The Vault of Horror & Day of the Woman Present: The Top 10 Penultimate Girls!

Ever since Carol J. Clover published her treatise Men, Women & Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film some 18 years ago, the term "final girl" has been one of the most universally recognized tropes in the entire horror genre (hell, we hear there's even a blog named for it!) We're all well-acquainted with the concept of the virtuous, resourceful female survivor who outlives all of her friends, and somehow finds the strength within herself to face off with and overcome the slasher/monster in the end. In other words, nice girls die last (or usually don't at all.)

But you know who everyone has completely forgotten thanks to the rise of this pop culture film studies phenomenon? Those poor girls who almost made it. The girls who gave it everything they had and came up just short. The also-rans who perhaps just weren't resourceful or virtuous enough, and met their grisly end just before the final girl made her stand. That's right, we're talking about the penultimate girls.

To help chronicle the exploits of these misunderstood and forgotten females, I've turned to the mistress of Day of the Woman herself, Ms. BJ-C, and together we've put together a very special edition of the "Tuesday Top 10". We hope you enjoy it. So without further ado, we bring to you, the girls without whom the final girls couldn't be final: The Penultimate Girls...

10. Tina Gray
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
In the tradition of Psycho, Tina is a female character killed off just as the audience is getting to know her. However, her death plays a vital role in the film, and in fact she is the only girl who bites the dust in NOES. She might not be on screen long enough for us to love her, but watching her body bag slide through the school hallways makes it impossible for us to forget her.

9. Chris Hargensen
Carrie (1976)
There are always those characters in horror films that you just cannot wait to see die off. Chris was by far the most easily hated character in the entire film, and yet she lasts longer than everyone in her high school but Amy Irving. She isn't a best friend, or a good person, but she's a character we all love to despise, and seeing her reach her demise is one of the best moments of the film.

8. Tatum
Scream (1996)
Tatum's death was one of the most heartbreaking moments of the entire Scream series. Mostly because it's Rose McGowan and she's a total fox. The typical "average girl" of the party crashes into Ghostface and goes through one of the most memorable death scenes in the movie. "Oh no, Mr. Ghostface, I want to be in the sequel!" I guess the moral of the story is don't get beer in the garage alone?

7. Lambert
Alien (1979)
If Ripley represented a strong female lead who broke the stereotype for women in horror films and stood her ground against the monster, than Lambert was th total opposite, fulfilling every stereotype of the hysterical, helpless woman who falls apart when the stuff hits the fan. She quickly becomes a total liability to the rest of the crew, and does nothing but weep and shiver before being gutted (and most likely raped) by ol' phallus-head.

6. Pam
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
The subject of one of the most masterful camera shots in horror film history, poor Pam (Teri McMinn) wanders from her safe tree swing into Leatherface's domain, only to become the first on-screen victim of cinema's favorite cannibal family. Pam's fate is far from pretty, as she's hoisted on that meat hook, and subsequently stuffed inside a refrigerator. But seeing what Sally goes through after her, we wonder if maybe Pam was the one who got off easy.

5. Brenda
Friday the 13th (1980)
All Brenda wanted to do was play a friendly game of strip Monopoly, drink some beer and smoke some weed. Little did she know she was about to become Pamela Voorhees' last victim. After braving the rain to go check on some weird noises outside, she finds herself on the business end of an archery range, and the next thing you know, her lifeless corpse is being tossed through the window of Alice's cabin as a prelude to Ms. Voorhees' be-sweatered entrance.

4. Helen Shivers
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
While portraying the "harder" version of Jennifer Love Hewitt, SMG has a way of making us all adore her character, and we even feel for her when she wakes up with her beautiful hair chopped to bits. She's one of the girls it hurts to see go and sadly, we can predict her death easily once JLH is shown to be the main character.

3. Sara
Suspiria (1977)
In grand penultimate girl tradition, Sara is a friend and confidante of the final girl--in this case, Jessica Harper's Suzy Banyon. Poor Sara gets oh-so-close to figuring out just what the hell is going on, before falling victim to one of the bleakest on-screen deaths in movie history. Stalked by our faceless killer, she is driven into a room filled with razor wire, where she fillets herself amidst the metallic vines.

2. Annie Brackett
Halloween (1978)
A best friend is someone who is willing to skip out on Halloween festivities in order to babysit with you. A best friend is also someone who is willing to let you take both the kids while she goes to wang her boyfriend. Laurie Strode is the best friend anyone could have, and Annie Brackett was lucky enough to have her. In both the original film as well as Rob Zombie's, Annie is portrayed as both a character you can't get enough of, and a character you hate to see killed off.

1. Marion Crane
Psycho (1960)
Without a doubt, the most iconic of all penultimate girls. Perhaps this is because her entire existence as a movie character hinges on the fact that she defies expectations by not living to the end of the picture, and in fact being killed off midway through in legitimately shocking fashion. By all the rules of film narrative, it should've been Janet Leigh's character who made it to the end, not her far less interesting sister. Yet the story messes with our heads, and becomes completely unforgettable in the process.

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Thanks for joining BJ-C and myself for this little homage to some of horror's most under-recognized characters. They may not have made it to the end, but they came so close, and they deserve our respect, damn it.

Women in Horror

Delving through the many sub-genres of horror, an almost unifying trait seems that horror loves female leads. Be it Alison Lohman in this year's exceptional Drag Me To Hell, or Mia Farrow in the classic Rosemary's Baby, women are more often than not at the forefront of the scary and the disturbing. From The Exorcist to Halloween, Blair Witch Project to Hellraiser, we delight at scary movies with female leads, and this is something that's true across the world. [Rec], The Orphanage, Ring, A Tale Of Two Sisters--they all feature women as the focal point. I get myself to thinking, why is this? Let me give you my perspective.

Some people would have you believe that Horror hates women. That the depiction of a male killer dominating female victims is a misogynistic expression of what young male audiences feel. Now, that's not something I believe for a second. It's a fallacy to think that the depiction of a woman's death in film is attacking women as a whole, when a film like Die Hard kills off an entirely male cast yet isn't believed to make any anti-male statements.

No, I find that the opposite is in fact true. Horror has brought us the idea of the Final Girl, the Scream Queen. A Nightmare on Elm Street features Nancy defeating Freddy, Halloween has Laurie overcoming Michael, and while often enough horror films can be more bleak in their endings, I do think that girls fare better than the boys a lot of the time. Johnny Depp didn't fare so well against Freddy, for example.

With that said, I do find that there are gender roles at play. Why, with Horror having such a huge male following, do women make such compelling leads? Action is another genre aimed towards the boys, and that still features predominantly male characters kicking the crap out of other males. I'm of the opinion that for a horror film to work, it needs to have a lead character that engages us, we need to connect with them and to feel afraid for them, and if we're not emotionally invested in them, the film loses it's power to scare us. I think that it's easier for us to be sympathetic towards and to feel afraid for a female lead than a male one. When watching Rosemary's Baby, we as an audience are concerned for Mia Farrow, and through her character's fear, the film affects us.

In the Korean horror A Tale of Two Sisters, our lead is a mentally unbalanced young girl who is deeply haunted by a past trauma. She seems so troubled and fragile, so vulnerable that she has our every sympathy and we do feel for her. It's perhaps this vulnerability that makes this female archetype so compelling for us as horror fans, and by comparison, it seems rare to find a male lead that we feel for. Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now and George C. Scott in The Changeling are two that I would say exemplify male leads that we connect to. They've both suffered horrendous losses at the beginning of both films, so we are sympathetic to them because they have had a part of their lives shattered.


In Satoshi Kon's deeply psychological animated film Perfect Blue, the main character is a young woman whose sense of reality and sense of self is falling apart piece by piece. She's a pop star turned actress who's having to deal with threats against her, a mysterious stalker, and a website that describes her life with frightening detail. It's a film that works so well because of how strong a character she is, continuing to push forward with her career, but she is under a lot of strain and we can't help but feel threatened for her. I don't think I would've felt as strongly had it been a male character in her place.

Now, that's not to say that having a female lead is the sure-fire way to success in Horror. There's been plenty of terrible pieces of fluff like the awful Lindsey Lohan vehicle I Know Who Killed Me, or the spectacularly bad Captivity with Elisha Cuthbert. You still need a good film, and well written characters in order for it to engage the audience, and the fact that there's plenty of throwaway fluff in the horror genre is a testament to that. But an awful lot of the best Horror films, the ones that do engage us and make us genuinely frightened for the characters, are the ones with female leads.

This is something I find equally true with children. The Shining or The Sixth Sense for example, part of why we're afraid is because of how concerned we are for the child characters. The Exorcist is rather disturbing because of how sweet and innocent Linda Blair is. Guillermo del Toro's films The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth work extremely well because both child leads are placed in a dangerous place where they're scared, and we feel great sympathy for them.

Now, that's probably not true of everyone, but I do find that the characters I engage with the most personally are often women and children. What do you think? After all, there's no doubting female leads are a popular archetype in horror, what do you feel is the reason? Be sure to leave a comment and let my know your thoughts.

This is Karl Hungus, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.

[Editor's Note: For more on the feminine side of fear, be sure and check out another Vault affiliate, Day of the Woman.]

A Quarter-Century of Krueger: Alice, Sweet Alice

"I have a place in my heart for all of the different characters I have played and there is a story or two behind each. The character of Alice in the Nightmare films is still one of my favorites. Alice was me in grade school and me when I 'blossomed' in college. From weak to strong, from day dreamer to realist." - Lisa Wilcox

With all due respect to BJ-C and her kick-ass Women of the Week over at Day of the Woman, in this particular installment of QCK, I'm taking a look at my personal favorite Elm Street final girl, and one of horror's most overlooked final girls in general: Lisa Wilcox, a.k.a. Alice Johnson.

Ironically, although I find her the most interesting (not to mention attractive) of all the NOES heroines, she debuted in my least favorite movie in the series, The Dream Master. Yet she proved so popular with fans--and the film itself made so much bank--that the character was brought back for the fifth and most underrated entry in the series, The Dream Child.

The strongest female character in the series, Alice is revealed to be the equal counterpart of Freddy, and thus the most powerful and integral of all the mortal characters in the series as well. In fact, she manages to pull off the unheard-of feat of defeating Krueger and surviving in not one, but two Elm Street flicks (take that, Heather Langenkamp!). So beloved was the character that there was a certain element of the fan base that was outraged when her storyline was abandoned and she did not show up in the sixth Nightmare episode, Freddy's Dead.

Although quite memorable in both of her appearances, Lisa--whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the Chiller Theatre convention some years back--has never done any other work that rivaled them.

While still a student at UCLA, she made her acting "debut" as a "Wendy's girl" in an early '80s commercial for the fast food chain. Her first major film role came in the 1984 sexploitation flick Gimme an F, for which she took off a quarter from school. She had a brief recurring role on the '80s prime time soap Knots Landing, and a one-time appearance on Star Trek: The Next Generation that is still remembered by hardcore Trekkies. Her most high-profile non-Nightmare work might very well be her turn as Florence Henderson in a 2000 TV movie on the Brady Bunch. Needless to say, to her fans she will always be known first and foremost as Alice.

These days, Lisa and her Dream Master co-star Tuesday Knight are the owners of Toe Brights, a wholesale jewelry supplier which has been featured in major women's magazines, and counts among its celebrity customers the likes of Drew Barrymore, Mariah Carey and Jennifer Love Hewitt.

Even as recently as 2002, fans continued to clamor for Wilcox to reprise her role in Freddy vs. Jason, which some hoped would finally resolve her unfinished storyline. Alas, with the impending Elm Street reboot, it seems that we will never again see Lisa appear onscreen as Alice again.