10 One-Off Slasher Horror Movie Villains Who Must Return

Todd Strauss-Schulson’s 2015 horror comedy has a premise so ingenious that it’s remarkable no one else had got there first. The Final Girls sees a group of friends who attend the screaming of a classic ‘80s slasher movie. When the theatre catches ablaze, they attempt to escape through a hole in the screen, only to awaken as characters in the film.

Like Scream before it, this is a postmodern examination of the genre which simultaneously exists as a great addition to the slasher canon. Its characters are genre-savvy to an extent not even seen in Wes Craven’s film, with the friends using their horror knowledge to attempt to keep the film-within-a-film’s cast of libidinous kids from getting murdered.

A slasher movie is nothing without a killer, of course, and The Final Girls’ Billy Murphy is a delightfully observed one. OK, he’s basically Jason Vorhees, but with the ability to flit between reality and fiction, as seen in the film’s ending, which simultaneously mocks slasher movies’ propensity for multiple sequels and sets up one of its own.