Final Girls Final Face-Off: In Unexpected Upset, Laurie Strode Is Out

Well, well, well. Just last week, this final round of our Final Girls Face-Off seemed destined to come down to Scream’s Sidney Prescott and Halloween’s Laurie Strode, who surfed multiple timelines and even chopped a dude’s head off at one point (the only seemingly surefire way to get rid of Michael Myers for good—except, it turned out in the next movie that she decapitated the wrong guy). And now, Laurie—in many ways the prototypical final girl—suffers a death that is just slightly more dignified than the one she did in 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, when she was thrown off a building in the movie’s prologue. (David Gordon Green’s reboot trilogy then pretended like Halloween: Resurrection didn’t exist, in lockstep with many of the franchise’s fans.) She’s been thrown out of this race—oh, the potential trauma.

So now it’s down to Sidney versus A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Nancy Thompson, a clever and at times fearless final girl who went on to impart the lessons she picked up defending herself from Freddy Krueger to a bunch of institutionalized teens. (And then she died. And then she kind of came back in the meta Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, in which the actor who played Nancy, Heather Langenkamp, played herself.) Sidney, meanwhile, is somewhere out there, after Neve Campbell sat out for Scream VI over a reported salary dispute. They’re both brainy and resourceful and both are utter icons of their eras—seems like it’s anyone’s game.

Nancy Thompson vs. Sidney Prescott

Nancy Thompson (A Nightmare on Elm Street)

Number of movies survived: Three
Number of movies not survived: One
Pros:

• She’s able to survive (kind of) without sleep.
• She’s smart! Not only did Nancy figure out who the murderer was, but she also learned ways to defeat him.
• Anti-authoritarianism (“Screw your pass!”) has never sounded so sweet.
• Even if she eventually meets her end, she’s one of Freddy Krueger’s most formidable opponents to date.

Number of movies survived: Five
Number of movies not survived: None
Pros:

• Millennial Laurie Strode vibes–if only she were as paid.
• She’s got trust issues, which normally might not be a good thing IRL. In a horror movie though, skepticism is as good as immortality.
• She’s as compassionate as she is tough as nails (see Scream 3 when she becomes a crisis counselor for abused women).
• Given everyone she’s ever cared about has either been brutally murdered or betrayed her, she’s psychologically resilient as well as physically resilient.
• Can and will kill people–like, multiple people–if she has to.