There are few more hallowed institutions in the horror genre than that of the Final Girl.
For the better part of a half-century, slasher films and the wider horror genre have typically foregrounded one female character who makes it to the end of the movie to confront the killer. Obviously, this isn’t true of all horror films, and the final girl can indeed come in many forms, and then there are also times when it feels like filmmakers have deliberately gone out of their way to subvert the whole final girl trope. After all, the final girl is such a firmly cemented facet of the genre that it risks feeling a bit moldy and played out, as much as many horror fans still swear by it to this day. And in fairness, when it works, it works.
All the same, filmmakers can’t be blamed for wanting to tinker around with the genre’s more formulaic elements, and so one way or another, the following efforts all presented apparent final girls who actually turned out to be anything but, for one of a multitude of different reasons.
Quarantine was a largely beat-for-beat English-language remake of hit Spanish found footage film [REC], with Jennifer Carpenter portraying Angela Vidal – a news reporter who ends up trapped inside an apartment building where a deadly strain of rabies is turning the inhabitants feral.
Angela is very clearly presented as the film’s protagonist and our anticipated final girl, but much like [REC], the film ends with Angela being dragged off into the darkness by an infected individual.
Here’s where it gets interesting, though. While [REC] had two sequels in which Angela returned, confirming her to be the series’ badass heroine protagonist, remakes of these films were never actually produced, and so Quarantine was effectively a one-off that left Angela’s fate hanging in the balance.
That is until 2011, when a direct-to-DVD sequel, Quarantine 2: Terminal, was released. Despite being largely standalone, the film offered up a few slivers of dialogue suggesting that nobody survived the apartment incident from the first film. And so, while the Spanish version of Angela was a card-carrying final girl all the way through her three movies, the American Angela was dragged away after a single one, never to be seen again.
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