Final Girl + Corpse Supercut

final girl + corpse supercut from rhiannon on Vimeo.

In honor of Halloween, I compiled a supercut of a trope within a trope: the moment in which the final girl* discovers a corpse. Enjoy!

*In her excellent 1987 essay “Her Body Himself” Carol J. Clover coined the term “final girl.” According to Clover: 

The Final Girl is introduced at the beginning and is the only character to be developed in any psychological detail. We understand immediately from the attention paid it that hers is the main story line. She is intelligent, watchful, level-headed; the first character to sense something amiss and the only one to deduce from the accumulating evidence the patterns and extent of the threat; the only one, in other words, whose perspective approaches our own privileged understanding of the situation. We register her horror as she stumbles on the corpses of her friends; her paralysis in the face of death duplicates those moments of the universal nightmare experience on which horror frankly trades. When she downs the killer, we are triumphant. She is by any measure the slasher film’s hero. This is not to say that our attachment to her is exclusive and unremitting, only that it adds up, and that in the closing sequence it is very close to absolute.