00:00Do you want to die, Sidney? Your mother didn't want that.
00:05In horror movies, there's a rule you've definitely noticed.
00:08The person who survives at the end is a woman and she is called the Final Girl.
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00:17The term Final Girl was popularized by academic Carol J. Clover in her book
00:23Men, Women and Chainsaw, which was published in 1992.
00:27She studied in particular those films in which a young woman finds herself alone facing the killers in the latest
00:33minutes
00:33and this character often follows certain codes.
00:36She understands the danger before the others, she observes it, she flees.
00:39Then, at some point, she simply stops being a victim and she fights back.
00:44But there's something much more interesting behind the Final Girl
00:47because slasher films of the 70s and 80s have often been accused of punishing their characters
00:53for their behavior, particularly around the S.
00:57It has even become one of the most famous images of its kind.
00:59If you have sex in a slasher film, you're going to die.
01:02Except that the reality is a little more complicated.
01:04Researchers who have studied slashers have shown that the link between sexuality and death
01:09is not as automatic as the cliché suggests.
01:12Most importantly, Final Girl will evolve significantly.
01:15With Sydney Prescott in Scream, something changes.
01:18Sydney knows the rules.
01:19She has a sexuality.
01:21She makes mistakes.
01:22She directly confronts those who want to kill her.
01:24And most importantly, she keeps coming back again and again and again.
01:27The Final Girl is therefore not just the one who survives until the final scene.
01:32She could become the heroine of an entire franchise.
01:35And here, it also tells the story of the evolution of the place of women in horror cinema.
01:40Because the genre has long depicted women being pursued by masked men
01:44It also gave them some of their most famous heroines.
01:48And we'll see why Scream changed the rules of cinema and the slasher film.