Horror movies are known for many tropes that have defined much of the genre through the years. One of the earliest tropes that have survived in many franchises over the last fifty years is that of the final girl. This trope describes the character, usually female, who is the last one left standing. It is particularly recognizable in slasher movies.
However, some horror movies manage to subvert the expectations of viewers to have one final girl survive the slaughter of whatever horror has been loosed and has been picking off characters throughout the course of the movie.
7 The Final Girls
If there was ever a movie that would tackle this trope and stretch, invert and subvert it completely, it was The Final Girls. The movie features Max Cartwright and her friends becoming trapped in a slasher movie from the 80s that starred her mother Amanda. From their entry into the movie, Max knows what will happen, but not how their interactions with the characters will change things.
The Final Girls is wildly intelligent and loves to play with the idea of the final girl trope. The characters even declare that Max has to be the final girl halfway through the movie because she is the only virgin left among them. This played on many of the personality traits often attributed to final girls and was a great twist on the slasher genre.
6 Friday The 13th (2009)
The remake of Friday the 13th decided to play on the final girl trope in a much simpler manner. Near the end of the movie, only Jenna and Clay are left alive as they continue the search for Clay’s sister Whitney. When they find her, there is but a brief reuniting before Jason impales Jenna with his machete, leaving the siblings in a desperate final attempt to escape him.
Jenna was the obvious lead for almost the entire movie and the filmmakers clearly wanted the audience to assume that she would be the last character left standing. Bringing Whitney back and leaving her and Clay in the final battle against Jason while Jenna perished was an attempt at bold misdirection to subvert the trope.
5 The Witch
The Witch might not have been a slasher movie, but Anya Taylor-Joy’s Thomasin was the last member of her family left standing in the climax of the movie after the mysterious forces surrounding them pick off the rest of them one by one.
However, instead of being the final girl that follows the trope and brings down the evil force which picked off the other characters, Thomasin gives in to them and becomes a witch. This isn’t the first horror movie to have a major character turn to evil, but it was still a massive subversion of the final girl trope.
4 Scream 4
The Scream franchise has always been about tearing down the very ideas and tropes around the horror genre that Wes Craven himself helped to build. From the beginning, Sidney Prescott took the fight to her tormentors and never backed away like many other final girls at that time would.
Scream 4 changed things even more, with Emma Roberts' character Jill Roberts. The niece of Sidney, Jill wanted fame and fortune and so tried to set herself up as a new final girl alongside Sidney, when she was in fact one of the killers. She almost got away with it too but made the mistake that everyone in the franchise makes of not finishing Sidney off.
3 You’re Next
Another interesting twist on the final girl trope was in You’re Next, in which leading lady Erin is left injured by several attackers. Instead of trying to run and escape, Erin uses her intelligence and knowledge of survival tactics to set traps and outsmart the attackers in order to beat them.
There are few movies that deal with a final girl really deciding to tackle the threat, usually focusing on the running aspect even if she is forced to eventually stand and fight. Presenting a final girl as smarter and more dangerous than the threat she faces is unusual and was an interesting story that really paid off for You’re Next.
2 Drag Me To Hell
Drag Me To Hell is one of the few horror movies that present the lead with a threatening potential demise and then just simply carry that demise out. Christine refuses an old lady a bank loan and gets a curse placed on her in return. The curse turns out to make a demon torment her for three days before literally dragging her to hell.
While the entire movie details Christine’s attempts to get rid of this curse and survive her ordeal, she finds herself trapped at the very end, and, in one last shocking twist, still cursed. The end of the movie features her being dragged to hell and not surviving as the audience was led to believe she would.
1 The Invisible Man
The Invisible Man reboot featured many surprising themes. The main character Cecelia deals with taking back the power that she didn’t have in her relationship with Adrian, who was abusive to her. Taking back this power and actually dealing with abuse as a theme is almost unheard of in the horror genre.
The ending of the movie was even more surprising, as Cecelia turns the tables on Adrian by going back to him and then murdering him with another invisible suit, staging the murder to look like a suicide. Instead of a helpless final girl, Cecelia became the terror herself in a way Sidney Prescott herself would be proud of.