The Final Girl Film Festival is a celebration of the women who made the term part of popular culture. It will be four days long, one day for each final girl (and two on day two): Nancy Thompson, played by Heather Langenkamp (A Nightmare on Elm Street); Alice Johnson played by Lisa Wilcox (A Nightmare on Elm Street); Kirsty Cotton played by Ashley Laurence (Hellraiser), Sydney Prescott played by Neve Campbell (Scream), and Laurie Strode played by Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween). These franchises have prospered through several decades and generations of fans. These women, have beome icons for strength and perserverance for both men and women. Considered to be the original scream queens, these five women have earned their places as horror icons. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “The final girl is a trope in horror movies, referring to the female protagonist who remains alive at the end of the film, after the other characters have been killed, when she is usually placed in a position to confront the killer. The term is credited to Carol J. Clover, a professor of Scandinavian and Comparative Literature at University of Caliornia-Berkeley, who used final girl to describe such characters in her book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992), which explores the similarities and differences in how male and female audiences engage with the horror film genre.”
