladder of success and lost his passion for the culinary arts, asks him to make her a cheeseburger. The film ends with Margot on a boat chowing down on that cheeseburger, which turned out to be Julian's final meal as he burned down his restaurant with everybody inside.
In "The Babysitter Murders", the final segment of The Mortuary Collection (originally released as a standalone short film), we learn that Sam, the Audience Surrogate throughout the film's Framing Device, had been one of these, surviving an attack on the home where she was babysitting by a Serial Killer who'd just escaped from the asylum. Except she's actually the escaped killer herself, having killed the real babysitter and taken his place. When Montgomery Dark learns who she really is, he subjects her to a Karmic Death before bringing her Back from the Dead and condemning her to take his place as the mortician.
The rare male equivalent is played up but then subverted in Mustang Sally's Horror House. The sole survivor is a rebellious guy who is revealed to be a virgin, compared to his comrades who all die. The final twist reveals that he's the son of the Big Bad and he actively led his friends to their deaths out of revenge.
Played With in My Little Eye. Technically, at the end of the film, the only person alive apart from Travis and the cop is Emma. However, unlike numerous instances where this trope is played straight or even subverted, by the time she's left as the lone survivor, her eventual survival is virtually out of the question.
In My Super Psycho Sweet 16, Skye Rotter is the daughter of a Serial Killer who has been haunted by her father Charlie's crimes ever since she caught him in the act. She spends the rest of the film as a more emo-tinged version of a classic final girl...until the very end, when the Alpha Bitch Madison Penrose reveals herself to be a Jerk with a Heart of Jerk, causing Skye to lock her in the basement of the Roller Dome to be killed by Charlie without feeling a shred of remorse. She drives off in Madison's car, the epilogue revealing that she's been missing for several days. The Lovable Jock Brigg and the Dogged Nice Guy Derek also survive, albeit wounded, with Brigg having nightmares about Skye killing her. The kicker: the film is a horror parody of the notorious MTVReality ShowMy Super Sweet Sixteen, with Madison based on any number of the bratty teenagers featured on that show, meaning that Skye leaving Madison to die is portrayed as karma for an Asshole Victim — complete with Skye's final scenes being set to the triumphant tune of "Miss Murder".
Averted in Perfume, where the killer saves the beautiful Laura Richis as his final victim to complete his perfect perfume. Laura's wealthy father uses all his power to protect her, but the killer walks right through all his defenses, right into Laura's bedroom, and kills her.
In Pitch Black, the woman who seems most likely to be the final girl is killed off only a few minutes before the movie ends, though the fact that she tries to sacrifice the passengers of the ship she was piloting early in the film hints at her redemptivedeath. The only characters to survive the movie are ironically the ones most likely to die in another slasher flick: the pacifist black man; the teenage girl who pretended to be a boy for the first half of the movie and has just reached sexual maturity; and Riddick, the Villain Protagonist, who survives due to Executive Meddling that turned out to be very profitable. This approach is arguably what sets the film apart and is part of why the sequel fails to deliver the same emotional punch. Pitch Black is a survival movie in space that subverts character expectations; The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) tries more to be straightforward.
Subverted in the original Prom Night (1980). With Jamie Lee Curtis playing her, the protagonist practically had "Final Girl" written all over her. However, when the killer is revealed, we find out that she was not a target all along. It is also outright averted with the killer's actual victims: 3 girls and 1 guy. All three girls die, the guy survives.
It's played pretty straight in Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil, until the virginal Final Girl takes down the killer and escapes. The ending suggests a subversion in that Meagan may now be possessed by the evil of the dying killer.
Chelsea in The Ranger starts out as an aesthetic subversion, being a punk chick with pink hair and a leather jacket who is seen doing drugs in the first act. She plays it straighter in her characterization, at least at first, feeling like something of an odd duck amidst the archetypal punk rockers she's friends with and identifying more with nature — a feeling that is reciprocated by their leader Garth, who regards her as an outsider to their group. However, her Dark and Troubled Past involves her having killed her uncle in cold blood on a camping trip when she was a little girl, with the titular villain, a park ranger who hates the protagonists for trashing his pristine wilderness, knowing her secret (having been the one who rescued her and helped cover it up) and wanting to bring that side of her back to the surface.
Subverted the hell out of in Saw and Saw II regarding the character Amanda Young. In the first film, Amanda is the only one of Jigsaw's victims to get free of his traps, but she's not the typically innocent Final Girl (she had been addicted to heroin) and she agrees with the man that tried to kill her. In the second movie, the sweet, innocent-like (at least by Saw standards) blonde girl dies fairly early on. The final girl? Amanda again — and this time, she's revealed to be working with the killer.
In Saw VI, the only survivors of the movie's trial are, you guessed it, female. The film in general acts as a deconstruction, actually. The tests are designed to show who the main character, a manager at an insurance company, is more likely to save and he always deviates towards the women as would the audience in these kinds of scenarios, despite the men deserving it just as much or more than the women. This bias led to him denying insurance claims to men who were fitter and more likely to survive with the aid of medical care compared to women.
It has a Final Boy in Bobby Dagen but subverted with Jill Tuck. As the last female left alive after the death of Bobby Dagen's wife Joyce, Jill is ultimately dispatched by Detective Hoffman with the use of the reverse bear trap, and her death drives the film to its final twist reveal (see below).
Dr. Gordon is revealed to have escaped in the original Saw film and is now an accomplice to the late John Kramer, having put Detective Hoffman in the bathroom trap without a saw for killing Jill.
Jigsaw presents a subversion. Anna shows all the traits of a traditional final girl early on: she is a resourceful and intelligent Action Survivor who comes across as kind, compassionate, and level-headed in comparison to the other players. But most of this is an act.Having murdered her infant child for purely disproportionate reasons and then selfishly framed her husband for it, which got him sent to an insane asylum where he hanged himself, she is one of the vilest characters in the entire franchise, and she eventually suffers a well-deserved Karmic Death. This leaves Ryan, the Jerk with a Heart of Gold, as the last man standing... trapped in a room with Anna's corpse, where he too eventually dies. The film then reveals that Logan, the first victim of the Barn, survived his "death" — making him the Final Boy and Sole Survivor of the Barn — and later became the new Jigsaw.
Also subverted in Saw X. Cecilia appears to be a kindhearted Back-Alley Doctor who is known to have successfully treated cancer patients. But in reality, she's not only a Con Woman who gave false hope to said patients for their money, but also treats her accomplices (including her own boyfriend) as expendable and is willing to murder an innocent child to spite Jigsaw for abducting her. She well-deservedly ends up being left to die in a room filled with deadly gas, leaving said innocent child as the only survivor of the movie.
Cindy Campbell from the Scary Movie films is pretty much a sustained spoof of Final Girls.
The slasher film final girl spoof was done a few decades previously (and just as, if not more, effectively) in 1982's Pandemonium, with the character of Candy, who was not only a comedic take on the Final Girl but also on Carrie.
The Scream series, with its exploration and parody of '80s slashers, doesn't take long to go after this trope.
By the third film, she's living in self-imposed isolation bordering on Crazy Survivalist levels, working from home under a fake name. She suffers recurring nightmares about Ghostface killing her, and when she visits the set of Stab 3, a recreation of her old home in Woodsboro, she has a mental breakdown as her memories of the first movie come flooding back. The passage of time and the settling of her family drama (and, presumably, years of therapy) mean that she's gotten better by the fourth film, where she's written a bestselling autobiography about her life and having the inner strength to move on from the nightmares she's experienced. She even returns to Woodsboro as part of the healing process... and then her cousin Jill (see below) turns out to be a murderous sociopath. For a real Final Girl, the horror wouldn't end when the credits roll — she'd have to live with the experience forever, and may God help her if she's cast in the sequels. No matter what she does, no matter how much time passes, poor Sidney Prescott will always be haunted by the most traumatic moment of her life.
Gale Weathers is also a subversion. Unlike Sidney, she doesn't even have a facade of purity and kindness — she's an abrasive, unscrupulous tabloid hack who's covering the killings simply to make money and promote her book. However, she too survives and even helps defeat the killer, and gets some major Character Development in the sequels revealing a much softer side to her personality.
Randy Meeks, the film's resident Meta Guy, discusses this trope when laying out his rules for surviving a horror movie. The first two points on his list are "never have sex" and "never drink or use drugs"note The third one is "never say 'I'll be right back'.", citing Laurie Strode from Halloween (1978) as an example of the sort of character who typically survives. He credits his own survival in the first film to him still being a virgin, and in the third film, he appears posthumously (having been killed off in the second film) in a Video Will he recorded shortly after he lost his virginity, claiming that, if anybody is watching the video, he's probably a dead-on account of Sex Signals Death.
In Scream 3, Angelina Tyler appears to be this trope at first glance, as she's The Ingenue who's playing Sidney in Stab 3. She turns out to be a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, however, revealing that she'd employed the Casting Couch to get the part — and promptly suffers one of the fastest-acting examples of Sex Signals Death ever. An earlier version of the script also had her as the main killer's accomplice, a further subversion.
Scream 4 has a group of film junkies debating this trope, with one of them remarking about how the "rules" of horror have changed since The '90s, such that old cliches (including this one) have been turned on their heads. Within the film itself, the character of Jill Roberts, initially presented as the Final Girl, takes this trope and puts it through the ringer. She was the killer all along, an Attention Whore who planned to frame her boyfriend Trevor for the murders so that she could come out looking like the Final Girl and ride the publicity to book deals and talk show appearances, following in the footsteps of her older cousin Sidney.
Scream (2022) introduces the new heroines Sam and Tara Carpenter, who team up with Sidney and Gale at the end to take down the killers. Tara is a more conventional "classic" final girl; while she gets brutally attacked by Ghostface in the opening, she becomes the first "opening victim" to survive, and not even the fact that she's on crutches stops her from getting some licks in against Ghostface at the end. Sam, however, is a far darker version of the archetype. She's the daughter of the first film's killer Billy Loomis and has spent much of her adult life in and out of trouble with the law, and she exhibits some of Billy's brutality as she ruthlessly takes down one of the killers, complete with her wiping her blade in characteristically Ghostface fashion afterwards.
The movie Shrooms gleefully takes aim at the whole concept of the Final Girl. At the end, the Final Girl discovers that she herself is the killer, having been driven insane by the titular Shrooms.
Famously toyed with in the twist ending of Sleepaway Camp during the early 80's when the trope was especially popular in slasher films. The character set up to be the final girl, Angela, is revealed not only as the killer but also as having been the young, seemingly male child who was thought to be dead the whole film, as it was actually her sister that had died.
The sequels, however, play this straight this with Molly and Marcia.
Inverted with Student Bodies, in which everyone is suspicious that the obvious Final Girl is really the killer.
The Blumhouse-produced horror film Thriller includes a traditional final girl in Lisa, who embodies many wholesome girl stereotypes found in the trope. However, she subverts it because she isn't the only survivor of the film; her love interest Ty survives, as does (surprisingly) Alpha Bitch Gina.
Valentine: Kate, the all-around Nice Girl and only good person of the cast, is pretty pathetic when confronting the Cupid Killer and defending herself that her boyfriend Adam was the one to dispatch and unmasked them. Turns out she was never targeted in the first place since it was revealed to be Adam all this time, having tricked Kate by knocking out and dressing up her last surviving friend, whose actions triggered the vendetta, as The Cupid Killer.
Usually averted or subverted one way or another in the Wrong Turn films. Earlier in the franchise, the last girl left standing was usually accompanied by a guy who helped her in the final confrontation.
The closest girl to upholding the shy-and-conservative standard would be Mara in the Dead End, whose death halfway through into the film not only blows this trope out of the water, but also holds up as an example of a Decoy Protagonist done right, leaving the artistic Granola Girl, Nina, as the real Final Girl instead.
Averted in Bloody Beginnings, Bloodlines, and Last Resort. It was also not out of the ordinary for the last girl to be shown having sex, getting naked, or doing drugs/drinking beer along with her doomed peers.
Bloodlines has the shy, innocent girl of the main group die first, since she already sealed her fate by having sex with her boyfriend in the beginning of the film, while the sexy, promiscuous girl gets kidnapped by the killers in the end.
Last Resort has the Final Girl having sex with her boyfriend, and said boyfriend ends up pulling a Face–Heel Turn after learning that he's one of the cannibals, further sealing her fate by having his new family finish her.
The reboot has Jen Shaw subvert this as well. Despite being the only one to escape her captors with the help of her father, she had previously offered herself as a wife to the Foundation's leader in a futile attempt to spare her friends and returns to her life pregnant with his child. Not to mention that she had become just as bloodthirsty and ruthless as the hostile civilization.
Maxine in X doesn't just violate every moral rule of slasher movie survival, she does so professionally. She's a literal porn star who habitually uses cocaine and the most scantily-clad female character in the film, spending most of it (when she isn't outright fully nude) wearing overalls with nothing underneath that just barelycover her breasts. The ending also reveals the televangelist we see throughout the film railing against the sins of pornography is her father. She winds up the Sole Survivor who departs the film with a triumphant snort of blow as she drives away, having no doubts or second thoughts about her line of work. Meanwhile, Lorraine, the virginal "church mouse" who does the audio on the porn film that the protagonists are making, is initially presented as Final Girl material, but later decides to star in the film herself (cheating on her boyfriend in the process, while he's filming it) — and sure enough, she's the last of them to die.
Discussed and invoked in You Might Be the Killer, where the last two girls get in an argument over who is the most pure and end up fighting to the death over who gets to be the Final Girl. The winner then goes on to use the killer's Evil Mask to become both the Final Girl AND the killer.
The first film ends with most of the world, including the family's own father and the (formerly) youngest child, dead, and the remaining physically capable boy huddled in the corner desperately trying to keep the new youngest child quiet, leaving the mother and daughter as the two final girls of sorts. One to give the creature a seizure and expose its weakness, the other to finish it off with a shotgun.
The second film plays it a bit straighter with Regan and Emmett alone in the radio station, with Emmett incapacitated and the creature on the prowl, leaving Regan to play the seizure-inducing sound and kill the creature by herself. Also gender-flipped, Marcus has to protect his injured mother and baby brother from another creature at the same time his sister is facing down another one.
Boggy Creek: A group of friends gets terrorized by a Bigfoot creature while vacationing in a remote cabin and its surrounding woods. When the rest of her group is either dead or captured, Jennifer almost manages to escape until she herself is captured right before the credits roll. While this may be seen as a simple subversion, the film might truly avert the trope. The creature seems to selectively kills the men in the group, while it is hinted that the women victims are kept alive for breeding. The killing of Alpha Bitch Brooke leaves the line between subversion and aversion a bit murky, though.
Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer survives the whole movie but is meant to be a subversion of the typical opening victim who dies before the title. While the good and wholesome activist girl we're meant to initially believe is the final girl turns out to be the first victim.
In Cabin Fever, Karen is initially presented as Final Girl material, with blonde hair, no nudity, and a relationship with the least debauched of the three guys in the group. Instead, she is the first to fall ill to the flesh-eating bacteria. The last survivor is Jeff, who decided to run away from the cabin rather than risk getting infected, and even he gets gunned down by the police at the end. What's more, the film inverts The Scourge of God in one notable way: the main vector for infection is the cabin's drinking water, so it's actually safer to get drunk than stay sober, hence why Jeff (who took two cases of beer when he fled) is the only one who doesn't get infected.
Invoked and subverted in The Cabin in the Woods. When the monsters ritually slaughter the college kids, Dana, the victim labelled as "The Virgin", can't be killed unless all the others are killed first, and, as long as she's suffered a lot and is the last one left standing, she can be allowed to escape the monsters without ruining the ritual. However, it turns out that Marty, one of the earlier male victims, wasn't as dead as everyone thought,Explanation... His routine smoking made him immune to the mind-altering drugs laced in the air and the zombie that pulled him underground was dismembered and left growling on the ground as a limbless torso, implying he overpowered it. and comes back to save Dana and kick some monster ass...and end the worldin the process by sabotaging the ritual. Further subverted by the fact that Dana, who the technicians had set up to become "The Virgin", was in fact screwing her professor in order to pass the class, while Jules, who had been picked as "The Whore", was the smarter and more wholesome of the two before she was drugged.
Subverted in Candyman. The main character studying urban myths for graduate school discovers the legend of the titular Candyman, who can be summoned when his name is said in the mirror five times. Needless to say, Candyman is indeed summoned during Helen's investigation and shows himself, framing Helen for murder as well as killing her best friend and her therapist. Helen dies saving the life of a baby at the end, but she herself becomes immortalized and is just as vengeful as the Candyman in that she kills her cheating husband when he unknowingly summons her after her death.
Played completely straight in the two sequels with Annie and Caroline, both of whom are descendants of the titular villain.
The Cave contrasts the slightly demure scientist Katheryn with the sexy blonde climber Charlie. Katheryn is indeed the only one of the two females to survive, but this is subverted at the end when she is revealed to be infected and out in the world to infect others.
The Cottage saw the Final Girl turn out to be so unpleasant and obnoxious that the technically bad but not actually evil kidnappers who made up the other three heroes were much more sympathetic characters. Hilariously, she not only releases the monster but manages to get herself killed by said monster before any of the guys - it is probably not a good idea to mouth off to a psychotic 7-foot-tall, deformed cannibal when he is about to brain someone with a shovel.
In the film Crazy Eights, the character Beth is built up to be the final girl, only to become the second victim when a horrible monster visits her and persuades her to rip out her own jaw to remove her guilt. The final girl is actually Jennifer, but she prepares to kill herself as the movie abruptly ends.
Inverted big time in the 2008 horror movie Credo. It's all typical with our sweet and innocent main character being the last one out of our group to die... That is until it's revealed most of the movie was all just a hallucination brought on by an evil demon to get her to hang herself. The other college twats are just fine, playing with a Ouija Board downstairs.
Set up and subverted in "The Raft" segment of Creepshow 2, in which the girl less concerned with boys and drugs at first ends up being the first victim of the monster after letting her guard down and trying pot. The story may serve as a cautionary tale for why the Final girl must avoid certain vices if she wants to survive a horror movie.
Set up in Damnatus, where Nira is the last of the party left alive (with The Hero even commenting that if anyone's going to make it out alive, it will be her), but when the daemon catches up with her, she dies just like the rest.
Subverted in The Dark, where Maria Bello's character Adèle fights through the Welsh interpretation of the afterlife to save her daughter, only to unintentionally kill herself and switch places with her. And depending on how you interpret the ending, she may not have even succeeded in saving her daughter.
The girl who looks most likely to be the Final Girl in The Deadly Spawn dies in the last 20 minutes and is replaced by another girl who arrived shortly before two-thirds of the way through the film. The monster ends up being killed by the precocious little boy who was hiding in the basement where he was cornered by the monster earlier, figured out its weaknesses by observing it, and had enough know-how to construct a homemade bomb when he finally got free.
The Evil Dead (1981) subverted the trope by having the sweet virginal girl raped by trees and then possessed. Her brother, Ashely J. Williams, becomes the Final Boy, though even he gets possessed at the end. In the sequels, he reverts back to humanity and becomes the boom stick-toting, chainsaw-handed badass we know and love.
Marybeth is almost a parody of a Final Girl, a virginal, innocent, nice girl who abstains from drugs, alcohol, and sex and has a sweetheart Southern accent on top. It turns out that she's the Hive Queen leading the Puppeteer Parasite aliens infiltrating the school. What's more, she's the only major character (not counting an early scene of Fan Disservice from an elderly woman whose body rejected the alien parasites) who gets a nude scene.
This leaves Casey, the nerdy School Newspaper Newshound who is The Smart Guy among the main characters and otherwise exhibits many Final Girl traits, to become the Final Boy who figures out the aliens' weakness and defeats them. He even has a Gender-Blender Name like many straight examples of this trope.
In Feast the character identified as Heroine ("Occupation: Wear tank-tops, tote shotgun, save day") is accidentally shot, knocked out a second-floor window and swarmed by monsters about halfway through the movie. We then get the real Final Girl, Tuffy, who is now credited as Heroine #2.
Final Destination follows this with Clear... until 2, which subverts it finally killing her, making Kimberly the Final Girl instead.
Final Destination 3, in which the makers explicitly went out of their way to kill the Final Girl, Wendy. Whether the two people she saved lives or die is left hanging in the theatrical version.
From Dusk Till Dawn ends with two survivors. Kate Fuller, the virginal preacher's daughter, is a straight example of this trope. Seth Gecko, on the other hand, is not only a Villain Protagonist, but arguably the evilest character in the film. Whereas his Ax-Crazy rapist brother Richard is implied to be legitimately insane, the bikers and truckers at the Titty Twister are rough-hewn but otherwise not harming anybody, and even most of the vampires are portrayed as animalistic and killing out of instinct, Seth is a professional bank robber who coldly murders multiple people out of pure greed or anger and is entirely aware and in control of his actions. That said, even he is shocked when Richard rapes and murders their hostage when he leaves to grab food near the start of the film, and he does get a bit nicer as the story goes on, convincing the preacher Jacob to recover his faith in God to help them fight the vampires and feeling regretful when he has to kill Richard. As he puts it to Kate at the end, "I may be a bastard, but I'm not a fucking bastard."
Jenny in Ghostkeeper seemed destined for this: Brunette, insecure and more reserved when compared to the other (blonde) girl in the group. The original intent was for her to have a chase with the monster when she was the last one left. However, production ran out of money halfway through filming, so a new ending had to be made that completely subverted this altogether. Rather than confronting the monster, Jenny confronts the woman who runs the lodge and as a result, becomes the new ghost keeper.
Since there are no women among the survivors (or even passengers) of the crashed plane in The Grey, it's pretty obvious that there will not be a final girl. Liam Neeson's character becomes the last survivor before meeting a Bolivian Army Ending (he does manage to kill the alpha wolf before dying, though).
Subverted in Grizzly Park, where Bebe, the ditzy, sweet girl, survives most of the movie, but it turns out it was all an act, and she is really a mean, spoiled bitch. Ranger Bob ends up sending the bear to kill her once he finds out.
Midsommar is a Folk Horror and Dani does survive until the end while being portrayed as nicer and more wholesome than her jerkass friends. However, she survives because she decides to get inducted into the cult — and punishes her boyfriend by making him the final sacrifice!
Subverted in the Sci-Fi Horror film Morgan. Lee Weathers is the last girl standing, but only because she executes the other two survivors in order to Leave No Witnesses to Morgan's rampage. And her toughness, poise under pressure, and avoidance of sex aren't because she's a virginal Action Survivor, but because she's a hard-nosed, emotionless corporate suit — and an Artificial Human just like Morgan.
Seemingly subverted in the original [REC] film (and its American remake), in that its heavily implied that Angela dies after being pulled into the darkness.
The 2009 sequel to the Spanish film subverts it further — Angela actually survived the first film's events, but it's revealed that she's now possessed after killing the other survivors in the apartment complex.
The 2014 sequel finally plays things straight, with Angela being one of the two only survivors when the virus outbreaks on a ship.
Averted in The Ruins. Technically, there is a Final Girl, but she is not the main character nor the most intelligent or resourceful one among the victims. Her boyfriend is the wise and resourceful leader, but he sacrifices himself to save her. However, the ending Wham Shot implies that she is doomed anyway.
In Slaxx, Libby is framed as this almost from the get-go, the one employee at Canadian Cotton Clothiers who isn't either a cynic like Shruti or an asshole like everybody else. Of the main characters, she is the Sole Survivor and almost makes it to the end of the film but gets killed in the stampede of shoppers she desperately tried to stop from entering the store, where the ghost of Keerat was waiting to kill them all. The actual sole survivor, a stockboy named Camilo, spent the whole movie in a changing room completely unaware of what was happening outside.
Thoroughly subverted in Trick 'r Treat with Laurie, whose name is a reference to Jamie Lee Curtis' Final Girl in the Halloween films, a cute virgin dressed as Little Red Riding Hood who is surrounded by loud, promiscuous friends who want to get her laid. However, none of them were in danger at all. It turns out that they're a pack of bloodthirsty werewolves, and that all along they were actually looking for a man so that Laurie could eat him. Though her eventual victim is actually a serial killer, and she does technically fight him off.
In Unfriended, Blaire meets all the criteria at first glance — virginal, less obnoxious than her female friends, and conventionally attractive but not quite gorgeous. However, it turns out that Laura's saving her for last not because she's the most innocent, but because she's the most guilty — she's a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who filmed the humiliating video of Laura that caused her to kill herself, and she refuses to take responsibility for it, even throwing her boyfriend Mitch under the bus to save her own skin. She's also not a virgin, having cheated on Mitch with his best friend Adam. Furthermore, at the end of the film she's not the lone survivor, but rather, the final victim.
Deconstructed in the "Tuesday the 17th" segment from VHS, a homage to the slasher genre. The final girl turns out to be far more of a villain than the actual supernatural killer (who is more akin to a force of nature). She was the final girl of a previous group who witnessed her friends get slaughtered by the Glitch. When no one believed her about the Glitch she went insane from the trauma and desperation to be believed, eventually luring another group of teens to the stereotypical haunted forest to use them as bait for the Glitch so she could try to capture it. In the end, her attempt fails miserably, and the Glitch effortlessly mutilates her.
The Wishmaster series is prone to playing with this. While played completely straight in the original, the sequel's Final Girl was a goth burglar who actually kills a guy in the opening, during a heist gone wrong, though she later redeems herself, in order to beat the Djinn. The protagonist of Wishmaster 4: The Prophecy Fulfilled is also shown having sex at least twice, including with the Djinn.
Subverted in The VVitch, a period horror film about a Puritan family in 1630s New England being stalked by a local witch. Thomasin, the family's eldest daughter, seems to check off nearly all of the classic markers of this trope: she's a beautiful, strong-willed, virginal teenage girl, and she is indeed the only member of her family to survive to the end. But she ends up as the Final Girl after personally killing her mother in self-defense after her mother accuses her of being a witch. And almost immediately after, she ends up personally selling her soul to Satan and joining a witch's coven, becoming the very thing that she successfully survived. And though the details are left deliberately ambiguous, there are also some strong hints dropped that there was never a witch at all, and that Thomasin killed her entire family herself — meaning that she could either be the Final Girl or the slasher. Watch the movie and decide for yourself.
Averted in Zombeavers, Zoe survives the zombie beaver attack, but she is not a virgin and gets run over by a truck at the end of the film.
Hell, the trope is Averted with both Jen and Mary. Jen got the most screen time of the other girls and had the standard setup of the trope (Like being the only one of the girls not to have sex with their boyfriends). But then it turns out that everyone found her very unpleasant and boring to be around and eventually got infected in the last 30 minutes, becoming the Big Bad. Mary was a nerdy girl with a jock boyfriend, until we find out she's a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who cheated on her boyfriend with Jen's boyfriend and the rest of the film followed her until she too turns and is killed by Zoe in the last 5 minutes.
