Horror Films of the 1980s - Final Girl - Essay Example

The plot of the movie is similar to several horror movies that had been produced earlier in the 1990s, whereby a chain of people are killed one after another by an assassin accompanied by rising terror, ending up in the peak whereby the final member of the group to survive is a woman/girl who either conquers the killer, or escapes.

The “Final Girl”- Loner Veronica is a shy and vulnerable virgin who is not available for any sexual relations, and she keeps away from the ill motives of the victims such as riotous lifestyle, sex, and illicit drug use. At times, Veronica uses names that will not tell if she is a man or a woman; on some occasions, the Final girl tends to have a similar history with the assassin. One of the essential grounds of Clover’s theory is that the viewer’s identification is unbalanced regarding gender, especially when it comes to the “Slasher movie” (Muir 25). Throughout the final girl’s confrontation with the assassin- boys, Clover,- the movie director argues that the “final girl” changes into a muscular person whereby she takes up weapons like a chainsaw and a knife to fight back the killer. Additionally, Clover says that the bad character in the “slasher movies” is regularly a man who has a problem with his manliness and sexuality; for example, Norman Bates in “Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho” (Muir 25).

The other dominant character of the Final Girl is intelligence whereby throughout the movie she is depicted to be clever, smart, and ingenious as compared to other victims. At times, at the end of the movie she turns into an “Action Girl” upon scrutiny, the Final Girl can be said to be a “hero,” “Damsel in Distress,” and “the Cutie.” The Final Girl is more often than not considered to be evil, which is a contrast to the traditional Final Girl who got killed at the end. Interestingly, the Final Girl can be easily recognized in the theory of the film, as the character appears to be the living personification with stereotypically traditional attitudes of what women are intended to be.  Alternatively, feminists have found out that due to this character, most male audiences are forced to recognize the woman at the peak of the movie. This means that the producers of this horror movie with the victim of the movie to have hopeless terror at the peak, and think that viewers may reject a film that illustrated a man undergoing such hopeless terror.

Examples of Final Girl in horror movies include; “Evil Dead” whereby Mia whose real name is Jane Levy shocks the minds of many viewers through her masculine character by trying to deal with the killer. For example, whenever the convicts tried to rape Mia, getting between her legs was hard because of her power to fight back. In Sleepaway Camp Angela is considered a Final Girl after on many occasions defeating those wanting to attack her. While in The House of the Devil, Samantha who is desperately looking for money secures a job babysitting an older woman but realizes too late that things were not right when she had fallen into the devil's trap that raped her and impregnated her.  Consequently, she took matters into her hands and shot herself in the head and still survived in the end. In The Descent Sarah after losing her husband and son in a horrible accident finds herself in a terrifying tunnel; however, because she wanted to live, she tried all the possible means and escaped from the tunnel.

In conclusion, the identities of the Final Girl in all these movies are unique in that they used every possible way to survive and escape from their attackers. Therefore, Clover says that for a horror film of the Final Girl to be triumphant the last person to survive has to be a female whereby the distinguishing trait is the ‘Punishment’ of being beautiful and sexually available, which at times is expressed as “Sex being equated to Death”.