So, I sometimes wonder when the term “final girl,” first coined by Carol Clover in 1987 in her essay, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” later collected and expanded on in her influential book, “Men, Women, and Chainsaws,” entered common parlance. The idea was certainly not new when she detailed it, based on her observations of gender-genre tropes in slasher films (primarily of the late 70s and 80s), but rather, she put her finger on something that had arisen naturally out of a confluence of storytelling trends and business assumptions. And it is successful coinage – when someone sees the phrase for the first time, they immediately get to what/whom it refers: the last girl standing in a body count film, who probably didn’t party as hard as all of her friends and is more clear headed and responsible, who we probably haven’t seen have sex, who possibly has been investigating the odd things going on and has thus had to discover the bodies of people she knew, who probably isn’t blonde and might have a gender neutral name such as “Stretch,” “Jess,” “Ripley,” or “Chris,” who has had to run and hide and scream and survive until finally she turns and finds the strength to fight back and kill the killer, though she may end up a broken, traumatized husk by the end of it all – the name carries a lot.
Now, in discussing the trope, I always feel it’s obligatory to point out that Clover had a focus other than just describing a trend in horror, and she certainly wasn’t trying to prescribe how people should be making movies. In short, in my understanding of her text, she questioned why this female character, this recurring role was so foregrounded in a genre conventionally understood to be targeted at young males, a genre often thought to be misogynistic, offering the vicarious thrill of looking through a masculine coded killer’s eyes as he stalks and murders young women (again, this is the common perception, and the data doesn’t support the characterization – men die about as much as women in these flicks). The theory she offered was a case of cross-gender identification, wherein the femaleness of the role allowed it to exhibit traits of vulnerability and fear which would have been uncomfortable for the audience in a male figure, or even rejected and mocked (a supporting example might be Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 2, which features a final boy (Jesse, played by Mark Patton) and which was not well received, Patton being outed and ridiculed for his portrayal). This enables the (male) viewer to masochistically enjoy being terrorized, just as by identifying with the killer, (he) can sadistically enjoy terrorizing. The final girl abstaining from sex meant that the young male audience didn’t have to take the leap of watching their viewpoint character be penetrated before them. Quite the opposite, by the end of the film, she would take the weapon (his symbolic, penetrating phallus) from the killer and be the one doing the penetrating, in her rise to action, to wielding the investigative gaze, to violence, to rage, taking on more and more “male-coded” traits.
Now, this reading of the trope is not without critics. Isabel Pinendo, in her “Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing” from 1997, criticized how in reducing femaleness to traits like terror and victimhood, and ascribing traits like aggression and violence exclusively to maleness, this paradigm results in “nothing less than the impossibility of female agency,” herself seeking to discuss what pleasure experience female viewers can find in this material (which can also take on a sadomasochistic flavor – as Clover had theorized for young males), without having to accept the relegation of all power to the boys. Beyond that, it has been pointed out how some of the elements that make up the “final girl” are not so set in stone. There are many examples (going back to Laurie Strode, the ur-final girl) who drink or do drugs. There are many who are at least in long term relationships and even if it’s not explicitly shown, one can assume aren’t ‘virgins.’ There are many who don’t initially have any hint of coded-male qualities, but just happen to be the last one left – are just lucky to have enough plot-armor to survive to the final showdown.
But the trope does exist (if anything, over the years, the more known the trope is in popular culture, the more fully it has come to embody Clover’s description, even when a given film is purportedly ‘subverting’ the concept), and this brings me back to my initial question. When did horror film makers become consciously aware of the role as such? When did they become aware of Clover’s reading? When did descriptive analysis become inadvertent, prescriptive instruction? I wish I had some data here – I can only guess at people’s intentions and influences.
I assume that in the beginning, it was merely a case of financially motivated imitation. Halloween turned an impressive profit (more than 70 million on a budget of about 320 thousand) and everyone wanted to repeat that success (another obligatory note that Halloween wasn’t really the first of the genre, but it’s success did kick off the first big slasher cycle, running until 1982), launching what might be the most formulaic of horror genres – whereas a ‘vampire movie’ features a vampire and a ‘ghost story’ features a ghost, a ‘slasher’ doesn’t even have to include a slasher killer – but it’s got to stick to the formula: a group of (probably young) people, wanting to party and getting killed off one by one until one girl (probably a girl) is the only one left, who then uncovers what has been going on and dispatches the killer. In the beginning, I think a lot of people were just seeing that something was selling and they repeated it. Of course, there were variations, and from early on, there were attempts to surprise by disrupting the pattern (for example, the feminist satire of Slumber Party Massacre (1982) or the Scary Movie-esque parody of Student Bodies (1981)), but those disruptions also served to make the pattern more clear (by attempting to wrong foot the audience by not perfectly enacting a formula, it makes the audience think all the more about what that formula would have been, what their expectations are).
And audiences came. Not everything made money like Halloween (and it must be said that most were nowhere near as good as Halloween), but they made money. The more the pattern paid off, the more it was reenacted, and the more audiences came to look forward to certain elements. And sooner or later, academics noticed this and wondered what was going on. Why were filmmakers telling this story in this way? Why was it satisfying enough for a paying public that they kept coming back? Some theories were put forth, perhaps making undue assumptions about who the viewers actually were, and ignoring the potential experiences of viewers who were thus unconsidered. But even if incomplete, this scholarly work helped to illuminate the depth of potential meaning of a genre considered no more than trashy exploitation.
At some point, the academic notion of the “final girl” was folded into the creative process. I don’t know if Kevin Willamson read Clover before writing Scream, but it sure feels like he did, and even if he didn’t, by 1996, Clover’s reading of the ‘final girl’ could have just filtered into the zeitgeist enough to influence the text (and practically everything that came after it in the 90s teen slasher cycle and every post-modern, self-aware slasher/slasher parody that came in its wake). With its explicit presentation of “the rules” of surviving a horror movie, Scream seemed to help make the ‘final girl’ a much more known role (including to a general public who weren’t necessarily horror fans, but who saw this hit movie), even if that name was not applied, was still not in regular use (but I’m not sure the term wasn’t used in any of the sequels – Scream characters are so horror-literate that you’d expect it to come up). For one example of use, I know the term surfaced at least briefly in one of the Scary Movie parodies (released between 2000-2006) as Stacie Ponder, a blogger I’ve been reading for the last decade, uses this image for her blog, Final Girl.
For an example of the conspicuous lack of the term, I recently saw an interview with prolific horror B-movie actress Linnea Quigley from 1999 where she described her professional trajectory moving from being the victim who takes her top off (much of her career) to being the girl who lives to the end. Nowhere in the discussion is the term “final girl” used (and, as mentioned above, it is such a clear term, that once people know it, they tend to use it – it really cuts to the chase).
Or, for a later example, the 2006 film, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, a mockumentary following a slasher in training, is utterly focused on the concept of the final girl, with the killer so certain of her mythic importance to him, knowing they are two sides of the same coin, and manipulating conditions to draw her out, calling on her to become herself so that he can become himself. But he never says “final girl.” In the film, she is always the “survivor girl.” Now was this a conscious decision to avoid an already popularized term, or had it somehow not yet achieved cultural saturation?
The Cabin in the Woods (released in 2011, but filmed in 2009, for the sake of tracking chronology) also leans hard into the concept of certain essential roles (the whore, the fool, the athlete, the scholar, for example) who all must be sacrificed before finally “the virgin” is all that remains. In this case, the people running the show manipulate the players to take on these roles even if they would otherwise be against type, but the ritual of playing out this formula in this way, with the virgin as the only one to see the end, must be faithfully enacted. But still no “final girl,” per se.
However, at some point something changed: in recent years, there have been many fictional works which revolve around both the role and the term (many of which I hope to write about in the coming weeks): Grady Hendrix’s the Final Girls’ Support Group, Stephen Graham Jones’s My Heart is a Chainsaw, and from 2015 alone, two films: The Final Girl and The Final Girls. All of these, and many others, focus on the significance of the role – how inspiring and important it can be for some people, how one can live in constant comparison with its ideal. Even if Clover was more interested in why men would identify with this female character, the resilient, heroic final girl has become aspirational for generations.
For my part, I find a couple of things both effective and interesting. On one basic level, something that works for me is that vulnerability, but I wonder if it’s an issue of what (male) audiences (myself included) will watch and respond to, or if it’s an issue of how writers, directors, and producers expect they will react. I cannot honestly imagine that were I to find myself in some terrible, dangerous situation, I would be John McClaning it barefoot through the air ducts, taking out a building full of terrorists. I would probably be cowering terrified in a corner someplace. It is much easier to identify (outside of hero-wish fulfillment, and don’t get me wrong, Die Hard is a blast!) with a “normal” person who is duly scared of scary things, but through whom we get to vicariously rise to the challenge of facing that fear and vanquishing that horror, even if we have to run around screaming a lot first, even if we drop our knife when we shouldn’t and don’t check to make sure he’s really, really dead before we start running away – it’s easy to yell at the screen and claim that we wouldn’t make such mistakes, but I bet most of us would. When we go on this journey with this fragile, very human character, the heroic thrill of overcoming the threat is all the more exciting.
On another level, I find it fascinating how the trope has been so culturally reproduced as to become truly mythic. The first slasher cycle is largely characterized by non-magical assailants – just a crazy guy with a knife, or a pitchfork, or a drill, or a, you get the picture… (later, especially in the second half of the 80s, following the success of Freddy Krueger, and trying to do something new, there were many more supernatural killers). But somehow, the repetition of this simple structure – kids, party, killer, girl-who-lives – has resulted in a significant archetypal figure, one who resonates in people’s imagination – this is perhaps how myths get born.
She was born out of the lust of storytelling and business. She was named by academia, and once identified, the art form in which she lived came to better know itself, becoming more reflexive. She has subverted gendered expectations and she has been used to reify puritanical norms. She has grown into a full-out action hero and she has been fleshed out as a person, allowed to grieve and to grow. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter why a group of film makers first settled on a pattern – now she exists and carries (sometimes contradictory) meaning. She is an inspiring feminist icon. She is a harmful reduction of femaleness – not even female, so much as a man in narrative drag. She is a calculated attempt to sell women’s empowerment to make a buck. She is a re-gendered ‘everyman’ with whom all can identify, with whom all can vicariously journey through hell and return, tempered by the experience.
All of this is to say that as I just spent a couple weeks focused on one sub-genre (the Lesbian Vampire movie), I’m about to spend a bit of time with Slashers and the Final Girl. Check in weekly for more.