Final girl

The final girl is the last surviving character in a slasher, who confronts the killer rather than escaping, and who is almost always female.

The term was coined by Carol J. Clover in her 1987 essay "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film" and developed in her book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992). Clover's argument is more interesting than the shorthand it produced. She observed that the final girl is typically coded with traits the audience reads as masculine, that she is frequently given a unisex name (Stretch, Will, Marti), and that a largely male audience was being asked to identify across gender for the whole final act.

The popular version of her argument, that slashers punish sexually active characters and reward chastity, is a simplification and does not survive watching very many of them. The pattern exists but is far less consistent than the shorthand suggests.

By 1996 the films were explicitly aware of the rule. Scream has a character recite it.

What Clover claimed

Three points, all more interesting than "virgins live".

1. The audience moves. The viewer starts the film sharing the killer's point of view through the subjective camera, and shifts to identifying with the final girl partway through. That is a claim about how slashers are watched, not only how they are written.
2. She is coded as boyish. Smart, grave and competent with tools, she is set apart from her friends, and sometimes has a gender-neutral name.
3. She avoids the vices of the victims. Drugs and casual sex are what the others do. This is where the popular version of the theory comes from, and it is the weakest part.

The essay appeared in the journal Representations in 1987. Clover studied slashers of the 1970s and 1980s, and the category she described is narrow. Applied loosely to any woman who lives to the credits, it stops meaning anything.

The films people cite

Black Christmas (1974) has a final girl four years before Halloween. Halloween (1978) is the template most people mean. In A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Nancy researches, sets traps and plans the confrontation, which makes her an unusually active example. Alien's Ripley gets cited too, though Alien is not a slasher in the strict sense. The browsable versions are Black Christmas, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream.

See the Best final girls list, and the slasher page for the wider genre.