by Rachel Peterson
You can picture her already. Running through the woods in the dark, hair (usually blonde) plastered to her face from some mix of sweat, water, blood or monster goo. She’s probably wielding a found weapon (never her own, of course) and is always the last one standing after her best pals are picked off one by one. That’s how you know she’s going to survive. She’s the final girl, after all. And if you spend enough time in the spooky corners of the theatrical and literary woods, you can probably pick her out from the opening scene.
In my personal and non-evidence-based opinion, the peak of the final girl era was the 1980s, when slasher films reigned and we were given so many of the heroines we still adore today. These kinds of movies are my jam, my comfort viewing. In fact, as someone without much of a stomach for horror, the campier a movie or book is, the happier I am.
But just like any trope, eventually the idea of the final girl got a little bit stale, and we saw its reimergence in self-aware films like the original 1996 Scream with final girl Sidney Prescott. And again, just like any trope, she went through new iterations, always being switched up to match the cultural zeitgeist – still somehow surviving through even the longest-running franchises in spectacular fashion. That’s what makes tropes so much fun: you already know what’s going to happen. The Final Destination, if you will. But how you get there is uncharted territory.
All Troped Up with No Place to Go
If the pop culture landscape is any indication, we’re looking for a strange mix within our entertainment: we want the classic tropes we love (or love to hate), but we also want to be surprised. We’re desperate for that happy ending, but endlessly cynical. It is not a coincidence that the romance genre is thriving right now, nor is it a coincidence that we are more likely to look for thrills and chills in our books and movies when real life feels chaotic and scary.
This is where the final girl goes to die.
Once a trope becomes so ingrained in our culture, it’s inevitable that it will get turned on its head. As someone who wrote a thriller in which the character’s death is revealed in the title (no spoilers here! Killing Sadie is pretty obvious), I love to hear that readers are just as fascinated by the literal death of the final girl as I am. It’s an idea that reflects plenty of broader themes across film and literature: in short, nothing is sacred.
And yet, when presented with the “anti”-final girl ending, we still feel discomfort. We still cling tightly to what we know or want to believe, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. That is what makes the final girl trope work: we can hope for survival. That is also what makes it so shocking and satisfying when we see it destroyed: maybe there is no hope after all (literarily speaking – I promise I’m an optimist IRL!).
Been There, Done That, Got the Weapon to Wield
It’s impossible to consider the trope of the final girl without also considering the ideas she has traditionally represented in horror, thriller and mystery culture. The trope is often implicitly, or explicitly, tied to the idea of what makes a female or female-identifying character worth saving. For example, it’s a longstanding joke that if two characters decide to have sex in a horror film or book, they’re doomed. Especially the women. In order to survive, or be deemed worthy of survival, a female character historically had to be both incredibly beautiful and totally virginal. The good girl lives, the bad girl dies … most often at the hands of a cold-blooded killer (human or otherwise).
With such a black-and-white view on morality in the old school ideations of the final girl (think The Texas Chain Saw Massacre circa 1974), it isn’t surprising that the trope has been through so many rebirths and reinventions. Happily, many of the creative ideas behind horror and thrillers have evolved as well. For me, one of the greatest joys of writing thrillers in which characters behave badly is that everyone is behaving badly. Events simply unfold, independent of any character’s presumed worth or society’s opinion on the morality of their actions. Purity and salvation are not one in the same. It’s a story in which there is no reward for being “good”, and there is no punishment for being “bad”.
In our true-crime obsessed world (guilty as charged!), that idea matches much more closely with the reality we’ve all come to know. It also creates a fascinating framework for storytelling, because there is ample opportunity to surprise, shock, and delight readers in unexpected ways. All bets are off, but you still have the ultimate safety net of knowing that eventually, the book will end.
Bye Bye, (Final) Girl
In real life, we tend to seek out the purpose or reason for events and circumstances that unfold. Life can be unfair, difficult and tragic, and frequently there is no true reason behind why certain things happen the way they do. The death of the final girl reflects that reality within fiction. For some readers, it comes as a relief, because they revel in the unexpected and the chance to see tropes turned on their heads in favor of what could be deemed a more realistic representation of the chaos of the universe. Other readers prefer the reliability of a trope, because the real world is rough enough without also finding stress and unpredictability between the covers of a book.
In this writer’s opinion, it’s all about balance. I love a frothy, classic romcom in which a happy ending is guaranteed … followed by a thriller or mystery so twisted that I’ll never guess the ending until the final shocking page.
No one is safe, not even the final girl.
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