Check Your Ego at the Door
On October 1, 2026, at sundown, five independent women release a record built on a blueprint pop music drew up in the eighties, the group charity single in the tradition of Band Aid and USA for Africa. “Final Girl” is sung by Kiki T, Teresa Suydam, Dina Renée, Helen and Xoë Miles, five artists with their own catalogs and their own audiences who do not normally work together. The cause they are drawing attention to is violence against women, and the release date was chosen on purpose. October 1 is the first day of Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
100% of Kiki T’s master streaming royalties from Final Girl will be donated for the song’s first year. The money goes to Take Back the Night, the global movement and non-profit working to end sexual and domestic violence, and the campaign runs through the whole month, built around Day of Unity on October 5 and Purple Thursday on October 15.
The template was drawn up in a London studio forty-two years ago. At eight o’clock on the morning of November 26, 1984, Bob Geldof stood in Sarm West Studios in Notting Hill and recorded a sign-off for the B-side of the record everyone in the building had spent the night making. “We’ve been here 24 hours and I think it’s time we went home.” Producer Trevor Horn had let the team use his studio free for 24 hours, and Geldof and Midge Ure had filled it with the loudest names in British and Irish pop, Bono and George Michael and Boy George and Bananarama among them. Geldof’s cautious hope was £70,000. “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” raised £8 million within twelve months of release, and the people who sang it went back to their own bands and their own labels.
Two months later the idea crossed the Atlantic. On January 28, 1985, right after the American Music Awards, a crowd of American stars filed into A&M Studios in Los Angeles, where producer Quincy Jones had hung up a sign that read “Check your ego at the door.” Harry Belafonte’s activism had set the whole thing in motion, and inside, Diana Ross stood in the front row between Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, holding their hands. USA for Africa says “We Are the World” has generated more than $65 million for humanitarian relief.
By that fall the format had grown teeth. Steven Van Zandt had just quit Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and passed on the lucrative Born in the U.S.A. tour. He founded Artists United Against Apartheid with producer Arthur Baker and wrote “Sun City” in support of the cultural boycott of South Africa, aimed at a whites-only resort complex in the homeland of Bophuthatswana that was paying huge sums to lure musicians past the ban. Miles Davis and Run-D.M.C. ended up on the same record. The artist royalties went to The Africa Fund, which used them to support political prisoners and their families inside South Africa.
Strip away the scale and those records share the same DNA. People who did not normally work together assembled for one song and one cause, and by the next morning they were back in their own careers. Nobody had to join a band to be in Band Aid.
Look at who was working the phones, though. Every one of those rooms was convened by men, from Geldof and Ure recruiting in London to Quincy Jones producing the session in Los Angeles. Women were in those rooms, and Diana Ross and Pat Benatar earned every line they sang, while the invitations went out under men’s names. “Final Girl” follows the same formula with one change: this time a woman made the calls.
Kiki wrote the first draft and sent it to four artists from her Rolodex, asking each of them to build her own melodies and harmonies on top of it. Teresa came back with the four lines that close the song. All five share the writing credit.
Nobody is mistaking five independent artists for the superstars who packed A&M Studios in 1985… yet, but the resemblance lives in the architecture. “Final Girl” is the first release from Girl Song Presents, Kiki’s umbrella for records made by a rotating cast, so artists can build something together without anybody signing on to a permanent band. It makes the Band Aid morning-after, when everyone goes back to their own careers, part of the plan from the start. And the song these five women made together is about a figure the movies spent decades insisting had to survive by herself.
The Girl in the Canoe
Alice Hardy is the last counselor breathing at Camp Crystal Lake when the sun comes up over the water. She has spent the night stumbling onto the bodies of her friends, and now she is down on the shoreline with a machete in her hands and Pamela Voorhees coming at her, the grieving mother who turned out to be the killer all along. Alice swings, and Pamela Voorhees loses her head. When it’s over she pushes a canoe out onto the lake and falls asleep in it, bloody and still alive, which was the most any girl in a 1980 slasher could hope for. Audiences loved her for it, and the film made nearly $40 million at the box office.
The following year, Friday the 13th Part 2 gave Adrienne King top billing and killed Alice in the prologue. A grown Jason, out to avenge his mother, finds her back in her apartment with her paintings, trying to put a life together, and she dies minutes into the movie when he impales her through the head with an ice pick. The franchise brought its survivor home so it could take her apart before the opening credits had finished settling, and her unexpected death became a catalyst for a trope in later slasher films, where the main survivor of the first film is suddenly killed off in the sequel.
What happened to the actress was worse, and nobody wrote it for her. After the first film came out, a man began following King, and she later told Uproxx that for a year and a half she didn’t know who he was, while Polaroids of what she had been doing the day before showed up under the door of her New York doorman building. When she called the police, they blamed her, telling her she should have expected it given the movie she made, which is a hell of a thing to hear from the people whose job is to stop him. When she finally confronted him, he got a slap on the wrist and one night in jail, because it was his word against hers. The harassment led her to recede from public life. Inside the movie Alice got a machete and a canoe at dawn, while the woman who played her got a police department that treated her stalker’s behavior as a review of her filmography.
The critics of the period saw the danger in these films and mostly missed the girl. In 1980, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert dedicated an entire episode of Sneak Previews to what they called “Women in Danger” films, and they went after Friday the 13th by name. In that special, Ebert argued that the genre’s biggest titles “systematically demean half the human race”. He was bothered that the film so often looked through the killer’s eyes, and he said these movies portrayed women as helpless victims. He had a fair point about the camera, though Alice ended her night holding the machete, which is a strange way to be helpless.
Seven years later, a Berkeley scholar whose other work dealt with women in bloodfeud and warrior maidens in medieval Scandinavia gave the woman on the shoreline a name. In “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” published in Representations in the fall of 1987, Carol J. Clover coined the phrase “Final Girl” to name the climactic female survivors of horror films. Clover wrote that she “alone looks death in the face” and that she alone finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued or to kill him herself. The whole mechanism rests on that word alone. Everyone else in the cabin has to die so one girl can be the exception.
Kiki T knew the image long before she knew the song. “You know that scene at the end of the horror movie where the girl is covered in blood, but she’s still standing while her paranormal stalker is completely obliterated?” she says. “That was the feeling.” Clover’s final girl survives by being the last one left. On “Final Girl,” five of them are still standing when the lights come up, and none of them are waiting on the police.
The Red Flag Test
Every song about women refusing to be afraid eventually meets a man who feels entitled to review it, and “Final Girl” met its critic before release day.
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“My favorite moment in this entire process was when a guy I know who is notoriously misogynistic heard the song and went out of his way to make sure I knew that men wouldn’t find it attractive, as if that were a genuinely useful piece of constructive criticism,” Kiki says. “He seemed completely confused by the idea that five women might make a song that wasn’t designed to be attractive to men. Then, a FULL DAY later, he texted me again to tell me he didn’t think the song was empowering, he thought it was the opposite. And honestly, I was like… perfect.”
Sit with that first note for a second. A man heard five women sing about surviving violence and graded the record on whether it would turn him on. That was always the bargain the slasher offered its audience. Clover’s question in 1987 was why films supposedly aimed at male spectators kept handing the last reel to a girl, and whatever else that girl was, she was built to be watched, screaming and bleeding in close-up for a theater full of teenage boys. “Final Girl” refuses the job.
The girls who never make it to the last reel were built for a different job. The slasher’s first victim is the party girl, the slut the movie has already decided needs to be punished, and her death usually arrives right after sex. Friday the 13th writes that rule into its killer’s motive. Pamela Voorhees blames her son’s drowning on the counselors who were supposed to be watching him, and she tells Alice what they were doing instead: “They were making love while that young boy drowned.” The franchise grows out of that sentence, and the trope it locks in is simple: sex is a sin, and the girl who has it pays with her life. The math never stayed in the theater. In October 1989, a Fort Lauderdale jury acquitted a man of kidnapping and raping a 22-year-old woman at knifepoint after being shown her lacy white miniskirt over and over, and the jury foreman explained the verdict: “We all feel she asked for it for the way she was dressed.” The courtroom borrowed the slasher’s math, and the woman who survived got treated like the girl who deserved to die first. The man who texted Kiki was working from a milder version of the same assumption, that whatever a woman wears or sings is addressed to men.
The second message is the one that gives him away. He needed a full day to come back, and when he did, he had moved from whether men would like the song to whether women should feel strong hearing it. His answer was that it made them weaker, which is a bold conclusion to reach about a chorus that promises the killer ends up in the grave.
Kiki’s response is to turn him into the instrument. “Final Girl is kind of the perfect red flag test,” she says. “If you hear five women singing about refusing to be afraid and your reaction is that it isn’t attractive or empowering, maybe the song wasn’t made for you. Final girls don’t come out of thin air. They come out of adversity. We didn’t go looking to hurt anybody, but we’re sure as fuck not going to let ourselves be victims either.”
The song that set off his double text began as something Kiki wrote for herself.
Regular Girls
“I originally intended it to be empowering for myself,” Kiki says. “I feel like as women we’re constantly under attack in one way or another, and what our attackers want most is for us to stay afraid. So I knew this song needed to be two things: cathartic and a motherfucking banger.”
Somewhere in the writing, she noticed the flaw in the premise she had borrowed. “I’m not some unique survivor,” she says. “I’m just a regular girl. And regular girls are strong as fuck and powerful as fuck.”
That realization breaks the slasher open. The final girl formula runs on scarcity, and Clover’s word for it was alone. When only one girl makes it out, the story goes looking for what made her special, and it finds its answers in what the dead girls did wrong, the beer and the boyfriend. The audience walks out believing survival is a reward for good behavior, which is a comforting thing to believe until the girl is someone you know and the questions start landing on her.
Five survivors on one record turn the exception into a pattern. “One unhinged woman who has had enough is one thing,” Kiki says. “Five? That’s unstoppable.” Women survive every day in her telling, and most of them do it without a soundtrack.
Her final girl also plays by different rules. The girl in this song stops running and fights back, so the man has a harder time coming for the next girl, and the killer gets what is coming to him before any sequel can be greenlit. In Kiki’s telling, that is what earns her the title.
“Thank God they said yes,” she says of the four artists she called, “because now I can’t imagine the song without the five of us.”
So who picked up the phone?
Who Picked Up the Phone
Teresa Suydam gave the song the dark ending it was screaming for. An Indigenous and Pinay alt pop artist, she moves between dark pop and hyperpop, with storytelling rooted in her Anishinaabe heritage. She is a three-time Native American Music Award nominee, and her Unsung Hero EP is up for GRAMMY consideration. When Kiki’s draft reached her, she came back with alternate lyrics, and four of her lines became the outro chant that closes the record, opening on “I’m a little wolf in lace tonight.” The line fits her the way a signature fits a hand. “I get to be the wolf in lace,” Teresa says, calling herself “the one everyone underestimates until it’s too late.”
Someone once called Britney Spears the love child of Madonna and George Michael, a description that fits another woman on this record as easily. Dina Renée came to Los Angeles from Knoxville, Tennessee, and built her sound out of nostalgic Y2K pop with a modern, empowering edge. She has passed a million Spotify streams and landed features in Harper’s Bazaar and L’Officiel. Her signature pink glam follows her into her work as a SAG-AFTRA actress.
Helen writes out of Minneapolis, borrowing the storytelling traditions of country and Americana and dressing them in bold pop production. Music in Minnesota described her songs as sounding “like a diary with a drum beat.” She also knows which shelf “Final Girl” belongs on. “One of my all-time favorite genres of music is country-song-where-woman-kills-her-cheating-or-abusive-husband, a la ‘Goodbye Earl’ by the Chicks or ‘No Body, No Crime’ by Taylor Swift and HAIM,” she says. “One of my OTHER favorite genres of music is pop, pop, POP! Final Girl is the ultimate amalgamation of the two, which is probably why I love it so much.”
Xoë Miles built her career the DIY way, as a multi-instrumentalist who produces her own songs and builds the visual world around them. Her work has been recognized by iHeartRadio and the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, and she has played stages from SXSW to The Roxy. Now based in Los Angeles, she calls her next era overthinker alt pop dressed in pink, which gives this record two women who wear pink like a goddamn warning.
What came back from those four artists reshaped the song, and Kiki made a point of crediting all of it. “I’m giving all five of us writing credit because what I really wanted from the beginning was a collaborative environment where everyone felt like whatever they brought to the song mattered,” she says. “Regardless of what ultimately made the final mix or didn’t, every artist brought 100% of themselves to it and made the final song better. I think that process is actually a big part of what makes Final Girl what it is.”
What they made together plays like a horror movie told from the girl’s side of the door.
The Girl’s Side of the Door
Verse one reads like a prop master’s checklist of cursed objects, the ancient artifacts and cracked camera lenses, the Ouija boards and voodoo dolls that have been telling horror audiences for decades that something is coming for the girl. A few lines later the direction reverses: “Getting haunted / Can be daunting / But lately I’ve been doing the haunting / I’ll follow you home.” She has picked up the killer’s oldest move and turned it on him.
When the man behind the mask finally appears, the girl in the song can barely keep a straight face: “And what he’s hiding in the mask / Honestly it makes me laugh / Because he’s so dramatic.” He broods and she finds it amusing, because she can’t take him serious. Laughter is the one response a slasher villain has no plan for, because the whole machine runs on the girl’s fear. It is the instinct Kiki named when she described writing the song, that what attackers want most is for women to stay afraid, played here as a joke at his expense. The pre-chorus says it plainly: “He wants me thinking / That there’s nowhere safe / I’m not running / I don’t need to be saved.” By the time the chorus arrives, the fear has changed hands: “The one that reminds you / You should be afraid / You’ll end up in the grave.”
By verse two she is the girl who has seen this movie enough times to call every scene before it happens, singing “I swear that I have read this book / Or seen this show” like a woman checking her watch, and she has plans for the chase: “I’ll get chased but never caught / Unless I want to / And I want to.” Kiki means it the way it sounds. The final girl wants him to catch up so she can finish it. The next move is the one every horror audience has screamed at for fifty years, the girl running upstairs when the front door is right there: “I’ll lock the door / Run up the stairs / Knowing that he’ll meet me there / Face to face.” In “Final Girl” the staircase is a choice, and the lock is on her side.
Somewhere in the bridge the “me” of the verses quietly becomes an “us,” and it happens on the line about the man who thinks women can be kept: “You try to collect us / Just like possessions / Just like obsession.” The collector is a type every woman listening will recognize. Forty-five years ago he was slipping Polaroids of Adrienne King’s evenings under her apartment door. The bridge answers him with his own question: “This is what you wanted / Are you happy yet.”
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The most dangerous line on the record sits in the second chorus, and it is the one any outlet with a legal department will ask about first: “The one that makes you suicidal.” Kiki crossed it out, and she wrote it back in on purpose. Her reasoning starts from a pattern she sees everywhere. Women are held responsible for the consequences of men’s actions, and public sympathy runs toward the man who had his whole life ahead of him. In the song, the consequences of his choices finally land on him. She draws the line between the song and the world herself: this is slasher fiction, and she does not want anyone to take their own life.
“I’ll wear white cause it splatters nice,” the five of them chant in Teresa’s outro, and with that line the record circles back to the image Kiki started from. White has always been the horror heroine’s color, the nightgown and the innocence it advertises. This girl chose it because the blood will show. The girl covered in blood from Kiki’s first vision is back, and she picked the outfit.
The song gets the score settled before the last chorus fades, which is more than most survivors ever see from the systems that are supposed to protect them, and those systems are where Kiki wants the attention to go.
What the Paper Was Worth
Kiki is willing to talk about what happened to her, and she has one condition for how it gets told. The system is the subject, and her experience is the evidence. Her argument starts with a distinction most people blur. Believing a woman and protecting her are two separate problems, and the space between them is where women get hurt.
A Colorado court had already believed Jessica Gonzales. During her divorce she obtained a permanent restraining order against her husband Simon, who had been stalking her, requiring him to stay 100 yards away from her and her children outside scheduled visits. When he took their three daughters, she reported it to the Castle Rock police again and again over several hours, and officers told her to wait and see whether he brought the girls back. He opened fire inside the police station hours later and was killed by officers there. He had already murdered all three of their children.
Gonzales sued the town, and on June 27, 2005, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that she had no constitutionally protected property interest in having the police enforce her order. Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion acknowledged “the horrible facts of this case,” and it held that under state law, what the police did about a violated order was up to their discretion. The court had believed her, and under the law nobody was required to do a damn thing to protect her.
The other half of Kiki’s argument is about where the scrutiny lands. When a woman reports, the questions tend to circle back to her own behavior, and the investigation turns into a review of her choices. It is the same instinct that pointed Adrienne King back to her own filmography, and the same one that graded “Final Girl” on whether men would find it attractive.
Her first instinct for where the money should go followed from all of this. She wanted legal aid, so survivors could make it all the way to the end of the story.
Take Back the Night
Legal aid was where Kiki started, and the idea widened as she talked it through. She spoke with five organizations before landing on Take Back the Night, a movement that grew up in the same years as the slasher and out of the same fear.
In October 1975, a microbiologist named Susan Alexander Speeth was stabbed by a stranger while walking alone, a block from her home in Philadelphia. Three days later, more than 250 people from Penn and the surrounding city held a candlelit procession in her memory, and they chanted that they would take back the night.
Two years later the chant became a name. Anne Pride, an activist with the National Organization for Women, used the words as the title of a memorial she read at an anti-violence rally in Pittsburgh. Pride also helped found one of the first rape crisis centers in the United States. By September 1979 the idea had reached Iowa City, where a rally ad in the campus paper promised women a chance to “reclaim the freedom that comes from being unafraid.” Forty-seven years later, five women set the same promise to a pop beat.
In 2001, women who had walked in the earliest marches formed the Take Back the Night Foundation, and events now run in more than 30 countries every year. That is the work Kiki’s pledge will fund, and every stream through the song’s first year counts toward it.
Final Girls Survive
Before Friday the 13th lets Alice go, it gives her one more scare. She is drifting in the canoe in the morning light, with the police finally pulling up on shore, when something rises out of the lake and drags her under. She wakes up in a hospital bed, and nobody can tell her whether it happened, but she insists he is still out there. The genre could not let her keep the morning. It sent a boy out of the water to take it back, and when that wasn’t enough, it sent him to her apartment with an ice pick.
Adrienne King kept hers anyway. She stepped away from public life after the stalking, and in the years since she has turned her story into something that helps the film’s fans, telling them what happened to her in the hope it helps them.
Clover built her theory on the word alone, and the slasher spent decades proving her right, killing off its survivors in the next sequel until surviving looked like a fluke. “Final Girl” writes its correction into the chorus. “And gets out alive / Cause final girls survive,” five women sing, and the noun is plural.
Somewhere the man who texted twice is still waiting for this song to make itself attractive to him, and he will be waiting a long time. It was written for the women who hear that chorus and recognize themselves, the ones who are still running and the ones who have stopped. Forty-six years after Alice fell asleep in that canoe, five final girls lock the door and climb the stairs to wait for him at the top. None of them has to make it out alone this time, and the chorus already told you how it ends. Final girls survive.
If you or someone you know is experiencing abuse, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233, and anyone in crisis can call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. More about Take Back the Night and its events is at takebackthenight.org.
