Final Girl: Single Parenting, Horror Movies, and the Will to Survive
It starts quietly– a drip in the sink, a creak in the floorboards. The refrigerator’s hum sounding too loud in the darkness. Before any of the action happens, before the first slash of a throat, the first desperate chase across a poorly-lit front lawn, there is the tension of a story about to begin.
I grew up on horror. I watched Scream when it was a new release and read Stephen King books as a preteen. By the time I had my first child, Michael Myers’s expressionless white face was as familiar to me as my own father’s. So when I think of how best to describe the experience of being a single parent, when I’m reaching for a way to translate the experience of shouldering all of the trials and labor that accompanies raising children alone, I think of the enduring nature of final girls.
There is an alien feeling to single motherhood that, for years I struggled to identify. I felt outside, watching my friends start families with dedicated partners or forego kids altogether. They all seemed to be building lives while I floundered, barely holding my head above water. You’re strong, they said. You’re brave. But bravery is just a nice word for the brutality of survivorship. I didn’t feel strong or brave. I felt scraped, bruised, covered in blood, like I was standing wide-eyed in the dark, clutching a knife.
Raising kids in a partnership implies some kind of backup. There is the implication of someone to take the night shift when the baby won’t sleep, or put in long hours at work when the bills come due. There is, in theory, someone to soothe your panic when the toddler spikes a fever or respond to a teacher’s email confirming a conference time. When that support system vanishes, whether through divorce, abandonment, or some other catastrophe, you find yourself alone in a way that feels primal. A voice whispers, you can’t do this or you’ll never be enough. That call comes from inside the house. That voice is your own.
Just as no final girl chooses to be the last one standing, I didn’t choose to be a single mother. When the person I trusted to raise children with me vanished like a side-character, I made the run through the metaphorical woods on my own, out of breath but too determined to let the killer catch me. Parenting alone swept me into its current and carried me into a life of constant obligations and worry, pressures that mount like skyscrapers and exhaustion that makes my bones ache. The path unfolds in front of us, and often, we don’t have time to second-guess. I didn’t stop and I didn’t look back– I took my children and I ran.
Every final girl has a moment when she turns around and realizes she’s the only one left. All her friends are gone. Her boyfriend took a knife to the throat in the first half hour of the movie, her parents are at the theater, the neighbors are out of town. She’s on her own now, and that’s when the real fight for survival begins.
The final girl has one job: to survive. She’s resourceful, quick-thinking, and determined, but she’s also underestimated. Everyone assumes she’s going to die, but she doesn’t. She’s the one who makes it to the end credits, limping away from the wreckage, bloody and broken but alive.
Single moms know that feeling intimately. We’re not set up for success. From the moment you find yourself raising children alone, people begin counting you out. I’m perceived as raising my children in a broken home, I’m told my family is incomplete, and it’s assumed that my kids will suffer as a result of my inadequacies.
I often have a feeling that I need to keep moving, as if something if always chasing me down. Shadows haunt my periphery like phantoms in a rearview mirror. In a horror movie, the minute you sit down, you’re vulnerable. The minute you stop moving, the anxiety creeps back in. What-ifs that circle like vultures. Sometimes it’s worry over little things- catching up on loads of laundry before the week begins, or updating my voter registration. Other times it’s as serious as a man with an ax.
In 2020, my daughter was diagnosed with leukemia, and for nearly three years after I felt like there was always something lurking in the shadows waiting to get us. Even now, as she enters her second year of remission, there is a constant feeling of someone hiding in the back seat of my car or behind the closed shower curtain. I always feel a tension, my breath catching at the top of my throat, my heart hammering against my ribs as if it knows I am about to die.
In slasher films, the villain is usually some unkillable force, a killer who refuses to fall no matter how many times they’re shot or stabbed or locked in a burning barn with flaming beams crashing down around them. In single parenting, that monster is burnout. It creeps in like a slow, suffocating fog. You think you can outrun it, that you’ll have a chance to breathe once you get through this tantrum or that sleepless night, but burnout doesn’t die. It just keeps coming back, getting stronger each time you think you’ve defeated it.
I often review my weekly calendar, searching for a free day when I can trick myself into thinking I’ll be able to rest. If I can just get through this week, I’ll be okay, is my constant refrain. But there’s always another week, another school event, another orthodontist bill, another relapse scare. I’ve learned to live in a state of constant alert, always watching the shadows for the monster I know is waiting to strike. It won’t be a knife-wielding psychopath. It’ll be the endless to-do list come to kill me, the crushing weight of being the sole emotional support to my kids, the silent fear that I’m making the kids of mistakes they’ll one day unpack in hours of intensive therapy.
For the final girl, the killer represents something more than just physical danger. It’s a metaphor for all the things she’s been running from—trauma, fear, grief. In single motherhood, the monsters are the doubts and insecurities that we carry from our pasts, magnified by the isolation and pressure of raising kids alone. And just like the final girl, we can’t just run away. We have to face it head-on, weapon in hand, knowing we might not make it out intact.
What is a final girl, after all, if not a mother? In A Nightmare on Elm Street, Nancy fights Freddy Krueger not only for herself, but for the future she’s still supposed to have. She fights because she’s supposed to grow up and live and be normal. She feels this future for herself acutely even as Freddy’s claws are trying to rip it away.
I think about the scenes of carnage that define so many horror films, the aftermath of the fight where the final girl stands among the wreckage of bodies, victorious but broken. In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Sally Hardesty spends most of the movie running from Leatherface, but by the end, she’s no longer the terrified girl she once was. She’s covered in blood, screaming in the back of a pickup truck as she escapes.
In Carrie, it’s not just Carrie’s blood-soaked prom dress that we remember—it’s her haunted expression, the way she’s both triumphant and devastated by what she’s done. She’s won, but at a cost that’s too high to celebrate.
The final girl never really gets to rest. Even after the killer is defeated, there’s always the threat of him coming back. The fear never leaves. That’s the price of survival. You’re always waiting for the next attack, the next crisis, the next time you’ll have to fight for your life alone in a world that seems tailor-made for your failure. Sure, the monster gets defeated, but then the sequel drops.
Ushering my children through their baby years felt tough, but their teen years have come barreling at me like a masked villain. I thought sleep deprivation was draining, but that was before I’d talked a 14-year-old through three existential crises in a single evening. Tantrums in the grocery store seemed a nightmare until dating and social media arrived on scene.
It’s a fact of fiction that horror movie villains always return. They just can’t leave the final girl alone. Their fate is to always find themselves tracing the same steps they took towards whatever it is they’re driven to destroy, and the final girl’s fate is to hang suspended in the low hum of her terror until it happens. You’re making dinner one night or picking your kid up from soccer practice and here comes Michael Myers, ready to drag you back into the fray. Jason Voorhees rises from the lake. Freddy waits in your dreams. The loneliness returns. The doubts and insecurities return. And every time they do, you have to pick up your proverbial machete and fight your way through again. The battles don’t stop just because you survived the first one. It’s not just about making it through once; it’s about learning to survive again and again.
The first night following my daughter’s diagnosis, we were admitted to the hospital. It was after midnight and she was asleep in a hospital bed, machines glowing softly around her. The room settled into silence as the stream of doctors and nurses petered out and my daughter sank through layers of consciousness and into sleep. The whole world felt still. I sat in her room watching her breathe and felt the weight of that silence. It felt too quiet. My life suddenly felt like it had shifted into something I didn’t recognize, something that no longer felt safe.
It echoed the shift that occurs in horror films. There is a moment when the characters move from their normal movie lives into something else– a shadow world where safety is an illusion. In Halloween, Laurie doesn’t know the moment Michael Myers enters her life, but he’s there, watching, waiting– a silent force that will upend everything. When my daughter got sick, I could only think about how something had slipped into our lives unnoticed and now it was too late to get out.
There are no special effects in my life, no moment when the camera pulls back to show the gore and ruins in a way I can distance myself from, no director yelling, cut! The demands of being a single mother always feel visceral and immediate. Each day feels like a sprint– to keep up with appointments, school forms, medical bills, the basic needs of growing children. I keep all of this tucked behind my heart in a place only I can see, and I try to outrun the fear gnawing at my heels.
Trauma embeds itself in me. I carry it in my bones, just as Laurie Strode carries hers. It’s in the way she looks over her shoulder, in the way she’s fortified her home with security cameras and hidden weapons. Even in peace, she’s preparing for the next battle, the next wave of terror.
My version of this is less cinematic. It looks like triple-checking every doctor’s report, obsessively researching symptoms online, being hyper-vigilant about every cough, every bruise. It’s the way I flinch when my phone rings late at night, the gut-level panic that maybe, just maybe, it’s all happening again. There’s no reset button for mothers like me, just like there’s no neat conclusion for the final girl. We live in a state of perpetual vigilance, our lives an endless sequel. There’s no valor in the fight—only the necessity to keep going, to do what needs to be done.
When my daughter was undergoing treatment, I ran on fumes. Meals were scarfed down in hospital waiting rooms, in between the beeps and hums of machines monitoring her vitals. Sleep was found in fragments and whispers. My exhaustion eventually made itself known through heart palpitations and an eventual ablation– the literal burning away of the stressed-out parts of my heart. It felt like removing rotting wood before it can infect the rest of the foundation.
My favorite part of horror movies is the end, when the final girl staggers into the frame covered in blood, not all of it her own. Survival leaves a mark, and she’s never the same after this. Neither am I. Parenting alone, especially through crises, is a bloody battle and the wounds aren’t always visible. They’re the wounds that come from trying to hold everything together by a thread. They’re the bruises that form when you’re trying to shield your child from the world’s sharper edges.
In the end, the final girl is always alone. She’s the last one standing, the only one who made it through. And while there’s a certain pride in that, there’s also a deep loneliness. No one else can understand what she’s been through, or the horrors she’s faced, or the strength it took to survive. That’s the burden of being the last one standing: you’re alive, but you’re alone.
When I watch Halloween, I always scream for Laurie. I want her to turn and face Michael Meyers– resolute, angry, ready to fight back. She’s the one with the knife now, I think, relishing the moment of her redemption as she turns his own weapon on him. I’ve seen the movie a hundred times, and I still holler my throat raw, urging her forward. I know she’s going to make it.
