10 Traits That Make Up A Modern Day Horror Movie Final Girl
9. Rule 2 - She Needs A Tragic Backstory
As usual in media, a woman's torture is seen as necessary in order to be sympathetic, but horror movies take this to a new extreme.
Time and time again we are introduced to our final girl by being informed of the horribly tragic life they've had to lead. Maybe it's a way of letting us know they're strong and enduring, or maybe it's to make us empathise with them but either way, it's a prevalent trope.
In the movie Midsommar we meet Dani on the night her sister kills herself and their parents in a murder suicide. It's a graphic and brutal scene that immediately informs the audience about what kind of film they're getting into.
But for Dani it is just another day in her tortured life, where she herself has to deal with her own anxiety disorder formed because of her life-long trauma. In Happy Death Day on the other hand, Tree hates her birthday because it was her mother's, who died tragically years prior to the film's events, birthday too.
The tortured soul of a modern day final girl is crucial to making her into the hero she needs to be, and usually by the movie's end she has to face her trauma head on to be able to fight against whoever it is that's trying to brutally kill her and her friends.
Max in The Final Girls for instance, comes to terms with her own mother's death by letting her mum's movie-character double die once more while she watches helplessly.
The final girl has to be relatable, and giving her a tragic backstory is just one way for writers to do this.