From Barbarian’s subversion of Bill Skarsgård’s casting, 2022 has been a great year for subversions of horror movie tropes. One of the most famous horror tropes is the “final girl,” the female character whose quick thinking and decisive action allow her to survive the monster.
On occasion, this trope has been subverted with a “final boy” character. From Evil Dead franchise’s Ash Williams, there are plenty of badass final boys from the classics of horror cinema.
10 Alex Browning (Final Destination)
Of all the “final boy” characters that the horror genre has to offer, Final Destination’s Alex Browning is one of the least badass, because he didn’t rely on his wits or his guts to elude the killer’s scythe. Alex only managed to survive the film’s opening plane crash because Death blessed him with a premonition.
After being spared yet again, albeit narrowly, in the first film’s final scene, Alex was ultimately killed off between movies, as his death is mentioned in ing in the sequel.
9 Bill Whitney (Society)
Brian Yuzna’s body horror classic Society revolves around Beverly Hills teenager Bill Whitney stumbling upon a horrifying cult of elite socialites that his wealthy parents are a part of. In the film’s shocking finale, Bill emerges as the “final boy.”
In The Pleasure and Pain of Cult Horror Films, Bartlomiej Paszylk wrote that Society culminates in “one of the craziest and most disgusting endings in movie history.”
8 Jim (28 Days Later)
Both Jim and the audience have to play catch-up at the beginning of 28 Days Later. He wakes up from a routine surgery to find that a zombie plague has swept the nation, society has completely crumbled, and London is crawling with the flesh-eating undead. The ending of the movie sees Jim recuperating in a cottage in Cumbria, where the zombies are dying of starvation.
All three alternate endings included in the DVD extras had Jim dying at the end. But after everything he goes through in the movie, like Sally Hardesty, he deserves to live.
7 Brody & Hooper (Jaws)
Steven Spielberg singlehandedly created the summer blockbuster model that studios have been chasing for the past half-century with his 1975 monster hit local police chief Martin Brody, marine biologist Matt Hooper, and veteran shark hunter Quint – two of them make it back.
Brody and Hooper might be the only two to survive the final stand against the shark, but they’re by far the least badass engers on the Orca. Quint is the boat’s resident badass, but he ends up in the shark’s jaws before the end credits.
6 MacReady & Childs (The Thing)
John Carpenter’s sci-fi horror opus The Thing has the perfect movie monster: a shapeshifting alien entity that can assume the form of any organism it assimilates. Since the monster could be any one of them, nobody can trust anybody – and they’re all very tired.
R.J. MacReady, the helicopter pilot, and Childs, the chief mechanic, are the only two who survive to the final scene – but they’re unlikely to survive much longer after the end credits.
5 Shaun (Shaun Of The Dead)
Edgar Wright’s zom-rom-com Shaun arms himself with a cricket bat, gets red on him, and quickly adapts to a world filled with ravenous hordes of the undead.
At the beginning of the movie, Shaun isn’t much of a badass. But over the course of the runtime, he assumes leadership during a crisis, starts standing up for himself, and becomes a self-taught zombie slayer.
4 Poindexter “Fool” Williams (The People Under The Stairs)
Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs has been lauded as a prescient satire of gentrification and class warfare. It tells the story of soon-to-be-evicted tenants breaking into their unscrupulous landlords’ house and discovering their dark secrets.
Not only does Poindexter “Fool” Williams manage to escape from the carnage; he destroys the bad guys’ house, distributes their money throughout the neighborhood, and frees the children trapped beneath the staircase.
3 Cooper (Dog Soldiers)
Neil Marshall’s blood-soaked debut feature Dog Soldiers sees special forces soldiers being attacked by werewolves during a training exercise in the Scottish Highlands. Ironically, Cooper, the one who refused to kill a dog in cold blood at the beginning of the movie, is the one who survives the night.
Cooper might survive the horrific events of the film, but the true terror is that after this ordeal, his entire traumatic experience is shrugged off as a sensationalist tabloid headline: “Werewolves ate my platoon!”
2 Chris Washington (Get Out)
Jordan Peele’s directorial debut Get Out has been praised as one of the greatest horror movies ever made, and it’s credited with revitalizing the social thriller subgenre. Its “final boy,” Chris Washington, is lured to a gated community so his white girlfriend’s parents can extract his brain and sell his body to the highest bidder.
In the final reel, Chris outsmarts his captors by filling his ears with armchair stuffing, rendering their brainwashing technique ineffective. He defeats his girlfriend’s family, one by one, before escaping with his friend Rod Williams.
1 Ash Williams (The Evil Dead)
The closest thing that horror fans have gotten to a male alternative to characters like Ellen Ripley, Laurie Strode, and Sidney Prescott – equal parts brains, brawn, and beauty – is Ash Williams, the deadite-slaying protagonist played by Bruce Campbell in Sam Raimi’s bonkers Evil Dead trilogy.
While Raimi and his team filled each of these movies with campy horror gags and eye-popping special effects, Campbell’s committed performance had to make the films’ uniquely gonzo, pitch-black comic tone work.
