10 Best Horror Movie Final Girls NOBODY Talks About
Because it's not purely about Laurie Strode and Sidney Prescott.
The notion of horror's final girl is one that's been round for decades, with it a label thrown on those characters who find themselves embarked in one last battle to the death with some murderous sort who's usually killed off this victim's friends and/or family.
When it comes to overplayed horror tropes, few can match the concept of the final girl. Synonymous with, but not exclusive to, the slasher subgenre, the final girl often tends to start off meek and mild-mannered, before ultimately finding a new edge and determination to stand up and take down the menace of the day.
While even casual film fans fawn over Laurie Strode of the Halloween franchise or Sidney Prescott of Scream fame, there are still so many other final girls who don't get the praise and respect that they deserve. That's not to take anything away from Laurie and Sid, for both of those are all-time great horror characters; it's more that a multitude of similarly impressive final girls don't get the credit that's due to them.
Taking a look across the realms of horror, then, here are ten phenomenal final girls who barely anybody ever makes mention of.
10. Camryn - Last Girl Standing
From Benjamin R. Moody, 2016's Last Girl Standing is a film that's criminally gone under the radar of many a horror hound. Taking the very concept of the final girl and exploring what happens once the cameras stop rolling, Last Girl Standing serves as a fascinating character study of the impact squaring off with a masked maniac can have.
As the movie opens, Akasha Villalobos's Camryn and her friends find themselves being brutalised by your classic masked killer. But while Camryn's friends all end up as further notches on this murderer's body count bedpost, she manages to somehow escape with her life intact.
Having set the table, Last Girl Standing then jumps ahead to spend the vast majority of its run time exploring the after effects of this encounter, as we find Camryn living a life of paranoid solitude, spending all of her time alone in her one-bed apartment or in quiet seclusion at her job at a laundromat.
In a landscape where the ideal of the final girl is all about surviving whatever terrifying threat is rearing its head, Last Girl Standing jumps out as something utterly unique in the horror genre - and seeing Camryn trying to go about her day-to-day life makes for compelling viewing.