Surviving Nightmares: Women in Horror

The character of the 'Final Girl', the killer's last remaining target who survives and gets the upper hand over her pursuer, is one of the horror genre's most persistent tropes. With reference to the subversive new iteration of Halloween, Gabrielle O'Brien argues that it can serve as a powerful metaphor for women's agency – particularly so in an age in which questions of gender representation are being addressed more urgently than ever before.

Additional keywords:
Talking Society, senior secondary, #MeToo, Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock, Carol J Clover, Linda Williams, psychoanalysis, sadism, masochism, misogyny, feminism, subjectivity, Jamie Lee Curtis