Ripley: Best “Final Girl” Ever
Why Sigourney Weaver’s iconic character in Alien stands above her horror peers.
The expression “final girl” was coined by Carol Clover in her seminal 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws. In a sterling rebuke to superficial arguments of horror as an inherently misogynist genre, she put forward the idea that audience pleasure is derived not from the voyeuristic sadism of the killer/monster/demon/nasty-thing-that’s-offed-the-rest-of-the-cast, but from rooting for the “final girl”, whose narrative arc is one of empowerment to defeat the threat.
The horror genre has a rich and varied tradition of “final girl” narratives, in everything from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) to Black Christmas (1974), Suspiria (1977), Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Hellraiser (1987), Scream (1996), and You’re Next (2011). I’ve included years so no-one gets confused with tepid remakes. As an aside, it’s worth noting sometimes the “final girl” can be male if he fits the trope sufficiently. Ash’s survival of the original Evil Dead (1981) more or less meets the criteria (though not his role in the sequels).
However, to the matter at hand: For my money, Sigourney Weaver’s character Ellen Ripley is the best “final girl” in cinema history. Why? Because her arc extends…
