Horror needs fewer Final Girls, and more Final Couples

At the 2025 Fantastic Fest film festival, director Johannes Roberts followed Primate’s world premiere by telling the audience he originally had a radically different plan for the movie: In the screenplay he’d been working on for 15 years, Lucy and Nick survived and got together. But “maybe literally a week before filming,” he rewrote the script to kill Nick off early, to make it clearer why the rest of the characters couldn’t just climb to safety as well. “It's like, ‘This fucker shouldn't live! And you need to know the edge of the [cliff] is dangerous! So a week before filming, we just rewrote the entire script and killed him.”

That was probably the right decision for Primate. Because the early scenes are so obviously setting up a different story for Nick and Lucy, Nick’s death is particularly unexpected. (Especially given how gross-out graphic it is: “I loved the theater reacting to his head just smacking [the ground],” Roberts enthused at the premiere screening.) At the same time, it’s a shame Nick didn’t survive, because the original script would have put the film in a surprisingly small category: the rare and special horror stories that come down to a Final Couple instead of a Final Girl.

The Final Girl became such a well-established horror trope for a few reasons: It was a satisfying subversion of the cultural assumption that young women are particularly vulnerable and particularly ill-equipped to survive dangerous situations. And women being physically menaced, frightened, and hurt, especially by men or male-coded creatures, has erotic overtones that movies have been exploring since the dawn of cinema. The movies that codified Final Girls as a horror go-to, like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, and Friday the 13th, were just reshaping a familiar exploitation-movie trope into a new form.

But today, the idea that women are weak victims feels dated and sexist, and there’s less shock and thrill in seeing them successfully fight back. The Final Girl idea has been worn down to a cliché by decades of overexposure — including a wave of meta-fiction playing with the idea that Final Girls have become so common they can form their own all-Final-Girl support groups.

When horror creators lean into the Final Girl ending today, they’re likely to subvert it, recontextualize it for shock value, turn it into a punchline, or purposefully build their entire movie around it. More often, though, they drop it altogether. In modern horror movies, the final survivors are more likely to be a family (Bird Box, A Quiet Place, the later Halloween movies, Primate itself), a found family (28 Days Later, Let the Right One In), a friend group (The Blackening, Bodies Bodies Bodies), or just a growing cast of fan-favorite legacy holdovers from previous movies. In darker or more satirical movies, the villain might be the final survivor, or everyone might die. And yet the Final Couple is still weirdly rare.

Maybe that’s because it’s so hard for horror filmmakers to resist the shock value of a protagonist’s partner dying right in front of them, or revealing themselves as the secret villain. (Looking at you on both counts, Scream.) Maybe it’s because isolating the protagonist is such a big part of horror, and navigating a horror scenario alongside someone you love and trust just seems inherently less frightening. But that just makes a successful Final Couple movie more of a challenge to make, and more surprising and intriguing to watch.

A few recent examples do particularly interesting things with the Final Couple concept. Michael Shanks’ sticky, creepy 2025 body-horror movie Together stars real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie as Tim and Millie, a couple whose relationship has been strained ever since they moved from the city to the countryside. Millie is pursuing an exciting job opportunity, while Tim feels her career unfairly comes at the expense of his unlikely dreams of becoming a rock star. When they’re infected by a mysterious force that causes their bodies to start merging, they have to navigate the problem… together.

The story could be read as a metaphor for codependency, or for the inevitable compromises of any long-term partnership. It also just plays fine as an intense, grotesque supernatural drama and character piece. But what makes it compelling is the way it plays on common anxieties about relationships, and blows them up into a creepy situation packed with nightmare-fuel imagery. It’s a horror story about a couple that doesn’t simplify the emotions by turning either participant into an easy villain, and doesn’t triumphantly dispose of either of them.

Scott Derrickson’s 2025 action-horror movie The Gorge takes a radically different approach to a Final Couple story. Levi (Miles Teller) and Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy) are skilled snipers from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, sent by their respective governments to spend a year in the wilderness, guarding a mysterious crevasse. The two soldiers eventually fall for each other — a bond their employers have strictly forbidden. But their connection becomes crucial when circumstances force them into the gorge and they have to face the survival-horror-video-game situation waiting at the bottom.

Levi and Drasa's fierce partnership is what makes The Gorge a warm, satisfying experience, rather than just another Resident Evil-alike. They’re skilled combatants and resourceful survivors who have each other’s backs through everything they face, but being able to rely on each other doesn’t lower the stakes — it raises them, because they each have so much to lose whenever the other is threatened. They’re both isolated loners who come to need each other, and watching them fight side-by-side turns The Gorge into a strangely romantic action-horror film.

Then there’s the radically different approach in David Robert Mitchell’s memorably unsettling movie It Follows. A college student, Jay (Maika Monroe), contracts a kind of sexually transmitted supernatural curse from the guy she’s seeing, who abandons her and disappears immediately after deliberately passing the curse to her. As she’s hunted by a relentlessly pursuing, shape-changing entity only she can see, her childhood friend Paul offers to save her by having sex with her and taking the curse on himself.

Jay clearly isn’t attracted to Paul, and tries several other routes to escape the curse, from having sex with a different friend (who the entity then slaughters) to setting an elaborate trap for the entity. But in the end, to save herself, she does sleep with Paul. The movie’s ambiguous final shot sees the two of them slowly walking through their neighborhood together, loosely holding hands and occasionally looking at each other without affection or warmth, while someone stalks behind them.

It’s a consciously ambiguous ending that promotes radically different interpretations, about Jay and Paul’s connection in particular. Is he a sex pest who got everything he wanted? A romantic who’s put his own body on the line to save the woman he loves? Did Jay finally see the value of his devotion, or settle for an unfulfilling relationship because it makes her feel safe? Mitchell provokes the audience to examine what coupledom means in a horror movie, particularly in an environment where “hunted by an implacable monster” is an STD contracted through casual sex.

Finally, there’s one of the most surprisingly romantic and romantically surprising horror movies of the past decade: 2025’s Heart Eyes, which folds a meet-cute rom-com into a gory slasher about a serial killer who targets couples. Ally (Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding) get a classic stressful-work-situation meet-cute that mutates into something else when they’re targeted by the killer. Director Josh Ruben (a Dropout veteran and director of Scare Me and Werewolves Within) and the film’s writers put a lot of winking humor into Heart Eyes, acknowledging viewers’ expectations both for a romantic comedy and for a horror movie with romantic elements. But the fun of Heart Eyes is how completely it upends all those expectations.

Watching Jay and Ally simultaneously navigate their attraction, flee an extremely skilled and cruel murderer, and go through the kinds of misunderstandings and miscommunications that usually complicate rom-coms is a lot of fun for fans of self-aware twist-and-turn movies that play around with genre. But Heart Eyes also makes the best argument yet for why the Final Couple should get more space in the horror world. With this movie, the audience isn’t just rooting for one person to survive, they’re rooting for a relationship to flower as well. The stakes are higher because the win conditions are more complicated — Jay and Ally both have to live through the movie, and survive under circumstances that don’t destroy their budding relationship.

That’s a lot to hope for in a horror story. This is a genre where life is fragile and love is usually a mistake, either because it’s cut tragically short, or because one partner or the other betrays it. But the genre’s long history of breaking up romances in bloody, graphic ways leaves a lot of space for horror stories that break that mold. This is a genre that thrives on innovation, reimagining, and surprise, and yet there are so few Final Couple movies that it feels like one of the few areas where creators can still define radically new territory of their own.

Each of the movies above does something completely different with the idea, and each one is an invitation to consider how much a good romance adds to a horror movie’s ending. But they’re all smaller, cultier films, not the kind of genre-redefining classics that turned the Final Girl into horror’s definitive end trope for so many decades. Ambitious writers and directors seeking something fresh to fuel the next big wave of horror might find their opportunity in one of the biggest areas the genre has neglected. There's still time for a definitive Final Couple movie, a modern classic that will show horror fans what they’ve been missing out on all along.