The final girl is a trope in thriller and horror films (particularly slasher films) that specifically refers to the last woman or girl alive to confront the killer, ostensibly the one left to tell the story. The final girl has been observed in dozens of films, including Halloween and its remake, Friday the 13th and its reboot, A Nightmare on Elm Street and its remake, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and its remake, Scream, Final Destination, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Hellraiser, Alien, The Strangers, The Ring, The Grudge, Terror Train, Event Horizon, The Cabin in the Woods and Resident Evil. There are also examples of final girls in other genres as well. The term was coined by Carol J. Clover in her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Clover suggests that in these films, the viewer begins by sharing the perspective of the killer, but experiences a shift in identification to the final girl partway through the film.
Read more about Final Girl: Concept, Examples of Final Girls, Buffy The Vampire Slayer As Subversion of The "final Girl" Concept, Later Versions
Famous quotes containing the words final and/or girl:
“For I had expected always
Some brightness to hold in trust,
Some final innocence
To save from dust;”
—Stephen Spender (1909–1995)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)