When you say “Final Girl”, I picture Grace in the final scene of Ready or Not, sitting in front of her in-laws’ burning mansion, wedding dress covered in blood while she smokes a cigarette. When law enforcement rushes to the scene, they’re bewildered, “Jesus Christ, what happened to you?”.
She exhales a cloud of smoke before delivering the final words, “In-laws.”.
Grace, whose wedding night turns to horror when she’s forced to hide-and-seek while her in-laws try hunting her down from midnight till dawn, was described as a perfect “Final Girl”, the best rendition of the trope in a while.
Who is the “Final Girl”? Coined by Carol J. Clover in 1987, the “Final Girl” is the one who survives, whom we see get “chased, cornered, wounded; […] scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again”. She is a vision of “abject terror”, and throughout the film, stumbles over her friends’ bodies to eventually slip through the killer’s fingers by killing him or being saved. Think of Jess Bradford, Laurie Strode, Sally Hardesty, Sidney Prescott. Or, as one Youtube user puts it, “Ah, the ‘Final Girl’, the ultimate grey area in film between sexism and feminism.”
Since its rise to popularity in 1970s slashers, the trope has come a long way. Though originally the “Final Girl” is, according to Clover, singular among other characters. She is consistently depicted as being of higher virtue than her peers: virginal, “good girl”, tomboy. The Final Girl is “the girl scout, the bookworm, the mechanic” and unlike the friends she watches die, she is the last one standing because of some implied moral superiority she has over the rest (she refuses sex, doesn’t do drugs, she’s smart, isn’t your “typical” girl). While this vision of the trope is entrenched in misogyny, the “Final Girl” was also a step forward regarding the depiction of women in Horror movies. Firstly, she survives, and secondly, she forces a dominantly male 1970s audience to identify with female characters defying societal expectations placed on them to die violent deaths in horror movies. A lot of people associate the word “badass” with the “Final Girl”—she’s a fighter who refuses to be a victim—and the 1980s saw slashers like Scream rewrite the trope to show that her story doesn’t have to end with her covered in blood; she can thrive. Sidney Prescott’s story doesn’t end with Ghostface; she graduates college, gets married, has children, and doesn’t become the typical “Final Girl” who lives to be killed in the sequel or institutionalised.
So, what should we make of the “Final Girl”? On one hand, she’s a step forward in the representation of women in the horror genre, but on the other, her existence is also deeply entangled in the male gaze. Sadly, what makes the “Final Girl” such an appurtenant component of horror is that violence against women is so common in our day to day lives—it cannot even be excluded from the media we consume.
“Scream was my gateway into horror. A friend who was a little older than me invited me to watch it with his mom. My parents being parents weren’t sure if I was old enough to watch a horror movie. Thankfully they let me. By the credits I was hooked. I was a” by -murdoc (Maybe trading) is licensed under CC BY 2.0.