In the 2015 preface to Men, Women, and, Chainsaws, Carol J. Clover concisely explains that within slasher movies the Final Girl is “the character whose story we follow from beginning to end, and the one from whose vantage, even through whose eyes, we see the action; and it is she who, at the end of the film, brings the killer down” (Clover 2015, x). Writing from a point some twenty years after the first publication of her original 1992 thesis, Clover goes on to add that the Final Girl, has, through further circulating discourses, become something of a “female avenger” or “triumphant feminist hero”. Gladys L. Knight offers a slightly different approach within her discussion of female action heroes, suggesting that “the term final girl was originally associated with horror and slasher films, but it is now associated with any female lone survivor in a film” (Knight 2010, 99). This intertwined development is understandable, given that any female lone survivor in a media text who manifests their position through autonomous action is likely to be engaging with some form of power fantasy narrative, be that against the male killer in the slasher genre, or any other of the countless ways in which female power has been restricted. Significantly, these heroes can be disruptive to patriarchal structure, causing “male anxiety” around gender norms, for example, as Amy Taubin notes in the now classic example of Alien (1979) (Taubin 1993, 94). But, in broadening the scope of the Final Girl, with a focus on what Carolyn Cocca calls “the often-sexualised ‘women warriors’ of today’s media” (Cocca 2016, 6), as Jennifer K. Stuller observes, there is still often the same reliance on masculine power strategies, so “there is little room for female experiences to be considered heroic” (Stuller 2010, 4).
While Clover, in her preface, does not entirely disagree with the reformulated iteration of the Final Girl, and the new directions that the term has taken, she is keen to stress that critics and commentators engage with a process that decentres the successful dénouement of the story for a focus on the journey instead. Framed in this way, Clover suggests that “victim-hero” or “Tortured survivor” might be better terms to use than just “hero” when describing the Final Girl (Clover 2015, x), because to focus only on the heroic “last minute reversal is truly missing the point” (Clover 2015, xi).
The purpose of this chapter will be to apply this approach to the videogame medium. Clover refers to an understanding of the Final Girl through plotted action (the ‘surviving’ part of the ordeal), which culminates at the end of a film’s predetermined narrative, yet, the functions and types of narrative in videogames differ significantly from that within film. This essay will explore how these differences can create new ways to explore and comprehend the possibilities afforded by the recontextualised Final Girl.
The Final Girl and Videogame Genre
Clover writes about the “slasher (or splatter or shocker or stalker) film” that lies “At the bottom of the horror heap”, from which the Final Girl could originally be found (Clover 2015, 21). There are titles that adapt, incorporate, and foreground the aesthetic and narrative conventions of these movies into videogames, such as Splatterhouse (1988) or Night Trap (1992), neither of which feature Final Girls, but these are not genre types that typically exist within videogame definitions. As David Myers asserts, “The representational form of video games may be distinguished in terms of the relationship the game establishes among out-of-game objects and in-game representations” (Myers 2009, 53), which indicates a key difference to the formation of film genre: videogame genres can also be culturally codified by a description of the dominant gameplay mechanics within them, such as ‘beat ‘em up’ for Splatterhouse, or ‘interactive movie’ for Night Trap. Dawn Stobbart discusses how in videogames, “genre classification has become the norm for videogames as it occurs across mass media, with gamers, retailers, and also the videogame industry itself using classifications that have become part of the everyday language of gaming” (Stobbart 2019, 25). Yet, where Stobbart then argues that there is a cultural space for formalised splatter and slasher genres, the examples that she pulls from for splatter games, Mortal Kombat (1992) and DOOM (1993), are again, widely known by their underpinning mechanics: ‘fighting game’ and ‘first-person shooter’, respectively (for example, see Maine 2022). This does not mean that videogames with slasher genre elements do not exist, but shifting the governing rules and terms from one media type (and audience) to another is not a matter of direct transposition. For example, Steam – an online marketplace of digital videogames – allows users to ‘tag’ any videogame with a term that they “think are appropriate or relevant to that title” (Valve Corporation. nda). A search of their store shows that there are 9,828 results for games tagged with “Horror” and there are 0 (zero) results tagged with “Slasher” (or splatter or shocker or stalker). Simply put, the videogame Final Girl cannot be easily found within the videogame ‘slasher’, as it is a game genre that itself is not easily located; it does not currently exist in any (commercially/culturally/formally) meaningful way.
As outlined in the introduction, the cinematic Final Girl has become untethered from their slasher genre roots, but how then has the videogame Final Girl also found traction, if at all, as a ‘lone survivor’ within the wider horror genre?….
The full 7,500 word version of this chapter is published in Heroic Girls as Figures of Resistance and Futurity in Popular Culture, edited by Simon Bacon, published by Routledge, 2024.
Carl Wilson 