**Heads up: Possible spoilers for the following films: Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Alien, House of the Devil, and You're Next.

The "Final Girl" is a common horror-movie trope that was first theorized by Carol J. Clover in her 1992 book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. And man, having 20/20 hindsight, I wish I had gone a different direction back in my grad school days and specialized in modern film or the new "critical game studies" so I could write fun papers like this and teach these subjects. Instead, I opted for medieval lit. Oh, well: lesson learned, and I can at least still dabble.

Anyway, the "final girl" is the...you guessed it...Last Girl Standing at the end of a good chunk of horror movies. She usually has the following characteristics:

• She's pure and virginal (so fundies can get right on board with that)
• She often functions as the "investigating consciousness" of the film, and exhibits traits such as curiosity and intelligence
• She usually appropriates the film's major phallic symbol and uses it against her attacker (the main baddie in the movie). So, the chainsaw. Jason's Machete. Michael Meyers's knife.

So, there's something empowered about the final girl. She lives because of her wits (supposedly), and she turns her male attacker's weapons against him. She flips the script, so to speak.

Some well-known final girls:

First of all, I see some issues with several of these examples, as far as their "final girl" status. Several do not seem to be empowered at all--if we take that to indicate some sort of agency. Here's my take on these:

1.) Sally Hardesty (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1974):

I don't find Sally particularly convincing as an empowered final girl. She's hardly an investigator, and what she finds out about the cannibalistic psychopathic family is knowledge gained through being captured and brutalized by males. Most of the time, Sally is a crying, sniveling, panicked mess (I would be, too!). She manages to escape by sheer luck (and the inability of the weak "Grandpa" to take control of her and deliver the killing blow). Throughout the film, she is degraded by terror and violence and served up (almost literally) for the male gaze in the film. The phallic symbol she turns against her attacker is when Leatherface accidentally cuts himself with his own saw--so, hardly an act of agency on her part.

2.) Laurie Strode (Halloween, 1978)

Pretty much ditto. Laurie fares a bit better in the agency/empowerment department, because she does actively investigate one location where some murders have taken place (after responsibly making sure the children she is babysitting are safely in their beds...good Laurie!). Although she's terrorized by Michael Meyers, and usually exhibits passive actions (like running and hiding), she does get props for stabbing that motherfucker with some knitting needles. [So, her phallic symbol is actually a symbol of female domesticity. I like that. Maybe she is more empowered than I had originally given her credit for.]

3.) Nancy Thompson (A Nightmare On Elm Street, 1984):

This girl has got some final girl chops. Yeah, she's got the whole virginal/nice girl thing going for her (I don't think she's let slept with the Johnny Depp character, which...why?!?  ), but when the shit hits the fan, she quickly becomes one to not be fucked with. Sure: she's initially scared crapless because this half-melted guy with a razor glove is haunting her dreams (who wouldn't be scared of that?), but she quickly takes control of the situation. She starts researching dreams, and investigating who Freddy Krueger was and how her parents were involved with him.

She also exhibits some true bad-assery when she researches antipersonnel devices and rigs her house up like a psycho version of Home Alone to take that a-hole Krueger down the next time he enters her dream. And she vanquishes his ass by basically using his own "dream power" against him. Her mental fortitude is what ends up conquering him.

So far, so good.

BUT! The ending basically undoes all of this empowerment by going with the old, "Ha ha...we were just kidding. None of this ever happened. You just dreamed it all and actually you're under Freddy's spell in a psycho schoolbus from Hell." WTF?!?

4.) Samantha Hughes (The House of the Devil, 2009):

Props to Samantha. She's not scared to go babysit in a spooky old house that's way out in the country. Not even when the guy who has hired her ends up being a *hugely* tall creepy guy who looks  like a reject from the set of American Horror Story: Freakshow, and oh, snap! She's actually babysitting his aged mother who is supposedly convalescing upstairs. While she gets creeped out several times, it's not so bad that she doesn't feel secure enough to put on her Walkman and blast The Fixx's "One Thing Leads to Another" in a truly epic horror movie dance break (which I don't think has been done before).

And when the stuff goes down, she makes it clear she'll fight back as best she can, and shoots the main baddie (gun = the phallic symbol). But I feel the ending totally undercuts this agency by turning the phallic symbol (almost literally) back upon her when she's impregnated by what we can only assume is the devil.

5.) Which brings me to pretty much the most bad-ass on this list, Ellen Ripley (Alien, 1979):

She triumphs against the so-called "perfect organism." 'Nuff said. And she's not afraid to use a little explosive decompression to jettison that bitch right out into the vacuum of space. Bad ass, but still imperiled at times, and imperiled in a way that is particularly suited for the male gaze (i.e. she's scantily clad hiding in lockers and such).

So, there are some good ones on this list, but some are either the same old imperiled woman--particularly young, inexperienced women (Ripley is a fresh departure from that trope)--being terrorized by male baddies in particularly violent and quasi-sexualized (if not outright sexualized) acts. Those that rise to a level of agency and empowerment often have that power undercut in subtle or not-so-subtle ways.

And you can't just flip the script with females/women in horror. I'm not sure exactly what that would look like, but I'm pretty sure it would entail the women becoming the aggressors doing violent deeds upon male bodies.

The closest thing, then, is to show a truly empowered female in one of these films, and I think the one that might get us pretty close (in addition to Ellen Ripley) is Erin from You're Next (2011).

Don't worry. That's someone else's blood, yo.

Some tidbits about Erin:

When the shit hits the fan, she immediately takes control. Although she expresses fear (and who wouldn't if three crazed psychopaths in incongruously tame lamb, fox, and tiger children's masks randomly bust in on your family reunion, crossbow bolts flying), the viewer never really gets the sense that Erin is in true peril. And her fear is certainly not served up in the conventional style of horror cinema. She's never scantily clad, and she never cowers in the face of fear.

From the moment the first crossbow bolt flies, she's all, "Take this chair. Block your side. Get down low. Hurry into the other room," and her boyfriend is all, "Um....who are you? Why have you changed all of a sudden?"

We find out about midway through the movie (after some twists and turns) that there's a reason Erin knows the survival skills that she knows.

She's from a family who thinks the shit is going to hit the fan economically, so they absconded to the Australian outback to live in an off-the-grid survival/prepper commune (hopefully with better sanitation than the Nauglers). And Erin has obviously picked up some mad survival skills during her time there.

Incidentally, her rigging of the house with antipersonnel devices makes Nancy Thompson's of Nightmare look like a joke.

In summary, then, Erin is more my idea of what a "final girl" should really be: empowered. She sort of flips the script on what we typically expect from horror movie women, and shows that the female character can be scared, terrorized, but still keep her wits about her and come out strong. And commence with some pretty severe ass kicking.

Thoughts? Can you think of other final girls who fit this bill? Who go beyond the Clover formulation above? I'm curious to see how the horror genre continues to evolve to get beyond the sad, tired, cliches.