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00:00But the media really loves Baby.
00:02Is a soul survivor.
00:06Almost every horror movie ends with one person left
00:09to face the villain alone,
00:11one final showdown full of catharsis and bloodshed.
00:14And usually this last one standing is a woman.
00:18You won!
00:19What does that mean?
00:21This phenomenon is so common it even has a name.
00:25The final girl, coined by Professor Carol J. Clover in 1987,
00:29the final girl has been a staple of horror
00:32since the slasher films of the 1970s,
00:35and while she may come in many different incarnations,
00:37she's united by a few common traits.
00:40The final girl is usually a virgin,
00:43or otherwise doesn't engage in sex,
00:45which often dooms her peers.
00:47He has been so patient with me, you know, with all this sex stuff.
00:50How many guys would put up with a girlfriend
00:51who's sexually anorexic?
00:53In fact, she might be a little bit different from other girls.
00:56She's socially awkward, or even a bit of a tomboy.
00:59What if I get bored?
01:01These'll help?
01:02Soviet economic structures?
01:04She also doesn't engage in other illicit activities,
01:07like drinking or drugs,
01:09which leaves her clear-headed and ready to run, or fight.
01:14In all, she exhibits what Clover calls
01:16the active investigating gaze of the film.
01:18She's smart, curious, and vigilant,
01:20and that's what makes her a survivor.
01:22We will never be broken.
01:25The final girl can be cunning and clever,
01:27outsmarting her enemies.
01:29Or she may just barely make it out alive.
01:32Her victory may be short-lived or ambiguous.
01:35She may live only to be left forever traumatized.
01:38But either way, she vanquishes the killer,
01:41at least until the sequel.
01:42I have to finish this.
01:44So why do we keep putting the final girl through this?
01:48What is it about her that makes her special?
01:50And is she a symbol of female empowerment,
01:53or a victim of regressive attitudes?
01:55Sex equals death!
01:56Here's our take on the evolution of this trope,
01:59and what she symbolizes,
02:01and how some recent subversions have caused us
02:04to rethink the final girl, for however long she survives.
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02:16to get notified about all our new videos.
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02:36In the early days of horror,
02:37women were almost exclusively victims—
02:40damsels in distress who were destined to die,
02:43unless they were saved at the last minute by a man.
02:46They were vulnerable and helpless.
02:50In F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu,
02:51the main female character, Ellen,
02:53is clever and tenacious, using her own purity to lure
02:57the vampire Count Orlok to his doom.
02:59Still, Ellen dies, sacrificing herself to save the world.
03:04It would be decades before women fought back against these horrors,
03:07and lived to tell their story.
03:09This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo,
03:16signing off.
03:17Carol Clover traces the true dawn of the final girl to the slasher films of the 1970s,
03:23which gave us young women who stood up to their would-be killers,
03:26outwitting and sometimes even subduing them.
03:29In 1974's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
03:32Sally manages to evade the deadly Leatherface,
03:34even escaping her bloody confines twice.
03:37But Sally becomes a final girl largely through endurance,
03:41and she's only rescued by chance.
03:44Jess, in 1974's Black Christmas,
03:46became another prototypical final girl for fighting back
03:49against a murderer targeting her sorority house.
03:52What do you want? Why are you doing this?
03:55She was the rare, fully-realized woman in a horror movie,
03:58one who provides the film's narrative point of view.
04:01Yet Jess didn't totally fit the final girl mold, either.
04:04For one thing, she's far from virginal.
04:07I'm going to have an abortion.
04:11You can't make a decision like that, you haven't even asked me.
04:13I wasn't even going to tell you.
04:15And although Jess survives at the end,
04:17it's far from certain that she's one.
04:20It's me, Billy.
04:22Most of our ideas about the final girl
04:24were established in 1978's Halloween.
04:27Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis,
04:29ticks all the main boxes of the trope.
04:32Laurie is the only one of her friends
04:33who's not interested in sex, or even dating.
04:36Here, Laurie. Scared another one away.
04:41It's tragic. You never go out.
04:43She's smart and observant,
04:45especially compared to her oblivious friends.
04:47Laurie, look.
04:50Look where?
04:50Behind the bush.
04:53I don't see anything.
04:55And she's resourceful,
04:56eventually fighting back against a rampaging Michael Myers
05:00with anything she can get her hands on.
05:02Although we start off looking at things from Michael Myers' perspective,
05:05we experience the horrors he commits through Laurie's point of view.
05:09As Clover writes,
05:10by making The Final Girl the film's POV and de facto hero,
05:14even male viewers are forced to identify with her.
05:17And in a genre that so readily indulges in violence against women,
05:21this can be read as a small step forward,
05:23forcing men to transport themselves into the psyche of a victimized woman.
05:28You messed with the wrong sisters.
05:30Still, the representation and empathy The Final Girl provides
05:34doesn't negate some of the trope's more sexist aspects.
05:37There are certain rules that one must abide by
05:40in order to successfully survive a horror movie.
05:43For instance, number one, you can never have sex.
05:47In Halloween, Laurie's friends are killed
05:49because they're distracted by sex.
05:51Laurie only survives because she's far more conservative
05:54and largely sexless.
05:56Guys think I'm too smart.
05:58The Final Girl is usually the only one who doesn't give in to her body's desires.
06:03Glenn, not now.
06:04And as critics have noted, there's obvious symbolism in the fact
06:08that slasher films usually find men trying very hard
06:11to penetrate them with phallic objects.
06:14When Laurie strikes back at Michael with knitting needles,
06:17wire hangers, and knives, she is what Clover calls phallicized,
06:21effectively becoming masculine and erasing her female sexuality entirely.
06:26The Final Girl did represent some progress
06:29from those early horror heroines.
06:31In the 80s, women became fighters, not just victims,
06:34and in the wake of Halloween, they only became more proactive,
06:38cunning, and deadly.
06:39Yet in many respects, these women were still being used symbolically.
06:43Like Ellen in Nosferatu, they were visions of purity,
06:46and their femininity was conflated with abject terror.
06:50As Carol Clover wrote,
06:52angry displays of force may belong to the male,
06:54but crying, cowering, screaming, fainting, trembling,
06:58begging for mercy belong to the female.
07:01Please, I'll do anything you want.
07:09The Final Girl was a tool.
07:11She was used because audiences presumably wouldn't identify
07:15with male characters in similar danger.
07:17The Final Girl could fight back, and she lived to tell the story,
07:21but it would be a while before she controlled it.
07:29There's a formula to it!
07:30A very simple formula!
07:32Horror is a genre built on formulas,
07:34and it wasn't long before The Final Girl became one as well.
07:38With 1996's Scream, director Wes Craven offered a meta-commentary
07:42on the many slasher tropes he'd helped to create
07:45through films like A Nightmare on Elm Street,
07:47including the concept of The Final Girl.
07:50Scream sets Sidney Prescott up to be a typical Final Girl.
07:53She's sweet and chaste.
07:55Would you settle for a PG-13 relationship?
07:58And she even sees herself as the opposite of a horror film's usual victims.
08:03They're all the same.
08:03Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can't act,
08:06who's always running up the stairs when she should be going out the front door.
08:09But Scream also shows us Sidney isn't quite as demure as she appears.
08:13She may not be totally innocent, either.
08:16During the trial, you did all those stories about me,
08:18you called me a liar.
08:19I think you falsely identified him, yes.
08:21And the film even takes away her purity
08:24by allowing Sidney to have sex with her boyfriend.
08:26Now you're no longer a virgin.
08:28Ahhhh, I said virgin.
08:30What?
08:31Now you gotta die.
08:33Those are the rules.
08:34Sidney proves to be a different kind of Final Girl.
08:37She exerts total control over what happens to her,
08:40knowing the rules allows her to bend them.
08:43This is the moment when the supposedly dead killer comes back to life
08:47for one last scare.
08:54Not in my movie.
08:55Like all good horror formulas, Scream inspired its own imitators.
09:00Nancy, you can't be the final girl.
09:02You're the shy girl with the clipboard and the guitar.
09:04You get laid and then you die.
09:05Films like 2015's The Final Girls and 2011's The Cabin in the Woods
09:10made similar inquiries into why these tropes persist,
09:13even as they reveled in them.
09:15The whore?
09:17She's corrupted.
09:18She dies first.
09:20Leaving the last?
09:20The virgin.
09:22But more importantly,
09:23Sidney Prescott helped to usher in a new era for The Final Girl,
09:27one where the heroine doesn't just survive, but thrives.
09:30Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, both the movie and the TV series,
09:35further upended the trope by making The Final Girl a blonde,
09:39unabashedly feminine cheerleader.
09:41The complete opposite of the virginal tomboy,
09:43Buffy not only defends herself against the monsters,
09:46she hunts them.
09:47I've been going out a lot.
09:51Every night.
09:53Controlling?
09:55Hunting.
09:56And you can see her empowered descendants in films where
10:00Final Girls no longer cower and hide, but run toward the fight.
10:04More recent films have taken this agency a step further,
10:07giving us Final Girls who are revealed to be in greater control
10:10than we ever suspected, causing us to question our gendered
10:15assumptions about their innocence.
10:16In Ari Aster's Midsommar, Dani seems like a quintessential Final Girl.
10:20She spends most of her time isolated from her friends,
10:23who indulge in drugs and sex and meet the deadly fates we'd expect.
10:27I'll be back, I guess.
10:28She's going to show me.
10:29Dani also fulfills the role of the active investigating gaze.
10:33She's the only one who seems to suspect that something sinister is going on.
10:37What about Josh, though?
10:39I'm honestly not too concerned.
10:41Yet she's not just the last one standing.
10:43In becoming the Final Girl, she's finally granted the control
10:47that her abusive boyfriend has repeatedly taken away from her,
10:50and she uses it to punish him, becoming a killer herself.
10:54A similar subversion occurs in Luca Guadagnino's 2018 remake of Suspiria,
10:59a tale of witchcraft, dance, and the meaning of authority.
11:03In Dario Argento's 1977 original, Susie is a classic Final Girl,
11:08snooping in the shadows as a coven of witches kills off her classmates
11:11at a dance academy and escaping through a combination of vigilance and pure luck.
11:16But the Susie and Guadagnino's film has real power.
11:20As the witches prepare to sacrifice her,
11:22Susie exposes herself as the true leader of the coven,
11:25who has returned to exact retribution on the women abusing their power.
11:28It's a reversal that shows Susie not just taking control of her fear,
11:41but revealing that she was the source of it all along.
11:44Beyond just offering meta commentaries on the trope,
11:52this new era of Final Girls poses a challenge to the structures that have defined them.
11:56The Final Girls in It Follows and The Witch triumph not because they're virgins,
12:01but because they accept and use their sexuality.
12:05J in It Follows is tracked by a supernatural entity that's transmitted by sex,
12:10a literal manifestation of the death by sex trope.
12:13Yet, rather than defeat it by shedding her sexuality entirely,
12:17J actually embraces and weaponizes it, using sex to free herself.
12:22All you can do is pass it along to someone else.
12:24Thomason, in Robert Eggers' The Witch, is a virginal, naive,
12:28teenaged girl who's repressed by her religiously strict 17th-century society,
12:33the final girl laced into a Puritan bodice,
12:36as Salon's Eileen Giselle puts it.
12:38Fear of her blossoming sexuality causes her family to treat her as a villain.
12:43You bewitched my brother, proud sloth!
12:46Until at last Thomason gives in and becomes one.
12:50Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?
12:56Yes.
12:57This allows her to claim full agency over her body,
13:00in a notably orgasmic climax.
13:03Rather than being fallacized like the Final Girls of those early slashers,
13:07the modern Final Girl is empowered by her sexuality.
13:10It's a feminist update to a trope that has long been mired in subjugation.
13:15I am that very witch.
13:17When I sleep, my spirit slips away from my body and dances naked with the devil.
13:27Even as the modern Final Girl may have more agency than those girls of the 70s and 80s,
13:32she remains confined by at least one outdated trapping.
13:36The Final Girl is still usually white.
13:39A black Final Girl?
13:42Sweetheart, they kill folks off of my complexion first.
13:44Director Alfred Hitchcock once mused,
13:46Blondes make the best victims.
13:48They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.
13:52And this attitude has prevailed even in modern, more enlightened horror films,
13:56which still depend on the empathy for female victims
13:59whose purity is conflated with whiteness.
14:02In many ways, this reflects real-world attitudes.
14:05PBS anchor Gwen Ifill coined the term
14:08Missing White Woman Syndrome to describe the disproportionate
14:11panic that surrounds imperiled white women.
14:14And we see this reflected in horror films that repeatedly foreground
14:17white women in danger while treating minority characters as disposable.
14:21The flip side to The Final Girl, after all,
14:23is the black guy dies first trope.
14:26I've seen this movie, the black dude dies first.
14:28While audiences are expected to be terrified for the white girl,
14:31the deaths of black characters are regarded as just part of the show.
14:35As Nerdist's Ty Gooden has pointed out,
14:38black women and girls weren't perceived as vulnerable people
14:41whom an audience could identify with as victims of violence
14:44because we were barely seen as people at all,
14:46much less valuable ones.
14:48All I'm saying is that the horror genre is historical
14:51for excluding the African American element.
14:53Horror films also reflect this in their settings,
14:56taking place in the familiar confines of high schools and safe suburban neighborhoods,
15:00showing terror invading an idyllic, often lily-white community
15:04that believes it's not supposed to happen here.
15:07Doc, do you know what Haddonfield is?
15:09Families, children, all lined up in rows up and down these streets.
15:13You're telling me they're lined up for a slaughterhouse?
15:15Films have long treated violence against black people as commonplace,
15:19and not especially terrifying.
15:21The black woman is therefore almost never the final girl.
15:24She is, at best, the close to final girl,
15:26there to offer her support and common sense.
15:29Look, look, stupid people go back, okay?
15:31Smart people run.
15:32We're smart people, so we should just get the f*** out of here.
15:34Before she is inevitably dispatched to teach the final girl a lesson.
15:38But the recent rise of social horror has begun to challenge
15:41this aspect of the trope as well.
15:43Jordan Peele's Us subverts horror's predominantly white perspective
15:47through Lupita Nyong'o's Adelaide.
15:49She's the rare black final girl, one who's been assimilated
15:52into those safe confines of white society through her wealth.
15:56Anyways, we should go back to our place.
15:58Sure.
15:58I think it's vodka o'clock.
15:59When that comfort is threatened by a mysterious other,
16:02a group of murderous doppelgangers known as the Tethered,
16:05it highlights just how much Adelaide has participated
16:08in creating the horror she now faces.
16:11If it weren't for you, I never would have danced at all.
16:19But the film's twist, that Adelaide is a member of the Tethered
16:22while her doppelganger is the one who really belongs,
16:25challenges us to ask who we side with.
16:28What are you people?
16:29We're Americans.
16:32Adelaide is both villain and victim, monster and final girl.
16:37And by making us both empathize with her
16:39and feel terrified of her, the film forces us to confront
16:43the social constructs that are the film's true source of horror.
16:47A similar social commentary underpins 2018's Assassination Nation,
16:51in which a group of diverse high schoolers,
16:53including transgender model Hari Neff and black singer Abra,
16:57become a collective of final girls who find themselves
17:00under attack by local men over their supposedly loose morals.
17:03So here's the thing that really bothers me.
17:05Who sees a naked photo of a girl and their first thought is,
17:10yo, I gotta kill this bitch?
17:12They not only survive, they violently turn the tables on their attackers,
17:17calling on all the other girls to join them in overthrowing
17:20the patriarchal terrors they face.
17:22And in Sophia Tical's loose 2019 remake of Black Christmas,
17:27one of the original sources of the final girl fully enters the 21st century,
17:31as the film's protagonist, Riley, fends off zombie-like fraternity brothers
17:35who seek to keep women in their place,
17:38and who targeted her for refusing to keep silent about her own sexual assault.
17:43Women who are willing to be obedient, like your friend here, will be spared.
17:48Those of you who refuse to be compliant will face the consequences.
17:52In the film's climax, Riley is joined by an army of multiracial,
17:56multigender survivors, no longer alone.
17:59The terrors in these films are systemic,
18:01affecting more than just one kind of girl,
18:04and they take more than one final girl to defeat them.
18:08Even as the final girl has evolved,
18:10she's remained rooted in ideas about women as inherently innocent,
18:14a waiting vessel for the violence the world cruelly inflicts.
18:18The final girl still feels sadly relevant,
18:21because violence against women is still rampant in our world.
18:25But whereas former final girls were defined by their victimization,
18:29today's final girl is a far stronger, far more complex character.
18:34She's a more intersectional representation of not just gender and sexuality,
18:39but of race and class, and the many ways in which we are made to live in fear.
18:44Today, her journey isn't just about defeating the monster,
18:48but finding the strength in herself.
18:50I can't change what I've done,
18:52but I can start trying to be a better person today.
18:54Tellingly, in the 2018 version of Halloween,
18:57Laurie Strode is no longer just a survivor.
19:00She's a warrior, forever prepared to fight.
19:04Happy Halloween, Michael.
19:05The terrors that women must endure haven't subsided,
19:08but the final girl will continue to stand up to them to the bitter end.
19:12I take back every bit of energy I gave you.
19:18Hi, everyone. I'm Susanna.
19:20I'm Debra, and we're the creators of The Take.
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