The "Final Girl" theory is focussed on the belief that a woman that commits no sin will survive a horror movie and defeat the villain.
This is evident in classic Horrors such as:
Halloween
Friday the 13th
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Scream
Final Destination
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
I Know What You Did Last Summer
Hellraiser
Alien
The Strangers
The Ring
The Grudge
Carol Clover, author of "Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film" suggests that in these films, the viewer begins by sharing the perspective of the killer, but experiences a shift in identification to the final girl partway through the film.
However, Buffy Summers, the protagonist of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series, is an example of a character deliberately designed by creator Joss Whedon as a more empowering alternative to the "final girl" cliché. Jason Middleton observes that although she fulfills the role of the final girl in killing monsters night after night, she is the antithesis of Clover's definition of final girls as boyish, not sexually attractive, favoring "practical" clothing, not sexually active, and often having a unisex name. Buffy is a cheerleader, a "beautiful blond" with a normal sex life, with a name that, Middleton observes, could not be more feminine. Buffy is, in the words of Jes Battis, "subverting" the final girl trope of B-grade horror films. In Middleton's words, she gets to have sex with boys and still kill the monster.
