Teen Nick Horror Movie With a Girl Who Died Comes Back and Kills People

Benny: But I still want to know what happens!
Buffy: Everyone gets horribly killed except the blonde girl in the nightie who finally kills the monster with a machete but it's not really dead.
Jennifer: Oh my God. Is that true?
Buffy: Probably. What movie is this?

The simplest definition of this is "the last character left alive to confront the killer" in a Slasher Movie. The character in question tends to follow a certain set of characteristics. The most obvious one is being (almost) Always Female. Especially in older works, she'll also almost certainly be a virgin, remain fully clothed, avoid Death by Sex, and probably won't drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, or take drugs, either. Finally, she'll probably turn out to be more intelligent and resourceful than the other victims, occasionally even evolving into a type of Action Girl by the movie's end. Looking at the Sorting Algorithm of Mortality, you could say that the Final Girl is a combination of The Hero, The Cutie, and the Damsel in Distress — which obviously gives her a very low deadness score. The Final Girl is usually but not always brunette, often in contrast to a promiscuous blonde who traditionally gets killed off.

The term was coined by Carol J. Clover in her 1992 book Men, Women, And Chain Saws: Gender In The Modern Horror Film, a critical examination of slasher movies.

The character is ultimately the last one left to tell the story. If the Final Girl appears in a sequel to the movie she survived, there is a very high chance that she will fall victim to Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome.

It's also interesting to note how the Final Girl can be interpreted in film theory. On one hand, the character seems to be the living embodiment of stereotypical conservative attitudes of what women "should be". On the other, feminists have noticed that through this device, the males in the audience are forced to identify with a woman in the climax of the movie. In practical terms, the makers of a horror film want the victim to experience abject terror in the climax, and feel that viewers would reject a film that showed a man experiencing such abject terror.

This trope has seen a growing number of subversions, aversions, and parodies in recent years, which suggests it may be slowly weakening. Then again, the Action Survivor's replacing the Action Hero points in an interesting direction.

Thank God for Monster Threat Expiration.

Often overlaps with Token Wholesome. Compare and contrast Kill the Cutie and Men Are the Expendable Gender. Has nothing to do with Last Girl Wins, which is about romantic pairings. A villainous (and usually male) variant might show up as part of a Mook Horror Show.

As both a Death and Ending Trope, all spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

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Examples:

• Live-Action TV
  • American Horror Story

Straight Examples:

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    Anime & Manga

• Aside from being male, Emporio Alnino from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is this played dead straight. Of the seven protagonists, he's the youngest, most innocent (relatively speaking) and the only one to have never killed until the end. He's also the last man standing after Father Enrico Pucci gains Made in Heaven and goes through the other protagonists like a chainsaw and kills him with the combination of Burning Down the House and Heavy Weather.
• Kaori Tanaka, though not inherently a main character, ends up the most prominent female survivor of Shiki. She survives her final confrontation and subsequently safe from any danger, as she's shown to escape in the end.

    Comic Books

• The comic book Hack/Slash stars a former Final Girl who becomes a slasher-hunter. She gradually meets up with other (mostly female) slasher survivors, ultimately assembled in the finale storyarc as the All-Final Girl Team.

     Fairy Tales

Fairy tales have as many final girls as damsels in distress. The most obvious is Little Red Riding Hood, who (at least in versions where she isn't rescued by a conveniently placed male) either ends up the killer's final victim or fights him off herself. Another is Gretel from Hansel and Gretel (which is likely the template for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) who not only survives but saves her brother from the killer as well.

    Films — Animation

• Played out in Anastasia (1997), in which the evil Rasputin curses the Romanov family whom he feels betrayed him and aids in a revolt that ultimately kills the entire family except Anastasia, who manages to escape with her life but is now an amnesiac who calls herself 'Anya'. Once he finds out that Anastasia is alive, Rasputin vows to kill the last Romanov to fulfill his dark purpose.

    Films — Live-Action (Slashers)

• Deconstructed and reconstructed in American Gothic (1988). The meek and emotionally fragile Cynthia does indeed become the last girl left standing, but in her survival she ends up losing her sanity and does a Face–Heel Turn when she joins the murderous family as a full-fledged member. This doesn't stop her from going batshit crazy on the family and becoming a killer herself, reconstructing the trope as she in her madness takes out the family of killers one by one.
• This trope, and the extreme lampshade hanging thereof, is a central plot element in the slasher deconstruction Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, where the character is referred to as a "survivor girl." Vernon spends most of the movie setting one character up as the final girl, both to the viewer and the crew filming his exploits. However, it turns out that Vernon's final girl is a decoy, and sexually active at that. It is the female reporter in the film crew who is his real final girl all along, and she fulfills her role exactly according to the trope.
• Black Christmas:
  • Black Christmas (1974) is one of the first slasher films ever made and was a Trope Maker in the genre. The movie has a final girl in Jess, though she is something of an Unbuilt Trope example; while she's obviously pegged as the heroine, she's also quite different from the conventional final girl set by the Trope Codifier. To start with, her actress Olivia Hussey is Latina. Jess is also pregnant and wants an abortion against her boyfriend's wishes, so she is definitely not a virgin. Meanwhile, the "good girl" Claire is the first victim, her death setting the plot into motion, while the Hard-Drinking Party Girl Barb only dies in the third act.
  • The 2006 remake has a straight example in Kelli, who confronts the killers, manages to kill both of them, and survives. However, the director tried to play around with the trope by casting multiple actresses who aesthetically could be the Final Girl (indeed Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who plays Heather, was the first choice for Kelli)- in hopes of fooling the audience. The film was supposed to have more survivors in Melissa and Leigh; Melissa was killed off because her actress made it a requirement for signing on, and Leigh only dies because of Executive Meddling forcing them to change the ending.
  • Subverted in the 2019 remake with Riley, even though she survives, she lost her virginity being raped by The Dragon before the events of the movie. And Kris also survives, along with several other background sisters, and only one boy is with them.
• Blood Widow: Laurie is the one of the cast who survives the longest against the killer. Sadly, she's beaten to death at the end.
• Jodie in Cherry Falls, though mainly out of virtue of being the main target and taking the fight to the killer, as many other female characters (Sandy, Cindy, Sharon, Heather, Jan and Deputy Mina) all survive as well.
• Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror plays this pretty straight with Allison. She's the plainest of the group that gets stranded in the middle of nowhere and has a run in with a deadly cult, with whom she has a tie with considering that her brother is a member. Allison's the last one left standing to take down the cult at the end, as well.
• The Cold Prey trilogy:
  • The original film plays this straight with Jannicke, though there's a slight inversion considering virginal Ingunn gets killed first whereas the sexual experience of the others is left a bit more ambiguous.
  • The second film serves as a desconstruction. Jannicke grows quite savvy by this film and knows what will happen if the killer gets resuscitated. Despite her warnings, she ends up getting sedated as the killer wakes up and starts killing the hospital staff one by one, leaving only Camilla left as a Final Girl. Once Jannicke comes to, she becomes an action survivor and teams up with Camilla to stop the killer for once and for all. And they both end up surviving.
  • The third film pulls a switcheroo. Siri seems more innocent and reserved when compared to Hedda, who rips off her top and goes skinny dipping with boys. None of this stops Hedda from being the true Final Girl, though she herself doesn't make it out alive.
• Evil Breed The Legend Of Sam Hain: Shae, the bookish brunette virgin is the only character to survive the onslaught of the Cannibal Clan. Lampshaded early in the movie when she is ranting about why she doesn't like horror movies and says that it always the goody two shoes virgin who survives, and Jerk Jock Steve says that she should be safe then.
• Final Exam with Courtney, who is basically a Laurie Strode clone.
• Friday the 13th has a definite final girl in every installment, but see below under subversions/aversions.
• The Funhouse with Amy, though the movie makes a point to show her topless early on in the film.
• Despite its titillating premise, Girl House manages to play this pretty straight with Kylie, a brunette final girl who would be innocent and virtuous if it weren't for financial troubles.
• Graduation Day with Anne. Justified since she initially wasn't in Kevin's list of targets, and he only comes after her once she finds Laura's remains in his room. Unlike earlier examples, she's a bit less Damsel in Distress and a bit more Action Survivor, most likely thanks to her time serving in the Navy.
• Halloween (1978) was the Trope Codifier and introduced the Death by Sex trope (actually unintentional) which became a staple of the genre. Laurie Strode's actress, Jamie Lee Curtis, was typecast as a Final Girl early on in her career so if she was in a slasher film, she would definitely be surviving. Except in Halloween: Resurrection. Laurie remained a final girl in Halloween II (1981). In Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Rachel and Jamie both shared this title, and in Halloween: Resurrection, Sara is the Final Girl.
• Subverted and then double subverted (ultimately played straight) in Happy Birthday to Me with Ginny. At first, "Ginny" confesses to committing the murders. Then, it turns up that the killer was an assailant disguised as Ginny, who then has to survive a birthday dinner from hell. A deconstruction is hinted at the end with a surviving Ginny, who is messed up and suspected by a detective of committing the crimes.
• Hell Night with Marti, the most innocent of the four pledges and the only one to survive both killers.
• House of Wax (2005) saw Carly emerge as the lone female survivor of what unfolds as a "real-life" horror story in the ghost town of Ambrose, Louisiana; her brother, Nick, also is alive at film's end, both having escaped the burning wax mansion (the town's centerpiece) seconds before it collapses into itself. It's downplayed as Carly is shown sleeping in the same tent as her boyfriend and does strip off on camera when she's changing (though is tastefully covered by her friends). The other female character she's contrasted with - her best friend Paige - is portrayed more sympathetically than normal (she's dealing with a possible unplanned pregnancy).
• The House on Sorority Row with Katherine. She was the most moral and level-headed of a group of sorority girls who find themselves being killed off one by one after a prank results in the death of their house mother. She was going to subvert the trope by dying in the end, but Executive Meddling put a stop to it.
• Humongous inverts this, at least so far as looks and resourcefulness are concerned. The plain girl, Carla, who easily looks the part of the final girl actually dies rather brutally towards the end with little chance to fight back. The true final girl? Sandy, a very attractive but resourceful girl who manages to take down the killer and live to the end credits.
• I Know What You Did Last Summer and its sequel with Julie, though her love interest Ray survives both films as well. Notably in the book it was based on, no one was killed off. Julie is also made into a straighter Final Girl than her book counterpart - in the book she's a red-haired cheerleader who was previously a slacker and only just buckled down in her schoolwork towards the end.
• Kelly in The Initiation. Although not a virgin, she is only one of the girls not to have sex over the course of the movie. Justified as the killer has a specific reason for savin her for last.
• Intruder with Jennifer, though she's definitely a bit more conventionally attractive than most traditional final girls and some of her qualifying traits (lack of doing drugs and having sex) may be justified by the fact that the slashing takes place at a grocery store on a night she was working.
• Laid to Rest and its sequel, though the concept is subverted slightly in the first when the Final Girl is revealed to be a prostitute.
• Lost After Dark specifically hightlights this trope in the naming of its female characters - each one is named after an actress who played a classic final girl (Marilyn, Heather, Jamie, and Adrienne). It then deconstructs the trope by setting up its obvious final girl to be so virtuous that she becomes easy prey to the killer. After she's the first casualty, another (non-virginal) character rises up to be the true final girl, reconstructing the trope in the process.
• Luther The Geek has a peculiar way of downplaying this trope. This time, the final girl is not the teenaged daughter, who has sex with her boyfriend on her mother's bed. Rather, it's the mother — a widowed farm wife — who is left to take the killer down in the film's final moments.
• A throwback to 80 slasher films, Killer Holiday follows a group of teens going on vacation, until they are killed off one by one, until one girl (Cammi) is forced to take him down and this girl is an A-student and virgin. Off course, her crush survived too.
• Applies to most of the Elm Street series. Nancy, Lisa, Kristen, Alice, Alice again, Maggie/Tracy, Heather Langenkamp (the actual actress who played Nancy), and Laurie. Part 2 is a partial subversion. Jesse is the only male protagonist of the series, and the one Freddy targets throughout the movie, making Lisa's role as Final Girl very limited. Lisa doesn't so much kill Freddy as drive him out of his possessed victim Jessie, who also survives in a rare case of Final Boy.
• The Prowler with Pam, who has all the qualities and also inverts the Slashers Prefer Blondes convention.
• In Rovdyr, the blonde-haired Camilla is the only one of the protagonists to walk out of the woods; having killed all of the hunters singlehanded. (She is probably not a virgin, though.)
• In Scream (1996), the main character has sex (with the killer!), but still maintains her final girl status throughout the entire film franchise. Subverted somewhat as Gale, Dewey, and Randy survive the events of the first film as well.
• Spirit Camp demonstrates an unusual zig-zagging use of the trope. While playing it straight, this film has a Final Girl with vices that would normally signal sure death for a character in a slasher film. For instance, she's a juvenile delinquent who smokes and she is the only character other than the opening victim who is seen topless.
• StageFright -Aquarius- with Alicia, an unassuming actress who must demonstrate a bit of resourcefulness after a mass murderer slices and dices his way through the rest of her theatre production staff.
• Tenebre with Anne. The film does not initially follow her as the main protagonist, but there does come a point where she becomes the only person left for the audience to identify with and she ends up being the last one left to take down the killer, albeit accidentally.
• Terror Train with Alana, as made clear by the fact that Jamie Lee Curtis was playing her. However, she's not completely pure or innocent either, given that she had a part in a prank that sent the killer over the edge.
• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre films tend to have a final girl who is forced to endure a hellish ordeal before escaping the psychotic family through any means necessary. This is especially true with the first two films with Sally, who manages to escape with a bit of luck after a grueling chase, and Stretch, who has to use a chainsaw to fight off one of her captors. It's upheld in later installments, as well — Michelle, Jenny, Erin, and Heather.
  • The series has also been known to subvert this, especially if the film is a prequel: Chrissie and Lizzy weren't so successful in escaping.
• Tourist Trap's final girl is purer than the white snow. In the Rifftrax version, the guys even jokingly call her Amish.
• Urban Legend and Urban Legends: Final Cut have Natalie and Amy (respectively), but there are also other survivors in both films.
• Valentine with Kate, who was left for last because she was the only one who was not outright cruel to the killer when they were younger.
• Hannah in Varsity Blood. Brunette, virgin, with a troubled home life and tragic back story, and the most recent addition to the cheer squad, it was obvious she obvious from the start of the film that she would be the one to survive. Her love interest Jeff also survives, but he is unconscious at the point where she kills the slasher.
• Venom (2005) with Eden, who has all the qualities and is the only one to escape the killer.
• In You Might Be the Killer, this trope is discussed in detail. Chuck explains to the counselors that the purest and most innocent girl will probably kill the killer and be the sole survivor in the end, and pegs Jaime as the most likely candidate. Imani tries to exploit this by killing Jaime so she can be the final girl instead, but fails; Jaime is indeed the only counselor to make it out alive.
• You're Next: Erin could be considered a Deconstructive Parody of one. While at first she appears to be a normal variety, it quickly turns out that she is not only an Action Survivor, but also came from a Crazy Survivalist background. It reaches the point where the remaining masked killers are scared of her. It's also heavily implied that she gets arrested after the events of the movie for the people she killed.

    Films — Live-Action (Other)

• Aftershock does this on the straight and narrow...until a last-minute subversion shows up in the form of a tsunami.
• Alien:
  • Alien does this with Ripley. And it should be noted that every role in the film was written as gender neutral (which is probably why everyone just used their last names for the whole film), so it could have easily been a Final Guy instead.
  • It's a common misconception that all of the subsequent Alien movies followed suit; in reality, there were other survivors in the second and fourth movies, and Ripley actually dies in the third.
  • AVP: Alien vs. Predator: Everyone but Alexa Woods are killed, leaving her alone with the last remaining aliens and the last predator; ultimately she is left to fight the Queen alongside the last predator who is slowly dying from his wounds. She's also the rare non-white Final Girl; her actress Sanaa Lathan is African-American.
  • Prometheus: Shaw, sort of: David also survives of a fashion, although in a state of Bishop-like discombobulation thanks to an Engineer.
  • Alien: Covenant looks like it will follow suit in series tradition, with Daniels taking this role alongside the other survivors, until the ending implies a subversion: "Walter" is actually David, who plans on using the people on board as further Xenomorph breeding fodder, so the "finality" of Daniels likely won't last.
• Played straight in Animal where Mandy outlives the others and runs over monster with car, effectively escaping with her life.
• Kate Ward in Army of the Dead is the only member of the Caper Crew who isn't in it for the money, having joined her father's team in order to get into the Las Vegas quarantine zone and rescue somebody. At the end, she's also one of only two survivors out of the main cast, with the other one, Vanderohe, being a Zombie Infectee about to start a new outbreak in Mexico.
• Played straight in the official ending of Autopsy from the third set of After Dark Horrorfest. The Final Girl manages to escape the insane doctor and nurse who had killed all of her friends. It is, however, subverted in the alternate ending where instead of escaping or being killed, she is strapped to a bed with all her organs removed but still functioning to keep the doctor's ailing wife alive.
• Upheld in Black Water. After the men in her group get killed and her sister gets terribly injured, Lee is the only person left to fight off the crocodile. She kills the croc, but she returns to find her older sister's lifeless body, thereby making Lee the sole survivor.
• Bunni: Paige is the only survivor of the killer's rampage, and is shown in the middle of the end credits to now be a single mother raising Chris' son. Then Chris shows up to take him back.
• Sue in Carrie (1976) is an imperfect example. While she is the only major character who survives the film, she's also best friends with the villainous Alpha Bitch Chris, and she never actually faces the killer after everyone dies. However, she had genuinely good intentions in asking her boyfriend to take Carrie to prom to make up for how she and her friends humiliated her in the showers, and it's hard to forget about the dream sequence at the end that shows Carrie grabbing Sue's arm in an infamous jump scare. It succeeds at showing how traumatized Sue is left by what happened.
  • Sue is a more conventional example in the original book and in the 2013 remake, where she does indeed confront Carrie at the end, triggering Carrie's Heel Realization before she dies.
  • Gender-flipped in the sequel, The Rage: Carrie 2. Rachel's love interest Jesse is the only survivor, and he's also left spooked by what's happened. Like Sue, Jesse is the Token Good Teammate of the antagonists, in this case a high school football team who treat their female classmates as "points" to score in a game they have going, which led to Rachel's best friend killing herself when she found out.
• Crimson Peak is Gothic Horror rather than a straight Slasher Movie, though the heroine Edith Cushing still has some aspects of this trope by the end. She's the last of Thomas' wives and the only one who survives]]; she also nearly single-handedly takes out Lucille following a deadly cat-and-mouse chase around the mansion. She's also intelligent and one of the film's more wholesome characters...though interestingly enough, she's not virgin by the end. In fact, she slept with Thomas, Lucille's accomplice.
• Deadly Detention: Lexie is the one who survives to the end of the film. Subverted in the end, as Ms. Presley reveals the others are still alive too.
• Jeryline is the last character left alive to confront the collector in Demon Knight. She eventually defeats him and lives happily ever after, according to the Crypt Keeper.
• A good example of a Final Boy would be Cooper from Dog Soldiers. An early scene seems to demonstrate that he has a strong moral code, and he takes on leadership when his troop gets attacked by vicious werewolves. And, in the end, he is the only survivor left to take down one particular werewolf that has an personal ax to grind against him.
• The Evil Dead series has a Final Guy, but otherwise plays it straight in spirit. The main character's name, Ashley (or more commonly "Ash"), is usually reserved for women nowadays. The 2013 remake fits this trope to a T, with Ash being gender-flipped into Mia, and her brother David (initially presented as the Ash analogue) being a Decoy Protagonist.
• Epps from Ghost Ship outlives her male crewmembers and becomes the sole survivor.
• In Ginger Snaps, Ginger's quieter, plainer sister Brigitte is the last major character left alive after Ginger kills Sam, with Brigitte forced to kill the werewolf that was once her sister and best friend. The sequel Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed, however, retroactively subverts this by revealing that the monkshood Brigitte injected herself with to stop her own infection and transformation only slowed the process, with her now relying on ever-greater doses of the stuff to stave it off. The film ends with Brigitte, without access to monkshood, fully turning into a werewolf and kept captive by the Ghost to unleash on her enemies.
• Gravity follows some of the conventions, even outside a slasher context. The main character is rather tomboyish, has a gender-bending name, and must demonstrate resourcefulness just to survive. It is important to note that the film is a pure survival thriller with no real antagonist, though.
• The Grudge:
  • While the franchise tends to play this straight, it also has a habit of killing its survivor right away in the next sequel so no one ever truly escapes the curse. Karen survives the first film, and Lisa makes it through the third along with her little sister.
  • The second is more of a subversion, seeing as the film follows two different storylines and the expected final girl of both (Aubrey and Allison) is dead by the end of the movie. Jake is a sole survivor in this film.
• The Hellraiser films tend to feature a young woman at odds with the Cenobites as all Hell breaks loose. Kirsty, Joey, Bobbi, Rimmer, Chelsea, and Emma. Deconstructed in Hellseeker in that original heroine Kirsty becomes Darker and Edgier in how she makes a deal with the Cenobites to kill five people (one being her husband, who conspired to have her killed for her family fortune) to save herself.
• House of 9 features a group of people being held captive in a house for a hefty prize to the eventual sole survivor. The winner of this prize is Lea, The Ingenue. She's so innocent that she was one of the very few who did not succumb to the temptation to kill for the prize money. Even in her final confrontation with a homicidal maniac, she attacks in self-defense and only kills him by accident.
• Ellen is the Sole Survivor of British werewolf horror film Howl. Everyone else is either killed or transformed into a werewolf.
• The Fangoria Frightfest film Hunger employs this with Jordan, who acts as the moral compass of a group of strangers who have been trapped together and forced to turn into cannibalistic savages in order to live. As if surviving that wasn't enough, she then has to outsmart the man who set up the experiment to begin with in order to escape.
• Trish from Jeepers Creepers fits into the Final Girl trope, as the only real other main character, her brother, is murdered and torn apart for his body parts.
• Anita "Needy" Lesnicki in Jennifer's Body is a unique example, in that she's friends (and possibly more) with the killer. While she ultimately defeats Jennifer, she gets locked up in a psychiatric hospital afterwards when Jennifer's mother walks in on her atop her daughter's body pulling a bloody box cutter out of her heart. Fortunately for Needy, she gained some of Jennifer's demonic powers after getting bitten during their fight, and proceeds to use them to break out and kill the Satanic rock band responsible for Jennifer's Demonic Possession.
• Sandy from Killjoy 3 is revealed to be a virgin and the last one left alive to take down Killjoy by laughing at him and reciting his real name. A deconstruction is hinted at the end when she's seen in an insane asylum still laughing and suspected by authorities of committing the murders herself.
• Played pretty straight with Simona and the child-killer in the Italian L'immoralita,` except that the final girl is eleven-and-a-half...and no longer a virgin...and she's the one who did all the on-screen killing, except for her father whose suicide helped touch off her Roaring Rampage of Revenge. All the child-killer's victims had already been dispatched before the film began, and he's shown burying the last of them in a shallow grave at the beginning. Let's just say that what accounts for her survival in the sorting algorithm is that everyone else in the film was demonstrably even worse.
• A group of climbers in A Lonely Place to Die rescue a kidnapped child in the mountains and are then subsequently picked off one by one by the captors until one girl remains. It is she who must take down the bad guys to rescue the child.
• Mindhunters is an action thriller, but follows many slasher movie tropes. Sara is meeker and more delicate than the rest of the protagonists - who all have their own Achilles Heels. Theirs are based on vices, while Sara's comes from a trauma in her past. Nicole, the only other girl in the film, is sleeping with one of the others while Sara is celibate. The film does have Gabe survive as well though.
• Barbara becomes this in the Night of the Living Dead remakes. In the 1968 original, Barbra, having just seen her brother get killed, was a catatonic mess for much of the movie and presumably dies towards the end when she's captured by the zombies. In the 1990 remake, the character responds to the living dead by becoming an Action Girl and ultimately survives.
• In Nine Dead, Kelley Murphy was the sole surviving female of the movie. In the end, she shot the masked shooter, leaving 9 people dead in the room. Subverted in that Kelley murdered the two men who should have survived with her to stay out of jail.
• Nobody Sleeps In The Woods Tonight: Of the six hikers who make up the main cast, only Zosia survives to the end.
• The Serbian horror film Nymph has three female characters - Kelly, Lucy and Yasmin. Lucy is the Hard-Drinking Party Girl, while Yasmin is the bitchy 'other woman' to Lucy's ex-boyfriend. Kelly naturally is more responsible and demure, and she survives to the end. It's a Bolivian Army Ending of sorts though.
• We see a group of young adults communicating with creepy spirits in The Ouija Experiment. Unfortunately for them, one of the ghosts ends up being a murderer and starts picking off the group one-by-one when they fail to say goodbye to the spirit before leaving the Ouija board. By the end, the only survivor is female. While it's played straight in the 2015 sequel, that's not to say that they don't play around with this a little bit. The shy, timid girl we expect to survive dies near the end, while the more outgoing one who does end up living makes it a point to not make the same mistakes girls tend to make in horror films.
• Psycho is considered to be an Ur-Example of a Slasher film. While not a perfect fit of the Final Girl that has become conventional in later years, Lila can be considered a prototype since she is the one who investigates her sister's disappearance and survives her confrontation with the killer, albeit not by her own doing.
• In The Pyramid, the group falls victim to the traps and creatures in the pyramid until we get a sole surviving female archaeologist, who manages to escape the clutches of the final monster and almost escapes the pyramid. Though she survives to the final frame of the film, odds aren't great that she survives for that much longer.
• The Redwood Massacre: The main cast gets picked off over the course of the movie by a Sackhead Slasher until only Pamela remains.
• Resident Evil (2002) plays it straight. Before she became a badass in the sequels, Alice was the only one able to escape the Hive without getting killed or infected by zombies.
• In Shark Week, Tiburon transports eight captives to his island compound. One or more die at each Shark Pool in the Death Course, until only Intrepid Reporter Reagan is left as the Final Girl to take on The Dragon Elena and the Big Bad Tiburon.
• In the 2001 TV movie She-Creature, a mermaid kills an entire crew of men out at sea, letting the only female on the ship live.
• Shock Waves with Rose. Oddly enough, the film established her as the Final Girl and Sole Survivor right from the getgo. The film basically narrates her survival story of a murder spree after being shipwrecked out at sea. While she was able to escape, the remaining members of the group she was with were not as lucky.
• Splinter has Polly, a Tomboy and borderline Action Girl who survives the parasite alongside her boyfriend Seth. She was introduced as an Outdoorsy Gal and morphs into an Action Girlfriend by the end.
• Suspiria (1977) is a colorful example of the trope at play. An all-American good girl attends a ballet school in Germany, where she's forced to defeat an ancient witch in order to survive the ordeal.
• Sarah Connor in The Terminator is an interesting combination of Final Girl and Damsel in Distress. For much of the film, she's dragged along by her protector, Reese. By the end, Reese is dead, and she, alone, unarmed and wounded, is forced to take the monster down herself. In the sequel, she's more of an Action Girl and isn't the only survivor. The first film also evokes the trope in other ways - she has a best friend who's killed while having sex with her boyfriend.
• The Thing (2011) prequel. Kate survives her encounter with the alien, but she's effectively left stranded in Antarctica so it's anybody's guess if she truly survives or not.
• Another possible candidate for the Ur-Example of the Slasher Movie would be the 1932 film Thirteen Women , which predates the classic proto-slashers Psycho and Peeping Tom (both 1960) by twenty-eight years. Thirteen Women codifies the genre as follows: 1) all the deaths are brought about (even if indirectly) by one individual; 2) the film sets up the victims and then kills them off one by one; 3) all the major characters die, except for a lone, innocent Final Girl.
• In Turbulence, a serial killer gets loose aboard a specially chartered 747, putting everyone in the cargo hold except for the cute, intrepid flight attendant who has to take him down. Slight variant on this trope in that, after she dispatches the serial killer, she still has to land the plane.
• A Rare Male Example occurs in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the protagonist Dave Bowman is the last crew member left alive to shut down HAL 9000.
• Ten: Murder Island's Nice Girl Meg Pritchard is this to a T. You pretty much pick up on this right off the bat, the second she steps off the boat. She's the last girl left at the end of the movie, and she's the only character to have a genuine showdown with the killer and win.
• Triassic World: Diana is the only person to survive a building full of genetically engineered dinosaurs.
• Zombeavers memorably subverts audience expectations. Jen is the cautious, level-headed girl who doesn't have sex (during the movie), and dresses the most conservatively. She ends up the first to get zombified. It's actually Zoe, the one who has loud, enthusiastic sex on screen and gets her tits out at the start of the movie, who survives to the end.

    Literature

• Clown in a Cornfield: Downplayed; Quinn is the main character and has all of the hallmarks including Gender-Blender Name. After she takes a level in badass, she manages to survive and kill multiple Frendos, but her father and both of the leading men surive. Though, Cole only survives because of her efforts.
• Devolution: The protagonist, Kate, is the last survivor of her group, and while she is initially naive and conflict-averse, she takes a level in badass and is the most virtuous member of her group. She may die shortly afterwards, but it's left ambiguous.

    Live-Action TV

• In murder mystery Harper's Island, protagonist Abby Mills is female, beautiful, clean-living, and is strongly implied to be a virgin. She has a Dark and Troubled Past and only picks up the Idiot Ball towards the last few episodes. Also, she is the object of affection of one of the murderers. She survives along with her love interest (and a little girl with Improbable Infant Survival and by extension the girl's mother), and is the one to kill the murderer.
• Gender Inverted in Psychoville where at the end of Series Two, Mr. Jelly is the lone survivor who calls out Grace for the murders. David Sowerbutts also survives, but is not present at Andrews Nanotech.
• Emma Duval in the TV adaptation of Scream. While Sidney Prescott, her counterpart from the films, is listed below as a deconstruction, Emma is a straighter example, though not perfectly so. In the first season, she's one of several characters who survives, and most of the credit for defeating the killer goes to Audrey, a bicurious punk chick who seems to have been working with the killer all along. Season two shows that Emma has been traumatized by the experience, her mental state not at all helped by a new killer running around.
  • The third season, Scream: Resurrection, plays with this. A boy named Deion Elliot is actually Ghostface's primary target, his girlfriend, Liv Reynolds, being a supporting role. Ironically, she and Deion are not the ones who defeats the killer despite Ghostface outright invoking Liv as the Final Girl, as another supporting girl is the one who finishes the job.

    Roleplay

• A Journal Roleplay called Battle Experiment Program N threw characters from various series into a Battle Royale-style program. The first group included characters like Lelouch, Peter Parker, House, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Akuma, Dexter and Verbal Kint. The last one standing from the main group at the end of the plot? Ichigo from Katamari Damacy.

    Video Games

• From Resident Evil, we have Rebecca Chambers, the sole official survivor of her team from Resident Evil 0.
• A rare non horror version of this is Asura's Wrath in the form of Mithra.
• A definite possibility for Jennifer in Clock Tower. Indeed, the sequel confirms her to be the sole survivor. Played with in the sequel as there are two possible Final Girls: Jennifer and her guardian Helen. Jennifer can survive again, but none of the endings depict her as the sole survivor this time. Can be played straight if the player chooses to play as Helen instead, as Jennifer can die in one of the endings, making Helen the Final Girl. Both can also survive together or be killed, depending on choices made.
• Can easily happen in Friday the 13th: The Game if a female character is the only survivor, but invoked as a game mechanic: at least one female counselor has to still be alive to kill Jason, as the process of doing so requires one to imitate Ginny's (the Final Girl of Part 2) Dead Person Impersonation to leave him vulnerable for Tommy Jarvis to land the killing blow and he's completely impossible to kill otherwise. Counselor Jenny Myers is also based off this trope and is an Expy of final girl Chris Higgins from Friday the 13th Part III. Jenny is still able to be killed by Jason though. There's also an achievement called "The (Unlikely) Final Girl" for being the sole survivor of a match while playing hot chick party girl Tiffany.
• Amanda Ripley is the Sole Survivor in Alien: Isolation. Her mother would be proud.
• In Maze 5: Sinister Play Sophie is the only survivor after Reality Warper twins place her and her best friends JP and Dario in situations based on the horror stories they made up to tell each other during the camping trip which never took place.

Subversions, aversions and parodies

    Anime & Manga

• As of the final page of Gyo, both the protagonist's girlfriend and his uncle's assistant both died (girlfriend) and are likely to die later on if not already dead (assistant).
• Danganronpa 3: Chronologically, Soshun Murasame is a subversion. We see that he's the most plain-looking of the Student Council, the one who believes in his friends' ability to not cave in to murder, and he never kills anyone during the Tragedy, nor is he targeted. Perfect example of a Final Boy...until he gets extreme PTSD, fakes catonia, and gets choked out by one of the Tragedy's perpetrators once they find out he still remembers in the very book he debuts in.
• Exploited, subverted, and averted by the oneshot manga Final Girl, where the protagonist (who had just read a list of common horror movie tropes) wakes up inside the body of Summer, the "slutty blonde girl" who usually dies first. Summer is Genre Savvy, and sticks close by Lucy, the designated final girl, avoiding common tropes like going to the Creepy Basement alone, Death by Sex, showering alone, and being Impaled with Extreme Prejudice on exposed nails. In the end, both she and Lucy survive (and possibly the guys in the group too).
• Parodied in an episode of Strike Witches. An ancient fertility idol is found that creates a Zombie Apocalypse that results in its victims boobs growing to enormous size. Nice Girl Lynette Bishop ends up being the final girl, and destroys the idol with her Anti-Tank Rifle.

    Comics

• In one Survival Geeks arc, the Geeks end up in a slasher universe. Sam and Clive are rescued by a group of Final Girls, who call themselves the Final Girls...but they want to cast Sam and Clive as the slut and the nerd to lure out the killers. The heroes turn their traps back on them, and Sam explains at length how the slut-shaming inherent in the standard Final Girl formula really isn't feminist.

    Films — Live-Action

• Famously toyed with in the twist ending of Sleepaway Camp during the early 80's when the trope was especially popular in slasher films. The character set up to be the final girl, Angela, is revealed not only as the killer but also as having been the young, seemingly male child who was thought to be dead the whole film, as it was actually her sister that had died.
  • The sequels, however, play this straight this with Molly and Marcia.
• Subverted in the original Prom Night (1980). With Jamie Lee Curtis playing her, the protagonist practically had "Final Girl" written all over her. However, when the killer is revealed, we find out that she was not a target all along. It is also outright averted with the killer's actual victims: 3 girls and 1 guy. All three girls die, the guy survives.
  • It's played pretty straight in Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil, until the virginal Final Girl takes down the killer and escapes. The ending suggests a subversion in that Meagan may now be possessed by the evil of the dying killer.
• Gradually subverted in Just Before Dawn. Connie starts out as an ordinary Final Girl candidate with conservative looks and lack of sex appeal. As the movie progresses, her clothing gets sexier and she's wearing more makeup. Rather than relying on masculine qualities to survive as most final girls had before her, Connie finds strength in herself by getting in touch with her feminine side to take down the killer at the end. The trope is downplayed in boyfriend Warren's survival, as well.
• Shows up in Joe D'Amato's early 80's horrors, though somewhat obscurely:
  • When considering that the film involves a group of middle-aged adults getting killed off one by one rather than the usual group of teenagers, Julie fits the bill pretty well in The Anthropophagus Beast. While she does smoke in one scene, Julie also turns down the advances of a fellow tourist who expressed a desire to be with her so she is sexually unavailable as well. The Final Girl notion is ultimately subverted in the final confrontation when a previous victim turns up to be alive and gives a deadly blow to the killer, saving Julie in the process.
  • In Absurd, the last female to confront the killer is Katia, whose innocence may be justified by the fact that she was bedridden for most of the film. Katia's not really the typical leading protagonist for most of the film until the killer invades her home, when she fulfills Final Girl duties by taking up a decorative axe and chopping his head off.
• Subverted in Curtains (1983). After all actresses but one coveting the role of Audra are murdered, we're left with one plucky actress (Patti) who easily fits the final girl mold. A use of an Impending Doom P.O.V. makes us think Samantha truly was the killer and not just a red herring. However, in the end, Samantha only killed the director and his mistress, but it was not-so-innocent Patti who killed her rivals for the role.
• Jess from Triangle averts this. She's technically the Final Girl, and she's also the killer. But it's much more complicated than that.
• The movie Shrooms gleefully takes aim at the whole concept of the Final Girl. At the end, the Final Girl discovers that she herself is the killer, having been driven insane by the titular Shrooms.
• Subverted in Inside. Sarah starts out as a Damsel in Distress, but she eventually graduates to Action Survivor status despite being pregnant and thisclose to giving birth. While she does a serious number on her attacker, it wasn't enough since Sarah still gets killed at the end.
• Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer survives the whole movie, but is meant to be a subversion of the typical opening victim who dies before the title. While the good and wholesome activist girl we're meant to initially believe is the final girl turns out to be the first victim.
• In High Tension, a lesbian spends most of the film trying to rescue the girl she likes from the hands of a slasher. It turns out that her alternate personality is actually the killer, having been driven murderously insane by her secret crush. Both the killer and the final girl survive.
• While Frontier(s) technically has two final girls, neither fit the wholesome image of the final girl (at least by association). Yasmine is pregnant member of a group of thieves, and Eva is a kind but obedient member of the cannibalistic family that's killed Yasmine's companions.
• Subverted in The Collector (2009). Arkin is an anti-hero ex-con who breaks into a house at the wrong time to steal a valuable gem in order to pay off his wife's debts. While the innocent family he was stealing from is killed off one by one, Arkin survives, but is captured. Not to mention being a final boy.
  • Played significantly straighter in the 2012 sequel with Elena, who is more of a Supporting Protagonist while Arkin is still the lead.
• The Final Destination series:
  • Final Destination 3, in which the makers explicitly went out of their way to kill the Final Girl. Whether the two people she saved live or die is left open in the theatrical version.
  • Final Destination follows this...until 2, which subverts it finally killing Clear.
• The girl who looks most likely to be the Final Girl in The Deadly Spawn dies in the last 20 minutes and is replaced by another girl who arrived shortly before two-thirds of the way through the film. The monster ends up being killed by the precocious little boy who was hiding in the basement where he was cornered by the monster earlier, figured out its weaknesses by observing it, and had enough know-how to construct a home-made bomb when he finally got free.
• The Cottage saw the Final Girl turn out to be so unpleasant and obnoxious that the technically-bad but not actually evil kidnappers who made up the other three heroes were much more sympathetic characters. Hilariously, she not only releases the monster but manages to get herself killed by said monster before any of the guys - it is probably not a good idea to mouth off to a psychotic 7-foot tall deformed cannibal when he is about to brain someone with a shovel.
• Cindy Campbell from the Scary Movie films is pretty much a sustained spoof of Final Girls.
  • The slasher film final girl spoof was done a few decades previously (and just as, if not more, effectively) in 1982's Pandemonium, with the character of Candy, who was not only a comedic take on the Final Girl, but also on Carrie.
• Subverted in Candyman. The main character studying urban myths for graduate school discovers the legend of the titular Candyman, who can be summoned when his name is said in the mirror five times. Needless to say, Candyman is indeed summoned during Helen's investigation and shows himself, framing Helen for murder as well as killing her best friend and her therapist. Helen dies saving the life of a baby at the end, but she herself becomes immortalized and is just as vengeful as the Candyman in that she kills her cheating husband when he unknowingly summons her after her death.
  • Played completely straight in the two sequels with Annie and Caroline, both of whom are descendants of the titular villain.
• Averted in The Ruins. Technically there is a Final Girl but she is not the main character, and is not the most intelligent or resourceful one amongst the victims. Her boyfriend is the wise and resourceful leader, but he sacrifices himself to save her. Ultimately, the end implies that she is doomed anyway.
• Averted in The Descent. The cast of female spelunkers gets whittled down one by one, but ultimately the Final Girl crosses a Moral Event Horizon, losing audience sympathy. In the end, she seems to escape, but the scene cuts to reveal that it was just a fantasy and she's irrevocably trapped in the cave. Due to Executive Meddling, the Final Girl trope is upheld in the American version, and she escapes.
• Played straight in the original cut of Deep Blue Sea, but averted in the finished cut, because test audiences found the female lead to be obnoxious and self-centered. The Plucky Comic Relief survived in her place. It should be noted that in both a shark wrangler - halfway between Action Hero and Action Survivor - also lives.
• The slasher-satire Hack! puts the trope through the grinder. The girl so obviously the final girl ends up being an evil bitch involved in the killings, whereas the hunky leading male is revealed to be a virgin and ends up being a final boy.
• Hostel
  • Subverted in Hostel. The film's only surviving character is Paxton, who is not only male, but a heavy drinker and drug user who spends the first half of the film screwing anything with a pulse. By contrast, Josh, who dies earlier, is relatively innocent—although Josh's ambiguous sexuality may make him an example of Bury Your Gays.
  • Also subverted in Hostel Part II. Beth, the Final Girl who we've come to see as innocent and virginal, turns out to be just as ruthless and bloodthirsty as her captors. She brutally castrates her "hunter" and strikes a deal with Sasha, the club's ringleader. In contrast Lorna, the untouched Cloudcuckoolander, is the first to die and was selected specifically because she was a virgin. Her "hunter" had a Countess Bathory fetish.
• Saw
  • Subverted the hell out of in Saw and Saw II regarding the character Amanda Young. In the first film, Amanda is the only one of Jigsaw's victims to get free of his traps, but she's not the typically innocent Final Girl (she had been addicted to heroin) and she agrees with the man that tried to kill her. In the second movie, the sweet, innocent-like (at least by Saw standards) blonde girl dies fairly early on. The final girl? Amanda again — and this time, she's revealed to be working with the killer.
  • In Saw VI, the only survivors of the Roulette Trap are, you guessed it, female. The film in general acts as a deconstruction, actually. The tests are designed to show who the main character, a manager at an insurance company, is more likely to save and he always deviates towards the women as would the audience in these kinds of scenarios, despite the men deserving it just as much or more than the women. This bias led to him denying insurance claims to men who were fitter and more likely to survive with the aid of medical care compared to women.
  • As for Saw 3D: The Final Chapter:
    • It has a Final Boy in Bobby Dagen.
    • Subverted with Jill Tuck. As the last female left alive after the death of Bobby Dagen's wife Joyce, Jill is ultimately dispatched by Detective Hoffman with the use of the reverse bear trap, and her death drives the film to its final twist reveal (see below).
    • Dr. Gordon is revealed to have escaped in the original Saw film and is now an accomplice to the late John Kramer, having put Detective Hoffman in the bathroom trap without a saw for killing Jill.
  • Jigsaw presents a subversion. Anna shows all the traits of a traditional final girl early on: she is a resourceful and intelligent Action Survivor who comes across as kind, compassionate, and level-headed in comparison to the other players. But most of this is an act. Having murdered her infant child for purely selfish reasons and then framed her husband for it, which got him sent to an insane asylum where he hanged himself, she is one of the vilest characters in the entire franchise, and she eventually suffers a well-deserved Karmic Death. This leaves Ryan, the Jerk with a Heart of Gold, as the last man standing... trapped in a room with Anna's corpse, where he too eventually dies. The film then reveals that Logan, the first victim of the Barn, both survived his "death" — making him the Final Boy and sole survivor of the Barn — and later became the new Jigsaw.]]
• Though, as mentioned above, the Friday the 13th film series usually plays it straight, special mention should be made for the character of Tommy Jarvis, who manages to make it safely through installments IV, V and VI as the Tagalong Kid, Troubled, but Cute, and Zen Survivor respectively.
  • The 2009 remake has a Final Girl, but also has a decoy Final Girl in Jenna who is quite possibly on screen for more time than actual Final Girl Whitney until her sudden death near the end. Additionally, there is another survivor in Whitney's brother Clay.
  • Original Final Girl Alice was shown smoking marijuana in one scene, Ginny from Part 2 has offscreen sex and kicks back a few beers, and Jessica of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday has a kid.
    • Speaking of Jason Goes to Hell, its arguable Stephen is more the main protagonist than Jessica.
  • The seventh and eighth installments, The New Blood and Jason Takes Manhattan respectively, have the male love interest survive alongside the Final Girl character for the entire final act.
• Inverted big time in 2008 horror movie Credo. It's all typical with our sweet and innocent main character being the last one out of our group to die...That is, until it's revealed most of the movie was all just a hallucination brought on by an evil demon to get her to hang herself. The other college twats are just fine, playing with a Ouija Board downstairs.
• In April Fools' Day, the cast are whittled down to two and the killer is revealed to be the secret and crazy twin sister of one of the characters. The boy gets locked in a closet while the Final Girl is left to confront the crazy twin. She backs into a room, and there are all the "dead," people, behaving calmly and casually as though nothing had happened. After about thirty seconds of her freaking out, they start laughing and explain that that the whole thing was both a elaborate practical joke and a test for a "Murder Mystery," inn, there is no twin. Then they have a party. Even when you first think it's a slasher, the first female victim is the one most likely to be a Final Girl - the bookish Shrinking Violet. The actual Final Girl is shown in bed with her boyfriend and they nearly have sex in the boathouse the next day.
• In Feast the character identified as "Heroine" (Occupation: Wear tank-tops, tote shotgun, save day) is accidentally shot, knocked out a second-floor window and swarmed by monsters about halfway through the movie. We then get the real Final Girl, Tuffy, who is now credited as "Heroine #2".
• In Pitch Black, the woman who seems most likely to be the final girl is killed off only a few minutes before the movie ends, though the fact that she tries to sacrifice the passengers of the ship she was piloting early in the film hints at her redemptive death. The only characters to survive the movie are ironically the ones most likely to die in another slasher flick: the pacifist black man; the teenage girl who pretended to be a ''boy'' for the first half of the movie and has just reached sexual maturity; and Riddick, the Villain Protagonist, who survives due to Executive Meddling that turned out to be very profitable. This approach is arguably what sets the film apart and part of why the sequel fails to deliver the same emotional punch. Pitch Black is a survival movie in space that subverts character expectations; The Chronicles of Riddick tries more to be straightforward Star Wars.
• In the film Crazy Eights, the character Beth is built up to be the final girl, only to become the second victim when a horrible monster visits her and persuades her to rip out her own jaw to remove her guilt. The final girl is actually Jennifer, but she prepares to kill herself as the movie abruptly ends.
• Also subverted in The Dark, where Maria Bello's character Adèle fights through the Welsh interpretation of the afterlife to save her daughter, only to unintentionally kill herself and switch places with her. And depending on how you interpret the ending, she may not have even succeeded in saving her daughter.
• In the gay slasher Hellbent, there's a Final Guy and his Love Interest.
• The Evil Dead (1981) subverted the trope by having the sweet virginal girl raped by trees and then possessed. Her brother, Ashely J. Williams, becomes the Final Guy, though even he gets possessed at the end. In the sequels, he reverts back to humanity and becomes the boomstick-toting, chainsaw-handed badass we know and love.
• Used one way or another in every Cube movie:
  • Cube features a cute, innocent girl in the cast of prisoners, but it's the the mentally retarded boy who survives, apparently by being even more innocent.
  • Cube 2: Hypercube appears to play it straight, with a wholesome blonde surviving to the end but not much further — she's revealed to be a government operative who, after her de-briefing, is executed to keep the secrets secure.
  • Cube Zero plays it straight with Raines.
• Averted in House of 1000 Corpses, where the final girl escapes the killer family, but the driver of the car that gives her a lift back to town is the Monster Clown Captain Spaulding, who turns out to be part of the killer family.
  • Very cleverly subverted in the sequel The Devil's Rejects. By the end, Baby becomes a sort of final girl when Sheriff Wydell is chasing her. Very interesting seeing the villain become the final girl.
• Averted in Perfume, where the killer saves the beautiful Laura Richis as his final victim to complete his perfect perfume. Laura's wealthy father uses all his power to protect her, but the killer walks right through all his defenses, right into Laura's bedroom, and kills her.
• Subverted in Grizzly Park, where Bebe, the ditzy, sweet girl, survives most of the movie, but it turns out it was all an act, and she is really a mean, spoiled bitch. Ranger Bob ends up sending the bear to kill her once he finds out.
• Identity subverts this in multiple ways: the character set up as the Final Girl was a prostitute, thus subverting the virgin-and-pure side of things. We then find out one of the other characters believed to have died was actually still alive. Said character, who was actually the killer, returns to finish the Final Girl off. Furthermore, the Final Girl, the character that killed her and all of the other characters who didn't make it were actually the multiple personalities of a serial killer, and the whole thing was being played out in his mind. The "killing" of the characters was his real-life attempt to integrate. So, when you get down to it, there's really no Final Girl at all, and no person at the motel ever really died.
• In After Dark Horrorfest 4's movie Kill Theory subverts this trope when the expected final girl stabs her boyfriend in the stomach, breaking the rules and ends up being killed by the actual final girl who she had shot earlier.
• The Wishmaster series is prone to playing with this. While played completely straight in the original, the sequel's Final Girl was a goth burglar who actually kills a guy in the opening, during a heist gone wrong, though she later redeems herself, in order to beat the Djinn. The protagonist of Wishmaster 4: The Prophecy Fulfilled is also shown having sex at least twice, including with the Djinn.
• Seemingly subverted in the original [REC] (2007) film (and its American remake), in that its heavily implied that Angela dies after being pulled into the darkness.
  • The 2009 sequel to the Spanish film subverts it further - Angela actually survived the first film's events, but it's revealed that she's now possessed after killing the other survivors in the apartment complex.
  • The 2014 sequel finally plays things straight, with Angela being one of the two only survivors when the virus outbreaks on a ship.
• Thoroughly subverted in Trick 'r Treat with Laurie, whose name is a reference to Jamie Lee Curtis' Final Girl in the Halloween films, a cute virgin dressed as Little Red Riding Hood who is surrounded by loud, promiscuous friends who want to get her laid. However, none of them were in danger at all. It turns out that they're a pack of bloodthirsty werewolves, and that all along they were actually looking for a man so that Laurie could eat him. Though her eventual victim is actually a serial killer, and she does technically fight him off.
• Set up in Damnatus, where Nira is the last of the party left alive (with the hero even commenting that if anyone's going to make it out alive, it will be her), but when the daemon catches up with her she dies just like the rest.
• Subverted to hell and back in All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. The innocent and pure Mandy appears to be this at first, but then comes The Reveal that, the whole time, she was working with the killer, with whom she had entered a Suicide Pact. It's then given a Double Subversion when Mandy backs out of the pact at the last minute, allowing her to be the Final Girl after all.
• Inverted with Student Bodies, in which everyone is suspicious that the obvious Final Girl is really the killer.
• The Scream series, with its exploration and parody of '80s slashers, doesn't take long to go after this trope.
  • The main heroine, Sidney Prescott, evolves from a straight Final Girl into a deconstruction of such. Even in the first film, she snaps at reporters trying to exploit her trauma (there's a quick scene of a shameless tabloid journalist, played by Linda Blair, asking her "how does it feel to be almost brutally murdered?"), she snarks at the stupid mistakes that Slasher Movie victims often make (though to be fair, this is a series where everybody does that), and she breaks the "virgins don't die" rule by having sex — with the killer! — and still surviving. In the second film, her life has grown to be defined by her status as the survivor of a massacre, and while this has brought her fame, fortune, and movie deals, it also means that she is constantly having to look over her shoulder for the next wannabe Ghostface. And then she has to repeat the entire experience, watching her friends getting slaughtered all over again — by the pissed-off mother of the last killer, at that, looking for payback against Sidney for killing her son.
  • By the third film, she's living in a self-imposed isolation bordering on Crazy Survivalist levels, working from home under a fake name. She suffers recurring nightmares about Ghostface killing her, and when she visits the set of Stab 3, a recreation of her old home in Woodsboro, she has a mental breakdown as her memories of the first movie come flooding back. The passage of time and the settling of her family drama (and, presumably, years of therapy) mean that she's gotten better by the fourth film, where she's written a bestselling autobiography about her life and having the inner strength to move on from the nightmares she's experienced. She even returns to Woodsboro as part of the healing process...and then her cousin Jill (see below) turns out to be a murderous sociopath. For a real Final Girl, the horror wouldn't end when the credits roll — she'd have to live with the experience forever, and may God help her if she's cast in the sequels. No matter what she does, no matter how much time passes, poor Sidney Prescott will always be haunted by the most traumatic moment of her life.
  • Gale Weathers is also a subversion. Unlike Sidney, she doesn't even have a facade of purity and kindness — she's an abrasive, unscrupulous tabloid hack who's covering the killings simply to make money and promote her book. However, she too survives and even helps defeat the killer, and gets some major Character Development in the sequels revealing a much softer side to her personality.
  • Randy Meeks, the film's resident Meta Guy, discusses this trope when laying out his rules for surviving a horror movie. The first two points on his list are "never have sex" and "never drink or use drugs" ^note The third one is "never say 'I'll be right back'.", citing Laurie Strode from Halloween (1978) as an example of the sort of character who typically survives. He credits his own survival in the first film to him still being a virgin, and in the third film, he appears posthumously (having been killed off in the second film) in a Video Will he recorded shortly after he lost his virginity, claiming that, if anybody is watching the video, he's probably dead-on account of Death by Sex.
  • In Scream 3, Angelina Tyler appears to be this trope at first glance, as she's The Ingenue who's playing Sidney in Stab 3. She turns out to be a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, however, revealing that she'd employed the Casting Couch to get the part — and promptly suffers one of the fastest-acting examples of Death by Sex ever. An earlier version of the script also had her as the main killer's accomplice, a further subversion.
  • Scream 4 has a group of film junkies debating this trope, with one of them remarking about how the "rules" of horror have changed since The '90s, such that old cliches (including this one) have been turned on their heads. Within the film itself, the character of Jill Roberts, initially presented as the Final Girl, takes this trope and puts it through the ringer. She was the killer all along, an Attention Whore who planned to frame her boyfriend Trevor for the murders so that she could come out looking like the Final Girl and ride the publicity to book deals and talk show appearances, following in the footsteps of her older cousin Sidney.
• Invoked and subverted in The Cabin in the Woods. When the monsters ritually slaughter the college kids, Dana, the victim labelled as "The Virgin", can't be killed unless all the others are killed first, and, as long as she's suffered a lot and is the last one left standing, she can be allowed to escape the monsters without ruining the ritual. However, it turns out that Marty, one of the earlier male victims, wasn't as dead as everyone thought, ^{Explanation...} His routine smoking made him immune to the mind-altering drugs laced in the air and the zombie that pulled him underground was dismembered and left growling on the ground as a limbless torso, implying he overpowered it. and comes back to save Dana and kick some monster ass...and end the world in the process by sabotaging the ritual. Further subverted by the fact that Dana, who the technicians had set up to become "The Virgin", was in fact screwing her professor in order to pass the class, while Jules, who had been picked as "The Whore", was the smarter and more wholesome of the two before she was drugged.
• In From Hell, Mary Kelly is played pretty straight as a Final Girl as she escapes Jack the Ripper and survives after all her friends have been picked off and despite the fact that the real life Mary Kelly didn't. However, she's also a subversion in that she doesn't kill the Ripper, just manages to avoid him and, what with being a prostitute, isn't the traditionally wholesome girl either.
• Since there are no women among the survivors (or even passengers) of the crashed plane in The Grey, it's pretty obvious that there will not be a final girl. Liam Neeson's character becomes the last survivor before meeting a Bolivian Army Ending (he does manage to kill the alpha wolf before dying, though).
• Death Proof: Quentin Tarantino himself noted during interviews about this film that he is a major fan of Carol Clover's writings on slasher films. As such, part of the thrill of the first half involves how he consciously plays with this trope in particular: Arlene/Butterfly is set up from the beginning to be a played-straight Final Girl in a standard slasher—especially how she's portrayed as rather "apart" from her friends, and not as open in her sexuality. Alas, she ends up dying with the others—which, as Quentin anticipated, is a big shock to the audience. Not to mention that the first group of girls are slightly repressed with their sexuality, whereas the second are more open about it - and survive.
• Deconstructed in the "Tuesday the 17th" segment from V/H/S, a homage to the slasher genre. The final girl turns out to be far more of a villain than the actual supernatural killer (who is more akin to a force of nature). She was the final girl of a previous group who witnessed her friends get slaughtered by the Glitch. When no one believed her about the Glitch she went insane from the trauma and desperation to be believed, eventually luring another group of teens to the stereotypical haunted forest to use them as bait for the Glitch so she could try to capture it. In the end her attempt fails miserably and the Glitch effortlessly mutilates her.
• In Evidence, there are two surviving girls...who then turn out to actually be the killers, who took turns taking on the role of the masked bad guy to throw everyone off.
• Usually averted or subverted one way or another in the Wrong Turn films. Earlier in the franchise, the last girl left standing was usually accompanied by a guy who helped her in the final confrontation.
  • The closest girl to upholding the shy-and-conservative standard would be Mara in the second film, whose death halfway through into the film not only blows this trope out of the water but also holds up as an example of a decoy protagonist done right.
  • Most brutally subverted in the fourth, fifth, and sixth films. It was also not out of the ordinary for the last girl to be shown having sex, getting naked, or doing drugs/drinking beer along with her doomed peers.
    • Bloody Beginnings ends with the last two girls escaping on a snowmobile only to have their heads lopped off by razor wire.
    • Bloodlines has the shy, innocent girl of the main group die first, since she already sealed her fate by having sex with her boyfriend in the beginning of the film, while the sexy, promiscuous girl gets kidnapped by the killers in the end.
    • Last Resort has the Final Girl having sex with her boyfriend, and said boyfriend ends up pulling a Face–Heel Turn after learning that he's one of the cannibals, further sealing her fate by having his new family finish her.
  • The reboot has Jen Shaw subvert this as well. Despite being the only one to escape her captors with the help of her father, she had previously offered herself as a wife to the Foundation's leader in a futile attempt to spare her friends and returns to her life pregnant with his child. Not to mention that she had become just as bloodthirsty and ruthless as the hostile civilization.
• Averted in Zombeavers, Zoe survives the zombie beaver attack, but she is not virgin and in the end gets run over by a truck in the end of the film.
  • Hell, the trope is Averted with both Jen and Mary. Jen got the most screen time of the other girls and had the standard setup of the trope (Like being the only one of the girls not to have sex with their boyfriends). But then it turns out that everyone found her very unpleasant and boring to be around and eventually got infected in the last 30 minutes, becoming the Big Bad. Mary was a nerdy girl with a jock boyfriend, until we find out she's a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who cheated on her boyfriend with Jen's boyfriend and the rest of the film followed her until she too turns and is killed by Zoe in the last 5 minutes.
• In Unfriended, Blaire meets all the criteria at first glance — virginal, less obnoxious than her female friends, and conventionally attractive but not quite gorgeous. However, it turns out that Laura's saving her for last not because she's the most innocent, but because she's the most guilty — she's a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who filmed the humiliating video of Laura that caused her to kill herself, and she refuses to take responsibility for it, even throwing her boyfriend Mitch under the bus to save her own skin. She's also not a virgin, having cheated on Mitch with his best friend Adam. Furthermore, at the end of the film she's not the lone survivor, but rather, the final victim.
• Boggy Creek: A group of friends get terrorized by a Bigfoot creature while vacationing a remote cabin and its surrounding woods. When the rest of her group is either dead or captured, Jennifer almost manages to escape until she herself is captured right before the credits roll. While this may be seen as a simple subversion, the film might truly avert the trope. The creature seems to selectively kills the men in the group, while it is hinted that the women victims are kept alive for breeding. The killing of Alpha Bitch Brooke leaves the line between subversion and aversion a bit murky, though.
• Completely Subverted in the ironically titled Final Girl. Instead of the film being about a terrified girl being the last survivor of a psycho, it's about a girl trained as an assassin who hunts, baits, and kills a group of psychos.
• Subverted in The VVitch, a period horror film about a Puritan family in 1630s New England being stalked by a local witch. Thomasin, the family's eldest daughter, seems to check off nearly all of the classic markers of this trope: she's a beautiful, strong-willed, virginal teenage girl, and she is indeed the only member of her family to survive to the end. But she ends up as the Final Girl after personally killing her mother in self-defense, after her mother accuses her of being a witch. And almost immediately after, she ends up personally selling her soul to Satan and joining a witch's coven, becoming the very thing that she successfully survived. And though the details are left deliberately ambiguous, there are also some strong hints dropped that there was never a witch at all, and that Thomasin killed her entire family herself — meaning that she could either be the Final Girl or the slasher. Watch the movie and decide for yourself.
• Painfully averted in The Lazarus Effect - Eva doesn't succeed in stopping Zoe's rampage, she just had a Dying Dream that she did.
• Played straight in Frayed, where the virginal girl is the last left to confront her murderous brother in true Final Girl fashion...until it's revealed that she as well as the other victims only existed as they were presented in the killer's delusional fantasies. The real sister was a completely different person whom the brother had never seen after childhood, the 'killer' was actually framed for a murder he did not commit, and the slasher portion of the film never really took place at all.
• The Final Girls: The film, appropriately, features several examples, and thoroughly parodies the concept.
  • Paula, the original final girl of the film Camp Bloodbath. Despite not fitting the traditional ingenue mold, instead being an Action Girl who arrives on the scene in a Trans Am and wears a leather jacket and ripped jeans, she makes a point of mentioning that she's a virgin and plans to stay that way as soon as she's introduced.
  • Vicki nominates herself to be the final girl after Paula dies, but is not eligible because being a Technical Virgin doesn't cut it by the movie's rules.
  • Enforced when Nancy and Max try to survive together. Max's mortal wound leads Nancy to pull a Heroic Sacrifice, making Max the final girl. As soon as this happens, Max's wound becomes Just a Flesh Wound, and she can suddenly fight Billy with slayer-level competence.
• Subverted in the Sci-Fi Horror film Morgan. Lee Weathers is the last girl standing, but only because she executes the other two survivors in order to Leave No Witnesses to Morgan's rampage. And her toughness, poise under pressure, and avoidance of sex aren't because she's a virginal Action Survivor, but because she's a hard-nosed, emotionless corporate suit — and an Artificial Human just like Morgan.
• Played With in My Little Eye. Technically, at the end of the film, the only person alive apart from Travis and the cop is Emma. However, unlike numerous instances where this trope is played straight or even subverted, by the time she's left as the lone survivor her eventual survival is virtually out of question.
• From Dusk Till Dawn ends with two survivors. Kate Fuller, the virginal preacher's daughter, is a straight example of this trope. Seth Gecko, on the other hand, is not only a Villain Protagonist, but arguably the most evil character in the film. Whereas his Ax-Crazy rapist brother Richard is implied to be legitimately insane, the bikers and truckers at the Titty Twister are rough-hewn but otherwise not harming anybody, and even the vampires are portrayed as animalistic and killing out of instinct, Seth is a professional bank robber who coldly murders multiple people out of pure greed or anger and is entirely aware and in control of his actions. That said, he does get a bit nicer over the course of the film, convincing the preacher Jacob to recover his faith in God to help them fight the vampires and feeling regretful when he has to kill Richard. As he puts it to Kate at the end, "I may be a bastard, but I'm not a fucking bastard."
• Get Out (2017)'s Rose Armitage appears to have all the traits of the Final Girl at first, but it is later revealed that Rose is actually part of her family's plot to kidnap African Americans and insert the brains of family members or well-paying customers into their bodies. In fact, she plays a key role as the Honey Trap who dates and lures the victims to her parents' isolated house under the guise of introducing them to her family.
• The Cave contrasts the slightly demure scientist Katheryn with the sexy blonde climber Charlie. Katheryn is indeed the only one of the two females to survive, but this is subverted at the end when she is revealed to be infected and out in the world to infect others.
• Irina in the Russian horror film Deadly Still initially looks like a typical final girl, only to be revealed to be working with the main villain of the film, who is her adoptive father. While she turns against him after discovering that he killed her birth parents (the creators of the deadly Magical Camera at the center of the film, which kills anybody photographed with it), she simply proceeds to continue the experiments that both her birth parents and her adoptive father did with the camera, killing the other surviving main character and then the group of police officers dispatched to investigate the deaths.
• Chelsea in The Ranger starts out as an aesthetic subversion, being a punk chick with pink hair and a leather jacket who is seen doing drugs in the first act. She plays it straighter in her characterization, at least at first, feeling like something of an odd duck amidst the archetypal punk rockers she's friends with and identifying more with nature — a feeling that is reciprocated by their leader Garth, who regards her as an outsider to their group. However, her Dark and Troubled Past involves her having killed her uncle in cold blood on a camping trip when she was a little girl, with the titular villain, a park ranger who hates the protagonists for trashing his pristine wilderness, knowing her secret (having been the one who rescued her and helped cover it up) and wanting to bring that side of her back to the surface.
• In Cabin Fever, Karen is initially presented as Final Girl material, with blonde hair, no nudity, and a relationship with the least debauched of the three guys in the group. Instead, she is the first to fall ill to the flesh-eating bacteria. The last survivor is Jeff, who decided to run away from the cabin rather than risk getting infected, and even he gets gunned down by the police at the end. What's more, the film inverts The Scourge of God in one notable way: the main vector for infection is the cabin's drinking water, so it's actually safer to get drunk than stay sober, hence why Jeff (who took two cases of beer when he fled) is the only one who doesn't get infected.
• Set up and subverted in "The Raft" segment of Creepshow 2, in which the girl less concerned with boys and drugs at first ends up being the first victim of the monster after letting her guard down and trying pot. The story may serve as a cautionary tale for why the Final girl must avoid certain vices if she wants to survive a horror movie.
• Discussed and invoked in You Might Be the Killer, where the last two girls get in an argument over who is the most pure, and end up fighting to the death over who gets to be the Final Girl. The winner then goes on to use the killer's Evil Mask to become both the Final Girl AND the killer.
• Theresa 'Tree' Gelbman, the protagonist of Happy Death Day would be one of the first victims in a traditional slasher as a snooty college Alpha Bitch who is having sex with her married professor and drinks alot lot and in fact she is quickly murdered...only to wake up in bed that same morning. Tree is caught in a "Groundhog Day" Loop reliving the same day over and over until she manages to defeat the killer and along the way she becomes a nicer person. By the sequel she's not only a better person but pretty badass, whose first response on hearing someone else is suffering the same fate is to pick up a baseball bat and go hunting the bad guy.
• The Blumhouse-produced horror film Thriller includes a traditional final girl in Lisa, who embodies many wholesome girl stereotypes found in the trope. However, she subverts it because she isn't the only survivor of the film; her love interest Ty survives, as does (surprisingly) Alpha Bitch Gina.
• Subverted in the British thriller The Hole. We open with a teenage girl, who is the lone survivor of a group of four teens locked in a bunker for ten days. When the girl gives her story to the police, she appears to follow the Final Girl archetype - a studious, responsible, intelligent and more level-headed than her peers. Of course, it turns out to be a complete lie - where she's a sociopath who locked her friends down in the bunker in the first place, because she was Yandere for one of the boys. She's shown to be just as promiscuous, drug-obsessed and prone to hysterics as the other teens.
• Erica Yang, the protagonist of Into The Dark: School Spirit, is presented as a classic Final Girl: A sweet, virginal, rule-abiding, Asian and Nerdy teenager who tries to help her fellow students escape from a killer. After she takes the killer out, the trope is subverted: She reveals that she's had sex with her ex-boyfriend several times, has actively cheated on multiple occasions to boost her GPA, and really doesn't care about the other kids who died except as a means to make herself look good in the media.
• In My Super Psycho Sweet 16, Skye Rotter is the daughter of a Serial Killer who has been haunted by her father Charlie's crimes ever since she caught him in the act. She spends the rest of the film as a more emo-tinged version of a classic final girl...until the very end, when the Alpha Bitch Madison Penrose reveals herself to be a Jerk with a Heart of Jerk, causing Skye to lock her in the basement of the Roller Dome to be killed by Charlie without feeling a shred of remorse. She drives off in Madison's car, the epilogue revealing that she's been missing for several days. The Lovable Jock Brigg and the Dogged Nice Guy Derek also survive, albeit wounded, with Brigg having nightmares about Skye killing her. The kicker: the film is a horror parody of the notorious MTV Reality Show My Super Sweet Sixteen, with Madison based on any number of the bratty teenagers featured on that show, meaning that Skye leaving Madison to die is portrayed as karma for an Asshole Victim — complete with Skye's final scenes being set to the triumphant tune of "Miss Murder".
• The Babysitter:
  • Bee in the first film is a character who seems consciously designed to evoke the image of a badass modern horror heroine, an attractive blonde babysitter who serves as a Cool Big Sis figure to the protagonist Cole...except she's actually the Big Bad who wants to use his blood for a Satanic ritual. Cole's friend Melanie, on the other hand, is a straight example, portrayed as a wholesome Girl Next Door with hints of Puppy Love.
  • In the sequel, Melanie turns out to be Evil All Along and became the new leader of the cult, complete with a Hotter and Sexier Evil Makeover now that She Is All Grown Up. The actual Final Girl this time, Phoebe, is not at all wholesome, being a New Transfer Student who is initially presented as a "bad girl", but turns out to be a straightforward hero beneath her "alternative" fashion sense.
• In Bloody Reunion, Mi-Ja is only one of the students to survive the Reunion Revenge. Because she's the killer.
• Midsommar is a Folk Horror rather than slasher movie, and Dani does survive until the end while being portrayed as nicer and more wholesome than her jerkass friends. However, she survives because she decides to get inducted into the cult — and punishes her boyfriend by making him the final sacrifice!
• In Slaxx, Libby is framed as this almost from the get-go, the one employee at Canadian Cotton Clothiers who isn't either a cynic like Shruti or an asshole like everybody else. Of the main characters, she is the Sole Survivor and almost makes it to the end of the film, but gets killed in the stampede of shoppers she desperately tried to stop from entering the store, where the ghost of Keerat was waiting to kill them all. The actual sole survivor, a stockboy named Camilo, spent the whole movie in a changing room completely unaware of what was happening outside.
• In "The Babysitter Murders", the final segment of The Mortuary Collection (originally released as a standalone short film), we learn that Sam, the Audience Surrogate throughout the film's Framing Device, had been one of these, surviving an attack on the home where she was babysitting by a Serial Killer who'd just escaped from the asylum. Except she's actually the escaped killer herself, having killed the real babysitter and taken his place. When Montgomery Dark learns who she really is, he subjects her to a Karmic Death before bringing her Back from the Dead and condemning her to take his place as the mortician.
• Escape Room:
  • Zoey is a by-the-book final girl: she is the younger of the two women who participate in the escape room, is socially awkward but immensely resourceful, being the one who contributes the most for the participants to survive. But she is seemingly killed in the fourth challenge, leaving two men to continue. The one who ultimately wins the challenge is Ben, a smoking addict who is initially unsympathetic and serves as The Load, but matures throughout the film. And then Zoey is revealed to have secretly survived and ends up rigging a game that was supposed to leave only one alive, so now there are two survivors.
  • The sequel, Tournament of Champions, averts the Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome characteristic of final girls. All of the new characters, including two women, are killed off, and the ones who remain standing to the end are Zoey and Ben again. They are joined by Amanda, the other woman from the first film, whose death is revealed to have been faked, meaning not only there are three survivors, they are all characters from the previous film.

    Literature

• Used as a theme in Jane Mendelsohn's Mind Screw novel Innocence, with the main character seeing herself as the Final Girl in her own horror story. She does kill the villain - that is, her stepmother.
• The Final Girls of the Friday the 13th spin-off books Church of the Divine Psychopath and Carnival of Maniacs are also The Lad-ette.
• In Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, Vera Claythorne is the last survivor on the island, only to hang herself. Furthermore, she wasn't exactly the last person left, she (and the reader) only thinks she is.
  • Also subverted in that Vera, unlike the traditional goody-goody Final Girl, is guilty of murder herself.
  • Played straighter in a number of theatrical and film adaptations, although there's usually another survivor too.
• Discussed and deconstructed in the novel Final Girls by Riley Sager. The main character, Quincy, and two other girls — the sole survivors of three separate slasher-film-style massacres — are dubbed "the Final Girls" by the media, and much of the book deals with Quincy struggling to cope with the physical and mental scars of being a sole survivor.

    Live-Action TV

• The Final Girls was a series proposed to ABC Family (now Freeform) in 2013 in which Jamie Lee Curtis would play the Charlie to a team of Angels consisting of girls who were Final Girls and use that experience to become monster hunters.
• Scream Queens, a show that did wind up starring Jamie Lee Curtis, had two possible candidates for the Final Girl in the first season. Grace Gardner is the traditional kind, the blonde, virginal ingenue with a hint of Nancy Drew to her. Chanel Oberlin is... not. While she fought off the Red Devil twice, she's also an elitist and bigoted Alpha Bitch who is guilty of the murder of Ms. Bean and later tries to kill Hester, along with all manner of lesser crimes, to the point where she can be considered a Villain Protagonist even though she's not the Red Devil killer. To be fair, though, she didn't mean to kill Ms. Bean. Her trying to kill Hester, though, is an entirely different matter. Even though Hester is later revealed to be one of the Red Devil killers, Chanel didn't know this when she pushed Hester down a flight of stairs. Both Grace and Chanel survive, but neither of them is fully alright at the end of the season; Grace is revealed in the second season to have been institutionalized due to the trauma of what she went through ^note In reality, this was because her actress Skyler Samuels had returned to college, forcing the writers to write out her character., while Chanel and her Girl Posse get served a major dose of Laser-Guided Karma when they are framed for the murders. The real killers remain The Unfought, with their last surviving member, Hester, getting away with everything, and the other two Red Devils, Gigi and Boone, both dying at Hester's hands.
• Charmed had an episode called "Chick Flick" featuring psycho killers being released from horror movies. Prue becomes the Final Girl when her sisters get trapped in the movie, but she saves them. The in-universe "Kill It Before It Dies" features a teen couple surviving.
• Dead of Summer has Amy Hughes, who initially seems to be this trope incarnate: Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold, a Dark and Troubled Past that (at first glance) only serves to make her more sympathetic, and being the token "good girl" on the show. She's actually the Big Bad, and her wholesome image is nothing but lies. She was responsible for all of the murders on the show and was behind the ritual to raise the demon Malphas, having actually welcomed her Demonic Possession because Malphas was the only one who "understood her". Instead of Amy, it's the Lovable Alpha Bitch Jessie who becomes the final girl instead, together with Blair and Drew — a gay guy and a trans boy, respectively, in another blow at the archetype.
• Slasher has at least one Final Girl in every season, but subverts the classic survivor character of the trope.
  • The Executioner: Sarah Bennet, despite being the star from the beginning of the season, is actually made to be less than the typical archetype and more Nancy Drew like. However, despite still being the one to defeat the Executioner, she becomes a Damsel in Distress to the killer for her sin of pride in the penultimate episode and is only spared when the original Executioner sacrifices himself to save her.
  • Guilty Party: Dawn Duguin and Keira. Dawn is guilty of helping the camp counselors kill her best friend and framed another counselor to get away with it. She barely survives her fatal encounter with the killer and decides to own up to her actions, turning herself in to the police. Keira is guilty of accidentally killing a patient during her time as a nurse and becomes a Damsel in Distress in the season finale, only spared when Peter sacrifices himself to save her. Ironically, Judith Berry also survives, but revealed to be the killer with sympathetic motives, taking revenge on the counselors for what they did to her son, who was the counselor they framed.
  • Solstice: Saadia Jalalzai. She subverts her reputation of goodness, because she is directly responsible for the Druid's Start of Darkness. She's still invoked as the Final Girl by the killer to become the alibi, and after the Druid dies, she saves herself and Dan from the accomplice, another girl named Jen Rijikers, who became the Druid along with her brother Connor out of revenge against their neighbors for their mother's suicide. Saadia tearfully confesses what she did to Jen as the latter dies.
  • Flesh & Blood: Liv Vogel. She is more of an enforced example of this, since she served in the military, thus is able to fight off the Gentleman's attempts to kill her. After the Gentleman dies, she has sex with one of the survivors and remains the only one left standing after the surviving members end up killing each other over the family inheritance.
• The first season of Chucky has an interesting example in Lexy Cross, as she is a preteen Alpha Bitch who bullies the gay protagonist. She also has an unchildlike promiscuous streak but is Properly Paranoid about the titular doll. After some Break the Haughty moments, along with her younger sister being targeted courtesy of Chucky, she finds herself teaming up with her bullying victim to stop Chucky to protect their families. Ultimately, she survives the season with a change of heart, but at the cost of her boyfriend and father's lives.

    Music

• "Final Girl" by Graveyard Guy is an Intercourse with You song about a killer and Final Girl, with the twist being that the Final Girl is just as dangerous and sadistic as the killer.

    Podcasts

• Stacey from the Cool Kids Table game Creepy Town fits almost all of the usual Final Girl requirements: she's a pretty blonde, and while she does have a history of sleeping with a lot of people she doesn't get any action in the game itself. However, she ends up being the penultimate victim, which leaves spoiled rich kid Will as the last named character. And then Will dies at the end as well, leaving no cast members alive.

    Pro Wrestling

• "The Fallen Flower" Kikyo thought she would be the one to end Zack Monstar's reign as RPW Top Crown Champion because "the female always beats the monster in the movie" and she had challenged him for the belt on the final REAL Pro Wrestling show of 2017. Unfortunately for her, in RPW the towering Monstar was the baby face, Kikyo had not learned much from her loss to Women's Champion Roxy Rouge three months earlier and Chico Adams had all but ensured he would be Monstar's last challenger.

    Video Games

• the white chamber seems to play with this...And it seems quite ironic. Sarah may be the last survivor, but she was the killer.
• Averted in Dino Crisis, no matter what ending you get, Regina and Rick will always survive, but Gail and Doctor Kirk may or may not. But played with but probably played straight in the sequel. Dylan and Paula make it to the gate room, but Regina is the only character that definitely survives the entire ordeal. Dylan and Paula might have if Regina did perfect a time gate and save them at the last moment.
• Subverted in Shivers. When Beth and Merrick released the Ixupi 15 years in the past, Beth was the last survivor. She figured out how to solve all the museum's puzzles, but she died before she could finish the job.
• In the Survival Horror mech game Space Griffon VF 9 the final girl is the useless Damsel in Distress scientist the hero picks up who is trapped in a locked room on the station. It appears the awesomely classy punk rocker chick will survive, but then she sacrifices herself to kill her brother who Came Back Wrong when he shows up out of nowhere in the final sequence. The crazy/idiot thing about it? Both you and her have battlemechs. He's in a hybrid recon/maintenance mecha. Even if he had gotten the drop on you in an ambush (and he didn't) either one of you could mop the floor with him without much trouble, so her completely random sacrifice was a waste, especially as the real Big Bad is still alive and waiting for you at the hangar. He's a mad scientist who turned himself into an Eldritch Abomination kaiju, so if anyone needed a mech blowing up in their face it definitely would have been then. It's a pretty difficult fight, so you'll find yourself wishing she'd have saved herself for this instead.
• In the 2012 version of Twisted Metal, Sweet Tooth's wish is to track down his Final Girl, his daughter Sophia, so he can finally kill her. Only it turns out she had already killed herself as a result of the trauma she went through. The result? Calypso buries Sweet Tooth alive in Sophia's casket. The Stinger reveals that Calypso later revived Sophia as a Monster Clown just like her father, in order to serve as a contestant in next year's tournament.
• In the Storynexus game Final Girl this can be played straight, subverted or averted, depending on your choices.
• Can be played straight, subverted, or averted in Until Dawn, a game in which all the characters can survive, none of them do, or everybody except the obvious final girl survives. However, there are two characters who are set up as this archetype.
  • Sam is the final person who is able to be killed in the game, only killable in the final cutscene, a distinction she shares with Mike. She is also put in heavy focus; she is voiced by Hayden Panettiere, who was arguably the biggest name in the cast (at least at the time; Rami Malek is now an A-lister), she tries to discourage her friends from going through with the Deadly Prank that gets Beth and Hannah killed in the prologue, and she is presented as athletic and fairly morally upright in contrast to the Alpha Bitch Emily and the sexy blonde Jessica.
  • Ashley is also presented as an obvious final girl, being a fairly meek Brainy Brunette with mostly academic interests. However, she takes part in the aforementioned Deadly Prank, and depending on how you play, her Bitch in Sheep's Clothing tendencies may come out over the course of the game. If Emily gets bitten by a wendigo, she'll think Emily's a Zombie Infectee based purely on (what turn out to be false) assumptions about how wendigos work, and if Mike decides not to shoot her, Emily will give her a well-deserved Armor-Piercing Slap for it. Meanwhile, if Chris puts her on the receiving end of the Sadistic Choice he's forced into, she will refuse to forgive him and will leave him to die later on, even though Chris' other option was (as far as he knew) suicide. Also, she can receive the most blatantly obvious Schmuck Bait death in the game, opening up a cellar door that someone, or something, is banging on and getting decapitated by the wendigo lurking behind it imitating Jessica's voice.
• Invoked in Dead by Daylight. Some characters and perks work better if you're the last survivor of your team, giving you an easier chance to escape from the killer. An escape hatch will also open up, giving the player an easier time of getting out if they could find it.
• The Final Girl is the unlockable class in the slasher-themed DLC "Bring the Crunch" of South Park: The Fractured but Whole. It turns the New Kid into an Action Survivor who fights with improvised weapons (throwing garden shears, laying down sawblades as traps, blowing up enemies with a bomb attached to a sledgehammer), with the Limit Break showing the New Kid being chased into a toolshed by monsters and MacGyvering a brutal chainsaw/axe combo to turn the tide on low-health enemies by instantly killing them, even bosses. Despite the name, the player can be of any gender when using the class. Gets lampshaded by Spontaneous Bootay (an obese stripper who was an Advancing Boss of Doom the last time she was seen beforehand), whereafter the New Kid changes to the Final Girl class, Bootay refuses to fight them and walks away since the class is her kryptonite.
• Completely averted in Peret em Heru: For the Prisoners; fuck up one too many times, and both of the final survivors will be men.

    Web Videos

• The Angry Video Game Nerd ended up being the last one to confront Freddy in his A Nightmare on Elm Street (NES) review after his clones died in various ways. Instead of having the usual Final Girl traits, the one thing he had that his clones didn't was a Power Glove!

    Western Animation

• A parody in Robot Chicken where Scooby-Doo meets Jason Voorhees. Velma complains that she is the final girl due to the stereotype that the virgin is always the last to die.

  Velma: The virgins are always the last to die. God my life sucks.

• In the episode "Failsafe" of Young Justice, M'gann is the last of all the heroes in their battle against the invading aliens. Turns out she had to be the last one, as she was the one subconsciously controlling the Your Mind Makes It Real simulation that Went Horribly Wrong. Once she is 'killed', everyone awakens.
• The Teen Titans episode "Fear Itself" had a similar premise, with a monster stalking Titan Tower and picking off the Titans one by one, using a method similar to killers used in slasher movies. Raven was the last one left because the "monster" was her own powers acting on her repressed fear - after the team had watched a scary movie, no less. Ironically, this would not only make her the Final Girl in this scenario, but technically, the antagonist as well.

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Teen Nick Horror Movie With a Girl Who Died Comes Back and Kills People

Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FinalGirl

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