Why does the final girl trope exist?

Breathless, bloodied, and crawling toward survival, the Final Girl has become one of horror’s most recognizable tropes. She spends most of the story fleeing from a malicious killer, only fighting back once she’s cornered with no other options remaining.

Roger Ebert, perhaps the most well-known movie critic of his generation, said,

“It’s always the same: The girl is at home alone, menacing attacker, the ringing telephone, the wide, frightened eyes. I think there’s something terribly wrong when an image like that becomes the building block for an entire movie genre.”

Ebert continued his rant, claiming that these films “hate women.” His peer, film critic Gene Siskel, agreed, claiming that the popularity of the final girl was a “primordial response of some very sick people.”

Why is it so often a young woman who’s chosen to play the hunted in a horror film? Why not have someone stronger, better prepared, and harder to kill?

Many critics and film scholars point to misogyny or bizarre psychoanalytical explanations when trying to explain the enduring appeal of the Final Girl. In a recent paper, Edgar Dubourg and I offer a new explanation rooted in psychology and evolutionary logic, and supported by several studies on hundreds of films.

The premise of the paper may sound familiar to some of my readers; it’s based on a Substack post I wrote a few months back.