10 Final Girls Who Should Return For A Horror Movie Sequel

One of cinema’s earliest true slasher films features a classic final girl, though Jess Bradford manages to defy a lot of the trope’s trappings. Sorority sister Jess not only has a boyfriend, but is unexpectedly pregnant.Not that this comes up in the text to any real degree - for the most part, Jess is a classic final girl, trapped in a house with a mysterious killer and watching her friends drop like flies.

What elevates the character is the excellent performance by Olivia Hussey. By this point a well established actor, Hussey makes Jess feel human and sympathetic. With the killer essentially a shadowy non-entity, the success of the film is down to Hussey building the tension.

She manages this with real poise - there's a great purity to Black Christmas, less quipping or daftness than the genre would later utilise. It's all about the scare, and really that only works because we care about our protagonist.

It also pioneers the ambiguous ending. Jess survives the ordeal, but at the finish, we’re given to understand that the killer remains, creeping around the house. This is probably why she’s never seen again, but horror heroines have withstood worse, and few are so likeable.