Graduate Program

Communication Studies

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

Spring 2026

Thesis Director

Marita Gronnvoll

Thesis Committee Member

Marjorie Worthington

Thesis Committee Member

Drew Britton

Abstract

Carol J Clover’s (2015) Final Girl, the female slasher protagonist who survives to the end of the movie, has become a staple of horror scholarship, providing insight into the function of gender within the genre as well as our cultural beliefs surrounding femininity. Given the attention paid to horror’s leading ladies, however, another fascinating figure has gone unexplored: the Final Boy. This project analyzes nine horror films from the 1980s with young male protagonists in order to conceptualize and critique this previously unidentified trope. Utilizing McKerrow’s (1989) critical rhetoric as a guide, this research not only provides a thorough definition of the Final Boy, but a deconstruction of how this recurring narrative reinforces harmful ideological structures including misogyny, white supremacy, ableism, and homophobia. Ultimately, it is only the boys who are white, able bodied, heterosexual, emotionally repressed, and sexually successful who are able to survive to the end of the film. In doing so, they ascend, not just to manhood, but to a messianic status, allowing them to save both themselves and others. This trope serves to naturalize the oppressive hierarchy of masculinity through who gets to live and who has to die. Identifying the figure of the Final Boy gives us a deeper understanding of one of the horror genre’s most influential eras and sheds light on the covert ways that media can reinforce damaging cultural ideas about gender.

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