The final girl trope has been done to death and will be until the end of slasher horror movies, but today we argue: Is horror the most feminist genre?

For those who aren’t aware, the final girl trope follows a girl in a slasher horror movie to the very end and, more often than not, shows how she survives the film’s events. There are plenty of films where men survive until the end, but today we want to center on the ones where it feels like the girls get all the spotlight. We have picked a couple of classics to focus on in chronological order: A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) is our main protagonist and final girl in this film. Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) terrorizes her in her dreams, and the ending is left vague.

Nancy faces Freddy head-on and essentially wins, which was added at the last second. She finishes off the antagonist in a blaze and escapes into the sunlight to live the rest of her life without the fear of her dreams. At least, that’s what we can infer.

She is the lone survivor of her friend group, which consists of two guys and one other girl, making her a great example of the final girl trope. When the odds are stacked against her—with a demon infesting her dreams and haunting her friends with bone-chilling kills that translate to the real world—she comes out victorious.

Scream (1996)

Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) is faced with a teen-killing slasher who is inevitably making his way toward her. In the aftermath of her mother’s murder, she becomes the target of a rising killer and must fight for her life, all while not knowing if the killer is a friend or a stranger.

She cracks the code from the beginning by suspecting her boyfriend and follows the stereotypical “virgin, good girl” character type associated with final girls.

She only backs out of her assumption because of what remains of her relationship with him, bringing forth second thoughts.

She is one of the first to assume that maybe there are two killers, but she goes back on herself once again. The entire back and forth is frustrating to watch, but it proves how smart she is—using her encounters with the killer to try to paint a picture of who is after her.

In the end, when the killers Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) and Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) are revealed, she outsmarts both of them and manages to live to tell the story for the rest of the franchise.

She is portrayed as intelligent and relies on her survival instinct throughout the movie’s events, doing well to outlive most of her friend group. The storytelling provides her with a strong character, unlike most other movie genres, where the strong characters are usually devoted to men.

These movies all have final girls who survive against the odds. Horror is definitely more of a feminist genre because the center has always been about men.

Male killers and male survivors made up plenty of movies over the years until the final girl trope came into play and put women into a place of power. It traditionally places the female character up against male slashers and proves that their strength and ability to survive are just as capable as any man’s.

Using Sidney from Scream as an example, she outwits both Ghostface killers and manages to kill them on her own. She is stacked against two men, her former friends, and still comes out on top of the fight. She even manages to evade other replacement Ghostface slashers throughout the franchise, coming out on top in the newer movies as well.

I would dare say that she is one of the most notable examples of this trope and lives to tell the story in each new film. Even after growing up and gaining a husband and children, she never loses the badass quality of being able to survive and outsmart these phony killers.

Horror has showcased time and time again not only the dumbest characters ever seen by man but also some of the smartest final girl characters who survive even under the most dire circumstances. These movies are the epitome of “equal rights and equal fights” and are definitely worthy of being called feminist.