As I've already discussed, the final girl (a concept codified in Carol Clover's analytical text Men, Women, and Chainsaws) is the archetypal female lead and survivor of a slasher movie.
She's often coded as both tomboyish and virginal to contrast other more sexualized female characters who are victims of the usually male and Freudian killer. This has garnered critique of the final girl upholding conservative standards for femininity and implying that premarital sex is sinful and earns you punishment. However, final girls have also been received and praised as feminist, since these gory slasher films with masculine brutish killers successfully get a presumed male-dominant audience to root for a woman as a hero, and slashers have spawned female protagonists who are awesomely clever, resourceful, and strong when facing off against men who want to kill them.
Final girls have evolved over time. Scream and Sidney Prescott invoked the classic tropes while building Sidney into a very developed character and never indulging in the insulting fate that has befallen multiple franchise final girls--killing her at some point after her first movie. Sidney is still alive as of Scream VI and I believe she'll never be killed by her villain as part of the franchise's statement. You're Next is a compelling subversion of a slasher which depicts its final girl, Erin, as a brutal powerhouse survivalist who makes every correct proactive aggressive decision and quickly becomes the hunter of the hunters. Erin ultimately becomes the film's goriest, most dangerous killer and she's unquestionably heroic and badass for it even as her machinations overcompensate.
Final girls have also been subverted to fairly negative effect.
Oh geez, Sleepaway Camp-
Sleepaway Camp is a 1983 film which can be called a camp slasher movie in both the setting and tonal senses. It has a setup where Angela Baker, the shy, sweet kid the story focuses on, is actually the killer menacing the summer camp due to mistreatment...but there's also a famous plot twist where Angela is revealed to be adopting the persona of their dead sister at the behest of their aunt--Angela was assigned male and raised as Peter Baker until the original Angela, the sister, died along with the kids' father in a boat crash the three were in. The kids' bonkers Aunt Martha decided to raise the surviving child, who had lived as male since birth, as Angela because she wanted a girl, and Angela's killing is also implied to be a result of angst from this imposed social gender transition.
In this film, it's not clear whether Angela truly identifies as female and can't take the pressure of the social experiences she's been pushed into as a trans girl, or is a cis boy deeply frustrated by being perceived and compelled to live as a girl unwillingly. I'd put money on the latter being the intended concept, but the portrayal is vague enough for the former to be true.
While the sequel films run with an adult Angela being unambiguously trans and female, they make her killings completely unjustified and her demeanor more unhinged, and her adoption of an imposed gender identity and her becoming an unsympathetic killer both open up new issues in the portrayal of gender. It's not much of a diversity win when the trans character is now unambiguously wrong and continues to be associated with mental illness, violence, and abuse...and the films might even be intimating that Angela is incorrect for embracing that identity, if the first film was trying to frame the character as a boy snapping under the pressure of an identity he didn't agree with. The sequels may be trying to say that Angela snapped so far that *I hate typing this* "he actually believed he was a girl" and that her more erratic, unstable behavior is meant to tie her full transition with losing her mind. Could somebody be so mentally traumatized that they embrace an identity forced onto them which is unhealthy for their well-being? Sure, probably. But it just puts a negative moral and pathological frame on the concept of transness when a gender transition is framed in this way.
Angela would have been a much easier character to vouch for if she was written in a trans-sympathetic light. While it's possible (and more enjoyable) to read the first film's Angela in a trans-sympathetic way, helped by how easy it is to root for the kid, the base portrayal of the reveal is so stark, sensational, graphic, and un-nuanced that it just seems to conjure Angela as a gender boogeyman shock horror to vilify transition. Even if the film was trying to speak to the valid and neutral message of not forcing a gender identity onto people (something that will create dysphoria in cis people, as the tragedy of David Reimer showed, and is an important concern in the upbringing of intersex kids), trans people still got hurt by the movie. It's ironic how close the film seems to come to trans understanding due to the dysphoria subtext of Angela's character, but they seem to be writing it from a "cis forced to be trans" perspective that doesn't comprehend that trans people are legitimate and often go through similar things from the reverse.
Sleepaway Camp's subversion of the final girl by revealing her as the killer is one thing...but the intended subversive concept that the final girl is "not even a girl" (the film's lens, not mine!) is very hard to swallow.
I'd love to see a remake of the film with a trans creative voice and lead actor. The original movie is delightful schlock with inseparable nastiness baked in, but there's pretty rich possibly-accidental subtext in the film that, when mined by genderqueer creatives, could finally turn Angela into a sympathetic, complex horror gender icon who doesn't feel designed to undermine transness as a concept.
Terrifier, another final-girl subversion downer
Damien Leone's grindhouse-style slasher Terrifier also subverts the final girl in a pretty negative way. The film is an extremely gory and twisted slasher with minimal characterization and a small cast, but we follow a young woman, Tara, who is posed as the more level-headed and less promiscuous woman between her and her friend Dawn. Creepy and horrifically brutal killer Art the Clown menaces the women and Tara watches Dawn getting killed in a pretty sexually violent way before trying to escape. After Tara manages to get the upper hand on Art, the normally-inventive killer pulls out a pistol and shoots her dead, annoyed she was winning.
It's a pretty big violation of the slasher format. First, slasher killers almost never use guns because they're not really seen as lurid in good old gun-culture America and they're too easy to kill with, so a slasher pulling a gun feels especially dull, cheap, and "wrong". Secondly, the film kills the final girl we've been following for most of the runtime, which is simply unsatisfying, no matter how thin Tara was as a character. It feels nihilistic and spiteful toward the audience, almost like Michael Haneke's Funny Games, but Terrifier isn't a pointed commentary on violent cinema as entertainment so it doesn't feel like it earns that moment of flipping off the viewer. It just feels like the film doesn't want the hero to win at this point and decides to go overboard and put her down to solve this. The first Terrifier has several moments that feel uncomfortably hateful, including the invocation of shock and disgust toward blurred gender on the villain, and neither Terrifier film is something anybody should watch for the script--their draws are David Howard Thornton's work as Art and the audacity of their ridiculously twisted violence and gore. However, the use of a more classical final girl narrative in Terrifier 2, with a heroine that wins the film, has been well-recieved and may be one of the factors that makes the second film work better for people. (I'm more receptive to it myself largely because it doesn't seek shock for its treatment of women and gender in the same way.)
But two films have come out in the last several years that offer uplifting and fascinating changes in the final girl's mechanics and story growth by co-opting fantastical comedy plot beats.
The Blumhouse slasher comedies
Blumhouse's Happy Death Day and Freaky are both in the same style (and apparently the same universe)--they're horror comedy films that operate by mixing slasher movies with famous comedy movie plots. This changes the slasher in very interesting ways.
Happy Death Day, a time-loop slasher where a sorority girl must figure out who's killing her over and over as her birthday resets to the same morning, is a horror take on Groundhog Day. Freaky, a body-swap slasher where a young girl switches bodies with the local serial killer, is based on the gimmick from either version of Freaky Friday--the slasher was even originally going to be called Freaky Friday the 13th. I guess I could spend time discussing how the movies work by mixing classic comedy plots with slashers, but that's not what really stands out to me about them the most. These goofy films are more fascinating to me in the way their core fantasy concepts deconstruct and warp the iconic final-girl slasher archetype.
I will discuss spoilers for both films, so please watch them!
Happy Death Day
Happy Death Day follows Teresa "Tree" Gelbman, a dirtbag sorority sister who nobody really likes for very understandable reasons. She dismisses a genuinely kind and honest guy who rescued her from a night of drinking, doesn't invest in others' feelings, judges people and refuses their engagement, sleeps with a professor, and alienates her father. On the night of her birthday, Tree finds herself murdered by a masked killer--and wakes up immediately after in the same bed on the same day. Everything is happening all over again, and the killer is there to off her once more, and gets her regardless of her path through the day. Wake up, die, repeat. As the film progresses, Tree starts to examine and rethink her life and lifestyle, and starts to grow as a person, becoming more empathetic toward the cast of characters encountered on her repeating birthday and trying to be more involved in fixing problems she and others have caused. She realizes she needs to find her killer to stop this time loop, but she also genuinely becomes a much better person through her experiences.
The effect this has on the final girl narrative is fascinating. Because Tree is caught in a murder time loop, this means she is not only the film's final girl, but she's also sort of every victim archetype of the classic slasher. Tree starts off the story as the archetypal inevitable slasher victim, a sleazy mean girl, and progresses through different identities as she becomes more empathetic, resourceful, and athletic in trying to deal with the situation until she becomes a good person, cutting off unethical sexual relationships and becoming more empathetic and kind. As Tree searches for the person she needs to be to win, the phases of Tree that fail and die comprise the classic horror archetypes that don't make it through a film! It's fascinating to see the final girl also be most of the kills of the movie and the way her personal growth takes her through the different archetypes of a slasher film's victim pool is so interesting to me. It's a great way to push the final girl into a more multidimensional portrayal by showing a final girl who starts off the film earning her targeting until it's clear she doesn't deserve to be killed anymore. It gives us a character who goes through different phases and shows complexity jn a really fun way. However, even though Tree ends the film as a good person, she's not suddenly chaste and demure like the final girl stereotype. She doesn't have to be to earn her survival on moral grounds. Her journey through the extremes of the horror victim pool has enriched her as a person and shifted only her empathy rather than trading one stereotype for another and flattening her in a different direction. (I think you could have that story of a final girl being unsympathetic until later in the narrative for any slasher, but the time-loop murder angle also adds in the symbolic reading that Tree's worse parts and previous identities are literally being killed off as she gets murdered over and over through her phases and grows as a person!) She's the final girl and every girl of a slasher story, one person and also several different people, and the time loop fantasy mechanic offers a really fun new look at the archetypes of a slasher.
The film also subverts the masculine killer idea. While Tree becomes sure her killer is the murderer John Tombs who is being kept in the hospital on her birthday and who goes after women like her, the true killer ultimately turns out to be her closest sister in the sorority, who is upset at the way Tree treats her but in a very petty and disproportionate matter. The villain of Happy Death Day is the petty feminine-coded social strife brought on by Tree's own bad actions--not a brutish male trying to harm her body.
Freaky
Freaky sees the killing spree of the Blissfield Butcher interrupted when he picks up the ancient cursed dagger La Dola, which will switch the consciousnesses of the stabber and victim. When the Butcher stabs meek, unpopular high school student Millie Kessler, the two wake up in each other's bodies. Millie struggles to navigate the world in the body of an imposing adult man who's wanted for murder, while the Butcher exploits the body of Millie to commit murders unnoticed. Only another stabbing with La Dola will be able to reverse the body swap, and they have a time limit before the switch is permanent.
Through the body swap, the final girl is completely flipped on her head. Our female protagonist is in the body of the male brute, and the male brute is in the body of the innocent young woman. Through this, we get to see a pretty clear statement that the body and gender presentation don't truly rigidly form these slasher archetypes. The Butcher's body inhabited by Millie is awkward, funny, and shy because she's Millie. Vince Vaughn takes on the role of the final girl by playing her for the bulk of the film, and the narrative treats this in earnest. Millie's body inhabited by the Butcher is ruthless and brutal because he's the Butcher. Kathryn Newton sells that she's the dangerous murderer. It's who the characters are that changes the frame they're in as a result, and it's a nice way to show these roles are not defined by one's body.
While the two characters remain in their roles as hero and villain, their experiences clearly teach them things. Millie gets to experience strength and confidence in a way that helps her, while the Butcher gets to witness male predatory behavior from the other side once he is targeted for his body, finding himself electing to kill the kinds of people he would probably align with otherwise. The film is based on a comedy plot, but the body swap including gender dissonance isn't just treated as a cheap gag. When she talks to the boy she likes and the two kiss, it's obviously very weird that Millie is in the body of the Butcher, but their feelings are sincere and it's treated as a real breakthrough where the boy still likes and accepts her in the moment. Neither character wants to stay body-swapped forever, but both are edified by the gender experience. This is probably the most uplifting genderqueer slasher...though I suppose it can be negatively read that the Butcher exploiting Millie's body to kill people is a direct echo of common transphobic rhetoric and depiction that malicously attempts to discredit transfemme gender queerness by claiming that sphere of identity is just a scheme for men to use the guise of a woman to commit crimes...
...and we're right back into the bleak history of trans-villain themes and allusions in media. I did not expect to be discussing it that much in this post.
However, with Freaky, I think that's more of an unavoidable audience connotation based on a consciousness of that history, more than the film directly falling into the same pattern. Though he doesn't stop killing, it can be argued that the Butcher is faced with the reality of misogynist predation once he is targeted by it, and his kills never seem to be fixated on young girls anyway. We're genuinely not meant to feel too bad for the Butcher's victims while he's in Millie's body, either, because he kills people who antagonize or annoy him...and thus, he is functionally avenging Millie by getting rid of people who are, and have previously been, awful to her. While Freaky would probably be an even better film if the Butcher genuinely had some moral revelations through his experiences, it's still clear that both Millie and the Butcher learn to feel themselves in their new bodies in a way that feels more trans-affirming, so the trans-panic reading of the Butcher's story is not followed closely enough in that horrible mold to be the biggest takeaway. With Millie's story in particular feeling so sympathetic, I think it's just a matter of the gender and slasher themes not ironing out totally evenly. With Freaky, what I come away with is a fun exploration of the final girl as an inherent personality rather than a gender or body, and a film that shows the hero and villain both can exist outside of the assumed structure.
The film advocates for defying gender constructs as a person, but could also be a statement for the idea in film as a whole--maybe we can detach the slasher and target from the rules of gender or age and still have a good movie.
I really enjoy the way these two films have such interesting new takes on what a slasher, its killer, and final girl can be as a consequence of adapting classic comedy-film fantasy devices. I don't know if the stories were meant to be so metatextually interesting, but they sure ended up that way. Final girls can be played with to uncomfortable and disappointing ends, but they can also be explored in exciting new ways that ask worthy questions about the structures of a protagonist and the gender coding in horror.
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