tibby
“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 event, the Final Girl lives with the knowledge for long minutes or 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 (ending A) or kill him herself (ending B).”
“The one character of stature who does live to tell the tale is in fact the Final Girl. She is introduced in the beginning and is the only character to be developed in any psychological detail. We understand immediately from the attention paid that hers is the main storyline. She is intelligent, watchful, levelheaded; the first character to sense something amiss and the only one to deduce from the accumulating evidence the pattern and extent of the threat; the only one, in other words, whose perspective approaches our own privileged understanding of the situation. When she downs the killer, we are triumphant. She is by any measure the film’s hero.”
“Yes, the Final Girl brings down the killer in the final moments, but consider how she spent a good hour of the film up to then: being chased and almost caught, hiding, running, falling, rising in pain and fleeing again, seeing her friends mangled and killed by weapon-wielding killers, and so on. “Tortured survivor” might be a better term than “hero.” Or, given the element of last-minute luck (she happens, in her flailing, on a cup of hot coffee or some other such item, which she throws into her assailant’s eyes), “accidental survivor.” Or, as I call her, “victim-hero,” with an emphasis on “victim.” It’s a great moment when she stops the killer, but to imagine that her, and our, experience of the film reduces her to that last-minute reversal is to truly miss the point.”
- Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
