It’s a chilly October night. You’re in a dorm room somewhere on campus. Wind howls outside as rain patters against the window relentlessly, filling the sidewalk below with a slew of runoff and leaves. A scented candle burns on a side table as the sound of popcorn crunching and wine sipping mingles with the tense atmosphere in the room. Everyone is silent.

The protagonist, illuminated on your friend’s laptop screen, stares right past the camera. Her eyes are wide and the button-up shirt she’s wearing is torn, blood seeping through the fabric. Dirt is smeared all over her face, disrupted only by streaks of tears formed from the long journey she faced that night.

Suddenly, a masked face appears behind her, machete raised inches from her head. Everyone screams at the screen hoping the protagonist will hear them. Popcorn flies across your friend’s bed as the killer steps closer, honing in on his target.

Then the girl turns around. She knows the killer’s dirty tricks after having fought him for the past 30 minutes. She pulls out a piece of scrap metal she’s been hiding up her sleeve and drives it into the killer’s heart. As she stares down at her foe in victory, everyone in the room lets out a sigh of relief.

You may walk away from this movie excited the male director let a woman be the hero. It’s from the ‘90s, so you’d expect a guy to be the one to take down the villain and save the day. But as you watch one slasher film, and then another, you begin to pick up on a pattern. Is the horror genre truly smashing the patriarchy, or is it all a facade?

The trope of the final girl was first presented in 1987 by Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws. As gender analysis within the slasher genre grew more popular in the ‘80s, it became apparent that a pattern of women being the sole survivor of a horrific murder spree was a recurring theme throughout the latter half of the 20th century.

The three final girls that typically come to mind first are Nancy Thompson from A Nightmare on Elm Street, Sidney Prescott from Scream and Alice Hardy from Friday the 13th.

All of these characters come from cult classics in the slasher genre (making them highly recognizable) and follow a specific set of “rules” that qualify them as final girls.

The first is an aversion to nudity and sexuality, which play a large role in deciding which characters are murdered in a slasher film. In Friday the 13th, Jack and Marcie are killed almost immediately after having sex in one of the cabins. In contrast, the final girl Alice is seen being hit on by the owner of the camp Steve Christy, but she turns down his advances — she’s an attractive girl, but it’s made clear to the audience that she wants no part in sexual promiscuity. Because of this, she’s “rewarded” at the end of the film by being the sole survivor of the Camp Crystal Lake massacre.

In addition to sexual innocence, all of the girls face long, grueling fights with the antagonists in their movies. They typically use intelligence to fight the killers — they only turn to extreme violence when absolutely necessary and it is sometimes never seen at all. Elm Street’s Nancy sets traps and effectively tricks the child murderer Freddy Kruger into his own demise, ending with a scene where she stops giving him power by not being afraid of him anymore. This ending seems unconventional: why isn’t there a satisfying vanquishing of the villain after Nancy’s grueling battle?

This question is answered when we ask why final girls are used so frequently in the slasher genre. And to reach this conclusion, it’s important to note that these films were made by men, for men. While it seems unconventional to put a woman in the position of a hero in this context, there are actually several reasons why it makes sense that the final girl was created for men.

As mentioned before, she is sexually innocent, a victim, a damsel in distress. She isn’t a force to be reckoned with — just a girl who got lucky enough to escape and eventually craft a plan to take down evil. She is controllable; her curiosity can only know set boundaries before she is punished.

She’s also used for shock factor. The fact that she has survived being chased by the boogie man, stabbed at by a crazed old woman and has watched all of her friends die is shocking. She shouldn’t be alive, but there she is, finally wielding a reasonably-sized weapon (a chainsaw would be too violent, obviously) and ready to win this battle (until the sequel, of course).

So why do men want to see this on screen? I believe final girls weren’t created with a specific answer in mind, so here are a few potential reasons why men would want to see a woman in this position.

Movies are created to transport us to a new reality, and in the ones depicted in slasher films, the position of the ‘strong male hero’ hasn’t been filled. Everyone is dead, a murderer or a practically defenseless woman, leaving space for a good male protagonist. This allows a man to envision himself in this setting as a knight in shining armour for our innocent victim. He can watch an attractive woman be tortured and attacked, but if he was there, the killer would have been dealt with already. He is stronger than the men who have been killed and stronger than the crazed lunatic who wants to slit everyone’s throats. The final girl just barely survives on her own, but she would be safe if he was there to protect her.

On the surface, it is refreshing to see any female protagonist on screen. In a world of men as the typical hero type, watching Sidney kill Billy Loomis with a bullet to the head after she learns he murdered her mother is objectively satisfying.

But watching for deceptive feminist tropes is important. Women deserve to see themselves on screen — not an innocent, submissive, toned-down version of who they truly are. They deserve to see protagonists who are allowed to be strong, crass, violent, loud, disruptive, angry, sexual and masculine — even innocent, if they want — because those are all things that women can be simultaneously.

The final girl script needs to be left in the ‘90s to make way for true representation: a final girl who not only survives the night, but is allowed to be tough while she does it.