In horror films, it’s an established rule of the genre that any character who has sex will die before the movie ends. In her influential book Men, Women and Chainsaws, academic Carol J. Clover coined the term “the final girl,” referring to the woman left alive at the end of a slasher film, usually a virginal and androgynous figure that finds the inner strength to fight off the killer. She’s the one that audiences identify with. It’s in these horror films, especially the slashers that emerged in the mid-1970s and that have been present ever since, that the rules of the genre were formed.
