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.