10 Best Horror Films With Final Guys
Girls just wanna have fun, but these guys just wanna survive.
The final girl trope is one of the most overused conventions in horror, particularly within the slasher subgenre.
This group of feisty and fearless women, most of whom are the sole-survivors of their respective horror films, include Sidney Prescott from Scream, Laurie Strode from Halloween, and Nancy Thompson from Nightmare on Elm Street - all of whom share the resilience, smarts, and strength necessary to somehow survive boogeymen, slashers, and serial killers.
While many have critiqued the trope for its ostensibly misogynistic undertones - seriously, why is it that only the 'morally pure' female characters survive horror films? - these horror heroine characters remain common within the genre, even within those meta-horror films (such as Scream) which have attempted to challenge the continued presence of such clichéd characters.
But where are horror's final boys? Accounting for some of horror's most iconic characters - we are looking at you Ashley J. Williams - final guys are a rare but often welcome addition to any horror film. Subverting expectations, the inclusion of a final male survivor in lieu of a female counterpart can refresh an otherwise bland and uninspired horror film.
Here, then, are ten of the best horror films whose final survivors are Scream Kings not Scream Queens.
10. Dewey Riley - Scream
While Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) is, on the surface, depicted as the true final girl of the Scream franchise, the loveable, dim-witted Sheriff Dwight 'Dewey' Riley (David Arquette) has also survived all four films in this self-referential slasher series.
This four-part series, wherein a group of teens and young adults are stalked by the stab-happy serial killer Ghostface - a masked murderer whose identity has been adopted by several different characters - has treated its audience to a variety of creative, gruesome, and bloody murders.
Even likeable fan favourites, such as Jamie Kennedy's Randy Meeks, have suffered grisly demises, and the series has consistently established that no character is truly safe from the twisted exploits of the various Ghostfaces.
Regardless, three characters have notably survived the series thus far: Sidney, Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), and, of course, Dewey.
Wes Craven had originally planned for Dewey to die in Scream, but, accurately sensing that this funny and resilient character would be well-received amongst audiences, decided that this sweet sheriff deserved to survive.