The best horror heroines in film

In 1992, feminist academic Carol J. Clover published Men, Women, and Chainsaws, a book that forever changed the way critics, filmmakers, and fans thought about women and horror movies. Previously seen as sexist stereotypes for men to ogle in a sort of pornography of murder, Clover argued that horror heroines — who she dubbed "final girls" — actually made it possible for men to empathize with women. The trick, she wrote, is that midway through most slasher movies, the film's perspective shifts from that of the killer to that of the heroine, allowing audience members of all genders to identify with a young woman. The final girl emerges victorious at the end of the movie, and audiences celebrate with her as she triumphs over evil.

Not all horror heroines are final girls; it'd be difficult to put Lupita Nyong'o's character in Jordan Peele's Us (2019) into that box, for example. But Clover and her creation have influenced writers and directors ever since the term was first introduced. Since then, we've seen revisionist final girls and final girl gangs enter the horror lexicon, sitting alongside iconic predecessors like Ellen Ripley, Laurie Strode, and Nancy from the A Nightmare on Elm Street series. Here are 18 fictional women who created — and broke — the mold for horror heroines on screen.

Ellen Ripley - <i>Alien</i> series (1979-1997)

If you subtract the time she spends suspended in cryo-sleep between movies, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) lives through the events of Alien, Aliens, and Alien 3 all within the span of six weeks. That's an intense tour of duty in humanity's war against the Xenomorphs. But even when she's frustrated because no one is listening to her warnings about the severity of the alien threat — indeed, one of the biggest lessons to take away from the Alien movies is to listen to women — there's no challenge Ripley can't handle.

The character of Ripley was originally written as male, and several people, including director Ridley Scott, have taken credit for the fateful decision to change Ripley into a woman. But over the course of the series, Ripley develops from a mere gender swap into a multifaceted symbol of womanhood. She's fierce, compassionate, intelligent, tough, and protective — and she's a cat lover, too.

Laurie Strode - <i>Halloween</i> series (1978-2022)

Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) was not the first "final girl" in horror movie history, but she is the ultimate, the ne pas ultra. The final girl from whom all subsequent final girls have sprung. An intelligent and soft-spoken high school student, Laurie was the most responsible of a group of girlfriends who spent October 31, 1978 babysitting in Haddonfield, Illinois. And that quality played a big role in helping Laurie survive the massacre committed by escaped mental patient Michael Myers on that infamous Halloween night.

But it's her toughness and perseverance that have carried Laurie through the next 40 years of battle against her quasi-supernatural archenemy. She's killed Michael more than once. She's stabbed him, set him on fire, and decapitated him, and yet he keeps on coming. But he underestimates his opponent if he thinks he can wear Laurie down. After all, she's died and come back, too — three times, in fact.

Sidney Prescott - <i>Scream</i> series (1996-2022)

Next to Laurie Strode, tough and whip-smart Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) is probably the most put-upon heroine in horror. Across 26 years and five movies, Sidney has tried, again and again, to escape the horror of the series of mass murders she witnessed (and barely survived) at a house party in Woodsboro, California in 1996.

But the shapeshifting killer known as Ghostface follows her to college, back to Woodsboro, on a book tour, and back to Woodsboro again, where she steps in to show a younger generation of final girls how it's done. She does so despite giving a big — and understandable — "no way" to pleas for help from teenage sisters Sam (Melissa Barrera) and Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) at the beginning of 2022's Scream. You can take the girl out of Woodsboro, but you can't take the Woodsboro out of the girl.

Nancy Thompson - <i>A Nightmare on Elm Street</i> (1984), <i>A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors</i> (1987)

An iconic final girl from an iconic horror decade, Nancy Thompson's (Heather Langenkamp) journey begins with the traumatic sight of seeing her best friend Tina murdered by an invisible killer while she watches helplessly in he original A Nightmare on Elm Street. And by the end of the movie, Nancy has been driven to the brink of sanity by fear and a chronic lack of sleep. But she not only has the presence of mind to figure out Freddy Krueger's weakness, she's calm and composed enough to simply turn her back on the "man of her dreams." Nancy's power comes from her refusal to be afraid, but she doesn't let that destroy her compassion.

By the time she returns to the franchise in The Dream Warriors, Nancy is a psychology student who wants to use her experiences to help others. The subsequent introduction of Kristen Parker (Patricia Arquette/Tuesday Weld) to the series only helps cement Nancy's cornerstone status in the franchise: Not only is Nancy a mentor and friend to Kristen, they share many of the same personality traits.

Sally Hardesty - <i>The Texas Chain Saw Massacre</i> (1974)

No horror heroine goes out looking for trouble. But Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) is especially unprepared for the carnage she witnesses after she and a van full of friends (plus her brother, Franklin) stumble into The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Sally and her companions are on a grim mission, going to inspect Sally and Franklin's grandfather's grave after news reports about graveyard vandalism.

But things get much darker, very quickly, after they encounter masked butcher Leatherface and his depraved, cannibalistic family in an abandoned farmhouse in East Texas. Conditions on the set of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were notoriously dangerous. And Burns went through nearly as much torture as her character during the shooting of the film: She was chased through prickly underbrush for hours, and tied up and dragged around sets decorated with real, rotting animal carcasses. It's a testament to both the actor's and the character's toughness that Sally makes it out of this nightmare bleeding and delirious, but very much alive, leading to one of the most stunning final images in horror history.

Ginny Field - <i>Friday the 13th Part 2</i> (1981)

One of the biggest criticisms of Friday the 13th— namely, that it's populated with a bunch of interchangeable figures whose deaths mean little to nothing because of how generic they are — is partially true. It does take a truly devoted fan to remember the names of every teenager killed off by Jason Voorhees over the course of the franchise. But certain characters do stand out.

Take Ginny (Amy Steel) from Friday the 13th Part 2: She's the first one in the film to take the threat of Jason Voorhees seriously. She survives multiple assaults from the killer, whereas most Friday the 13th characters don't even hear him coming the first time. And her plan to tame Jason by pretending to be his mother is one of the most gruesomely memorable moments in the entire series.

<i>Jeryline - <i>Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight</i> (1995)

In a cast stacked with beloved character actors, Jada Pinkett Smith — or, as she was known at that time, Jada Pinkett — is the obvious star of Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight. (Sorry, Cryptkeeper, but you've been outclassed.) Pinkett's Jeryline is a dreamer, a cat lover, and an underdog, a parolee who works at a boarding house that's besieged by demons in this '90s horror classic.

She's the kind of character who wins the audience's heart immediately, even if the other characters are slower to catch up. She's also smart and resourceful — essential traits in any final girl — which allows her to hold her own against the film's wonderfully rendered, extra-creepy creatures, as well as a deliciously diabolical Billy Zane. Without totally spoiling the ending, Demon Knight also ends on a triumphant note for Jerilyne, a refreshing rarity for Black women in horror films of the era.

Grace - <i>Ready or Not</i> (2019)

Though she made her mark in horror already in cult favorites like Mayhem and The Babysitter, Samara Weaving broke out as a leading lady with her knockout performance in Ready or Not, a word-of-mouth hit in the summer of 2019. Weaving stars in this horror satire as Grace, a newlywed who makes a horrifying discovery about her husband's very rich, very messed-up relatives when they invite her to a family game night. Weaving brings a striking blend of balletic grace and spitfire energy to the darkly comic bloodbath that follows, not to mention an excellent primal scream.

Weaving's performance also strikes the difficult balance between portraying Grace as a real, flawed person and transforming her into a badass heroine over the course of the film. The stinger, in which Weaving smokes a cigarette drenched in blood on the steps of her in-laws' flaming mansion, is pretty charming as well.

Ángela Vidal - <i>REC</i> (2007)

The same qualities that make someone a good reporter — persistence, a commitment to uncovering the truth no matter what — come in handy when you're the heroine of a horror movie. Perhaps that's what makes Ángela Vidal (Manuela Velasco), the heroine of the REC series, such a good example of both. This Spanish series of found-footage movies begins with Ángela and her cameraman on what seems to be an ordinary night filming a TV documentary series about firefighters in Barcelona.

When the situation goes sideways, and it turns out they're trapped in a barricaded apartment building with a horde of flesh-eating zombies, does Ángela give up? No, she continues her investigation, going so deep that she also becomes possessed by the infernal virus that's turning everyone into monsters. And she doesn't let that stop her, either, returning as a badass action hero in the Ellen Ripley mold for REC 4: Apocalypse.

Anita "Needy" Lesnicki - <i>Jennifer's Body</i> (2009)

Some might argue that Jennifer (Megan Fox) is the heroine of Jennifer's Body. But for the purposes of this list, unfortunately being a blood-drinking succubus disqualifies Jennifer from the "heroic" category. That makes her best friend Needy, played by a bespectacled Amanda Seyfried, the protagonist.

And Needy does undergo an empowering transformation over the course of this 2009 cult classic: She evolves from a meek, bookish nerd who's both terrified of and strangely drawn to the more popular Jennifer into a self-assured fighter. (She's still terrified of her BFF, but for different reasons.) We should all be so lucky to have a friend like Needy, who's willing to go truly above and beyond to get revenge on behalf of those she loves.

Melanie - <i>The Girl with All the Gifts</i> (2016)

Melanie (Sennia Nanua) is an unusual example of a horror heroine, and it's not just because she was raised in a lab and has to wear a Hannibal Lecter-style mask so she doesn't rip the faces off of the adults who surround her.

Melanie is one of a group of children created in a top-secret experiment fusing human DNA with zombie DNA in a post-apocalyptic London, and her genetics hold the key to the survival of the human race after a fungus had turned most of humanity into mindless flesh-eaters.

Melanie isn't mindless; she has a conscience, and a brain, and is smarter than the people who made her realize. And while she knows when to play dumb and play along, her vision for a post-zombie apocalypse world is very different from that of her creators.

Beverly Marsh - <i>It</i> (2017), <i>IT: Chapter Two</i> (2019)

The only female member of The Losers' Club, Beverly "Bev" Marsh (Sophia Lillis/Jessica Chastain) is a linchpin of the Stephen King extended universe. Like many King characters, Bev had a difficult upbringing; King's 1,168-page tome It details the sexual abuse Bev suffers at the hands of her father, a cycle she continues as an adult with her marriage to a tyrannical, violent man named Tom Rogan.

As he does with her friends, Pennywise the Clown uses Bev's past to taunt and traumatize her with terrifying visions of the things that scare her the most. But although she's insecure and often emotionally fragile, Bev refuses to give in to the fear. The ending of Bev's story depends on which version of It you're reading or watching. But it's always a cathartic journey watching this frightened girl transform into a fearless woman.

Erin Harson - <i>You're Next</i> (2011)

Sharni Vinson's performance as Erin revitalized the "final girl" in the 2011 indie-horror hit You're Next, sparking a wave of imitators trying to recapture the magic of Adam Wingard's revisionist slasher movie. The story begins, as several of the movies on this list do, with a family dinner, as Erin and her boyfriend arrive for a 35th wedding anniversary celebration at his parents' house.

Things go downhill quickly from there, but that's where the enigmatic Erin, who hasn't said much up to this point,  really shines. As it turns out, Erin was raised on a survivalist compound in Australia, an experience that made her extremely skilled with weapons, both conventional and improvised. She's not someone you want to mess with, in other words — especially not when there's a blender in the room.

Maddie - <i>Hush</i> (2016)

Kate Siegel's performance in Hush is remarkable for how compelling it is, despite our heroine never saying a single word. Maddie, Siegel's character in the elemental cabin-in-the-woods slasher Hush, is a writer who's retreated to an isolated house in the woods to get away from society and get some work done. She's also Deaf and mute. That makes her easy prey in the eyes of the masked killer known only as The Man, and Hush spends most of its running time demonstrating just how wrong that assumption is.

Maddie is tough, even for a horror heroine, and we have no doubt in her ability to survive even when director Mike Flanagan uses Maddie's lack of hearing as a device to ramp up tension. Siegel co-wrote the film with Flanagan, and her devotion to her character is clear in her impressively committed physical performance in the film.

Adelaide Wilson - <i>Us</i> (2019)

If the Academy took horror movies seriously, then Lupita Nyong'o would have been nominated for an Oscar for her work in Jordan Peele's Us. Nyong'o plays a dual role in the film, portraying both Adelaide Wilson, the daughter of two Northern California academics, and Red, Adelaide's "Tether," an uncanny doppelganger who terrorizes Adelaide and her family when they go back to her parents' house for a summer vacation.

Adelaide is a fierce mother figure who would do anything for her children — a conviction that gets tested as she descends into the surreal nightmare world she never knew existed under her hometown. Nyong'o keeps viewers guessing throughout the movie, and a scene where Red and her Tethered "family" invade the Wilson home is stunning, both for its performances and how deeply unsettling it is.

Zoë, Abernathy, and Kim - <i>Death Proof</i> (2007)

Not content to have one "final girl" beat the stuffing out of the villain at the end of Death Proof — his version of a slasher movie — Quentin Tarantino rounded up three. Stuntwoman Zoë Bell plays herself in the film, showing off her skills in a heart-stopping sequence where she hangs off the hood of a muscle car during a high-speed chase with only a pair of gloves as protection.

Rosario Dawson co-stars as Abernathy, a movie makeup artist who tags along with Zoë and Kim (Tracie Thoms), another professional stunt woman who serves as the driver on this adrenaline-pumping joy ride. It doesn't take long for serial killer Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) to show up and ruin the party, but don't worry about these girls. They can handle themselves — and Stuntman Mike, too.

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