@TigersMS78 put forth his favourite Final Girl…Sarah from The Descent
There are hundreds of Final Girls from hundreds of horror movies, plenty of them come from the 70s and 80s films but what about in the new millennium? They are few and far between so when a Final Girl stands out, it is something to behold. The Final Girl is resourceful, fierce, and furious and if you’re the bad guy – deadly. However what happens when the Final Girl is scared, emotionally crippled and surrounded by outwardly stronger girls? Well she adapts.
This is the case with The Descent and more aptly Sarah. Before the story has even started Sarah suspects her friend Juno and her husband are getting VERY close but before she can really address this issue, she is in a car crash with her husband and daughter who are horribly killed and whilst she survives – it’s a very harsh beginning and as George Clooney says in From Dusk Til Dawn ‘Those acts of God really stick it in and break it off, don’t they’. Sarah is obviously struggling with what happened and so after about a year her friends decide to take her spelunking. Good choice girls.
As they go deeper into the cave, despite Sarah’s issues both mentally and the fact she really doesn’t want to go, Juno then confides in her that she hoped to rekindle her friendship with Sarah, naturally Sarah being hard as nails gives her the brush off, it’s a further string to her Final Girl bow – This. Girl. Don’t. Compromise.When the sh*t storm starts to descend on the group in the form of injuries, cave ins and vicious, people eating crawlers – Sarah is the one that steps up, doing what she can to survive. Sarah not only euthanizes one of her friends but she then gets confirmation that Juno was indeed playing the beast with two backs with her deceased husband.
Sarah is a survivor and as such is prepared to do anything to survive. Taking on the cave crawlers, hiding in a pool of blood, struggling with every fibre of her being to live when considering all the bad things that have happened to her, you wouldn’t blame her for giving up. Sarah fights on laying waste to anything stupid enough to step up to her. Then comes the biggest badass moment of all – she meets up with Juno, lets her know that she knew about the affair and then maims Juno for the crawlers to come and get. Despite the peril she is in Sarah sticks by her code. Now this selection maybe deemed as controversial as Sarah doesn’t escape (in the real ending at least – if you think the film ends with the jump scare in the car, you need to see the proper ending) but she IS the final girl in the film and portrays all the attributes required.
Ryan Morrissey-Smith
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