The Final Girl Rule, and the Films That Broke It

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 13:00:00 +0000

In 1992 the film scholar Carol Clover published Men, Women, and Chain Saws, and gave the horror genre a piece of vocabulary it has never given back: the Final Girl. She was describing something viewers already half-knew, the recurring figure of the slasher who survives to the end credits while her friends are butchered around her. Clover’s insight was that this survivor followed rules, and that the rules said something uncomfortable about who a mostly male audience was watching, and how. Thirty years on, the term has escaped the academy and become a marketing hook, a T-shirt, a shorthand. It has also become the most productive thing in horror to break, because every generation of filmmakers works out that the surest way to frighten an audience is to violate the pattern they think protects them.

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The Final Girl Rule, and the Films That Broke It