In her 1987 essay, ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,’1 Carol J. Clover introduced the concept of the Final Girl—the one female character who, while being chased, wounded and cornered by the killer, is forced to endure the trauma of encountering the mutilated bodies of her friends long enough to either be rescued or slaughter the killer herself. Through this term, Clover challenged the simplistic assumption that the pleasures of horror cinema begin and end in sadism of misogynistic men, finding in slasher films a productive space to explore the issues of gender ambiguity and cross-gender identification. However, the Final Girl of the early slasher films, despite her ‘smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters,’ lacked any real potential in terms of feminist politics (1987, 204). This is because, for Clover, the surviving, ‘boyish’ girl (1987, 204) merely stood in for male desires, acting as a source of identification for the predominantly male teenage audience.
In the years following Clover’s essay, scholars took up the figure of the Final Girl as a critical trope to stimulate feminist debate about gendered spectatorship and female empowerment, while mainstream producers of horror-related products appropriated her image in every popular media form. In her new preface to the 2015 edition of Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in Modern Horror Film (Princeton University Press), Clover offers an insightful reflection on this discursive circulation of the Final Girl trope, making reference to the book’s previous covers: the original 1992 Princeton University Press edition, which shows a close-up photo of a psychotic killer, and the 1996 British Film Institute edition, also featuring a close-up, but this time of a terrified woman looking directly at us. As Clover explains in the preface, the tension between these two opposing covers anticipated a tension in the book’s reception more generally in the following decades: the public response turned, for the most part, on the Final Girl. ‘The fate of that trope since then has largely determined, for better or worse, the intellectual and more broadly cultural trajectory of the book itself’ (2015, x), Clover writes, arguing that in the course of history, the Final Girl seems to have ‘hijacked’ the later reflections on slasher films, eclipsing other figures and issues discussed in the book—such as the Final Girl’s victim-hero status, with an emphasis on ‘victim.’ ‘Detached from her low-budget origins and messier meanings, she now circulates in these mostly cleaner and more upscale venues as “female avenger,” “triumphant feminist hero,” and the like,’ Clover concludes (2015, x).
Indeed, it could be argued that, rather than a ‘tortured survivor’ (2015, x), the contemporary Final Girl is often understood through the lens of fantasies of empowerment and neoliberal ‘Girl Power’ discourse, the shift that speaks to the complex redefinition of gender roles ‘legitimated’ under postfeminism (Tasker and Negra 2007).2 An unconditional glorification of the Final Girl in horror films as an agent of violence raises doubts about the extent to which these images can be considered empowering. Linking the proliferation of these representations with a postfeminist discourse centered on apolitical, individualistic and capitalist celebration of a violent woman, Lisa Coulthard (2007, 173) demonstrates in her analysis of Kill Bill (2003, USA), Tarantino’s take on the rape-revenge film, that rather than being phallicized or masculinized—as Clover states in relation to the Final Girl—the violent action heroine is ‘postfeminized’: ‘The film’s depiction of female violence is entwined with discourses of idealised feminine whiteness, heterosexuality, victimhood, sacrificial purity, maternal devotion, and eroticised, exhibitionistic, sexual availability’ (2007, 158). Several scholars, however, are wary of seeing these new facets of the Final Girl as necessarily depoliticizing, reading them as both symptomatic of, and oppositional to, postfeminist discourse.3 As Martin Fradley (2013) argues, contemporary horror cinema often displays a thematic preoccupation with neoliberal femininity and, at the same time, an increasing disillusionment with the limitations of its individualistic nature.
The aim of this volume is to revisit these debates by examining the significance of Clover’s legacy and its connections to twenty-first-century feminism. We are particularly keen to expand research on the Final Girl trope by complicating the celebratory storylines of the figure à la ‘Girl Power,’ which proliferated in the late 1990s and 2000s, thinking about the ways in which these powerful characters continue to inspire far-reaching audiences, while also responding to the socio-political backdrop of their time. Even if the Final Girl ‘is only a sketch,’ as Clover argues in reference to the current circulation of the trope, we propose to ask: what does this sketch tell us about gender, sexuality, race, ability and shifting modalities of genre? If the proliferation of the Final Girls in the mid-1970s was an effect, as it has been argued,4 of discourses on gender during that period, in particular within the women’s movement, then the recent resurgence of the Final Girl across a wide spectrum of popular culture forms—the 2015 films Final Girl (Canada/USA, dir. Tyler Shields) and The Final Girls (USA, dir. Todd Strauss-Schulson); TV’s popular Scream Queens (2015–2016, USA, Fox), which concluded its first season with an episode titled ‘The Final Girl(s)’; Riley Sager’s novel Final Girls (2017), which plays on horror movie themes from Scream (1996, USA, dir. Wes Craven); several videogames5 and a handful of board/card games,6 just to give a few examples—raises questions about how to rethink this figure in contemporary terms. These recent reformulations of the Final Girl in films, TV, games and literature confirm the pervasiveness and flexibility of the trope, as well as the need to expand discussion of Clover’s framework beyond the traditional ruminations of the slasher subgenre that have been so central to most of the research to date. While the Final Girl continues to materialize in slasher remakes and revisions, often in a highly self-conscious way,7 it also circulates in other genres, such as dystopian Young Adult literature or superhero comic books, which refocus critical attention on the trope as a cross-media phenomenon. Even if Clover’s original analysis addressed mainly the dynamics of cinema spectatorship, it is our contention that, given this transmigration of the figure between different genres and modes, as well as the abundance of onscreen and literary material produced since the beginning of the twenty-first century that references, often explicitly, the Final Girl, Clover’s theory equips us with a number of useful tools to think about gender, feminism and popular culture in a wider sense. However, and bearing in mind the mutability of the trope across diverse formats, these tools need to be expanded and reworked.
The texts addressed in this volume provide rich opportunities to redefine the Final Girl figure on many levels, from a reconsideration of the narrative and visual traits that Clover identified in early slashers to the critique of her understanding of horror spectatorship. One of the most contested aspects of Clover’s theory has been her claim that the slasher audience was composed of mostly young male spectators, which mandates that the Final Girl be ‘boyish’ to appeal to these audience members. Clover remarks that in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986, USA, dir. Tobe Hooper), when the Final Girl Strech (Caroline Williams) takes up the chainsaw and kills Chop ...