Sidney Prescott, Laurie Strode, Maxine Minx, Ellen Ripley. Final girls. The ones at the end of the movie who survive, who will come back movie after movie to fight the same masked man or figure. As iconic as these women are, I have to ask, why are there no final men?
Final girl is a term used to refer to the female character that survives at the end of a horror movie. Traditionally, these are the main characters, the women who are terrorized by the horror throughout the whole movie, who witness their friends and family die, and narrowly escape death themselves. However, there seems to be no male counterpart to this iconic horror movie trope. In fact, there seems to be very few, if any, popular horror movies where the last man standing is actually a man.Â
Why is this? Because being a woman is scary. For centuries women have been portrayed as weak and prone to danger, the threat of a man with bad intentions always seeming to be present. It’s easier to imagine a woman being hunted down by some creep, hellbent on revenge, than it is for the target to be a man, someone who for centuries has been portrayed as the knight in shining armor, the one to save the woman.Â
I think horror movies often feature a female main character because it’s more exciting. It makes for a more interesting story if you see someone you don’t really expect to be the one to out smart and survive the crazy guy. While this trope probably seems trivial now, it was probably seen as exciting, making movies scarier because there was probably a very real feeling that the female characters wouldn’t make it out alive.Â