So lately, I’ve been digging into the trope of the Final Girl. One reason for this is that I recently guested on the great podcast, Random Number Generator Horror Podcast No. 9, and the film we discussed was the 2015 eighties-summer-camp-slasher set dramatic comedy, The Final Girls. It was a really fun discussion, and I invite you to give it a listen. As an avid listener of horror-podcasts for years, it was an absolute treat to be on a really good one and I thank Jeffrey and Cecil for the opportunity!
And inspired by the movie under discussion (which I really like, but won’t detail here – check out the podcast for that!), I wanted to throw together a list of ten great final girls. So I started checking out what was already out there, and a quick google search yields loads of lists of the “best Final Girls,” but I noticed that I was seeing the same names over and over on list after list, and for good reason. Ginny from Friday the 13th, Part 2 is great (maybe my favorite), with her empathy, resilience, and no-nonsense demeanor. Nancy from Nightmare on Elm Street is awesome (also maybe my favorite) with her book on booby traps and being so “into survival.” Ripley in Alien (a stretch to call it a slasher exactly, but she is certainly a final girl) is aspirationally tough and sensible (if they’d only listened to her and followed quarantine rules, it wouldn’t have even been a horror movie). And so many, many more.
But I felt I wouldn’t really be contributing much if I just listed famous movies that everyone, whether they watch horror or not, has heard of, if not seen. So I tried to dig a bit deeper to shine a light on final girls who don’t always get so much attention. I can’t guarantee that none of them feature on any other list (the internet is a big place), but these are at least somewhat deeper cuts – also, I can’t promise that all of their movies are exactly “good,” but each does have something to recommend it.
That said, I am no slasher expert. There are so many and I’ve but scratched the surface. Out of more than 200 that came out between 1978, when Halloween’s success kicked off the first cycle (between 1980-1982 alone, there were at least 72) until 1989 (because I have to choose an end-point eventually, and horror took a dip in the early 90s), I’ve seen maybe 30% – the most famous and then the fairly well known, with a small spattering of more obscure titles. So please accept this list with that caveat.
And now, without further ado, here is my list, in order of appearance, of great Final Girls who don’t get enough credit:
Courtney – Final Exam (1981) Cecile Bagdadi
Most of this film seems more like Animal House or Revenge of the Nerds, but with a killer on the loose (whose story we never learn). A bunch of frat guys are trying to ride out the year without doing any work by putting a lot of effort into elaborate pranks to help them cheat (one of which, featuring a fake mass shooting, is quite disturbing through contemporary eyes). In a world of rich, entitled brats who don’t take anything seriously, Courtney stands out as the only person actually studying for her “final exam.” She isn’t a prude (if anything, she’s trying to get a particular boy to notice her) but she has more consequential things on her mind. The boy is nice enough (though his obsession with mass shooters and serial killers seems like a red flag), and it’s a shame when he doesn’t make it as they’ve just had a sweet moment. It all builds to a solid chase where she acquits herself well, but in the final shot of the film she seems so traumatized by the experience. While this is a common image, it is still quite effective here. Courtney grounds the horror of these killings and her own survived ordeal in a way that the other victims in their frivolity could not.
Anne – Graduation Day (1981) Patch MacKenzie
Anne has a different vibe from the very beginning. She’s an active military member, coming home to honor her dead sister at what would have been her high school graduation, only to find everyone else on her late sister’s track team getting murdered. We first meet Anne in a truck where she’s hitched a ride and she capably and aggressively fends off the lecherous approaches of the driver, instantly endearing her to us. She starts as a tougher final girl than many, and that self-confidence is fun, but in the final reel, she still has to go through it, fighting to overcome this particular psycho. I think what prevents her from ranking higher on many lists is the fact that we lose her in the middle stretch of the film when she is one of countless red herrings (everyone in this town owns a grey sweat suit and black leather gloves – what we see the killer wearing). In one scene, she is even made out to seem crazy and threatening to a potential (and eventual) victim, distancing us from her even more. But by the end, when the killer is revealed, it is satisfying to return to this level-headed, tough-minded final girl to take him out. Plus, the film is fun and the rest of the cast is solid.
Pam – The Prowler (1981) Vicky Dawson
Pam is great. It seems like she’s studying journalism – at the top of the movie, she’s just published an article about the killing that happened 35 years ago which is why this college stopped having the annual graduation dance (isn’t that more of a high school thing? Anyway…). Thus, when she has to go back to her room to change and narrowly escapes the returned killer, who is dressed as a masked WWII soldier and carrying a pitchfork for some reason (in an exciting sequence that had me wondering if she was in fact going to survive to be the final girl), she can’t not investigate and see this through to the end. There’s a fantastic moment when her boyfriend, the local deputy left in charge for the weekend, tries to drop her off back at the dance so she can be safe. She is just not having it – the resolve with which she threatens him and then gets back in the car foreshadows the strength of character that will help her turn the killer’s own pitchfork on him before blowing his head clean off. Also, just in a connection to another great final girl, Pam finds herself hiding under a bed with a rat, just like Ginny in Friday the 13th Part 2, but at least this one didn’t pee (they were basically filmed at the same time though, so I think it’s a coincidence). In addition, while some elements really don’t make sense, this is one of the better slashers on this list – it’s tense, the killer’s costume looks cool and scary, some scenes are genuinely exciting, and the gore effects might be the best work that Tom Savini ever produced – really effectively grisly and horrifically realistic.
Constance – Just Before Dawn (1981) Deborah Benson
I’ve written at greater length about this backwoods slasher before. Constance stands out as both exemplifying and subverting the still developing tropes of the final girl. Filmed in the summer of 1980, she really offers a different spin on the role. At the beginning of the film, she seems like a typical final girl – reasonable, capable, the only person appropriately dressed for hiking a difficult trail. But she feels that she’s too mousy, inadequate compared with her friends who are bolder than her, braver. And so, as the film progresses and things get progressively more difficult, so does she, changing her physical appearance in the process. In an inversion of the trope, she becomes more outwardly feminine and sexual, donning shorter shorts, showing more flesh, putting on makeup, letting down her hair. And she is more sexually aggressive with her boyfriend. In a way, it’s like she’s putting on the mask of a different role, one you might expect to get killed much earlier in a film like this. However, wearing her mask, she is freed – she can be the wild, primal figure she needs to be to take down this hulking killer in what might be the most satisfying moment of a final girl killing a slasher on film. You may see many final girls rise in violence to take down the killer, but no one quite does what Constance does – just watch it – I don’t want to spoil the fun. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the “Final Girl’s” will to life, her stubborn, desperate determination not to be erased. And the film itself, while a bit slow in the middle, is a pretty enjoyable watch as well.
Sandy – Humongous (1982) Janet Julian
I can’t really say this is my favorite of the bunch, but Sandy rises to the occasion in the final reel. The film starts strong (though quite disturbingly) and then falls into a long stretch of poorly lit muddling along on an island where some kids have been stranded with a killer. For a while I was wondering who the final girl would be – as it seemed that the one unattached girl with glasses was the first to open a photo album and start piecing together the back story, but she snapped under the pressure of it all and Sandy, evidently the most stable of the bunch, finally figures things out. When things kick into gear in the last 15-20 minutes, Sandy leads a great chase, seems to rip off (not sure when it was filmed, but it was released more than a year after Friday 2) Ginny’s idea of playing the killer’s mother, races to the boat house where she traps him with fire and blows him up before finally staking him. Still, having learned his sad story, she feels sympathy for this poor, burned, deformed creature (no action or words, but there’s something in her eyes). He may have killed all her friends, but she can still pity him. In this, she balances all of the investigativeness, proactivity, ability to violently do what needs doing, and heart of a classic final girl, even if her movie is…just alright.
Valerie, Courtney, & Trish – The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Robin Stille, Jennifer Meyers, & Michelle Michaels
Is this the first “meta” slasher? I mean, no, but it is so self-aware – written as a parody, but filmed more or less straight, it subverts the tropes that by 1982 had already calcified, delivering in my opinion, a subversive, hilarious, effectively scary, feminist slasher classic. One twist here is that three girls survive by fighting back together: Trish, who had thrown the party to have one last hurrah with her childhood friends before adulthood pulls them apart (sadly none of those friends make it to the end), Valerie, a new girl who, for all of her beauty, brains, and athletic skill, is still an outsider, and Courtney, Valerie’s little sister, a boy-obsessed teen eager for more adult thrills than she is yet allowed. Each of them is granted personality and real feeling. Trish starts the film throwing away childhood toys and looking to the future, a future which, by the end of the day, she will have been thrust into too soon, too harshly. Valerie feels the most like a classic final girl, the responsible one, staying home to look after her sister instead of going to the party (until she has to). Courtney is a firecracker, funny, impulsive, insistent. And all of the other girls (or boys) who are murdered by the nameless killer with an improbably long bit on his cordless drill (what kind of battery does he have?) are also people whom we can like and root for. This is a fun movie, with sly, knowing shots taken at its genre and possibly its audience, but it has emotional weight. By the time the girls finally symbolically castrate and dispatch the killer, they are deeply traumatized by the horrific events – there’s been so much death, so many friends lost, so much horror. They’ve done what they had to do to live, but their lives won’t be the same after this. The degree to which they get to mourn, cry, be broken at the end makes this often funny, light slasher land harder than expected.
Joan – Silent Madness (1984) Belinda Montgomery
Joan is great, a breath of fresh air – something really different – and she’s surely the most highly credentialed final girl on the list. A doctor at a psychiatric hospital which has accidentally released a psycho killer because of a computer error, Joan is surrounded by men who just refuse to do their damn jobs, (other doctors, administrators, the sheriff, even her reporter love interest). Either no one believes her as she investigates this major screw up which is getting kids killed at the college where the psycho was long ago arrested for a massacre, or they are all just covering their butts, hoping that if no one talks about it, no one will notice the pile of dead sorority sisters. Either way, Joan has to take care of everything all on her own, both hunting after the killer, navigating bureaucracy, and avoiding the murderous orderlies from her hospital, hot on her trail to shut her up. Along the way, she uncovers buried truths, tries (and generally fails) to protect the sorority girls in question, and finally takes out the ‘bad guy,’ only to then discover a deeper cover-up. She is a self-assured, mature adult, bringing the final girl’s typical responsibility, but with full confidence from the beginning. However, while she is a self-assured professional, she is not some kind of fighter, so exploring creepy basements where a killer lurks is still effectively terrifying for her. This was a really fun watch and she rises above the crowd.
Allison – Chopping Mall (1986) Kelli Maroney
This may not be a slasher, but Allison is a great final girl. And though the threat in this case consists of a set of killer robot security guards in a mall, the film follows the classic slasher pattern of a group of kids partying somewhere and getting picked off until only one girl remains (who knows if she’s ‘virginal,’ but she’s the only one who doesn’t have sex that night) – who overcomes adversity and triumphs. Played by Kelli Maroney, a mainstay of 80s B-movies, Allison balances being really sweet with also being a tough cookie who’s a crack shot with a firearm (apparently because her dad is a marine). The set-up is that a group of young people, some of whom work at a mall, stay after hours to party in the furniture store where one of them works (and try out the beds). There are two couples (one of which is married, which is a rarity in this kind of thing) and then Allison has been set up with a nice, dorky boy with whom she actually hits it off (the two of them bond while watching old horror movies while everyone else fools around). They are really cute together and it’s easy to root for them. The film can be silly and fun, and also exciting, but by the end, it of course comes down to Allison and the final killbot. By this point, she’s in full trap-setting, robot-exploding, badass, final girl mode and she even gets to blow up the last bot with an action star quip. Otherwise, the film is just a blast: a great cast (including Barbara Crampton and Dick Miller), a really cool score, and a bunch of killer robots.
Kit – April Fool’s Day (1986) Amy Steel
This is a really fun, different spin on the whodunit-slasher (though its twist may be the most famous thing about it – if you can go in cold, it’s worth it) – spring break happens to fall on April first and Muffy invites all her friends, about to graduate college and with no idea what to do next, to her island mansion for the week. Being April Fool’s, she’s got a lot of pranks in store, but soon the practical jokes become a series of murders and we’re off to the races. Everyone is so well played that it took me a while to peg who the final girl would be, but it should have been obvious that it would be the one played by Amy Steel. Her Kit is a solid, investigative final girl who solves the mystery of the killings (though still having one big surprise in store), and who also really cares about her friends, even if some of them are kinda jerks. There’s one moment when she could get away, but she has to go back cause she can’t leave Muffy behind (even though it’s been implied that Muffy might be the killer). Amy Steel brings a similarly grounded, clear headed, empathetic quality that she did to Friday part 2 – which helps the terror land, and it gets exciting when she’s put through the paces in the final act.
Stretch – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) Caroline Williams
This is also not a slasher, but it’s a sequel to one of the most influential proto-slashers, and Stretch undergoes a true final girl experience, just without much of a body count. (Also Clover referenced her when defining the role, so she surely counts). A tough talkin’ Texas rock DJ who is pulled into the Sawyer family’s shenanigans after fielding a call from some kids getting chainsawed on her radio show, Stretch is just cool. She really doesn’t fall into any kind of bookish, innocent little “virgin” role – rather, she is an adult woman who wears short shorts, navigates a world of pushy, aggressive men, brings the rock ‘n roll, and chooses to court danger in order to get the story, to do something important. As a result, she almost literally goes through hell, suffering in a similar fashion as Sally before her, experiencing debilitating terror, seeing a friend’s face skinned off before having it draped on her own and being made to dance in order to pacify a chainsaw wielding man-child before climbing out, grabbing a chainsaw of her own and eviscerating the man who’s chasing her, and subsequently dancing around crazily with her chainsaw in the air, mirroring Leatherface at the end of the first film. The fact that Stretch starts the film so together and tough means that her descent into violent, triumphant madness is all the more intense. It’s a weird movie – funnier than the first, but that comedy brings its own horror. Plus, it features Dennis Hopper, fresh out of rehab, screaming maniacally and running around with a chainsaw in each hand. What’s not to love?
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And so, there we have it, ten final girls that don’t always get mentioned. As I said at the beginning, I’ve only seen about a third of what’s out there, so I’m sure there are many others worthy of inclusion who I am overlooking, but perhaps that’s fuel for a future list.
And for a fun discussion of a funny film which revolves around the concept of the final girl, check out the podcast here, or wherever you get your podcasts.