Final Girl

"Benny: But I still want to know what happens! Buffy: Everyone gets horribly killed except the blonde girl in the nightie who finally kills the monster with a machete but it's not really dead. Jennifer: Oh my God. Is that true? Buffy: Probably. What movie is this?"

- Cut dialogue from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer

The simplest definition of this is "the last character left alive to confront the killer" in a slasher flick. The character in question tends to follow a certain set of characteristics. The most obvious one is being (almost) Always Female. She'll also almost certainly be a virgin, avoiding Death by Sex, and probably won't drink alcohol, smoke tobacco or take drugs, either. Finally, she'll probably turn out to be more intelligent and resourceful than the other victims, occasionally even evolving into a type of Action Girl by the movie's end. Looking at the Sorting Algorithm of Mortality, you could say that the Final Girl is a combination of The Hero, The Cutie and the Damsel in Distress - which obviously gives her a very low deadness score. The Final Girl is usually but not always brunette, often in contrast to a promiscuous blonde who traditionally gets killed off.

It's also interesting to note how the Final Girl can be interpreted in film theory. On one hand, the character seems to be the living embodiment of stereotypical conservative attitudes of what women "should be". On the other, feminists have noticed that through this device the mostly male audience (or...not) is forced to identify with a woman in the climax of the movie. In practical terms, the makers of a horror film want the victim to experience abject terror in the climax, and feel that viewers would reject a film that showed a man experiencing such abject terror.

The term was coined by Carol J. Clover in her critical examination of slasher movies.

This trope has seen a growing number of subversions, aversions and parodies in recent years which suggests it may be slowly weakening. Then again, the Action Survivor's replacing the Action Hero points in an interesting direction.

Thank God for Lowered Monster Difficulty.

Usually overlaps with Token Wholesome. Compare and contrast Kill the Cutie.

Anime and Manga

 * Lisa Pacifist from Final Fantasy Unlimited.

Comic books

 * The comic book Hack Slash stars a former Final Girl who becomes a slasher-hunter.

Films -- Live-Action

 * Pick a Slasher Flick, any slasher flick.
 * Friday the 13th has a definite final girl in every installment, but see below under aversions.
 * As does the Nightmare On Elm Street series.
 * In Scream, the main character.
 * Played pretty straight with Simona and the child-killer in the Italian L'immoralita`, except that the final girl is eleven-and-a-half... and not a virgin].. and
 * Alien does this. And it should be noted that every role in the film was written as gender neutral (which is probably why everyone just used their last names for the whole film), so it could have easily been a Final Guy instead.
 * It's a common misconception that all of the subsequent Alien movies followed suit; in reality, there were other survivors in the second and fourth movies, and in the third.
 * Sarah Connor in The Terminator is an interesting combination of Final Girl and Damsel in Distress. In the sequel she's more of an Action Girl and isn't the only survivor.
 * Trish from Jeepers Creepers fits into the Final Girl trope, as the only real other main character, her brother, is murdered and torn apart for his body parts.
 * Played straight in the official ending of Autopsy from the third set of After Dark Horrorfest. The Final Girl manages to escape the insane doctor and nurse who had killed all of her friends.
 * It is however subverted in the alternate ending where instead of escaping or being killed
 * In Turbulence, a serial killer gets loose aboard a specially chartered 747, killing putting everyone in the cargo hold except for the cute, intrepid flight attendant who has to take him down. Slight variant on this trope in that, after she dispatches the serial killer, she still has to land the plane.
 * Halloween was the Trope Codifier and introduced the Death by Sex trope (actually unintentional) which became a staple of the genre. Jamie Lee Curtis was typecast as a Final Girl early on in her career so if she was in a slasher film, she would definitely be surviving. As of the events of Halloween Ends,
 * The Evil Dead series subverts this, but not in spirit. The main character' name, "Ashley", is usually reserved for women.
 * Yeah, now. Ashley started out as a male name. A lot of male names end up like that after a century or two. Still, Ashley had been a popularly female for so long, this is easily exactly what the filmmakers were going for.
 * In Nine Dead,  was the sole surviving female to confront the masked shooter at gun point. In the end,
 * Tree from Happy Death Day could be considered the ultimate Final Girl. Due to the Groundhog Day Loop she is trapped in, she dies - horribly - a total of eleven times, with each "reset" seemingly forcing her to die again and again - if not for the fact that she learns from each time and fights back, finally managing to figure out what happens and defeat the villain.

Live-Action TV

 * In murder mystery Harper's Island, protagonist Abby Mills is female, beautiful, clean living and is strongly implied to be a virgin. She has a Dark and Troubled Past and only picks up the Idiot Ball towards the last few episodes. Also, she . She survives along with
 * Gender Inverted in Psychoville where at the end of Series Two, is the lone survivor who calls out  for the murders.

Video games

 * Claire Redfield in Resident Evil Code: Veronica.
 * Not to mention Rebecca Chambers who managed to be the sole official survivor of her team from Resident Evil Zero.

Web Originals

 * A Journal Roleplay called Battle Experiment Program N threw characters from various series into a Battle Royale-style program. The first group included characters like Lelouch, Peter Parker, House, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Akuma, Dexter and Verbal Kint. The last one standing from the main group at the end of the plot?

Anime and Manga

 * As of the final page of Gyo,.

Films -- Live-Action

 * The "survivor" of Cry Wolf (also provides the film's "twist" ending).
 * The movie Shrooms gleefully takes aim at the whole concept of the Final Girl. At the end
 * In High Tension, a lesbian spends most of the film trying to rescue the girl she likes from the hands of a slasher. It turns out that
 * Played with in the movie Mindhunters,
 * Final Destination 3, in which
 * Also in the first Final Destination....
 * The girl who looks most likely to be the Final Girl in The Deadly Spawn
 * The Cottage, saw the Final Girl turn out to be so unpleasant and obnoxious that the technically-bad but not actually evil kidnappers who made up the other three heroes were much more sympathetic characters. Hilariously.
 * Cindy Campbell from the Scary Movie films is pretty much a sustained spoof of Final Girls.
 * The slasher film final girl spoof was done a few decades previously (and just as, if not more, effectively) in 1982's Pandemonium, with the character of Candy, who was not only a comedic take on the Final Girl, but also on Carrie.
 * Averted in The Ruins. Technically there is a Final Girl but
 * Averted in The Descent. The cast of female spelunkers gets whittled down one by one, but ultimately the Final Girl crosses a Moral Event Horizon, losing audience sympathy. In the end, Due to Executive Meddling, the Final Girl trope is upheld in the American version, and she escapes.
 * Played straight in the original cut of Deep Blue Sea, but averted in the finished cut, because test audiences found the female lead to be obnoxious and self-centered.
 * Subverted in Hostel.
 * Also subverted in Hostel 2. Beth, the Final Girl who we've come to see as innocent and virginal,.
 * Subverted the hell out of in Saw. Amanda is the only one of Jigsaw's victims to get free of his traps, but she's not the typically innocent Final Girl (she had been addicted to heroin) and she agrees with the man that tried to kill her. In the second movie, the sweet, innocent-like (at least by Saw standards) blonde girl
 * In Saw VI, the only survivors of the Roulette Trap are, you guessed it, female.
 * Saw 3D has a Final Boy in Bobby Dagen.
 * Tony in Devil.
 * Though, as mentioned above, the Friday the 13 th film series usually plays it straight, special mention should be made for the character of Tommy Jarvis, who manages to make it safely through installments 4-6 as the Tagalong Kid, Troubled but Cute, and Zen Survivor respectively.
 * The 2009 remake has a Final Girl, but also has a . Additionally there is another survivor in.
 * Original Final Girl Alice was shown smoking marijuana in one scene, Ginny from Part 2 has offscreen sex and kicks back a few beers, and Jessica of Jason Goes to Hell has a kid.
 * Speaking of Jason Goes to Hell, its arguable Stephen is more the main protagonist than Jessica.
 * The seventh and eighth installments, The New Blood and Jason Takes Manhattan respectively, have the male love interest survive alongside the Final Girl character for the entire final act.
 * Inverted big time in 2008 horror movie Credo. It's all typical with our sweet and innocent main character being the last one out of our group to die... That is, until it's revealed most of the movie was all just a hallucination brought on by an evil demon to get her to hang herself. The other college twats are just fine, playing with an Ouija Board downstairs.
 * This trope, and the extreme lampshade hanging thereof, is a central plot element in the slasher Deconstruction Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, where the character is referred to as a "survivor girl." Vernon spends most of the movie setting one character up as the final girl, both to the viewer and the crew filming his exploits. However, it turns out that
 * In April Fools Day, the cast are whittled down to two and the killer is revealed to be the secret and crazy twin sister of one of the characters. The boy gets locked in a closet while the Final Girl is left to confront the crazy twin. She backs into a room, and.
 * In Feast the character identified as "Heroine" (Occupation: Wear tanktops, tote shotgun, save day) is accidentally shot, knocked out a second floor window and swarmed by monsters about halfway through the movie. We then get the real Final Girl, Tuffy, who is now credited as "Heroine #2".
 * In Pitch Black, the woman who seems most likely to be the final girl is . The only characters to survive the movie are . This approach is arguably what sets the film apart and part of why the sequel fails to deliver the same emotional punch. Pitch Black is a survival movie in space that subverts character expectations; Chronicles of Riddick tries more to be straightforward Star Wars.
 * In the film Crazy Eights, the character Beth is built up to be the final girl, only to become the second victim . The final girl is actually Jennifer, but.
 * Also subverted in the 2005 film The Dark, where Maria Bello's character Adèle . And depending on how you interpret the ending,.
 * In the gay slasher Hellbent, there's a Final Guy and his Love Interest.
 * The Evil Dead subverted the trope by having the sweet virginal girl raped by trees and then possessed. Her brother, Ashely J. Williams, becomes the Final Guy, though even he gets possessed at the end. In the sequels, he reverts back to humanity and becomes the boomstick-toting, chainsaw-handed Badass we know and love.
 * Used one way or another in every Cube movie:
 * Cube features a cute, innocent girl in the cast of prisoners, but it's the  who survives, apparently by.
 * Cube 2: Hypercube appears to play it straight, with a wholesome blonde surviving to the end
 * Cube Zero.
 * Averted in House of 1000 Corpses, where the final girl escapes the killer family, but
 * Very cleverly subverted in the sequel to House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects. By the end, becomes a sort of final girl when
 * Averted in Perfume, where the killer saves the beautiful Laura Richis as his final victim to complete his perfect perfume. Laura's wealthy father uses all his power to protect her, but
 * Subverted in Grizzly Park, where Bebe, the ditzy, sweet girl, survives most of the movie, but
 * Brutally subverted, along with every other aspect of the genre, by Funny Games.
 * Identity subverts this twice: the character set up as the Final Girl was a prostitute, thus subverting the virgin-and-pure side of things. We then find out
 * It could also be considered a subversion that.
 * In After Dark Horrorfest 4's movie Kill Theory subverts this trope when the expected final girl, breaking the rules and ends up
 * The Wishmaster series is prone to playing with this. While played completely straight in the original, the sequel's Final Girl was a Goth burglar who actually kills a guy in the opening, during a heist gone wrong, though she later redeems herself, in order to beat the Djinn. The protagonist of Wishmaster 4: The Prophecy Fulfilled is also shown having sex at least twice, including with the Djinn.
 * Thoroughly subverted in Trick 'r Treat with Laurie, whose name is a reference to Jamie Lee Curtis' Final Girl in the Halloween films, a cute virgin dressed as Little Red Riding Hood who is surrounded by loud, promiscuous friends who want to get her laid.
 * Set up in Damnatus, where Nira is the last of the party left alive (with The Hero even commenting that if anyone's going to make it out alive, it will be her),
 * Subverted to hell and back in All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. The innocent and pure Mandy appears to be this at first,
 * Inverted with Student Bodies, in which everyone is suspicious that the obvious Final Girl is really the killer.
 * In Scream 4, the character of Jill Roberts
 * Invoked and subverted in The Cabin in the Woods.
 * Invoked and subverted in The Cabin in the Woods.

Literature

 * Used as a theme in Jane Mendelsohn's Mind Screw novel Innocence, with the main character seeing herself as the Final Girl in her own horror story.
 * The Final Girls of the Friday the 13th spin-off books Church of the Divine Psychopath and Carnival of Maniacs are also The Ladette.
 * In Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, is the last survivor on the island, only to . Furthermore,.
 * Played straighter in a number of theatrical and film adaptations, although there's usually another survivor too.

Live-Action TV

 * Buffy the Vampire Slayer, both the movie and TV show were created specifically as a subversion of the trope—the "final girl" (who isn't particularly final, all things considered) is sexually active, conventionally attractive, and generally a lot more girly than the norm. Admittedly she does have superpowers (often explicitly superior to her foes) which makes it a bit debatable as to whether she belongs as a Final Girl proper, or is simply a straight up superheroine who borrows a fair bit of slasher flick imagery.
 * According to the Word of God, Buffy was actually a subversion of the girls who get killed in monster movies, not those who survive slashers (if memory serves).
 * Buffy only became "sexually active" halfway into the second season - prior to that she was a virgin. She also doesn't smoke or do drugs or drink that much, and as for girlishness she is a cheerleader for all of one episode. In fact, whether by accident or design, Buffy resembles the classic Final Girl a lot more than the characters she is supposedly subverting.
 * The movie paints pre-slayer Buffy as a promiscuous, popular, superficial cheerleader who refuses to fit entirely into the Slayer/Final-Girl mold. Whether you saw the movie before watching the series probably makes a big difference in your perception of her during season 1.
 * A paper written on the subject of final girls points out that, early on, Willow fit the stereotypical final girl mold to a T.
 * It is this trope that Buffy is subverting.

Web Originals

 * The Angry Video Game Nerd ended up being the last one to confront Freddy in his Nightmare On Elm Street review after his clones died in various ways. Instead of having the usual Final Girl traits, the one thing he had that his clones didn't was a Power Glove!

Video games

 * The white chamber seems to play with this... And it seems quite ironic.
 * Averted in Dino Crisis 1, no matter what ending you get, Regina and Rick will always survive, but Gail and Doctor Kirk may or may not. But
 * Subverted in Shivers. When Beth and Merrick released the Ixupi 15 years in the past, Beth was the last survivor.
 * In the Survival Horror mech game Space Griffon VF 9 the final girl is the useless Damsel in Distress scientist the hero picks up who is trapped in a locked room on the station. It appears the awesomely classy punk rocker chick will survive, but then she sacrifices herself to kill her brother that Came Back Wrong when he shows up out of nowhere in the final sequence. The crazy/idiot thing about it? Both you and her have battlemechs. He's in a hybrid recon/maintenance mecha. Even if he had gotten the drop on you in an ambush (and he didn't) either one of you could mop the floor with him without much trouble, so her completely random sacrifice was a waste, especially as the real Big Bad is still alive and waiting for you at the hangar. He's a mad scientist who turned himself into an Eldritch Abomination kaiju, so if anyone needed a mech blowing up in their face it definitely would have been then. It's a pretty difficult fight, so you'll find yourself wishing she'd have saved herself for this instead.
 * In the 2012 version of Twisted Metal, Sweet Tooth's wish is to track down his Final Girl, Sophia, so he can finally kill her.

Western Animation
"Velma: The virgins are always the last to die. God my life sucks."
 * A parody in Robot Chicken where Scooby Doo meets Jason Voorhees. Velma complains that she is the final girl due to the stereotype that the virgin is always the last to die.


 * In the episode "Failsafe" of Young Justice, M'gann is the last of all the heroes in their battle against the invading aliens.