Final Girls: Ranking the Top 5

No Slasher is Safe From Final Girls

It’s a bloody night. Monsters have descended on a sleepy suburb, cutting up the attractive, 30-something year old teenagers who were distracted by sex, drugs, and rock and roll. But one remains, a once-mousey woman prepared to square off with vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness. She is the Final Girl.

Final Girls are the top of the horror movie food chain. They remained innocent or pure compared to other members of the morality play (or should I say mortality play?) As the last woman standing, they must channel righteous vengeance and slay the monster.

Standards have loosened to let Final Girls have more fun, but they remain the ultimate Slasher slayers. So who are the top 5 Final Girls? Let’s find out.

Honorable Mention: Buffy Summers

Series: Buffy: The Vampire Slayer
Played By: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Kristy Swanson

Final Girls were overused in the 80s and 90s. It was a given that they’d be the last survivor and save the day. This one flipped the script. She wasn’t in danger from the monsters, she endangered them.

Buffy Summers was an ordinary teenager until an old man threw a knife at her that she caught. He introduced himself as a Watcher named Merrick and revealed that Buffy was The Slayer, a chosen one meant to kill vampires. She reluctantly accepted her fate after classmates started dying in droves, ultimately killing the head vampire at the cost of Merrick’s life.

Buffy moved to Sunnydale searching for a new start. Unfortunately, new Watcher Giles revealed that Sunnydale had been built atop a Hellmouth that was a magnet for evil creatures. Buffy joined forces with outcast Xander, skittish Willow, mysterious Angel, and Giles to form the Scoobies and fight vampires.

She inverted Final Girl tropes, but that’s why Buffy can’t make the list. Only three major recurring allies bit the dust over seven seasons. Can’t be the “final” anything when you’re surrounded by a family of badass monster hunters. 

#5 Tina Shepard

Series: Friday the 13th
Played By: Lar Park Lincoln

Slashers often have superpowers that explain how they keep coming back or can rip teenagers apart barehanded. Most survivors have to make do with cunning and traps, but one Final Girl can fight on the killer’s level. It’s Jason Voorhees vs. Carrie White!

Tina was a young girl with an abusive father. Her psychic powers manifested while running from him and led to his death when she collapsed a pier on him. The murder traumatized Tina, who returned to Crystal Lake for closure as a teen. She tried to resurrect her father, but accidentally awakened Jason Voorhees instead.

While Tina partied with Crystal Lake’s teen crowd, Jason went on a killing spree. Then she learned that her therapist had been gaslighting her to continue using her powers for his own benefit. Everyone except for Tina was slaughtered, who was alone and threatened, until she unleashed her powers.

Tina whaled on Jason with everything her mind could manipulate. Impaling him, knocking him through stairs, setting him on fire, crushing his head with his own mask, and blowing up a house with him inside occurred rapid-fire. Jason kept pushing through Tina’s assault until she succeeded at reanimating her dad as a zombie. He wrapped Jason in chains and dragged him back into Crystal Lake, finally giving Tina peace.

Fun Fact: Tina’s beatdown on Jason took a toll on suit actor Kane Hodder. He nearly hit his head on real stairs and almost died during a scene where Tina collapsed an awning on Jason. Combined with the house explosion being much stronger than planned, and it almost seems like Tina was taking revenge on the cast.

#4 Final Girl: Laurie Strode

Series: Halloween
Played By: Jamie Lee Curtis

It’s not easy being a Final Girl. All your friends are dead and the monster still haunts you, even before it begins moving again. Do you accept what happened and move on with your life or do you prepare so you’re never the victim again?

Laurie Strode was a babysitter working on Halloween night. She kept seeing an odd sight throughout the day, a man in blue overalls and a bleached Captain Kirk mask. This was Michael Myers, an escaped madman who killed most of Laurie’s friends. She survived long enough to be rescued by Myers’ doctor, Sam Loomis.

Michael kept coming after Laurie, who learned that she was his sister. She survived her second run-in, but later died in a car accident. That’s just one of many timelines, though. Another saw her become a killer before being gunned down by police. A third had Michael kill her before getting his ass kicked by Busta Rhymes. 

2018’s Halloween trilogy gave Laurie a canonical fate. She became a survivalist who alienated her family by preparing for an inevitable rematch with Michael Myers. After three more massacres and her daughter’s death, Laurie finally killed the boogeyman and fed his carcass through an industrial shredder, ensuring that she was freed from the curse of Michael Myers. Until the next timeline…

#3 Nancy Thompson

Series: A Nightmare on Elm Street
Played By: Heather Langenkamp

A Final Girl isn’t safe forever. They often die in the sequel’s opening scenes or disappear for good. The more they appear, the more opportunity screenwriters have to kill them. But when this Final Girl fell, she went down swinging.

Nancy Thompson was an ordinary teenager until the night her best friend was murdered. She began having nightmares about a burned man with a knife glove. Even stranger, any injuries she suffered in dreams happened in reality. Nancy discovered that he was Fred Kruger, a child killer her parents had helped kill.

Nancy struggled to stay awake and out of Kruger’s realm, but eventually realized she could banish him by not being afraid. It worked and he disappeared. Nancy taught new Final Girl Kristen how to empower her friends in dreams before Nancy was killed, although she bought time for her friends to escape by stabbing Freddy with his own glove.

Death couldn’t stop Nancy from protecting others. Several comics transformed her into a Beautiful Dream, Freddy’s heroic counterpart with power over good dreams. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare paid homage to Nancy when her actor Heather Langenkamp fought a demon taking Kruger’s form.

#2 Final Girl: Samantha Carpenter

Series: Scream
Played By: Melissa Barrera

WHOA! Torches and pitchforks down, folks! I know this wasn’t the final girl from Scream you expected. Sydney Prescott’s great, but passive until she’s directly endangered. Gale Weathers wouldn’t fit either, she’s the plucky sidekick. The requel duology’s main character won by asking a simple question: what if Ghostface was the Final Girl?

Sam Carpenter was a young runaway coping with mental health problems. She learned that her sister Tara had been attacked by Ghostface and returned home to Westboro. Sam searched for the killer while reconciling with Tara, eventually discovering that the killer was recreating the original Ghostface massacre.

Sam revealed that she was the bastard daughter of Billy Loomis, the original Ghostface. Her fear and protective instincts hallucinated the form of his ghost telling her to kill anything that threatened her or Tara. That made her a perfect scapegoat for the new Ghostfaces’ massacre. Sam and Tara murdered the killers with help from previous Final Girls Sidney and Gale.

More Ghostfaces targeted the Carpenter sisters in New York. Sam found a shrine that they had made to the massacres and experienced an almost hypnotic connection to her father’s mask. She donned the costume and murdered the attackers as Ghostface. But instead of becoming a serial killer, Sam abandoned the mask on a road and moved forward with her life.

Not so Fun Fact: Sam and Tara were returning for Scream 7, but actor Melissa Barrera was fired after accusing Israel of genocide during the Israel-Hamas War. Costar Jenna Ortega dropped out to support her. The upcoming movie has refocused entirely on series vet Neve Campbell and several returning Ghostface actors.

#1 Ellen Ripley

Series: Alien
Played By: Sigourney Weaver

It’s rare to see an adult Final Girl. It suits the trope better if they are young, inexperienced, and forced to mature in the face of evil. The best Final Girl has military training and some big damn guns.

Ellen Ripley was a crew member of an interstellar cargo freighter ordered by its owners, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, to investigate a distress signal. They discovered an alien ship and a parasitic lifeform that infected one of the crew. Ripley’s attempts to enforce quarantine were overridden by her superior officers, as were all of her other suggestions.

The parasite gave birth to a xenomorph that began slaughtering the crew. Ripley survived and blew up the ship, managing to force the xenomorph out of an airlock. Weyland-Yutani disciplined Ripley because they wanted the xenomorph as a weapon.

Ripley was forced to aid colonial marines in a mission to the xenomorph’s homeworld, which she barely escaped with a handful of survivors. She crash-landed on a prison planet and had to fight a third infestation of xenomorphs. Ripley was infected with a queen xenomorph and leapt into a furnace to ensure that Weyland-Yutani couldn’t weaponize it.

Which Final Girl is your favorite? Is there a better survivor than these? Tell us in the comments.

Image: © 1997 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved.

Jared Bounacos

Jared Bounacos has written for Movie Rewind since 2016.