In recent years, there’s been a growing fascination among women and girls of the 21st century with true crime. An ambiguous fetish, woven through podcasts, series, and literature, it has found its way into the lives of people from all walks of life, united by one common denominator: being female. The reason? Perhaps it’s the desire to “have a clear picture of our worst-case scenario”—to understand the darkness, yet still find a way to survive it.

At the opposite end of this obsession lies the horror genre, which shaped the early adolescence of millennial and Gen Z girls. They grew up amidst the dichotomy of the blonde girl—the first to die—and the “good girl,” fresh-faced and unpopular, yet intelligent enough to outwit her deadly fate. The final girl trope has been exaggerated in countless ways, from Jennifer’s Body to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But what remains of the “good girl,” the one who is drawn into a trap by a bizarre chain of events, only to become the sole survivor?

Few films and series offer these girls a real chance at life after the chaos, but Midsommar and Buffy are examples of stories that try. Yet the final girl, having defeated the killer, remains trapped in a reality she can no longer fully understand. Suspended in the loneliness of her past, she is left marked, unable to fully adapt to everyday life.

This photographic series explores the final girl’s complex identity: not just a survivor, but a woman who, despite being “dead” in a symbolic sense, continues to fight, to live, but always shadowed by an unsettling past. Her beauty, haunting and melancholic, is a reminder of a victory, yet also the cost she paid to reach it.