The Final Girl movement: How heroines took over horror

When the original Black Christmas first hit cinemas in 1974, the slasher film would unknowingly create a pop-culture phenomenon that would later rule the horror genre: the Final Girl.

The film saw Jess (Olivia Hussey) end up the sole survivor of a sorority killing-spree – the only one clever enough to remain alive by outwitting the villain and surviving when her peers couldn’t, taking all the guts, glory, and, of course, screams, for herself.

That trope of “the final girl” has become “strongly embedded in the genre”, says arts critic and senior lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Canterbury Erin Harrington, and if you look around, you’ll see her influence everywhere.

“You have Sally in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Laurie Strode in Halloween, Ellen Ripley from Alien, Nancy from Nightmare on Elm Street … After that, [the Final Girl] starts to evolve,” Harrington says.

READ MORE:
* Why do we love scary movies?
* The It factor: Why horror has risen from the grave
* Women in Horror: Victims no more

“That’s part of the pleasure of a genre – people who make horror films, and people who love them, want to celebrate tropes and challenge them, as well as challenge the audience too.”

“There’s been this real amazing up-tick and female-driven horror in the last 10 to 15 years or so that has completely reconfigured the often limited ways that women were being seen.”

Frequently touted as a figure of progressive feminism, the Final Girl emerged as a sort-of symbol of hope for horror, which is often incorrectly seen as a genre made for a masculine fan-base.

Despite this, Harrington says the Final Girl’s roots are based in proving that only certain types of women are worthy of a heroine status.

“[The Final Girl] is fighting back against this often queasy masculine figure, but often those girls were held up as final girls because they weren’t ‘like other women’.

“Often the other women in these films would be sexual, feminine and sociable, and they would be punished for that.”

Modern Final Girls include Mia Goth’s younger character in X – a woman who has been taken advantage of by the men in her life – and the ensemble cast of Yellowjackets, about a group of women who survived a plane crash and horrors in the woods.

These women shine as heroines who not only have enough fight in them to survive the most extreme circumstances, but whose unfiltered pain makes them relatable to viewers, often manifesting as the famous female horror scream

“One of the things [Yellowjackets] explores is rage, and it means to be placed into this tiny little box that says: ‘you’re a mother, you’re this, you’re that, suck it up and behave in this particular way’, when you are so much bigger than that,” Harrington says.

“Screams, these kinds of guttural expressions, can be ways of expressing all the things that don’t fit in that tiny little box, and that we might feel some kind of purging, as well because these screams aren’t just screams of fear.”

Many times, the men who are meant to be fighting alongside our heroines end up as the villains themselves, reflecting deeper real-life anxieties about the everyday villains among us.

In the 2022 horror Barbarian, protagonist Tess (Georgina Campbell) finds herself the victim of extreme decisions made my men in the film – and she has no choice but to fight and survive.

“It’s riffing on really contemporary female anxieties about stranger danger … What does it mean to suddenly find yourself with a strange man in the middle of nowhere and a situation that can read as sexual?

“What are women’s vulnerabilities in the present day, particularly in an age where everything’s kind of connected? You end up with a set of anxieties about objection, maternal issues – and the abject body.”

As the Final Girl becomes more and more prominent in our favourite horrors and thrillers, Harrington says she is excited to see how the future of these genres progress.

“The greater diversity of voices – as directors, writers, cinematographers, and all the people who work on films – the more interesting films will be not just for women, but for queer and non-binary people, for people of colour, for people with various different kinds of abilities and disabilities,” Harrington says.

“I’m really excited to see how this kind of explosion is going to continue and influence the next generation of people who want to make films.”