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THE FINAL GIRL: How Horror Heroines Have Changed
Picture this: you're in a horror film. There's a masked killer somewhere outside, the telephone has conveniently stopped working, and your friends have decided that splitting up is an absolutely brilliant idea. Someone is drinking, someone has disappeared upstairs with their boyfriend, and another person has just announced they'll be right back, which, as anyone familiar with horror films knows, is practically a handwritten invitation to their own funeral.
Somewhere amongst all the questionable decisions, there's one girl who notices that something isn't quite right. She's intelligent, careful, usually a little quieter than everyone else, and somehow seems to be the only person taking the situation seriously. Congratulations, you've probably just met the Final Girl.
For decades, slasher films have introduced audiences to women who, against seemingly impossible odds, manage to outsmart the person trying to kill them. But these heroines often had surprisingly similar characteristics. They were sensible, cautious, frequently sexually inexperienced and, in Hollywood's most recognisable examples, white. While other characters were eliminated through increasingly imaginative deaths, the Final Girl remained standing. Yet beneath all the screaming, running and questionable decisions about investigating suspicious noises, this familiar character reveals something fascinating about how cinema has portrayed women, and how those portrayals have changed.
May Baciquetto Executive Editor
THE BIRTH OF THE FINAL GIRL
Long before audiences started using the term Final Girl, these women were already running for their lives on cinema screens. In 1974, Sally Hardesty survived the nightmare of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and four years later, Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, became one of horror's most recognisable heroines in John Carpenter's Halloween. But it wasn't until 1987 that American film scholar Carol J. Clover gave this character a name in her essay Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film, later developed in her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.
Clover's research explored an interesting contradiction. Although slasher films frequently subjected women to extreme violence, audiences were ultimately encouraged to identify with the woman fighting for survival rather than the man pursuing her. The Final Girl wasn't simply a helpless victim waiting to be rescued. She was observant, resourceful and often the first person to recognise that something was wrong. However, her traditional portrayal also reflected the expectations placed upon women at the time. Sexual restraint, responsibility and conventional femininity became closely associated with survival, even though the pattern was never an absolute rule. The genre had created powerful female survivors, but it was still remarkably selective about what those women were allowed to be.
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BREAKING THE RULES
Then came Wes Craven's Scream (1996), a film that seemed perfectly aware of how ridiculous some of horror's traditions had become. Through Randy Meeks, audiences were introduced to the infamous rules of surviving a horror film, including the supposed consequences of having sex.
Spoiler Alert: Except Sidney Prescott, played by Neve Campbell, breaks that particular rule and survives anyway. More importantly, Sidney isn't simply reacting to the violence around her. She's dealing with grief, betrayal and the terrifying discovery that people she trusts might be responsible for her suffering. Her strength comes from her determination to confront what is happening, even when the truth becomes almost unbearable.
A year later, I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) introduced Julie James, played by Jennifer Love Hewitt. Unlike the traditional image of an entirely innocent heroine, Julie carries the guilt of helping conceal a terrible accident. Her actions have consequences, her judgement isn't always perfect, and her story is as much about responsibility as it is about escaping a killer. These characters helped move the Final Girl away from a simple symbol of innocence towards something more recognisably human. They could have complicated relationships, make serious mistakes and still become the people audiences rooted for.
Yet while the genre was becoming more adventurous with its female protagonists, one particular limitation remained difficult to ignore: most of its celebrated heroines still looked remarkably alike.
WHO GETS TO SURVIVE?
For decades, women of colour were frequently relegated to supporting roles or characters with little development beyond their usefulness to the plot. There were exceptions, including Brandy's Karla Wilson, who survives I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998), but meaningful representation requires more than simply keeping a character alive until the credits roll.
The newer Scream films offer an interesting contrast. Sisters Sam and Tara Carpenter, played by Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega, place Latina women at the centre of the story, while Mindy Meeks-Martin, played by Jasmin Savoy Brown, brings a black queer perspective to the franchise's tradition of horror-obsessed characters. Their identities aren't the entirety of their personalities. They have complicated relationships, conflicting emotions and their own reasons to fight. The Final Girl is gradually becoming less of a narrowly defined character type and more of a role that different women can inhabit.
As a Brazilian woman, I find it particularly interesting to explore how these conversations change when we look beyond Hollywood. Brazil has an incredibly rich relationship with folklore, supernatural stories and social commentary, and our horror cinema often reflects the contradictions within our own society. In Medusa (2021), director Anita Rocha da Silveira explores how women can become responsible for policing other women's appearance, sexuality and behaviour. Meanwhile, As Boas Maneiras (2017) uses supernatural horror to examine race, class, desire and motherhood. And in Bacurau (2019), survival becomes something collective, with an entire community fighting against outsiders determined to destroy it.
None of these films follows the classic American Final Girl formula, but perhaps that's what makes them so valuable to this conversation. They demonstrate that stories about fear, resistance and female agency don't have to follow Hollywood's traditions.
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A NEW KIND OF SURVIVOR
Contemporary horror has also become increasingly comfortable with protagonists who aren't necessarily heroic in the conventional sense. Grace, played by Samara Weaving in Ready or Not (2019), discovers that marrying into a wealthy family apparently includes the delightful possibility of being murdered before breakfast. She fights desperately against people who consider her disposable, turning what should have been a celebration into a wonderfully chaotic struggle for survival. Meanwhile, Dani, played by Florence Pugh in Midsommar (2019), experiences a transformation shaped by grief, emotional manipulation and a terrifying cult. Her ending is disturbing precisely because it refuses to offer the audience a straightforward definition of liberation.
Elsewhere, Mexico's Huesera: The Bone Woman (2022) explores the pressures surrounding motherhood, while Indonesia's Impetigore (2019) follows a woman confronting a horrifying family history and a community that wants her dead. These stories approach female survival through different cultural experiences, demonstrating how much richer horror becomes when filmmakers are free to explore perspectives beyond the familiar slasher formula.
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THERE'S STILL SOMEONE LEFT TO SAVE
Of course, the Final Girl isn't the only horror stereotype that deserves a little attention. There's the best friend who is black with an entire personality revolves around delivering funny one-liners, the queer character who barely gets a storyline before being killed, and the attractive blonde whose sexuality somehow becomes her most defining characteristic. Horror has spent decades relying on these shortcuts, and while the industry has made progress, including a more diverse cast doesn't automatically guarantee meaningful representation.
I don't think the solution is to make every woman invincible or insist that characters from underrepresented communities must always survive. After all, this is horror, and occasionally we still need someone to make the spectacularly terrible decision to investigate a suspicious noise in the basement. What matters is allowing these characters to exist as complete human beings, with motivations, relationships and personalities that extend beyond a familiar stereotype. They should be allowed to be heroes, villains, survivors and, yes, sometimes victims, without their identities determining their fate before the story has even begun.
The Final Girl has changed enormously since the early days of the slasher, and her evolution reflects something much bigger than the history of horror cinema. It reflects the gradual recognition that women don't all look, behave or experience the world in the same way. They can be courageous and frightened, compassionate and selfish, capable and deeply flawed, sometimes all within the same scene. Their strength doesn't depend on perfection, and their stories are far more interesting because of it.
Because at the end of the day, the most important thing about the Final Girl was never that she was the perfect girl.
It was that she refused to be the last victim.
From 31.10.26 Article 12 link available.
