Final boys are rare. They are so rare that they are sometimes written out of existence entirely - occasionally people will assert that a final girl is definitional to the slasher movie rather than just being a recurring trope of the genre. There are, in fact, slasher movies where the main character is a guy instead of a girl - A Nightmare on Elm Street II, Child’s Play, and Final Destination, among others, all spring to mind. But the final boy is not simply a mirror image of his distaff counterpart; he knocks his movie out of alignment with the rest of the genre, slipping it more towards the occult oeuvre of films like Don’t Look Now, Poltergeist, and The Serpent and the Rainbow. And except when he is a literal child, he is rarely seen as innocent the way a final girl is; his gender unsettles the boundary between victim and slasher, leaving his heroism comparatively questionable.
But if we’re going to discuss final boys, we have to start with final girls - Eve, it seems, predates Adam. The term originates in Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws, where she posits it as a form of what she calls the “female victim-hero.” The victim-hero blurs the line between herself and her victimizer (typically, but not always, a slasher villain); she is not a passive recipient of violence, eventually finding a way to turn the tables on her attacker. Sometimes she merely escapes him; sometimes she manages to disarm him, robbing him of his weapon and metaphorically castrating him before turning his weapon back onto him. The victim-hero is not exclusive to slasher movies, but within that genre she is called the “final girl.” To Clover, the final girl’s arc is one of transitioning from vulnerability to power, from reactivity to proactivity, from femininity to masculinity.
And perhaps this explains why final boys seem so rare: a man, even as a teenage boy, is too far on the other side of the masculine/feminine spectrum. Most of the handful of final boys in the genre exist on the fringe of normal teenage masculinity: they are children, mentally ill, or in some way effeminate. Andy Barclay is a child in the first two Child’s Play movies, as is Tommy Jarvis in Friday the Thirteenth IV. In Parts V and VI, the older Tommy is explicitly mentally ill, and his hallucinations are the main feature of his arc in V. Jesse Walsh of A Nightmare on Elm Street II is gay-coded; at one point, he tells a male friend that he fears “something is trying to get inside my body;” the friend retorts, “yeah and she’s female and she’s waiting for you in the cabana, and you wanna sleep with me.” In My Soul To Take, Adam “Bug” Hellerman is an outcast at his school, ostracized by most of his classmates because of rumors of mental illness - rumors spread by his older sister, who physically assaults him at the end of the movie. Todd in The Burning and Alex Browning of Final Destination are both relatively rare everyman final boys, but Todd shares his final boy status with Alfred, a creepy loner, and Alex is not especially masculine compared to costar Carter Daniels, an angry, aggressive jock.
And Alex’s masculinity is further unsettled by the fact that he is, essentially, a psychic. In the opening of Final Destination, he is struck by a vision of the plane he and his classmates have boarded being destroyed by an explosion, and his attempts to warn the passengers and crew leads to him and a handful of classmates being kicked off the plane. The rest of the movie will see him haunted by more intuitive and subtle visions of the future - a name shredded from a newspaper indicating who is next to die or a spark from a lighter hinting that a friend is in danger from lightning.
Jesse, too, is a budding clairvoyant. The first half of A Nightmare on Elm Street II resembles real world accounts of poltergeists manifesting around teenagers - teenagers who are almost always girls. Jesse is haunted by recurring nightmares, likely as a result of moving into Nancy Thompson’s house from the first film, although his sister’s comments wondering why he is like this and the fact that he and his family have just moved in leaves open the possibility that his problems predate their arrival at Elm Street. Like Alex, Jesse’s visions are continuous throughout the movie - his semi-girlfriend Lisa even compares him to a police psychic. But the power manifesting through Jesse is, of course, more malign. At one point, Jesse seems to cause his family’s pet bird to explode. Later, when he is menaced by his sexually predatory gym teacher, Freddy manifests in his defense. But Freddy is entirely unseen during this episode, attacking the teacher with telekinetically propelled sports equipment as Jesse watches, either uncomprehending or uncaring.
Even Tommy, in a way, is haunted by visions. In Friday the Thirteenth V, his second appearance in the series, a now older Tommy has been released from a psychiatric hospital into halfway house. Despite his release, Tommy is nearly mute and is prone to violent outbursts - but most distressing are the continual hallucinations of Jason, who he killed in the last film. Tommy attempts to ignore them, but they turn out to be quite prescient, as the halfway house is soon attacked by a Jason imitator seeking revenge over the death of his son.
These psychic episodes align these movies with what Clover calls the “occult film,” the male counterpart of the slasher movie. Instead of a teenage girl, the standard star of the occult movie is a man, typically an agent of “White Science” - Clover’s term for the ordered, rational, and visible world that is threatened by the chaos and madness of the hidden world of “Black Magic.”1 The occult hero does not find victory by becoming more masculine; his antagonists can’t be defeated by ordinary shows of force. Instead, he must become more feminine, accepting the existence of the unseen and the irrational and learning to trust his own emotions and intuition - an arc exemplified by a hero having psychic visions, which are both supernatural and implicitly feminine.
Possession is another recurring motif of the occult film - a process which Clover notes frequently entails over-masculinization. Regan of The Exorcist becomes crude, confrontational, and violent when possessed by Pazuzu, as does Arnie under the influence of the titular Christine. For the final boy, the fear of possession makes the line between him and the slasher thinner and blurrier; he is haunted by the possibility of becoming the slasher. Even when he is not directly threatened by possession, the pall of suspicion falls upon him; the final girl is ignored, the final boy is accused.2 In Child’s Play, after Chucky pushes Maggie out of a window, Andy is the primary suspect. The audience, who witnessed the death of Charles Lee Ray at the toystore and has seen Chucky move on his own, knows otherwise and watches as Andy’s pleas of innocence are ignored.
Alex faces similar scrutiny in Final Destination; he is initially suspected of having had something to do with the explosion of the plane that killed most of his classmates. The suspicion is justified at first - how did Alex know the plane was going to explode? - but Alex is blamed for deaths he could not possibly have caused. When his friend Tod is strangled by a clothes rack, Tod’s parents hold Alex responsible, saying that guilt over his brother’s death on the plane drove him to suicide. Miss Lewton, a teacher who avoided the explosion because of Alex’s intervention, believes he is the cause of the deaths that follow, even after she witnesses another student get hit by a bus in what was clearly a freak accident.
Tommy in Friday the Thirteenth VI similarly struggles to warn those around him of the danger from Jason, and ends up becoming accused of Jason’s murders in the process. When he arrives in Crystal Lake, newly rechristened Forest Green, not only does no one believe him, he is assumed to be a troublemaker and locked in a local jail. When he is first released, the sheriff demands that he leave the town entirely. When Jason’s murders are discovered, the sheriff concludes that Tommy is responsible, even when his daughter reveals that Tommy was with her when the murders occurred.
Of course, the line between Tommy and Jason was always shaky. Friday the Thirteenth IV ends with Tommy killing Jason; after Jason is dispatched, Tommy stares, blank-eyed, at the camera while his sister hugs him. V too hints at the possibility that Tommy will replace Jason and become the franchise’s slasher. When the killings begin, he has already been set up as a suspect - his use of masks, his tendency towards violence, and most of all his aforementioned hallucinations all make him stand out amongst the other possible killers (most of whom are quickly dispatched after being introduced). When he disappears entirely in the third act his guilt seems to be confirmed. But he is not, in fact, the slasher, and instead is once again the one to land the killing blow on “Jason” (actually a minor side character in an inexplicable disguise) by pushing him out of a barn onto a spike harrow. Later, when he is recovering in the hospital, Tommy has a hallucination in which he stabs Pam, another survivor, to death. This is quickly revealed to be a dream, and Tommy has a vision of Jason dissolving away; at last, the shadow of the slasher has been banished. But in fact, it has merely been replaced - Tommy dons a Jason mask he had hidden and prepares to attack Pam for real. The next movie will drop this plotline entirely, and Tommy will not appear in any additional movies past that, but from his very first appearance, Tommy was always presented as a possible inheritor of Jason’s murderous spirit.
Child’s Play features a more explicit threat of possession. In the first film, Chucky must transfer his soul into the body of the first person he revealed himself to: Andy. This continues in the second movie; in the third, Andy is no longer the target, having been replaced by the younger boy Tyler. Seed of Chucky introduces Glen, the child of Chucky and another possessed doll, Tiffany. Glen’s gender is ambiguous; while Chucky and Tiffany have functional genitalia, Glen does not. Chucky wishes for the queer-coded Glen to be both more masculine and more murderous, but Glen’s more homicidal personality identifies as female, referring to herself as Glenda.
Similarly, My Soul to Take hints at the possibility that its final boy might be overcome by the soul of a dead slasher. In the opening scene, we see the Riverton Ripper struggle with what seems to be Dissociative Personality Disorder; when Bug develops identical symptoms sixteen years later, the link is rather obvious; the revelation that Bug is the son of the Ripper serves to further cement the connection between the two. But it is Bug’s friend Alex, not Bug, who is actually the new Ripper, as he has been possessed by the spirit that had originally driven the Ripper to kill. Bug’s symptoms, it turns out, were actually caused by being inhabited by the spirit of the Ripper’s victims. Though he is not the final boy himself, Alex illustrates the paradox that the final boy faces: overcoming their victimizer risks becoming like him. Alex, we learn at the beginning of the film, is being abused by his stepfather. When he admits to having killed him, it is our first clue that he, rather than Alex, is the new Ripper.
But Jesse is our most literal example; the main plotline of A Nightmare on Elm Street II is his attempts to resist Freddy overtaking his personality. And the way that this is framed makes it seem less like Freddy is an independent entity and more like he is an inherent, suppressed part of Jesse. Freddy’s first kill is done in defense of Jesse, when his gym teacher appears to be planning to sexually assault him. And unlike with Nancy, whom he mostly attacked externally, manifesting as a gloved hand in her bathtub or a tongue emerging from her telephone, Freddy’s assaults on Jesse are internal. Jesse sleepwalks, and Freddy’s voice speaks from his mouth. When, at the start of the third act, Freddy takes control of Jesse completely, he does so by bursting, fully formed, out of Jesse’s body. When Lisa urges Jesse to fight Freddy’s control, Freddy retorts “he can’t fight me: I’m him!” Lisa’s final confrontation with Freddy takes a different cast from the typical slasher movie showdown; Freddy is not defeated by force or violence. Lisa rejects the idea that he is something inherent to Jesse, rebuking the connection between the final boy and the slasher. In doing so, she becomes one of the few slasher movie characters to win nonviolently; after kissing Freddy/Jesse, she watches as the facade of Freddy crumbles away, revealing a still living Jesse underneath it.
The blurriness of the border between the final boy and the slasher means that final boys lack any equivalent of the final girl who is the sole murderer, a la Carrie White of Carrie or Jennifer Hills of I Spit On Your Grave. If his murders are entirely justifiable, like Jennifer’s, he is an action hero; the equivalent of Jennifer is, per Clover, Rambo. If they are not, he scans purely as a monster, like Billy Chapman in Silent Night, Deadly Night. The closest male equivalent of Carrie is David Kessler of An American Werewolf in London, who remains sympathetic even as he rampages through London, but even he is not justified in his murders; they are the result of the werewolf’s murderous instincts, not a quest for righteous revenge.
The final boy slips between the final girl and the slasher, caught halfway between them. Even when he is innocent, he is suspect: his gender prevents him from taking the conventional victim-to-hero path traveled by the final girl. When he turns the tables on his slasher, it is not a moment of empowerment; it is a crossroads in which he risks falling down the path of the slasher himself.
Clover borrows this terminology from the movie “The Serpent and the Rainbow.”
Todd would, at first, seem to be an exception to this rule; no one in The Burning ever accuses him of being the slasher. But of all the final boys, Todd is one of the most guilty: he participated in the prank that left Cropsy disfigured, thus leading to his murder spree.