I'm not sure I can explain how much the final girl means to me.
At 22, in my first semester of graduate school and feeling way over my head with classmates who were older and smarter, I first read Carol J. Clover's "Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film." I had loved horror movies since I was way too young to be watching them, without realizing there was a name for my favorite kind of character.
