Your final girl is soaked in blood and has tapped into her feral core. She has let go of sanity, her eyes wide, laughter manic, her movements animalistic. It’s the only way after having lost everything, having been told over and over, “it’s nothing.” The only way to express and release the rage (because of this incident, because of thousands of incidents before). In order to beat the “monster”—a summoned demon, a pack of entitled rapists, countless humanoid cave-dwellers, a man with a chainsaw, or even their own unearthly fetal abomination—these women must channel this hysteria, and appear as terrifying monsters themselves. 

And when they triumph, soaked in blood, born anew, we’re vindicated along with them.

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For decades, many horror movies have hinged on a plot-point all too familiar: the invalidation of the non-male experience. 

“You’re crazy, it’s nothing.” 

The slashers of the ‘80s loved this one, having repeated it so often that the trope we now know as “the final girl” was molded. The final girl: often chaste, often brunette, pretty, but not sexy (at least not that she’s aware of), smart, maybe a little nerdy, but still invited to the function. She has a boyfriend, but she won’t put out. Good news! Because if she did, she’d probably be one of the first to get stabbed. Instead, the final girl is the last one standing; usually defeating the monster on her own, without being distracted by sex, emotions, her looks, or other stereotypically “feminine” diversions.

The invalidation of women’s experiences is clear in the ‘80s slashers, in the final girl’s arc. She’s oftentimes aware that something is off: they shouldn’t be at this old abandoned house, she swears she sees the shadow of a man in the next room. Or, maybe she’s dealing with her own issues: trying to come to terms with past trauma, a lingering grief, a sickness or addiction. All of this is quickly dismissed by those around her. She’s a buzzkill; not cool enough to just ignore the warning signs, get over her emotions, and pound some beers in the forest.

“It’s nothing, you’re crazy.”

“You’re just sick, take off your bikini top, smoke a doobie.”

Before the ‘80s slashers gave us our ignored final girls, the paranoia and possession movies of the ‘70s focused on the use of women and girls as vessels for evil, taking away their bodily autonomy and dismissing their feelings about their own personal well-being. Films like Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby emphasized an especially vulnerable point in the protagonist’s life: pregnancy, making it all too easy to brush away Mia Farrow’s unease: “Hey wait a minute, I’m pretty sure that demonic-sexual-assault dream felt a bit too real; there’s something uncomfortable about my wacky neighbor showing up all the time; my husband is acting strangely; I think they want my baby.” 

Historically, the health of women and non-binary people has been something society and the medical community have struggled to address. It doesn’t help that people socialized as women are taught from a young age to tamp down their own pain and not make a huge deal about it. When women’s health concerns are paired with the duties of the devil, well, all the more reason to silence a woman’s voice. 

The carnal, feral, and oftentimes excessively bloody ascendance of our heroines in the finale of horror movies are prescient even today. They emerge, confront the demons, killers, and creatures tormenting them, often becoming bloodied and battered in the fight. This rebirth in blood gives these women the opportunity to show their strength, to look straight into evil’s face and ask: “Do you believe me now?” 

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In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Descent, Revenge, Immaculate, and so many more horror films, the final girl becoming a blood-soaked creature is integral to her finally beating the monster. In these movies, the blood is worn as a celebration of the end: evidence of very real grief; victimhood overcome; a reclamation of bodily autonomy.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, dir. Tobe Hooper)

When you think “blood-soaked final girl,” chances are you’ll think of Marilyn Burns as Sally Hardesty. After witnessing all of her friends be absolutely decimated by the Sawyer family at her family’s abandoned Muerto County home, screaming is all she knows how to do. Running for miles from the chainsaw-swinging Leatherface, she manages to stop a truck, hop in the bed, and hightail it out of there. Sally is covered in blood, scream-laughing as she is pulled away from the very-much-still-alive Leatherface, dancing in the sunset with his chainsaw. 

Throughout the film, Sally couldn’t express her own complicated emotions or gut feelings about revisiting her family’s old house. When she’s finally able to—to beg for help and share her fear—it’s at a nearby gas station after witnessing her brother Franklin’s brutal murder. While the gas station attendant comforts and shushes her, it’s because he’s in on it—soon to drive Sally back to the house in his pick-up to meet the rest of the family. A sick analogy for how women are dismissed when flagging real issues, only for them to be punished for them later on. 

In that final scene, in that truck bed, leaving Leatherface maniacally reeling in the dusty sunset, Sally triumphs, drenched in blood. For a film that revels in its brisk pacing—its nonstop horror and Hooper’s gritty camerawork not concerned with lingering on the gore—the extended final scene seems like meaningful punctuation. The viewer is finally allowed to take a breath, to see Sally’s blood-covered face as a signifier that she’s finally free. She reverts to a more feral version of herself, the whites of her eyes set against her red-streaked cheeks as she screams and laughs. Frantic uncertainty, chaotic survival.

But survival nonetheless.

The Descent (2005, dir. Neil Marshall)

In one of the most shocking car accident scenes ever—one that you can add to your highway nightmares along with the logging truck scene from Final Destination 2—the protagonist Sarah’s young daughter and husband are killed in an accident on their way home from a day spent whitewater rafting. 

A year later, she forces herself to set her grief aside to go spelunking with her five friends. This group is led by Juno, Sarah’s former best friend who is revealed later on to have been sleeping with Sarah’s husband before he was killed. Juno, who ends up leaving their friend Beth to die alone in the dark and bloody den of the murderous creatures they refer to as “crawlers.”

With her family having been violently ripped away from her, and her best friend revealed to have deceived her, it only makes sense that this cave is crawling with bloodthirsty demons. In fact, there’s a theory that the setting for The Descent may well be the inside of Sarah’s mind, a physical representation of her grief; a grief so powerful that it feels violent, but can only be seen by her, while everyone else moves forward. Her hallucinations and encroaching madness due to the death of her family and the deceit of her best friend and husband have caused her to create a terrible world all her own inside of her head—a spelunking nightmare playing out over and over in her mind, while Sarah’s in a mental hospital somewhere.

While no one tells Sarah to “get over it,” that’s what it feels like to the viewer. It’s been only a year, and she’s expected to return to these activities like life is normal, until the “crawlers” prove it isn’t; until Sarah emerges from the cave, dazed and as nonverbal as those same creatures, absolutely soaked in blood, and once again a sole survivor. Only this time, she’s wearing her grief all over. Covering her, a slick red suit of her pain and endurance. It’s unmistakable and undismissable. 

Revenge (2017, dir. Coralie Fargeat)

Jen in a pink “I <3 L.A.” shirt, hair California-blonde. Jen sucking a lollipop, pink star earrings dangling, sunglasses low on her nose. She seductively dances, prances around, dotes on her much older, married boyfriend, flirts with his friends. After all, he brought her to his glass mansion in the desert, complete with a pool and all the booze she could ask for. He’s her ticket to the life she wants.

For the men, it’s a good time. They may be dealing in some illegal activity, but by the looks of her, Jen won’t be a problem. She’s a bimbo side-piece, a prop, a pretty young girl on some guy’s arm. She’s there to be good, to listen, and to make things fun, make things sexy.

When things stop being fun, and Jen is raped by her boyfriend’s “colleague,” she threatens to leave, to tell everyone, to tell his family. They run her out into the desert, and then push her off a cliff. Jen’s impaled by a tree—and that’s it. The brainless beauty is finished, the problem is solved. She won’t talk, not that anyone would believe her anyway.

But Jen shows an unbelievable resilience. A back-from-the-dead level of endurance, a Terminator-style hunger for survival. She hunts down and murders these men. Every. Single. One. Ending in a final showdown against her boyfriend in his glass house, and an amount of blood that makes the elevators in The Shining look like a papercut.

The movie concludes with a shootout in which Jen and her boyfriend, slick with blood, maneuver around the condo. Jen quickly turns corners and crawls behind cabinets, as her boyfriend flails and flounders. When he catches her, she punches him in the stomach. Forcefully penetrating his wound with her fist before blowing him apart with a shotgun. 

Whereas the blood that drenches him was his downfall, the blood covering Jen starting from her impalement and ending with her blowing her rapist away, has somehow fueled her power. She’s further than ever from the immaculately put together side-piece dancing poolside. The blood that covers her, a symbol and direct consequence of her painstaking survival, shows that she’s scarier, smarter, and more of a “problem” than these men ever anticipated. 

Immaculate (2024, dir. Michael Mohan)

During her new residency at an Italian convent, the young, beautiful, and chaste Sister Cecilia becomes pregnant. The priests and other leaders of the church accuse her of being sexually active, before deeming her pregnancy an Immaculate Conception. It seems that no one believes her when she says something’s not right—when really the church leaders know they’ve impregnated Cecilia with dark science, using the DNA of the flesh on Jesus’s crucifix. How dare she question the will of the Lord? Isn’t she grateful for this miracle?

Unsure if she’s actually had sex, if she’s been assaulted, if she’s going to give birth to God, the devil, or simply a human infant, Cecilia tries to escape the prison-like convent. She covers herself in chicken blood and convinces them to take her to the hospital straight away. But after being caught and imprisoned once more, forced to be a prisoner until she gives birth, Cecilia knows the only way to reclaim the right to her body is to threaten whatever’s inside of her, holy or otherwise.

Breaking free of her restraints, beating the Mother Superior to death with a cross, and strangling the Cardinal to death with a rosary, Cecilia’s water breaks. Like an animal, she crawls her way through a tunnel to eventually go into labor by herself on a cliffside. Covered in the blood of her oppressors, the men of God, she lets out a guttural scream before she gazes in terror at what she’s given birth to. A warped entity, a symbol of something forced onto her and her body. But she’s in charge now. She brutally crushes it with a stone, graphically reclaiming her autonomy.

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Sally wearing blood like a mask of relief, the camera finally allowing us to relax as it lingers on her laughing face. 

Sarah emerging from a deep cave of blood, daring anyone to deny her grief. 

Jen, bloodied, rising above the bimbo stereotypes with a shotgun. 

And Cecilia, taking back her body, spattered with the gore of her abusers and the parasite that grew inside of her.

The hysteria that women are accused of, in horror films, and in life; the gut feelings they’re told are stupid, the concerns for their well-being they’re told are unfounded, the grief people are quick to dismiss, and the word “crazy” thrown at them like daggers—these all fuel and culminate as a new beast: one that is hysterical. One that is powerful. 

And one that is, more often than not, covered in a shit-ton of blood.