Is it time to kill the Final Girl?
In a recent discussion for Interview, horror icons Samara Weaving and Sarah Michelle Gellar debated this well-loved character trope while promoting the release of their upcoming film Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. After decades of starring in genre films and TV, Gellar explains her frustration with the moniker, wondering, “I almost feel like it needs to be rebranded because Final Girl makes other women seem unsuccessful.” Weaving replies, “At least [call us] final woman, we’re not young [Laughs],” before musing, “It is quite dismissive, isn’t it?”
As a lifelong fan of Final Girls, I will admit to being somewhat taken aback by this frank exchange. It’s not an exaggeration to say that my life was changed when I first met Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) in Wes Craven’s meta-slasher masterpiece Scream. I’ve been obsessed with Final Girls ever since, finding strength in their onscreen empowerment and resilience as I’ve matured alongside the evolving archetype.
But could these two titans of feminist horror be correct? Considering their combined experience, Gellar and Weaving undoubtedly have a unique perspective on the topic. After decades of watching our favorite Final Girls survive a wide array of slasher killers, is it time to finally let her die?
Who Is the Final Girl?
The term Final Girl was codified in Carol J. Clover’s 1987 essay “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film” (later published in her seminal book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film). She introduces us to the paradigm by describing the character as “the one who does not die.” Clover follows this oversimplified definition with a detailed analysis of slasher theory while situating the Final Girl in the well-loved subgenre. “She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of her preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified.”
For the next thirty pages, Clover continues to expand on this theory, placing the Final Girl in direct opposition to the Slasher Killer. We’re usually introduced to this formidable antagonist through first-person point of view sequences as he watches our heroine from afar. Young and usually naive, she will slowly find strength by taking it from her predator.
Clover bases much of her theory on Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), the teen protagonist of John Carpenter’s genre-defining Halloween (originally titled The Babysitter Murders). In addition to prototypical examples like Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and Marion Crane (Janet Leigh, Psycho) — ironically played by Curtis’ mother — Clover includes a multitude of heroines from the ’80s heyday of slasher film. Though she notes the trope’s absence of sexual transgression, Clover reminds us of the Final Girl’s defining attribute: she survives as a relatable heroine, becoming a proxy for the audience’s emotional journey.
The Weapons of Empowerment
As the story barrels toward a final showdown, the Final Girl grows increasingly paranoid, aware that someone is watching her. After discovering the bodies of her slaughtered friends, she must find a way to survive on her own, coming face to face with the slasher villain, a monstrous symbol of masculinity. Clover explains, “the killer is with few exceptions recognizably human and distinctly male; his fury is unmistakably sexual in both roots and expression; his victims are mostly women.”
While many female characters fall to his invariably phallic weapon — a knife, machete, drill, or chainsaw — he is bested by the Final Girl, whose empowerment defangs his patriarchal authority. For example, Michael Myers (Nick Castle) is credited in Carpenter’s original Halloween as simply the Shape, a blank-faced spectre of a violent man.
Each element of the slasher formula serves this inspiring characterization, from a growing paranoia to the killer’s masculine appearance. By the time we reach the blood-soaked finale, we have fully switched our point of view and now align with the vulnerable young woman we’ve been symbolically stalking through the killer’s eyes. Clover describes the Final Girl’s unique empowerment as she picks up his phallic weapon (or an approximation thereof) to finally wield it for herself. Vanita ‘Stretch’ Brock (Caroline Williams) concludes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 by waving a chainsaw over the decimated Sawyer family while Laurie stabs Michael with her own makeshift blades: knitting needles and a straightened coat hanger.
Dropping the Knife
Moments after this triumph, the Final Girl often relinquishes the adopted weapon, reverting to her feminized self. This transition is known in horror academia as “dropping the knife,” a symbolic return to societal order. Many critics take issue with this startling move, balking at what could be read as an intentional abdication of power or a conflation of weakness and femininity. But I’ve always found strength in the Final Girl’s stark display of vulnerability as she buckles under the weight of unthinkable trauma. I tend to agree with Clover that dropping the knife does not imply a loss of strength, but shows that “gender is less a wall than a permeable membrane.”
In fact, the Final Girl rises alongside her killer, proving that even a vulnerable teenage girl can withstand an overwhelming patriarchal force. Heather Langenkamp, who stars as iconic Final Girl Nancy Thompson in Craven’s 1984 classic A Nightmare on Elm Street, has repeatedly discussed interactions with fans in which they thank her for modeling empowerment.
They invariably note the moment when she turns to face the monstrous Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) to bravely say, “I take back every bit of energy I gave you” before defiantly sending him back to the dream world. In an interview with Bloody Disgusting to celebrate the film’s 40th anniversary 4K release, Langenkamp describes Nancy’s legacy: “She’s really become a touchstone for so many people — not only women, but men too, for her strength and her intense character.”
The Final Girl Evolves
In the decades since Laurie and Nancy first graced our screens, the Final Girl continues to change with the evolving slashers she occupies. Scream (1996) serves as a deconstruction of the formula Craven himself helped establish as Sidney takes charge of her own narrative. In addition to reclaiming the Final Girl’s sexual liberation, she not only defeats two maniacal killers, but shuts down Ghostface’s attempt at a supernatural rise with her definitive, “not in my movie.” Sidney also does not survive alone but alongside franchise stalwart Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), a flawed yet intensely relatable character who shatters Clover’s archetypal description.
We’ve seen our share of Final Boys, most notably Jesse Walsh (Mark Patton) in Jack Sholder’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge and Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) in James Wong’s Final Destination. Of course, there’ve been countless subversions of the formula itself from Urban Legend to The Descent, which both remix standard slasher mechanics while spiraling into exciting new fields.
Director Scott Glosserman would further explore the parameters of the archetype in his 2006 cult classic Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. This meta-slasher and faux documentary takes us behind the scenes with Leslie (Nathan Baesel), a self-styled murderer planning his upcoming killing spree. In-world director Taylor Gentry (Angela Goethals) and her crew follow the would-be villain through meticulous preparation, capturing detailed explanations of slasher tropes, from the importance of crafting an iconic mask to his painstaking search for a “survivor girl.”
But this scrupulous honesty hides a shocking bait and switch revealed when his ostensibly virginal victim is caught enjoying raucous sex. We realize that Taylor has been Leslie’s target all along, the character with whom we’ve grown to identify. Recent news of a long-awaited sequel brings the promise of further genre exploration, perhaps featuring the trope’s most recent iteration.
The Legacy Final Girl
This unique concept arguably originated with Steve Miner’s Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, which catches up with Laurie Strode (Curtis) on the 20th anniversary of the Shape’s first attack. However, the trend would reach ubiquity two decades later in David Gordon Green’s alternative sequel Halloween (2018) and its subsequent chapters, Halloween Kills (2021) and Halloween Ends (2022). Eschewing all but Carpenter’s original 1978 film, Green’s trilogy reunites us with Laurie (also Curtis) as a hardened and solitary grandmother living on a survivalist compound. Now practiced in the art of mortal combat, she’s spent the last four decades obsessed with the monster who derailed her life and patiently waiting for his return.
In the wake of Green’s success, other reboot/sequels have seen similar reimaginings of classic Final Girls like Sally Hardesty (Olwen Fouéré) in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) and Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) in I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025). While the results vary in quality and success, each legacy sequel or slasher explores the long-term effects of trauma on our beloved characters who still wrestle with memories of their original attacks.
Now forced to confront her darkest fear, the Legacy Final Girl must once again defend herself while imparting wisdom to a younger version who will carry the torch for the next generation. In fact, Green’s Halloween concludes with Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) gripping a knife as she’s rushed to the hospital, intentionally upending decades of “drop the knife” fare.
More Than Mere Survivors
Perhaps because of this new iteration, interest in the Final Girl has skyrocketed, with many new fans confusing the term. I bristle at a seemingly endless series of social media posts arbitrarily naming fan favorite characters Final Girls regardless of their movie’s plot. From Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall, The Shining) and Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster, The Silence of the Lambs) to Adelaide Wilson/Red (Lupita Nyong’o, Us) and Dani Ardor (Florence Pugh, Midsommar), all manner of female horror characters are now being classified as Final Girls, seemingly because they survive their films.
While each of the aforementioned characters is important in their own right, they are respectfully not Final Girls and serve their stories in different ways. To misuse the term Final Girl not only erases her unique contributions to the landscape of horror but also reduces a complex array of female characters to the simple dichotomy of survivor and victim.
Several years ago, another genre icon, Barbara Crampton, took issue with a similar trope in her revelatory op-ed “Don’t Call Me a Scream Queen.” Explaining her dislike for the titular term, Crampton writes, “Being a Scream Queen implies that you’re good at two things: howling at the top of your lungs and being a woman.” To extend this concept, our pop-culture understanding of the Final Girl seems to have devolved to simply: a female character who does not die.
While this does harken back to Clover’s initial definition, it negates the thirty pages of analysis that follow. These characters do more than survive while female, from their gender-coded climaxes to the trauma of a stylized killing spree. Calling all female protagonists final girls dramatically reduces the role of women in a genre that has always served as a feminist haven.
Is There a Future for Final Girls?
Misuse of the term seems to weave through Gellar’s conversation with Weaving and their frustration at being called a Final Girl. It must be said that neither actress is known for roles as the sole survivor of a slasher film. Gellar is perhaps best remembered for starring as a tough-as-nails warrior in the long-running series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in addition to a pair of spectacular deaths in I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2, and a starring role in the American J-Horror remake The Grudge.
Weaving has made a name for herself in a wide array of genre roles. To date, she’s played a seductive satanist (The Babysitter, The Babysitter: Killer Queen), a horror academic and early victim (Scream VI), an escaped cult sacrifice (Azrael), a nailgun-toting avenger (Mayhem), and a tortured bride (Ready or Not, Ready or Not 2: Here I Come). While some of these films may be slasher-adjacent, none of these characters are Final Girls.
Perhaps therein lies the rub. After embodying some of the genre’s most important roles, pop culture idols who inform our collective understanding of female strength, it’s understandably frustrating to have this nuance reduced to a single archetype.
But is there a future for the Final Girl?
The blockbuster success of Scream 7 — which itself introduces a younger version of the trope in Sidney’s teen daughter Tatum (Isabel May) — proves that younger audiences are hungry for new reimaginings of the slasher formula updated to reflect our changing world. And Sally, Laurie, Sidney, and Nancy continue to welcome in new waves of burgeoning horror fans who find strength in the Final Girl’s empowerment.
Perhaps the problem lies not with Final Girls themselves, but in the fallacy of lumping them together with every other surviving female character. Maybe instead of constantly trotting out this singular term, we can find more accurate ways to describe a breathtaking landscape of female characters. From mother, witch, seductress, monster, bride, warrior, crone, or queen, there’s power in acknowledging the differences in the many female characters who populate our favorite horror films.
Maybe it’s not the Final Girl who needs a rebrand, but the way we describe women in general. After all, we are more than our womanhood and the fact that we live to fight another day.
