Final Women: The Next Natural Step in Horror's (r)Evolution

Horror is slowly but surely retiring its obsession with youth, and I am here for it.

Adriana Barraza as Lupita, Bingo Hell (2021), Amazon Studios

The horror genre carries a lot of weight on its shoulders.

For more than a century, masters of horror storytelling have been holding up a much-needed mirror to humanity, getting under our skin, even prophesizing our disasters, and inviting us to confront those aspects of our lives which are just begging for a reckoning. In 1922, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari warned of the anxiety and disillusionment of post-WWI Germany that ultimately steered them to fascism. Night of the Living Dead (1968) inadvertently highlighted the escalating racial tensions in the U.S. following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. Just a few years later, The Exorcist (1973) shone a poignant light on the perceived taboos of puberty and female visibility. And in 2014, The Babadook expertly tackled themes of grief and mental health, reflecting a new age of increased awareness.

Horror personifies and examines our deepest fears and greatest strengths as human beings, often with very little respect or recognition from the societies that benefit from it. Some people still don’t take the genre seriously... and they really, really should because right now, we’re standing at another cultural crossroads, and horror is once again stepping up to inspire introspection and change.

At the center of that crossroads stands a woman over 40.

Behind her, the world.

Without diving too deeply into the mortifying, long-term implications of idealizing young women and girls, let’s just say it has become glaringly obvious that society sees them as synonymous with desirability and relevance, while physically mature women are viewed as the living death of that ideal. The message in our media has been loud and clear for a long time: The younger you look, feel, and are, the better. As women, when our breasts inevitably succumb to gravity, our hair turns grey, and we can – by design – no longer bear children, we’re routinely shoved to the margins, our stories as protagonists considered less compelling, our presence in the foreground less necessary. In a culture that romanticizes youth to a grotesque degree, the need for a shift in this perspective is crucial. For everyone.

“What’s perhaps most disturbing is the impact [the lack of age representation] is having on women and girls of all ages. It’s a painful irony that a multi-billion pound industry, purporting to mirror real life, is essentially erasing women’s stories from our screens.”

Lisa Moore, The Conversation, 2021

Make no mistake – horror movies have been a big part of this particular problem. As a lifelong devotee of the genre, I’ll be the first to point out that women over 40 have rarely been its front-and-center heroes. The most celebrated hero archetype in horror is the final girl (or, occasionally, final boy), after all. Older women are typically depicted in horror films as weak, psychotic, or tragically dispatched early on, leaving the younger gals in the room to pick up our slack and survive in our stead. Slasher films have been pushing teenage girls into the spotlight for ages. Paranormal horror has taught us repeatedly that our daughters or younger sisters are often the most special. Possession stories couldn’t possibly be more fixated on adolescent girls as conduits for evil. And, while we’re at it, can you name the male equivalent of “Hagsploitation?” If you can, I’ll eat my hat, because I’m pretty damn certain it doesn’t exist.

Now, I’m not implying that the stories of young women and girls are irrelevant or should be excluded from horror. Quite the contrary. The genre has worked tirelessly since the 1960s to showcase them overcoming sexual violence, abuse, trauma, and evil men, all of which are very real and present threats in their lives. The final girl is a staple of horror – one of my personal favorites, in fact – and she serves a noble purpose. The issue here is that those dangers, along with the strength and drive to overcome them, are undeniably age-discriminate when viewed through a mainstream cinematic lens, and that view is both short-sighted and counterproductive. By providing abundant space for older women’s journeys, we not only create better representation, but we allow for a vital revision of how we perceive youth.

Thankfully, the space for women in horror is beginning to broaden. Our trusty, scary storytellers are realizing their mistakes. They’re noticing that when the camera lingers on a woman of a certain age, it exposes her profound strength, resilience, and natural beauty. It reveals her humanity. Older women’s stories remind us that survival isn’t only the province of the young; it’s a lifelong practice, a muscle that is tempered again and again. Unsurprisingly, horror is starting to embrace what the rest of the world is still struggling to accept: A heroine who has been to hell and back already – with the scars to prove it – and who, at this point, would prefer to rescue herself. By forcing audiences to journey alongside these once neglected characters, horror is also challenging us to reconsider our ideals.

You can almost feel the tribal revelation rolling in like a long-awaited storm. We are so close to understanding that the idealization of the young leaves them even more vulnerable to danger. And we’re even closer to finally grasping that part of the way we can change that is by changing the way we present, discuss, and perceive older women in media. If you look around, you’ll see evidence of this all over the horror genre right now. We’re no longer shoehorning women over 40 into the roles of the haggard witch, the evil stepmother, or the mom who died a long time ago and left only a framed photograph in her wake. We’re putting them right in the forefront and forcing the audience to notice them. We’re giving them voices. We’re telling their stories.

We are, at long last, entering the era of the Final Woman.

Carla Gugino as Jesse Berlingame, Gerald’s Game (2017), Intrepid Pictures

Jessie Burlingame of Gerald’s Game (2017) is perhaps one of the most striking examples of this shift in focus. A story centered entirely around a middle-aged housewife, isolated, terrified, and literally chained to a bed, Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game was considered for a long time to be un-filmable. This was, of course, largely because so much of the horror is happening inside her head. But I also believe it was because our understanding of women – of how women think and feel, what we go through – needed time to evolve.

“I thought that we needed to have her confronting a physical embodiment of all the male perversion that she has dealt with in various forms from various people throughout her life. I wanted to take all of that male gaze and the dirty nastiness that she’s gone through and put it all into skin.”

Mike Flanagan, Bloody Disgusting, 2017

Jesse has been victimized to the point of paralysis by her husband and the harrowing echoes of her traumatic past. Hers is a tale of truly hard-earned escape, both physically and psychologically. It takes time and requires the presupposition of an entire life lived before she ever gets out to that house in the country. To survive, she has to confront the abuse she endured as a child and break through a lifetime of silence. Gerald’s Game insists that her age, her experiences, and the scars they left behind aren’t just window dressing for an “unlikely” heroine – they are precisely what makes her heroism possible.

Carla Gugino’s performance brings Jesse’s story to a gut-wrenching depth, as well, evoking subterranean layers of strength and perseverance. She wasn’t afraid to fall apart, to get angry, to get crazy, to be unapologetically strong and determined, and she makes sure the audience feels all of it with her. We’re given a long, up-close-and-personal look at her panic, her grief, her exhaustion. Every lingering, intimate shot of the bags under her eyes and the lines on her face screams, "I’m a human fucking being!” As she conquers her demons, we’re conquering our indifference towards her. We’ve seen similar arcs in earlier films like Halloween: H20 (1998) and What Lies Beneath (2000), but the world at large was not quite ready then to join the conversation. The impact of Gerald’s Game that persists today, nearly a decade later, hints at a modern audience that yearns to see older women depicted as warriors.

Courtney Cox as Gale Weathers, Scream (2022), Spyglass Media Group

Our collective response to the rise of legacy sequels can be seen as an extension of that want. Sure, emotions are mixed regarding the continuation of stories we’ve already seen and loved, but the demand from audiences that our former final girls return has a delightful undercurrent of age-inclusiveness. It also forces today’s horror writers to step beyond the “teenage comfort zone” in which they’ve been too cozy for too long, and it provides filmmakers with an opportunity to revitalize our collective interest in older women’s journeys. With the release of Scream VI (2023), for instance, Courtney Cox set a record as the longest running "scream queen" in a horror franchise as Gale Weathers. Considering Fay Wray – cinema's very first scream queen – appeared in King Kong in 1933, this means it's taken us nearly a hundred years to keep a woman alive for more than a few movies. If that doesn’t signal the beginnings of a much-needed shift in perspective, I'm not sure what would.

Gale Weathers is not just a final girl. She's a final woman and one who can't be restrained to the confines of a trope. Throughout [six] films, she's stood up to every maniacal Ghostface killer. In her, they have met their match. None of them have survived. Gale always does.

Shawn Van Horn, Collider, 2023

Truly, if you had told me back in 1996 that my favorite character in the Scream franchise would one day be Gale, I might have laughed you out of the room. But watching her mature throughout the films into a fully formed, complex, and formidable woman has placed her right at the top of my list of cherished characters. Gale’s arc is a giant middle-finger to the “cult of youth” and it exists simply, without an overwhelming sense of novelty. At the start of Scre4m (2011), she’s sidelined by her age and the expectations placed on her by traditional married life, a life she had always maintained was not for her. She’s struggling every day to be someone she’s not. A different writer might have pushed her to embrace her role as the dutiful wife, but Kevin Williamson was having none of it. She looks her husband, her choices, directly in the eye and says firmly, “I love you, but get the hell out of my way.”

We’ve seen some regression in her character since Gillet and Olpin took the reins in 2022, namely that she seems to have shed some of the emotional layers she’d gained in the previous films, but complaints from the fans about this lack of continuity further indicate that the two-dimensional narrative for women is getting tired. Most importantly, Gale remains an essential part of what keeps people going back.

Let’s not forget it was Courtney Cox’s “ruthless” ambition that secured her role as Gale in the first place, her desire to break free from the stereotypes present in the earlier part of her career. She has breathed so much of that strength and nonconformity into the character over the years and crafted a new message to a now massive audience: Ambition and compassion are not mutually exclusive, and a woman driven equally by both is a force to be reckoned with. The more we understand and recognize that dynamic combination in older women, the more we can begin to normalize it and the more inspiring and heroic they become.

Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, Halloween Kills (2021), Trancas International Films

A decidedly darker narrative can be found with Laurie Strode’s return in David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy (2018 - 2022). This version of Laurie – the second reinvention we’ve witnessed – is no longer recognizable as the girl we met in Haddonfield in 1978. She lives in relative isolation, in a compound stocked with weapons, struggling to maintain relationships with her daughter and granddaughter. Frankly, she’s pissed off. She’s an entirely new character, a woman whose endurance has calcified into an unrelenting will to protect her family and her community, to stay hyper-vigilant in the face of a grossly underestimated evil, and to end its rampage for good. For a long time, I felt torn about Green’s depiction of Laurie, as I felt she was too hard, too cold, too broken. But as the discussion surrounding her role in the franchise intensified, I realized how important this extreme portrayal is.

This Laurie isn’t just an innocent girl pitted against an allegorical serial killer; she’s become a living, breathing metaphor for all women who have endured decades of misogyny and marginalization, who have had to watch as their loved ones, their communities, are threatened. She emerges, still fighting, taking up space, relevant, and ultimately victorious. And, of course, her evolution from final girl to final woman hits especially hard because of Jamie Lee Curtis’s talent, passion, and history with the franchise. The character rests in the hands and heart of someone who pioneered the very trope she’s now subverting, who plays her masterfully as both weathered and unbreakable, with scars that are not just symbolic but brutally real.

“Nothing changes until something changes, and nothing’s going to change until you understand it and how to deal with it, and I think cinema and art—as brutal and violent and horrific as it can be—once you see it and you’re taken in by it, you can start to imagine a different world. And you can start imagining what you, as an individual can do about it.”

Jamie Lee Curtis, Deadline, 2021

The “new” Laurie also harkens back to the action-packed heroism of Ellen Ripley in Aliens (1986) and Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), both of whom were steadily approaching 40 at the time and widely beloved by audiences. Their near-perfect balance of battle-worn and vulnerable was hard to achieve, and the genre is closer now to nailing it again than ever before. Green’s Halloween trilogy might seem like it goes a bit too far, but it’s still a step forward. If your viewers are pumping their fist and shouting, “She is badass!” for a leading older woman, you’re on the right track.

Lin Shaye as Elise Rainer, Insidious: The Last Key (2018), Blumhouse Productions

The Insidious franchise (2010–2023) takes a different but equally inspired approach with Elise Rainier. The now 81-year-old heroine is not the typical "quirky expert” we might expect to see in a paranormal film; she’s equipped with layers of complexity and history that inform her every move. Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015) reveals her grief and isolation following her husband’s death, and The Last Key (2018) explores her abusive childhood and estranged family, adding depth and context to an aged heroine, the likes of which we’ve rarely seen in the foreground of horror. These glimpses into her past highlight that she is a hell of a lot more than a plot device. Elise is a woman with agency, who anchors the series not with fisticuffs (well… okay, she did that once…) or a firearm, but with gentility, experience, and unwavering empathy.

Through Elise, the Insidious films challenge our long-standing tendency to render women invisible once they pass a certain age, particularly in genres that historically privilege youth and push the problematic idea that it is the only power we possess. Actress Lin Shaye has said that she doesn’t think much about Elise’s age or gender because she could easily be anyone, of any age, and I agree, but her presence at the center of one of the most commercially successful horror franchises in recent years – as a woman of advanced age – has begun to help influence others to think that way.

It’s important that we see women over 40 as more than “outdated” versions of the young women and girls we might have admired, idolized, or rooted for earlier on in their lives. Elise is a sterling example of our improving ability to do that.

There’s much to be said for a character whose strength and agency lies in her nonconforming yet motherly authority. How often are we presented with a 60- or 70-year-old ‘leading lady’ who kicks ass in cardigans and muted scarves?

Lauren Morgan, The Daily Fandom, 2022

Together, the popularity of characters like Jessie, Gale, Laurie and Elise marks a very slow but steady movement toward a smarter, stronger, and safer world. And it doesn’t stop with them. With the help of real-life heroines like Barbara Crampton, Adrienne Barbeau, and Bonnie Aarons, films like Jakob’s Wife (2021) and Suitable Flesh (2023) and podcasts like She Kills are out there on the fringe, wrenching older women’s voices into the spotlight in new and pivotal ways. Bingo Hell (2021) uses humor to remind us that the older women in our communities are often our greatest assets. She Will (2021) backs us into a necessary corner and forces us to lock eyes with the horrific remnants of the “man’s world” that still need to be destroyed. The women in these movies are not tokens or novelties; they’re the heart and soul of their narratives, and they’re redefining our standards by degrees.

Look, I adore horror movies. Of all kinds. If you comb through my extensive list of favorites, you’ll find plenty that are part of the problem. My podcast is called Final Girl Friday, for chrissake. What matters now is that we can look back and around and see that problem for what it is and move forward with the knowledge that we are capable better. We can demand better from each other and ourselves. Not just for the sake of age representation and inclusiveness, but for the safety of the young women and girls who are inheriting our world. It’s time for us to rethink what “ideal” women look, act, and feel like in our movies. It’s time for the final girl to grow up.

As I said, horror carries a lot of weight on its shoulders.

And so do women.

It should no longer be unique to acknowledge that.

I know hope has become increasingly hard to come by lately. And although we have an incredibly long road before we reach our destination - made all the more difficult by the current political climates closing in around so many of us - I’m proud and excited to see the horror genre at the head of the line, steadfast and rebellious as always, eager to help us better comprehend the journey ahead.