FRIDAY THE 13TH

WHAT’S A FINAL GIRL

ANYWAY?

IN HER 1992 BOOK, MEN, WOMEN, AND CHAIN SAWS, Dr. Carol Clover coined the term “final girl” to define the female survivor of a horror movie, writing that she’s “introduced at the beginning [of the film] and is the only character to be developed in any psychological detail…She is intelligent, watchful, level-headed; the first character to sense something amiss and the only one to deduce from the accumulating evidence the patterns and extent of the threat.” She also makes it to the closing credits alive. As

Clover writes, the final girl is “the resourceful young female who survives the serial attacker and usually ends the threat (until the sequel anyway).” Clover also pointed out that the audience, both male and female, identified with the final girl and shared her point of view, making horror movies one of the few film genres where men were encouraged to identify with women. Some of the most famous final girls are Laurie

Strode from Halloween (1978), played by Jamie Lee

Curtis; Ripley from Alien (1979), played by Sigourney Weaver; and Sidney Prescott from Scream (1996), played by Neve Campbell. However, there have been final girls who are men, like Mark Patton’s character in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985), and Tommy Jarvis, a character played, respectively, by Corey Feldman, John Shepherd, and

Thom Matthews in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984), Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985), and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986). By the way, if anyone in 1984 truly thought that

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter would actually be the final chapter of that franchise, they hadn’t learned about the most unstoppable force in the world, one that can bring a killer back from his grave: market capitalism. Which brings up another aspect of the final girl: she always gets a sequel. Except for Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), most final girls have to face their killers in other installments in the franchise, a fate that seems particularly brutal for someone who’s already gone through so much.

The first time I remember seeing a final girl on screen was in Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), which opens with the final girl from Part 1, Alice Hardy (Adrienne King), on the phone with her mom in her kitchen. She’s trying to piece her life back together after the first movie, until Jason pops back up and stabs her to death with an ice pick. It always struck me as exquisitely cruel. Here was a woman who had lost all her friends, survived a night of terror, killed the killer, and was doing the hard work of going on with her life. Instead of honoring that, the filmmakers have her bumped off in the first five minutes.

Final girls fascinated me for years, and I never knew why. It’s only through writing this book that I understood. If you like horror movies you’re used to people thinking you’re morbid. After all, you’re spending your free time watching people get killed. But final girls taught me that there’s more to horror movies than murder. If you’re watching the movie from the final girl’s point of view, horror movies are about facing the worst possible thing that can happen to you, and how, against all odds, you can survive.