The Absolute Best Horror Movie Final Girls Ever

If you've watched a plethora of horror movies, especially films from the slasher subgenre, you may notice a repeating trend: the young woman in a group of friends is the lone survivor after a series of horrific events. It happens a lot because it's a compelling story. This long-standing trope is called "the final girl," which has led to a number of iconic female performances in the horror genre. The phrase itself is pretty self-explanatory, but for those not heavily-invested in horror movies, it may be a new concept.

The most notable early example of the final girl trope comes by way of 1974's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as Sally Hardesty is the final survivor of Leatherface and the cannibalistic Sawyer family. This trope can also apply to Psycho and Voices of Desire, but the final girl is best defined, early on, by the character Sally.

In 1987, University of California, Berkeley professor Carol J. Clover coined the term "final girl," and aside from being the final living friend, the definition of this trope also includes the final girl's moral superiority as she's typically not the character engaged in drinking, drug usage, or sex within the world of the film.

And as you look deeper into horror and the final girl trope, you'll notice that the characters aren't all carbon copies of one another. There is a lot of depth to some of the best characters in this trope. So thinking about some of the best final girls in the horror movie genre, we came up with a list of the best final girls in horror. Check it out!

Appeared in: Happy Death Day, Happy Death Day 2U

In what is essentially a slasher version of the Tom Cruise flick Edge of Tomorrow, a college student named Tree Gelbman finds herself in a time loop--she wakes up, goes to class, gets murdered by a mystery person, and then wakes up again on the same morning. In other words, it's Groundhog Day but the only way out is for Tree to solve her own murder, which she does, in the end. But Tree remains a unique final girl in that she actually was killed (many times!) before surviving.

Appeared in: Ready or Not

Grace (Samara Weaving) thinks she's marrying into a normal rich family, the Le Domases, but there's one condition: On her wedding day, she has to randomly draw a silly game to play with the family. And she gets hide and seek, which is the bad one--Grace will need to hide well, because the family members find her, they'll kill her. We later learn that this game isn't just normal rich people nonsense. One of the le Domas ancestors made a deal with a godlike entity for massive wealth and power in exchange for having to play these games with new members of the family forever. And if they fail to kill Grace, the entire Le Domas family will be wiped out. And when Grace manages to stay alive until the sun came up, each member of the family explodes, one by one.

Appeared in: Sorority Row (2009)

A group of sorority sisters, including Briana Evigan's Cassidy, try to prank a boy by pretending he accidentally killed one of them--and then he stabs the girl repeatedly to make sure she's dead, killing her for real. They toss the body down a mine shaft and go back to their lives, but a year later, someone who knows about the murder starts killing each of the girls during a big party--it's Cassidy's rich boyfriend, taking out everyone who knew about that old crime and setting the sorority house on fire in order to "liberate" her. But, instead, Cassidy blasts him with a shotgun and sends him falling to a fiery demise.

Appeared in: Friday the 13th, Friday the 13th Part 2

Alice (Adrienne King) is a summer camp counselor hanging out at Crystal Lake before all the kids arrive, but all her friends are killed one by one by a mysterious villain nobody knows. Once she's the only one left, the killer reveals herself: a middle-aged woman known only as Mrs. Voorhees. Her son Jason drowned in the lake while at camp, and these murders are her revenge. They fight, and Alice wins by cutting off Mrs. Voorhees' head with a machete--and the movie ends with Alice, floating in a boat on the lake, being attacked by a mysterious man from beneath the lake itself. It's just a dream sequence, but it foreshadows Jason's role as the killer in all the subsequent Friday the 13th entries, and Alice's own death by icepick at the start of the second movie.

Appeared in: The Descent, The Descent Part 2

A year after her husband and daughter were killed in a car crash, Sarah (Shauna McDonald) and five of her friends go spelunking and get trapped underground when a tunnel collapses. And it turns out that 1) there are scary monsters in this cave that want to eat them, and 2) her husband had been cheating on her with one of these friends when he died. That friend, Juno, also accidentally mortally wounded another of their friends and lied about it--Sarah stabs her in the leg and leaves her behind, barely escaping with her own life. And, for good measure, she even survived the direct-to-video sequel, in which she had to go back into that cave a couple weeks later.

Appeared in: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Leatherface

Five young adults, including main character Sally Hardesty, (Marilyn Burns) are taking a road trip through a remote part of central Texas when they run out of gas and are forced to contend with the locals: a family of murderous cannibals that includes the iconic, chainsaw-wielding Leatherface. After watching all her pals get brutally murdered by this group, Sally waits for her turn--the family decides to let Grandpa do the honor, but he's too weak to hold the hammer they give him, and Sally is able to get free while this is going on. The family pursues her to the road, where a passing truck flattens one of the baddies, and Sally is able to escape by jumping in the back of a pickup truck. But, as is the case with many of these women, she ended up being killed by Leatherface in Netflix's 2022 revival of the franchise, which was a direct sequel to that first movie. Shoutout as well to Jessica Biel, who played the character in the 2003 remake.

Appeared in: Final Destination, Final Destination 2

Most of the five Final Destination flicks have a final girl, but only one of them came back for more: Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) from the first and second movies. She and her friends survive a plane explosion because her friend Alex has a weird premonition about it, but death comes after them anyway, picking off these kids one by one in the order they would have died on the plane. Clear, Alex, and their other friend Carter are seemingly able to dodge their fates by saving each other from death's shenanigans, but death wasn't done--Carter gets nailed by a falling sign at the end of the movie, and Alex dies between movies. Clear has herself institutionalized and lives in a padded room, but comes out of her seclusion to help the protagonists during the second movie--and she gets blown up for her trouble.

Appeared in Hellraiser, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, Hellraiser IV: Hellseeker

A teen girl named Kirsty moves into her uncle's old house with her dad and creepy step-mom, and finds a puzzle box that unleashes sadomasochistic monsters called Cenobites on whoever opens it. Kirsty is spared because her uncle was a Cenobite victim who managed to survive, in a sense, but then she has to spend the rest of the movie dealing with both the Cenobites and her evil undead uncle, who has roped the step-mom into his new schemes. But that was just the beginning--Kirsty also had to deal with the Cenobites in two Hellraiser sequels, successfully navigating the situation each time. You could argue that Kirsty is the smartest person on this list.

Appeared in: You're Next

Erin (Sharni Vinson) travels with her well-to-do boyfriend to visit his family, and it's not long before several masked home invaders show up and start murdering them. But it's a false flag--Erin's boyfriend and one of his siblings were using these guys to steal the family fortune from their parents. But what they didn't know was that Erin was raised in a survivalist compound and was more than prepared for this situation, and she's able to kill all of them using lethal Home Alone traps, basically. The movie ends with a cop showing up and seemingly also getting killed by one of the traps, so Erin's future might be a little bit fraught. Despite being more of a cult movie than most of the other movies on this list, Erin gets high placement because she's the only person on this whole list who was actually prepared for the situation she found herself in.

Appeared in: Scream, Scream 2, Scream 3, Scream 4, Scream (2022)

It's not unusual for somebody to survive a slasher movie, but it is fairly out of the ordinary for that person to keep surviving in future movies as well. Sidney made it to the end of one massacre only to keep finding herself in the middle of new ones that were somehow always inspired by that first one--she survived five of these things before Campbell skipped the sixth movie over a pay dispute. But nearly three decades into this franchise, she'll be back for more bloody murder in the next movie. Will she be able to keep surviving?

Appeared in: Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection

This character was the center of our greatest sci-fi/horror series for its first four movies, battling and defeating a xenomorph that killed every other member of her crew in Alien, then having to simultaneously contend with a whole colony full of xenomorphs and corporate greed in Aliens, then navigating the tense political situation in space prison while a xenomorph is on the loose in Alien 3, and then, hundreds of years after she sacrifices herself at the end of the third movie, being cloned with a xenomorph embryo in her belly. That's a lot for one person to experience, especially since she only died once through all of it.

Appeared in: Halloween, Halloween II, Halloween H20, Halloween: Resurrection, Halloween (2007), Halloween II (2009), Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills, Halloween Ends

Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is the ultimate final girl in so many ways, like the fact that she's done battle with iconic murderer Michael Meyers in nine different movies, while nobody else on this list has more than five movies. She was there for the first two iconic Halloween flicks, before being killed off between movies, and then returning (she faked her death, it turned out) for H20 and Halloween: Resurrection, when Michael Meyers finally was able to kill her. But Laurie is such a survivor that she came back for David Gordon Green's reboot trilogy, which ignored all the previous Halloween sequels and allowed her to finally kill and destroy Michael's body, ending him for good. And we shouldn't forget about the other Laurie, from the Rob Zombie remake series. This Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton) also successfully defeats Michael, but then puts on his mask herself at the end of the second movie.