Final Girl - Television Tropes & Idioms

One of the most consistent tropes of the [horror] genre is the character whom filmmakers call "the final girl"—the survivor.

—from the July 31, 2009 issue of Entertainment Weekly.

Benny: But I still want to know what happens!
Buffy: Everyone gets horribly killed except the blonde girl in the nightie, who finally kills the monster with a machete but it's not really dead.
Jennifer: Oh, my God. Is that true?
Buffy: Probably. What movie is this?

— Cut dialogue from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer

The simplest definition of this is "the last character left alive to confront the killer" in a slasher flick. The character in question tends to follow a certain set of characteristics. The most obvious one is being (almost) Always Female. She'll also almost certainly be a virgin, avoiding Death By Sex, and probably won't drink alcohol, smoke tobacco or take drugs, either. Finally, she'll probably turn out to be more intelligent and resourceful than the other victims. Looking at the Sorting Algorithm Of Mortality, you could say that the Final Girl is a combination of The Hero, The Cutie and the Distressed Damsel - which obviously gives her a very low deadness score.

It's also interesting to note how the Final Girl can be interpreted in film theory. On one hand, the character seems to be the living embodiment of stereotypical conservative attitudes of what women "should be". On the other, feminists have noticed that through this device the mostly male audience (or...not) is forced to identify with a woman in the climax of the movie. In practical terms, the makers of a horror film want the victim to experience abject terror in the climax, and feel that viewers would reject a film that showed a man experiencing such abject terror.

This trope has seen a growing number of subversions, aversions and parodies in recent years which suggests it may be slowly weakening. Then again, the Action Survivor's replacing the Action Hero points in an interesting direction.

Thank God for Reduced Monster Difficulty.

Compare and contrast Kill The Cutie.

Straight examples

Comic Books

The comic book Hack/Slash stars a former Final Girl who becomes a slasher-hunter.

Film

Pick a Slasher Flick, any slasher flick.
- Friday The Thirteenth has a definite final girl in every installment, but see below under aversions.
In Scream, the main character has sex (with the killer!), but still maintains her final girl status.
Alien does this. Though it should be noted that every role in the film was written as gender neutral (which is probably why everyone just used their last names for the whole film), so it could have easily been a Final Guy instead.
- It's a common misconception that all of the subsequent Alien movies followed suit; in reality, there were other survivors in the second and fourth movies, and Ripley actually dies in the third.
Trish from Jeepers Creepers fits into the Final Girl trope, as the only real other main character, her brother, is murdered and torn apart for his body parts.

Subversions, aversions and parodies

Film

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.
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.
Played with in the movie Mindhunters, there are two of the original group left standing - a guy and a girl, but seeing as the boy is the killer, she is technically the Final Girl standing. But alas it's not technically true, as one of the other victims is shown to have just passed out.
Final Destination 3, in which the makers explicitly went out of their way to kill the Final Girl. Whether the two people she saved live or die is left open in the theatrical version.
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 it's weaknesses by observing it, and had enough know-how to construct a home-made bomb when he finally got free.
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.
Cindy Campbell from the Scary Movie films is pretty much a sustained spoof of Final Girls.
Averted in The Ruins. Technically there is a Final Girl but she is not the main character, and is not the most intelligent or resourceful one amongst the victims. Her boyfriend is the wise and resourceful leader, but he sacrifices himself to save her. Ultimately, the end implies that she is doomed anyway.
Averted in The Descent. The cast of female spelunkers gets whittled down one by one, but ultimately the Final Girl crosses a Moral Event Horizen, losing audience sympathy. In the end, she seems to escape, but the scene cuts to reveal that it was just a fantasy and she's irrevocably trapped in the cave. Due to Executive Meddling, the Final Girl trope is upheld in the American version, and she escapes.
Averted in Deep Blue Sea. Originally the Final Girl was supposed to live and another character die, but test audiences really hated the female lead, so the two characters' fates were switched for the final release, making the woman a Mad Scientist instead of a Final Girl.
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.
Subverted the hell out of in Saw. 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 she's working with the killer.
Though, as mentioned above, the Friday The13th 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 4-6 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.
Subverted big time in 2008 horror movie Credo. It's all typical with our sweet 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 in a Xanatos Gambit to get her to hang herself. The other college twats are just fine, playing with an Ouija Board downstairs.
This trope, and the extreme lampshade hanging thereof, is a central plot element in the slasher deconstruction Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, where the character is referred to as a "survivor girl." Vernon spends most of the movie setting one character up as the final girl, both to the viewer and the crew filming his exploits. However, it turns out that Vernon's final girl is a decoy, and sexually active at that. It is the female reporter in the film crew who is his real final girl all along, and she fulfills her role exactly according to the trope.
In April Fool's Day, the cast are 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 that the whole thing was both a elaborate practical joke and a test for a "Murder Mystery," inn, there is no twin. Then they have a party.
In Feast the character identified as "Heroine" (Occupation: Wear tanktops, 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".
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 crosses a Moral Event Horizon early in the film hints at her redemptive death. The only female to survive the movie was ironically the one who had pretended to be a boy for the first half of the movie. Riddick, the Villain Protagonist, also survives due to Executive Meddling that turned out to be very profitable.
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.
Also subverted in the 2005 film 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.
In the gay slasher Hellbent, there's a Final Guy and his Love Interest.
The Evil Dead subverted the trope by having the sweet virginal girl raped by trees and then possessed. Her brother, Ashely J. Williams, becomes the Final Guy, though even he gets possessed at the end. In the sequels, he reverts back to humanity and becomes the boomstick-toting, chainsaw-handed Badass we know and love.
Cube features a cute, innocent girl in the cast of prisoners, but it's the the mentally retarded boy who survives, apparently by being even more innocent.
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 Evil Clown Captain Spaulding, who turns out to be part of the killer family.
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.
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.
Brutally subverted, along with every other aspect of the genre, by Funny Games. The Final Middle-Aged Woman is tied up on a boat, when she spots a knife dropped there at the beginning of the film. But before she can accomplish anything, the killers nonchalantly pitch her over the side. THE END
Identity subverts this twice: 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 who we thought had died was actually still alive. Said character, who was actually the killer, returns to finish the Final Girl off
- It could also be considered a subversion that 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 ever really died in the first place.

Literature

Used as a theme in Jane Mendelsohn's Mind Screw novel Innocence, with the main character seeing herself as the Final Girl in her own horror story. She does kill the villain - that is, her stepmother. Or did she?

Live Action TV

Buffy The Vampire Slayer, both the movie and TV show were created specifically as a subversion of the trope — the "final girl" (who isn't particularly final, all things considered) is sexually active, conventionally attractive, and generally a lot more girly than the norm. Admittedly she does have superpowers (often explicitly superior to her foes) which makes it a bit debatable as to whether she belongs as a Final Girl proper, or is simply a straight up superheroine who borrows a fair bit of slasher flick imagery.
- According to the Word Of God, Buffy was actually a subversion of the girls who get killed in monster movies, not those who survive slashers (if memory serves).
- Buffy only became "sexually active" halfway into the second season - prior to that she was a virgin. She also doesn't smoke or do drugs or drink that much, and as for girlyness she is a cheerleader for all of one episode. In fact, whether by accident or design, Buffy resembles the classic Final Girl a lot more than the characters she is supposedly subverting.

Web Original

The Angry Video Game Nerd ended up being the last one to confront Freddy in his Nightmare On Elm Street review after his clones died in various ways. Instead of having the usual Final Girl traits, the one thing he had that his clones didn't was a Power Glove!

Video Games