We can all identify the final girl early in any slasher story.
She’s the bookish one. She dresses conservatively, she takes her responsibilities seriously. If it’s the eighties, she’s probably just gone camping at the wrong place, or signed on to work at an unlucky summer camp, and if it’s the nineties then she’s probably already dealing with some trauma, has some issue this confrontation with horror can make her deal with, and if it’s the 2000s or later then she’s in a time loop, she’s up against the ancient ones, or maybe she’s even the slasher herself.
If it’s the seventies, though?
If it’s the seventies, then she’s Laurie Strode in John Carpenter’s Halloween, which codified the slasher forevermore. What sets Laurie Strode apart, what makes her the template for all the final girls since 1978, is that she’s keenly aware of her surroundings, she’s puzzling together a day’s worth of odd and portentous encounters. All of this makes her come off as reserved, not as fun-loving and carefree as her babysitter friends, but really this is just her survival instinct—the reason she’ll see the sun rise in the morning, while none of her friends will.
And, while it’s easy to think that the final girl appeared fully formed under Debra Hill and John Carpenter’s scriptwriting pen, she’s actually been with us a lot longer. As long as there’s been bullies, there’s been final girls to push back against them.
Take Red Riding Hood, say. Granted, this is a fairy tale, but that’s just another way of saying “cautionary tale”—and slashers are definitely and always warnings, aren’t they?
But, Red.
There she is, bopping through the woods to see her grandmother—a very responsible girl. One who’s been warned to stay on the path. And, just like Laurie Strode seeing Michael Myers through the window of her English class, so does Red encounter a mysterious stranger, whom she knows better than to trust.
It’s just some glancing contact, though. Enough to let us know she’s being targeted. That she’s got a pursuer. That there’s menace, danger, and, all-importantly, stalking. Then, when she gets to her grandmother’s place, there’s masks, there’s death, and there’s a final dance of wits, one Red has to win if she wants to live.
It’s easy to imagine Red in that closet Michael’s breaking into at the end of Halloween, isn’t it? Red, like Laurie, would know to bend a coat hanger into a deadly weapon, to strike her bully down. She might even scream like Laurie—screams ring the alarm, screams hopefully bring in help, but they can also be a war cry, can’t they? A challenge. A warning not to come any closer.
Part of the final girl’s DNA, after all, is the scream queen, typified in Fay Wray’s performance in King Kong. She wasn’t necessarily the first of her kind, but talkies were relatively new in 1933, so her scream was especially loud—loud enough to carry across the whole century.
However, final girls may come from the tradition of scream queens, but that doesn’t mean scream queens are final girls themselves. Yes, scream queens are menaced by horror, and yes, they survive their ordeals, but what their screams tend to do, actually, is bring the men in to deal with this bully. These scream queens are, after all, “white women in peril,” usually from some “dark” monstrosity—a giant gorilla, say. Their main function in the story is to cringe and run, and be abducted. Scream queens are damsels, perpetually in distress.
The final girl is no damsel. She doesn’t scream to call a man in to help her. No, she takes this lumbering beast down herself.
Specifically, she’s the only who can. The authorities can’t, bullets can’t, but the final girl, when all the chips are down, when this campaign of terror has reached a fever pitch, she finally—unlike everyone else—turns around and fights.
The reason she can is that she’s the built-in governor on the slasher’s cycle of violence. How werewolves have silver, vampires have daylight, and zombies have headshots? What the slasher has is the final girl.
To understand that, though, it’s important to first understand the slasher itself. What the slasher’s risen for is usually revenge—to enact a justice fantasy for us. Years ago, some prank or unpunished crime happened to them, and now they’re back to balance the scales. Carving through this prom or that reunion is a disproportionate response, yes, but when you amplify insult by time, as slasher logic dictates, these weekend massacres are generally the result.
Example: camp counselors in Friday the 13th are fooling around instead of watching their young charges, one of whom—Jason Voorhees—drowns in the lake. So, the next year, and then twenty-odd years later as well, Jason’s mother Pamela returns to extract her many pounds of flesh. The problem with her attempt to seek justice for the death of her son, though, is that, instead of only punishing the counselors who are actually guilty, she goes after all counselors, which includes those counselors who might never be negligent, are just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So, just as an unpunished crime can conjure a spirit of vengeance, so can Pamela Voorhees seeking “justice” on innocent parties call for a force to rise in response to that: the final girl, Alice Hardy, this slasher’s silver bullet.
Or, consider A Nightmare on Elm Street, where Nancy Thompson’s parents went outside the law to enact their mob justice and burn Freddy Krueger to death. They did this, not their daughter. What this means is that when Freddy returns to take vengeance upon her and her friends, she’s then ‘empowered’ to stand up to him as an equal, not a victim. Because she’s outside the cycle of justice, she can finally defeat Freddy in a battle of wits, and fight her way back to the daylight.
What of Laurie Strode in Halloween, though, right? Did a prank conjure Michael Myers?
Not really. But that’s because Michael isn’t a revenge slasher so much as he is a mad-dog killer. While not as common as revenge slashers, as the power dynamic is completely different, mad-dog killers tend to be scarier, finally, as they put us all in the victim pool. These killers aren’t here for vengeance, they’re here because slashing is what they do.
Still, a final girl can take them down just the same.
What empowers Laurie Strode to push back against Michael Myers is that, unlike her friends, she’s vigilant. Though the common perception is that slashers punish behavior that parents and society don’t condone—sex, drugs, drinking—they’re actually less moralistic than all that. As John Carpenter says of Halloween, it just makes sense for a killer with a knife to attack when victims are at their most vulnerable. That vulnerability can come from being naked, entangled with someone else’s limbs. It can come from having your senses dulled. It can come from all the things that distract you, make you less vigilant.
If you see the slasher approaching, though, then you can prepare, and Laurie Strode, she senses this boogeyman coming from a long way off, she actually listens to the children whispering about him, so she can take the necessary steps to protect herself and her babysitting charges.
And yes, when we conjure “final girl,” Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode from Halloween is likely the first one we think of.
The first one we hear, though?
This goes back to the scream queen in the final girl’s DNA: Marion Crane in Psycho, played of course by Jamie Lee Curtis’s mother, Janet Leigh. Her iconic shower-scene death, in a story about a masked killer, has come to epitomize the slasher genre for many—and for good reason: just as the scream queen is forever part of the final girl’s makeup, so is Psycho indelibly part of the formation of the slasher. Even in 1960, it already had “slashercam” (that peeping tom-ish point-of-view camera that disguises identity), and it all hinged on a final, startling reveal.
Talking Marion Crane, the first victim of Norman Bates in Psycho, it also had what would soon become a requirement: the blood sacrifice that starts this cycle of violence.
Marion Crane’s death establishes the mortal stakes of the story, and gives us that all-important first glimpse of the one brandishing the knife.
After Marion Crane, though, then . . . yes, the scream queen does begin to shade into the final girl. But not initially on American screens. Rather, on Italy’s, in the giallo, where there’s always a killer carving a wide swath through some group of people, and—importantly—the killings often bottleneck at a lone woman, the survivor girl, the killer’s final would-be victim. While it’s tempting to go ahead and designate some of these women final girls, since the Grand Guignol stories they’re in feature meat cleavers, they open with blood sacrifices, they’re dependent on slashercam to hide the killer’s identity, there’s set-piece murder tableaus left and right, there’s a third-reel bodydump, there’s a final battle of wits, and there’s usually even a final reveal of the killer’s identity and motivation—all tried and true slasher conventions—still, most of these gialli killers are either serial killers or they’re motivated by greed, as in Diabolique. Which is to say, giallo killers are neither revenge-driven nor mad-dog, so these women who survive the ordeal are more of the order of Clarice Starling than Laurie Strode.
However, at the height of the giallo frenzy—1974—there was a development back in America: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Specifically, Sally Hardesty, who somehow manages to survive this cannibalistic family and fight through to the dawn. Though often considered the first real final girl, Sally’s actually more in keeping with the scream queens of yore, in that that’s basically what she does: scream and run, and get abducted. Granted, what’s she’s running from is magnitudes of order more brutal than any of the white women in peril before her had to deal with, and it is her constant running-away that finally results in the timely demise of one of her grindhouse bullies, but . . . that’s not quite the same as bending a coat hanger into a weapon, is it? Sally doesn’t exactly turn and fight her attackers. What Sally does—amazingly—is just keep on living, so she can be terrorized again in a few minutes.
Much closer to the slasher we know and love is Black Christmas, also from 1974, where another mad-dog killer is carving through a sorority house, until Jess Bradford is the only one left. And Jess is extremely capable—she’s suspicious, she’s intelligent, she’s a fighter . . . all final girl characteristics, which she exemplifies as well as any final girl would in the coming decades. However, the ‘killer’ she faces off against at the end turns out not to be the actual slasher, which is to say: for all her fighting, she doesn’t win this battle of wits. She does save herself, which is remarkable considering what she’s up against, but now this can all happen again next Christmas.
Still, where Sally Hardesty could only run from Leatherface, Jess isn’t cut from that same scream-queen stock. Jess turns and fights tooth and nail, Jess insists on her own life, and that effectively shades her into being a final girl, even if the proto-slasher she’s in is more open-ended than all the slashers about to flood the market.
Just four years after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, then, John Carpenter and Debra Hill do for the slasher what Curt Siodmak did for the werewolf in 1941, with The Wolf Man: they codify all the pre-existing conventions and tropes into not just an elegant sequence, but a repeatable formula, one with a pinnacle of empowerment at the swirling center—Laurie Strode, the final girl, staring her bully down, a coat hanger in one hand, a knitting needle in the other, because final girls, they don’t need special weapons. They are the weapon.
Three years after that, trying to capitalize on that box-office magic, there’s Alice Hardy in Friday the 13th, decapitating Pamela Voorhees once and forever. Three years after that it’s Nancy Thompson, turning her back on Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street, and then, next decade, it’s Sidney Prescott, squaring off against Ghostface in Scream, which features another revenge-slasher. And, though Sid doesn’t start out wearing red, she will be slathered in blood by the end of Stu’s party, which her wolf will have followed her to, fairy tale style.
The trick with the wolf, though, is that he always thinks that because he’s got those teeth, these instincts, he’s got the advantage.
Wrong.
He picked the wrong girl, this time.
This final girl, like all final girls, she’s got heart, she’s smart, and, most importantly, she doesn’t know how to give up, which is precisely what you need in order to make it through to sunrise.
The slasher story isn’t necessarily pleasant to process through, no, but the final girl is a model for us to follow. We should all fight so hard against injustice. At some point in our struggles, we should all turn around, face down our bullies, and then, like Nancy, turn our back on them.
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