Let's talk about the Final Girl.
First let's set the scene. The 'Final Girl' generally speaking is the lead character in a slasher film.
Now I want to explain what a slasher is. But to do so I need to explain what a movie is. We have so many filters to dive through.
Horror movie definition from Master Class: "Horror is a genre of [storytelling] that is meant to scare, startle, shock, and/or even repulse audiences. The key focus of a horror [story] is to elicit a sense of dread in the audience through frightening images, themes, and situations."
- my definition is a lot longer and can be found here. Link.
Slasher flicks are a subgenre of horror... one of so many.
The definition from Wiki states: "A slasher film... []... involves a killer stalking and murdering a group of people, usually by use of a bladed tool."
So the elements of slashers are a high body count and a killer who uses a non-firearm weapon.
Some notable prototype slashers include: the 1960 double team of Peeping Tom and Psycho, then the 1974 releases of Black Christmas and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
It wasn't until the 1978 John Carpenter film Halloween that we have the birth of the modern slasher film.
Part of the reason for that is the Production Code, more well known as the Hay's Code, which was a fairly strict code of do's and don'ts for films from 1934 until the late 1960's. It was formally replaced by the (now named) MPA's rating system (G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17).
Now I can define 'Final Girl'!
Coined by Carol J Clover in her 1987 essay 'Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film' (though it's usually credited as her 1992 book 'Men, Women, and Chainsaws.'). The simplest definition of 'Final Girl' is by Trope.com: "the last character left alive to confront the killer [in a slasher movie]."
"Final Girl: the image of the distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl. She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the 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. If her friends knew they were about to die only seconds before the events, the Final Girl lives with the knowledge for long minutes of hours. She alone looks death in the face; but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued or to kill him herself. She is inevitably female." - Clover. 1987. Gender in the Slasher Film.
As the main character and survivor, horror movies allow a unique situation for a woman to not only be the lead but also to be an action hero in film.
With the release and box office success of the modern slasher, Halloween, a slew of slashers were made in the coming years. The slasher boom lasted from 1979-1984 or so. Many directors took the wrong lessons form Halloween. Sex equals death, drugs and drinking equals death, and the protagonist of the slasher should be female. Thus puritanical 'the rules' are born!
So... why is the Final Girl a girl?
Generally Western culture views women and girls as more innocent, weak, and vulnerable. Also, toxic masculinity exists. Men who are attacked, mugged, jumped, ect, are often looked at as weak for not being able to defend themselves. A sad truth.
In 175 slasher films that were made between 1978 and 1984 there were 1,046 deaths, 558 of them were men. So that's 53.5% men and 46.7% were women. Part of that is because the survivor is a woman. But I think it's important to also note women/girls are most likely to have longer death scenes which are more violent and they are more likely to die topless or even nude. So while men are killed off more... how they are killed differs and contextually that does matter. Slashers really are the most female empowering and simultaneously sexist movies. It's a paradox.
It's easy to make the survivor of a film a girl/woman because women are more likely to be stalked/attacked in real life. It's assumed audiences are more likely to feel more compassion and fear for her than a man (a boy (child) is the exception to the rule).
Ultimately Clover felt (to paraphrase extremely) that the survivor of the film's slasher antagonist abstained from sex because movies were made for a target audience of men. It is assumed that the intended male audience would be pulled out of the movie and cease to relate to the woman protagonist if she had sex with another man.
In Feminist Film Theory it's asserted that: "the living embodiment of stereotypical conservative attitudes of what women should be. At the end of the film the male audience is forced to identify with the female victim as she's attacked and fighting to survive... []... it's generally felt that men would reject another man in that scenario."
"The image of a virginal man cowering in a closet fumbling tearfully with a defensive coat hanger just isn't someone audiences can root for." - Clever Girls. The Evolution of the Final Girl Trope. I'll add that when we do have a Final Boy - a male scream queen - they are often queer coded.
Another theory, which is true either way, is that in abstaining from sex the lead character is in less compromising positions. During the horizontal hokey pokey generally people really aren’t paying a lot of attention to their surroundings making them easy prey for a guy with a machete (or whatever their weapon of choice is). Post boot knockin’, often people are tired and more importantly still in their birthday suits. Being fully nude is a very exposed state. People, especially women, are likely to be more afraid and less likely to run outside to seek help. It makes sense that the person who isn’t distracted and is fully clothed (shoes on and everything!) is the one who lives.
The trope for this ‘virginal final girl’ is generally attributed to the Halloween’s Main Character Laurie Strode. She isn’t the first final girl; that’s often attributed to the character Lila Crane from the 1960 film Psycho. A lot can be learned from Psycho. I’ll return to that point in the end. There are a few final girls between 1960 and 1978 such as Jess Bradford in 1974’s Black Christmas who certainly was not a virgin. Circling back to Laurie in Halloween. Halloween was a hugely popular and successful movie, meaning it was copied by a lot of other movies. It changed the landscape of the horror genre. Likely, Laurie was written as a character who is innocent, smart, and sweet. The puritanical morality tale in the film was not intentional. I doubt very much even the copycats meant for that to be their message either. It just became common to kill the girl with her shirt off... no matter how ridiculous the scenarios became to allow for that to happen. It was only upon reflection of a decades worth of slashers that a clear pattern emerged and women like Carol J Clover and Barbara Creed wrote about it in the 1990’s that it became an obvious and well known and soon acknowledged trope for slasher films.
Let’s be clear there are a lot of ‘Final Girls’ that are not actually virgins. There are a lot of slashers or just general horror films with a ‘Final Girl’ who is certainly not a virgin – even
before Scream came out in 1996. Regardless of their level of sexual activity prior to the events of the film, usually the surviving character will not engage during the events of the film. There are a lot of lead girls/women who are not virginal, they just simply abstain during the movie, and thus survive for the reasons above... because they are on the lookout and the audience can empathize with them. Going back to Psycho: the woman, Marion, who got nude died because she was an easy target, the chick who was fully clothed and suspicious, her sister Lila, lived.
That’s the true idea... paranoia prevails.
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