Story structure
Final girl
Carol Clover's term for the last surviving female character to confront the killer, the one left to tell the story.
The final girl (or survivor girl) is a horror trope: "the last surviving female character to confront the killer, ostensibly the one left to tell the story." Carol J. Clover coined the term in her 1987 article "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film" and expanded it in Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992). Her famous observation concerns the audience, which "began by sharing the perspective of the killer" but "experienced a shift in identification to the final girl partway through the film." Clover's type is "typically sexually unavailable or virginal and avoids the vices of the victims," often bears a unisex name, and serves as the story's "investigating consciousness." Sally Hardesty in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Laurie Strode in Halloween and Sidney Prescott in Scream carry the line.
For a horror novelist the term is a contract about survivorship. The slasher premise routes both the terror and the payoff through one watchful character, so her "intelligence, curiosity, and vigilance" need establishing before the killing starts, or the survival reads as luck. In serialized horror she is also a long-game asset: a final girl who has survived one arc becomes the knowing center of the next, and how to write horror spends much of its tension budget on keeping her competence earned rather than conferred.