Final Girls

Original Air Date: April 9, 2025 In space, no one can hear you scream! In Alien (1979), Sigourney Weaver redefined what a Final Girl could be: smart, resourceful, emotionally grounded, and completely unafraid to torch a xenomorph when it comes down to it. This week, we board the Nostromo and break down Ripley’s iconic status and why her legacy still looms large over the Final Girls canon. Join our...

Hey listeners! We love this show, we love all of you, and we are stoked to have been doing this podcast for almost a hundred episodes! As you can imagine, we need a little break from time to time, so we will be back with brand new Final Girl episodes for Season 3 on December 9th. With that said, we’re NOT going radio silent! We have a few new regular Final Girls episodes we are going to debut on o...

What an excellent day for an exorcism! This week we’re covering the head-turning story of poor Regan from The Exorcist. We go into Regan’s journey from sweet 12-year-old wingwoman to her mom, Chris, to possessed pre-Deadite projectile vomiting pea soup, to scuffed up 12-year-old again, and we also cover all the spooky things that happened during and right after the movie’s production. So press pla...

This week we’re covering the Final Girl of one of two Summer 2026 Barbenheimer for Sickos movies, Backrooms (Obsession is the second). Like so many female characters in horror movies these days, Mary is left to deal with a whiny man-baby who can’t hold himself accountable for the sh*tty way he’s treated women, so that’s her first Final Girl fight. But there are many more FG fights she encounters,...

Nothing - and we really mean NOTHING - good happens after 3am, so if you get a knock at your door around that time after a particularly rough night with your significant other, DO NOT OPEN IT. This week we’re covering Kristen from The Strangers (2008), a movie that feels different in 2026 because of the massive shift in the genre. It is always lauded as one of the scariest movies ever, so is Krist...

“I would kill for her! I would die for her! Either way, what bliss!” This week we’re taking it back to the 90s with Morticia from The Addams Family (1991). This movie is basically a live action cartoon, but we love it and we love her. It may be a bit of a stretch to call Morticia a Final Girl, but she is the matriarch of a family of outsiders - and in this episode we dive into her confident, unbot...

Rocky from Don’t Breathe (2016) fits all the definitions of a Final Girl, yet this movie is still deeply unpleasant and a very difficult watch. But she does have some great moments, and in this episode we cover all of them. We also dive into ladybug tattoos and the trope of Detroit as shorthand for urban blight, as well as how gross visuals are fun in Evil Dead ways but not in story lines that fea...

Which is scarier: The Creeper, or Justin Long’s early 2000s tribal rose tattoo? This week we’re covering a highly requested Final Girl, Trish from Jeepers Creepers (2001). Trish is road tripping it home from college with her kid brother, Derry, and his garbage bags of laundry when they encounter a creepy truck and its creepier driver. And instead of minding their business, Derry forces them to inv...

Natalie from Urban Legend (1998) hits all the Final Girl marks: she’s not believed when she figures out the killer’s pattern, she does Final Girl Research in a library, she has past trauma that is slowly uncovered, and she survives some brutal attacks from The Killer. She also navigates an environment with terrible sex advice and a roommate who constantly sexiles her, and we consider that final gi...

Tell everyone! And carry an EpiPen! This week we’re examining the artful world of Brianna from Candyman (2021) and her journey to figuring out who the Candyman is and what his relationship is to her boyfriend Anthony. This movie is heavy-handed about police brutality, racism, gentrification, and more, but in our opinion, there are a LOT of people who need to hear these messages so we support the u...

When we were watching The Ruins again, we both had the same thought: maybe DON’T be one of THOSE tourists who takes photos of locals like they’re props and then proceeds to visit an unmapped area that those same locals told you not to visit (in flip flops, too, by the way.) This week we’re covering our Final Girl Amy’s vacation from hell, cursed ruins, spooky vines, having a med school boyfriend,...

This week our friends from Chopping It Up are joining us to break down John Carpenter’s 1980 spooky cult classic, The Fog! Get ready to learn A LOT about this movie and its two Final Girls, Elizabeth (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Stevie (Adrienne Barbeau.) We go into how much we love the idea of being a radio DJ in a lighthouse, the way Carpenter decided to make a ghost story about fog, how to get unstuc...

If you knew you had seven days to live, would you spend them chasing LEAD after LEAD like our Final Girl Rachel in The Ring (2002) and Kellie? Or would you be like Sarah and say eff it, and catch a plane to Bali for your remaining days? This week we’re tracking Rachel’s grim, wet, blue/green journey through Seattle, in a movie that could literally just be titled “Final Girl Research: The Movie.” A...

“Pacts with the devil - real or bullsh*t?” That is the question on everyone’s mind in Ready or Not (2019) and especially for our ICONIC Final Girl Grace. Grace sets the FG standard - she’s got moxie, resourcefulness, and commitment (our top three ingredients) on LOCK. We dedicate this episode to all of the badass listeners who have requested a Grace episode over the past year and a half! Join our...

I’m Chucky!!! Wanna play? No? Actually, we totally get it, because otherwise you might get stuck like our Final Girl Karen saving grown-ass men from a killer doll in Child’s Play (1988). Karen shows us lots of things about how to be a Final Girl, like you should definitely keep a first aid kit handy and sometimes, you need to take matters into your own hands, especially when there’s a manbaby dete...

Angsty goth girls unite! Stokely is our Final Girl in 1998’s teen horror cult classic The Faculty, and this week we’re chasing her story like the queen alien who chases Frodo through the gymnasium. This movie has one of the most STACKED casts of all time, including YOUNG JON STEWART WITH A GOATEE??? We also cover whether Planet Hollywood is still a thing and the Cabin in the Woods/the Faculty east...

Carrie White is Burning in Hell! This week, we unpack the telekinetic Final Girl victim/villain arc of Carrie White from the 1976 film Carrie. This movie is a hard watch because really, who hasn’t been relentlessly bullied at some point in their life? We also cover the religious psychosis that conditioned her to be scared of her body and whether or not we should consider getting Carrie insurance o...

We’re back from our travels and PUMPED to talk about one of our favorite performances in a horror movie of all time - Toni Collette as Lynn in The Sixth Sense (1999). This was one of the most grounded, realistic portrayals of a mother’s fear and exhaustion we’ve ever seen. Even if she’s not a Typical Final Girl™, we think she’s deserving of the title because she shows that bravery is doing the thi...

This episode is a love letter to nostalgic millennials who saved up their chore money for the Scholastic Book Fair. This week, we’re covering Deena from Fear Street 1994 (2021), a charming trilogy based on the Fear Street novels by R.L. Stine. Deena’s an angsty feminist punk Final Girl whose story isn’t just about surviving a killer curse, but also aggressively defending her culturally unaccepted...

Double Trouble! This week we’re teaming up with Maggie and Kassie from Skip or Scream Podcast to dive into the Final Girl journey of Maddie from Hush (2016). In this film, our Final Girl lives by herself in the middle of the forest, you know, like you do. Because of her hearing impairment, she has to fight like a Final Girl in some alternative ways, and some very classic ways, and we think she’s a...

You’re invited to our Slumber Party! Just please don’t bring strawberry daiquaris, because who drinks those with pizza, honestly (other than Trish and her friends). This week we’re covering Trish and Valerie, the two Final Girls from the 1982 slasher cult classic The Slumber Party Massacre. This one follows all of the sleazy slasher beats, but it was written and directed by women, and we have quit...

CODE DILL! Kara joined us for Sarah’s bday episode to cast some cute dark magic and dive into the coven from Forbidden Fruits. This movie is Mean Girls meets Heathers meets The Craft meets a tiny bit of Clueless, and two of the three of us are here for it. Goat's milk, thigh gaps, rose petals, bone casts, truffle oil, bitch slap, blood clots, juice press. Bee emoji, Couple emoji, Red heart emoji,...

This week, we're analyzing the Final Girl journey of Skye from Smile 2 (2024), an overworked and lonely NYC pop star fighting multiple demons - but only one of them is supernatural! This is a very rewatchable movie in a franchise we hope will only get better and better. But how does her Final Girl story measure up? We changed our Patreon! We now only have ONE level for $5. Our Patreons get TWO ext...

They Will Kill You (2026) is part Quentin Tarantino, part Sam Raimi, part Wes Anderson, and we're here for all of it. This week we’re continuing our month of listener requests with a VERY recent Final Girl -- Asia, a bona fide badass who has come to save her sister from a satanic cult in a creepy art deco hotel in NYC, only to discover they are a far more difficult villain to vanquish than she ima...

Who are we, you ask? Demons to some, angels to others 😈 This week, we’re analyzing Kirsty’s Final Girl credentials in one of the most iconic franchises in horrorstory, Hellraiser (1987). She’s the trifecta of Final Girl resourcefulness with a perfect blend of physical strength, intellectual capability, and emotional awareness. We just wish she had a lot more screen time in this one. Listen to (or...