It also loves Carol J. Clover’s 1987 essay 'Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,' (Representations [Number 20: Fall 1987, pp. 187-228] - later included by Clover in her hugely influential book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1992]), which was the first work to coin the resonant phrase 'Final Girl' to name climactic female survivors of slasher/horror/fantasy-sci-fi-horror films.
Clover's essay asked the following, rather fascinating, question: why, in these films which are supposedly principally aimed at male spectators, are the surviving heroes so often women characters?
It's a question that has been frequently addressed, since, in film, television, and now videogame studies, many of them freely available online. So here's Film Studies For Free's not-so-weak-and-feeble list of terribly-brave-and-resilient links to open-access "Final Girl" Studies, beginning with Clover's key essay, and then proceeding in an orderly alphabetical direction, by author surname:
- Carol J. Clover, 'Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film', in Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy, e-Book, Edited and with a New Introduction by R. Howard Bloch and Frances Ferguson, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989 continues here and here
- Holly G. Barbaccia, 'Buffy in the “Terrible House”', Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy Studies, 1.4, December 2001
- Arial Yuan-Jie Chou , 'On Horror Films: A Psychoanalytic Approach On A Nightmare On Elm Street Series' E-Thesis Providence University July 2006
- Celestino Deleyto Alcala, 'Masochism and Representation in Modern Horror: The Case of Alien 3' , Atlantis VVIII (1-2) 1996
- Sérgio Dias Branco, 'Being Her/She in ‘Who Are You?’”. It’s the End of the World. Again?!?: Why Buffy Still Matters, Conference at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, March 16, 2007
- Elizabeth Ezra, 'Resurrecting the Alien Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet in Hollywood', Stirling Online Research Repository, originally published in New Cinemas volume 1, no. 1 (2002): 54-60
- Robert Genter, 'Imagining murderous mothers: male spectatorship and the American slasher film', Studies in the Humanities, June 1, 2006
- Sara M. Grimes, '"You Shoot Like A Girl!”: The Female Protagonist in Action-Adventure Video Games', Digital Games Research Association - Level Up Conference Proceedings, November 2003
- Andrew Grossman, 'Against Pleasure, Against Identification: Feminism, Cultural Atheism, and the Tragic Subject (Part One)', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 47, February 2005
- Andrew Grossman, 'Against Pleasure, Against Identification: Feminism, Cultural Atheism, and the Tragic Subject (Part Two)', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 50, November 2005
- Tamiko Southcott Hayter, 'Perverse Pleasures: Spectatorship, The Blair Witch Project,' E-Thesis, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2005
- Lacy Hodges, '"Scully, what are you wearing?": the problem of feminism, subversion, and heteronormativity in The X Files', e-Thesis University of Florida, 2005
- Irene Karras, 'The Third Wave's Final Girl: Buffy the Vampire Slayer', Thirdspace, Vol. 1, Issue 2, March 2002
- Mikel J. Koven, 'The Terror Tale: Urban Legends and the Slasher Film', Scope, May 2003
- Jenni Lada, 'Feminizing the Final Girl', Cerize Magazine, October 2007
- Colin Le Sueur, 'Misogynism and the Macabre: An Analysis of the Representation of Women in Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses', Film Fortress, June 9, 2006
- Uel McMahan, 'The Alienation of Ripley and the Maturation of the Final Girl', Wiggledog's Song, June 21, 2008
- 'Mittens', 'Feminist Horror Film Theory', Everything2, [date unknown]
- Victoria Newsom, 'Young Females as Super Heroes: Superheroines in the Animated Sailor Moon', Femspec, ('Girl Power' Issue) 5.2
- Marc Ouellette, '"When a Killer Body Isn't Enough": Cross-Gender Identification in Action-Adventure Video Games', Reconstruction 6.1 (Winter 2006)
- Iva Radat, 'Haute Tension: Lesbian Audience and the Slasher Film', Transgressing Gender Conference, Zagreb, Croatia, 2005 (scroll down to page 20/262)
- David Robinson, 'The unattainable narrative: identity, consumerism and the slasher film in Mary Harron's American Psycho', CineAction, January 1, 2006
- Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, 'Scream, Popular Culture, and Feminism's Third Wave: "I'm Not My Mother", Genders Online Journal Issue 38 2003
- Steven Jay Schneider, 'Introduction - Psychoanalysis in/and/of the Horror Film', Senses of Cinema, July 2001
- Shweta Sharma, 'The Killer Father and the Final Mother: Womb-Envy in The Cell' Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, Vol 1, No 2 (2007)
- Elizabeth J. Silas, Abstract Themes of Awakening in Mainstream Films: Female Subjects and the Lacanian Symbolic, E-Thesis, Miami University, 2005
- Anneke Smelik, 'Feminist Film Theory', from Pam Cook and Mieke Bernink, (eds), The Cinema Book, second edition. London: British Film Institute, 1999, pp 353-365
- Ashley Lorrain Smith, 'Girl Power, feminism, girlculture and the popular media', E-Thesis, University of North Texas, August 1999
- Donato Totaro, 'The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror', Offscreen Journal, January 31, 2002
