The Best Horror Leading Ladies Who Made It to the End

Every great horror movie needs a “final girl.” Here are our favorites.

This October introduced us toThe Final Girls, a metahorror comedy that finds a group of attractive teens (including Taissa Farmiga and Nina Dobrev) mysteriously transported into an ’80s slasher flick with no real means of escape. The film pays homage to scary-movie classics by poking fun at their stigmata of sex and over-the-top acting as the surefire way to end up on the wrong side of a machete. What makes a final girl? In essence, it’s the bodies that pile up around her while our heroine fights on to the end credits.

Here, a list of our favorite final girls. It’s time these implacable survivors finally got their due. They’ve suffered enough.