The Body and Its Denizen

IMPROBABLY, THE FINAL GIRL is fat. She stands tall, cut-up and bleeding, but breathing. After confronting the killer and making it out alive, after watching her loved ones—people who couldn’t quite see past her body and into her soul, people who tried, but not hard enough—die at his hands, she rides off into the sunset or stalks out of the woods.In film theory, the “Final Girl” trope refers to the last woman left standing in a slasher movie. The term was coined to highlight the horror genre’s typically moralistic, misogynistic, and racist rules. The “Final Girl” was and is, in most movies, a thin, blonde white woman, who at some point in the film refuses some moralized substance or activity her (now dead) friends enjoy: drugs, alcohol, sex. But in the films Fat Girl (2001) and Piggy (2022), conventionally hot girls are murdered by a killer who harbors a sexual obsession with the fat girl, whom he leaves alive. Raging, sweaty, and buoyant with grace, she has her whole life ahead of her.