10 More Horror Movies Where The Final Girl Was The Villain
The horror movie heroines who became villainesses.
Twisting established tropes and subverting audience expectations are among the ways a filmmaker can keep a movie fresh. This is especially needed for slasher films, a horror subgenre that has been cutting things up at the box office for close to 50 years now.
The final girl is one of the most well-known tropes from the subgenre and involves a female survivor overcoming the odds and escaping the terror. But what happens when these supposed heroines are not what they seem? What happens when they turn out to be the villain all along?
This narrative twist is often used in different ways from blurring the lines between right or wrong to using the audience's preconceived notions of a horror movie heroine and turning it against them.
Whatever the case, this type of twist has produced some of the best villainesses in the genre and in most cases, helped make their films more memorable.
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!
10. Melanie - Fantasy Island
Having your fantasies come to life is certainly an enticing what-if scenario. But what happens when these dreams turn into nightmares? For the characters of Fantasy Island, their desires go wrong and they are forced to find a way to get out of the island.
Melanie Cole leads the cast of the film and gets a lot of focus throughout the movie. We witness her noble intentions when she saves her former bully, Sloane, after seeing her held captive. And despite the initial bad blood between the two, the pair eventually learn to work together in order to make it through the ordeal.
But we later find out that Melanie has been the mastermind all along.
You see, not only was she aware of what was going to happen to Sloane, but her fantasy involves getting the entire cast dragged into the island. This is because prior to the events of the film, she went out with a man named Nick who died in an apartment fire. A vengeful Melanie then gathered everyone indirectly responsible for the tragedy, such as Gwen, who left the kettle in her apartment that led to the fire.
In the end, however, our supposed final girl gets her just desserts when she is ironically taken down by a zombified Nick.