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 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 (Sidney, Laurie, Stretch, Ripley), 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.

See the Best final girls list.