NPO #32: Ten Favorite Final Girls (and Guys)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster

You may have noticed, if you're an avid reader of my posts (particularly Time Drops), that today's content was a last-minute addition to the line-up for this week. But seeing as how I did one of these last year, and I didn't have to be a Patron or watch an entire franchise or genre to contribute to an episode of Dead Last, I would do this again.

The deadline has passed for you Ticketholders out there to give your lists, but there is no deadline for remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your favorite horror movie survivor at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I trade piece of mind for peace of mind, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

For those who don't know, there is a trope in slasher movies (and occasionally, non-slasher horror movies and non-horror movies) called the "Final Girl." Typically a virgin (from the large crop of anti-sexuality slasher horror of the 80s) or a character who is or becomes a badass by virtue of having a particular set of skills throughout the course of a franchise or film, and (duh) being female, the Final Girl usually ends up being the survivor or last victim standing against whatever masked, muscled, or magical man-monster mowed his way through the rest of the miscuous cast. It's so well known that there have been several movies referencing or focusing their premises around the trope. But, as suggested in the following YouTube short, a Final Girl can also be a Final Guy.

I had to pick ten (in no particular order), and here they are:

• Sidney Prescott (Scream): She's Sidney Fucking Prescott; of course she has a gun! And a close group of friends she can trust to help her adhere to horror movie tropes in a good way when someone puts on the Ghostface mask for some Roger Jackson action. And a husband who is a handsome-looking cop with a gun of his own. Sidney is probably the horror movie Final Girl who has survived the most movies in a single continuity without having to be cloned, retconned with time travel, wished back from the dead, or turned into a robot. She isn't the best Final Girl from an ass-kicking, iconic, likability perspective, but she is the most successful.
• Danny Torrance (The Shining/Doctor Sleep): Psychic powers, tricking his evil spirit-possessed maniac father into freezing to death in a hedge maze, and surviving alcoholism, a demonic hotel, and a traveling tribe of Crimson King-powered psychic vampires...and he did most of that as a child!
• Mary Beth Dunstan (Hatchet): Actively survived three movies (and another one offscreen) where the villain is a Kane Hodder-sized deformed hillbilly voodoo repeater ghost with super-strength, teleportation powers, and an assortment of creatively used power tools at his disposal, all by using her familial connections and whatever was convenient at hand...and in one of those movies, she outlived a heavily armed military force.
• Tommy Jarvis (Friday the 13th Part IV-VI): As a child, he became the only character to successfully kill Jason Voorhees after tricking him with industry-level makeup and effects skills. That alone is cool enough. He loses points for almost becoming a legacy villain and being the one to bring Jason back from the dead, but he also overcomes his childhood trauma, kills the "Imposter Jason," and defeats the revived Jason at the cost of his own life.
• Ginny (Friday the 13th Part 2): Being the first character in the franchise to "kill" Jason Voorhees, and using her psychology degree and spur-of-the-moment acting skills to lure him into a false sense of security by pretending to be his mother. I haven't seen the Friday the 13th movies in a long time, but even though she was a one-off (and presumably still alive?), that final psychological showdown with Baghead Jason is unforgettable.
• Laurie Strode (Halloween): She's on here solely for icon status and Jamie Lee Curtis' performances. Yes, she may be tied with Sidney for most movies survived or featured in, and she has a mix of desperate brutality and calculated preparedness going for her, but those appearances are spread across three (four if you count the Rob Zombie films, but only the Jamie Lee incarnation is really worth talking about - Danielle Harris is a much better Final Girl in the Hatchet series) continuities, and she dies in at least two of them, so she "wins" by quantity over quality.
• Sarah Connor (Terminator): From meek waitress to kickass chick, the mother of the savior (or destroyer, depending on which movies you acknowledge - cough!; Genisys) of the human race is a cool, hard-edged heroine with the firepower and connections to face down an increasingly sophisticated army of time-traveling, humanoid robots. Too bad she got taken out by cancer offscreen after two movies and had to be resurrected by time travel twice.
• Ellen Ripley (Alien): The Final Girl with the best character growth, skillset, intelligence, ingenuity, one-liner, and emotional stakes. Killing two Xenomorphs without weapons, killing and surviving countless more, including a Queen, with weapons, and temporarily wiping out the entire invasive, carnivorous, metamorphic species at the expense of her own life just adds to her badass cred even though the original died after three movies. Also, hot take, but I kind of think Ripley-8 is cool.
• Nancy Thompson (A Nightmare On Elm Street): Surviving almost three movies where the villain is a reality-warping dream demon serial child-killer (she came back as a mentor figure in Elm Street 3, where she was killed off partway through) on smarts alone, and surviving just as long without sleep, is enough to put her on this list. Throw in the New Nightmare meta-sequel where Heather Langenkamp pulls double-duty as herself, saving her son from the demonic entity that inspired Wes Craven to create Freddy Krueger, and Heather/Nancy is a horror icon. Plus, she was nice enough to let Sidney's family live in her house after she died....
• Ash Williams (Evil Dead): Ash is the Final Guy with the best character growth, skillset, intelligence, ingenuity, one-liners, and emotional stakes, even though he's an opportunistic horndog who is mostly played for laughs and causes every movie and TV episode to happen through the mistakes he makes. He's survived multiple instances of demonic possession, amputation, time travel (including a deja vu continuity pseudo-sequel and an alternate ending where he slept for a few centuries without dying), a Deadite army, and several of the apocalypse. Ash is cool, no clone required.

I don't really think of the Tremors franchise as being horror (not that Alien and Terminator are strictly horror, either), but honorable mention has to go to Burt Gummer for his reclusive, survivalist nature and obsessive knowledge of the Graboid species that got him through six movies and a television series before allegedly dying in an explosion in a Most Dangerous Game knockoff. You will be missed, Burt!

Speaking of things that will be missed, the deadline has passed for you Ticketholders out there to give Josh your lists, but there is no deadline for remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your favorite horror movie survivor at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can trade piece of mind for peace of mind someday, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Ticketmaster,

Out.