The 25 Most Badass Horror Movie Heroines

This Halloween, kids all across the land are knocking on doors looking for candy, adults are anxiously awaiting the little ones' returns so they can swipe fun-sized Snickers bars when the kids are distracted, and cable television networks are airing censored, thus pointless, Friday the 13th marathons (those movies without gore are like porno flicks minus the penetration). Your friends at Complex, on the other hand, are celebrating the calendar's scariest holiday the only way we can: by honoring the horror genre's best in sexy, resilient women.

It's an ongoing tradition in nightmare cinema—when most of a film's characters have been graphically slaughtered, there's one young woman left standing, commonly referred to as the "final girl." Within the genre's long history of female survivors, many of them also qualify as guiltless eye candy for male viewers hoping to see some other-sex hotness along with the blood, guts, and violence. For horny gorehounds, it's the ultimate two-for-one deal.

As a way of both toasting to Halloween's scary movie trickery and doling out visual treats in the form of beautiful ladies, we've compiled and ranked The 25 Most Badass Horror Movie Heroines. In the chance that a killer wearing a hockey mask ever shows up at your house, you'd better hope there's a girl of this ilk sleeping next to you in bed. Well, even if there's no killer around.

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Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

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Technically, Melanie Daniels spends the bulk of Alfred Hitchcock's classic nature-gone-amok horror show The Birds being the damsel in distress. To be fair, though, that same description applies to everyone else in Bodega Bay, CA, where hundreds of angry, deranged, and bloodthirsty crows, seagulls, and other flying animals endlessly strike down upon the townsfolk and leave cadavers as crumbs.

But how many of those scared-shitless Bodega Bay residents can also say that they withstood being trapped in a bedroom by dozens of birds at once? For that one harrowing sequence alone, Tippi Hedren's seemingly unkillable character will forever hold a strong place within any badass chick pantheon.

It's not like Erin Hardesty (played by Jessica Biel and her front-and-center cleavage) needed to do anything more than simply walk around. Thanks to shameless director Marcus Nispel, the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre very proudly flaunts its greatest asset, with numerous shots of Biel's twos taking up most of the camera's space.

So it's a nice bonus that Erin is also the kind of sexy tomboy who's unafraid to fight back against Leatherface (by lopping his arm off with a machete) and the chainsaw-wielding ogre's elder colleague, corrupt Sheriff Hoyt (by running him over with a cop car).

The case of Candyman's Helen Lyle, at least in relation to her fellow badass horror movie heroines featured here, is a curious one, indeed. She's the only woman on this list who achieves her infamy by dying, but what a legacy it is that she leaves behind.

As director Bernard Rose's first-rate adaptation of Clive Barker's great short story "The Forbidden" begins, Helen is a graduate student specializing in the study or urban legends, one of which is the story of a local inner-city Chicago legend known as Candyman. It's believed that the Candyman, a la Bloody Mary, appears in mirrors whenever his name is said five time in front of one, and murders the person who summoned with the hook that replaced his severed hand.

By the end of Candyman, Helen's various run-ins with the eponymous spirit lead to her death and assuming the Candyman's role in the afterlife. She's seen again when her cheating, no-good husband, Trevor (Xander Berkeley), remorsefully says "Helen" five times into a bathroom mirror. Killing the unfaithful bastard on the spot, Helen establishes herself as a worthy successor. And, of course, one badass ghost.

In Dario Argento's deliriously freaky masterwork Suspiria, innocent protagonist Suzy Banyon isn't exactly the ass-kicking type. Having just arrived at a top-ranked dance academy in Munich, Germany, the American ballet student is quiet, warm-hearted, and perpetually terrified. As for the latter quality, one could directly credit her fears to the fact that the academy happens to be run by a coven of witches who take pleasure in murdering pretty dancers in elaborately gruesome ways.

Throughout Suspiria, Suzy doesn't take action much beyond nervously investigating the premises and running scared from the dead bodies she discovers along the way. It's not until the film's batshit finale that Suzy gets her lick in, stabbing the demonic spirit of the academy's Greek witch founder, Helena Markos.

Fleeing from the building as it burns to the ground (the result of the witches' reaction to Helena's slaying), Suzy must be saying to herself, "Damn, I really picked the right time to grow a pair, huh?"

If nothing else, use Elizabeth Berridge's inclusion here as an excuse to track down director Tobe Hooper's overlooked '80s horror oddity The Funhouse and experience its twisted pleasures for the first time. Granted, Berridge's Amy Harper character does make it out of the death-filled amusement park attraction alive, after defeating the maniacal owner's son (dressed as Frankenstein's monster) by causing his electrocution and crushing his body between two spinning gears.

That definitely qualifies her as badass, but The Funhouse's many strange joys lie in the overall film's unique approach to slasher movie conventions. Rather than only use a machete, the killers employ various props from the theme park's rides, and the dude in the Frankenstein get-up gains some viewer empathy when he busts early in the presence of a prostitute. OK, so he then murders the hooker, but, for a brief second, you feel for the guy.

Killing one of horror's all-time greatest monsters once is something to be proud of? But defeating an antagonist like Freddy Krueger twice? That's grounds for legendary genre status.

When people think of the Elm Street series, visions of Robert Englund's iconic performances as Freddy Krueger instantly come to mind, and for good reason. But Englund's pop culture omnipresence has taken away from the franchise's thick-skinned heroines, namely Lisa Wilcox's Alice Johnson, who used smarts (remembering a "Dream Master" nursery rhyme in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master) and motherly instincts (reverting Freddy back to harmless infant in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child) to defeat Krueger in two Elm Street installments.

It's safe to say that poor Sally Hardesty has the worst day ever in Tobe Hooper's notorious classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. First, all of her friends get bumped off by the hulking, flesh-wearing maniac Leatherface. Then, she watches helplessly as Leatherface decimates her wheelchair-bound brother with, yes, a chainsaw. Making matters worse, she seeks refuge in the arms of the leather one's equally psychotic family member, which puts her in all kinds of heinous trouble.

In order to make it off the sicko fam's property, Sally has to, not necessarily in this exact order, run faster and with more routes than an NFL running back, get bound and gagged, jump through windows, and take blows to the head with a hammer from a nearly dead old man. When all's said and done, though, Sally gets out alive. And, despite the nightmares and mental trauma that will no doubt plague her life until she's no more, Sally can take solace in the fact that she's undeniably badass and still breathing.

Kirsty Cotton, the heroine in the first two Hellraiser films, is so desirable that even Pinhead and his demonic, fellow Cenobites can't resist her charms. Proving that deals with devils aren't always life-ending, Kirsty accidentally summons the Cenobites into reality by messing around with a dangerous puzzle box, but they're willing to bypass bringing her back to their dimension of S&M hell if she retrieves her son-of-a-bitch father, whom Pinhead's crew feel has betrayed them.

But, of course, you can't trust a guy named Pinhead. Having delivered her pops to the Cenobites, Kirsty realizes that Pinhead has gone against his word and plans on trapping her in his land of horrific piercings, unrelenting torture, and sexual nihilism. It's a good thing that she's proficient with that puzzle box, though, and uses it to send the Cenobites back home, sans one gorgeous, brunette (human) female.

It must be tough doing anything that's physically strenuous while you're pregnant, let alone fighting off neo-Nazi cannibals. With an unborn child in her tummy, Yasmine finds herself being held captive by a family of Hitler-worshipping occultists living in the French countryside, after they've murdered her boyfriend and his buddies in grotesque manners. The reason why Yasmine has been spared: She's been picked to be the eldest son's new bride.

Fuck a pre-nup. Instead of succumbing to her would-be in-laws' commands, Yasmine takes them all out, with a little help from another one of the family's young lady prisoners. In the film's best scene, Yasmine pushes her potential brother-in-law onto a buzzing table saw and slices him in half. Sure beats having to listen to a long, boring "Best Man" speech.

Whereas most of the ladies included here earned their spots through whooping ass, Ginny Field, the final girl in Friday the 13th Part 2, does so through pure brainpower.

After Jason Voorhees (in his Friday the 13th series debut, wearing a grain bag over his face, not a hockey mask) gorily eliminates all of her friends, Ginny tries to hide out in an abandoned shack that's also Jason's personal shrine to his dead mother, complete with her mummified head, lit candles, and corpses propped up like trophies. Quick on her feet, she tricks Jason by dressing up in his mom's clothes and speaking to him with motherly command. Although Jason quickly figures her plan out, Ginny's on-the-spot ingenuity is quite impressive.

Cold Prey, from Norwegian filmmaker Roar Uthaug, is widely regarded as of one of the most underrated horror movies of the new millennium. Which is to say, it's also one of the best slasher movies you've probably never heard of. It follows five snowboarders shacking up inside an abandoned hotel where a deranged killer is hiding out and ready to cut their respective vacations permanently short.

One of the main reasons why Cold Prey, as well as its solid 2008 sequel, is hailed as a "perfect slasher movie" is actress Ingrid Bolsø Berdal's Jannicke, the quintessential "final girl" who takes charge when her male friends chicken out. In Cold Prey 2, she goes on a revenge mission to avenge her earlier, first movie nightmares, and gets to finish the franchise's killer, known as the "mountain man," with a definitive act: She sticks a shotgun to his face and pulls the trigger.

In director/co-writer Chuck Russell's slick remake (co-written by a young Frank Darabont) of the 1958 monster movie The Blob, the sexy female protagonist is also the baddest chick on the block. As the film opens, though, not even Meg Penny herself realizes how tough she is—she's just a fun-loving high school student with a jock boyfriend and a precocious little brother.

Soon enough, a monstrous, jelly-like mass, fresh out of a crashed meteorite, starts fatally engulfing her friends and neighbors, even gruesomely destroying her boyfriend before her very eyes. Eventually pushed to her limit, Meg says "Fuck it" and becomes the hero, whether she's attacking the Blob with a fire extinguisher (the Blob hates the cold) or rigging explosives to canisters filled with liquid nitrogen.

What list of badass horror movie women, of any kind, would be complete without the alluring Danielle Harris? One not worth caring about, frankly. Similar to most scream queens, Harris' back catalog of horror movie characters is predominantly comprised of victims, from murdered beauties to protagonists' doomed best friends.

But in his sequel to the independent, critically embraced slasher throwback Hatchet, writer-director Adam Green gave Harris the chance to fight back and destroy the monster. And she delivered wonderfully, ending the film by driving a hatchet into the head of deformed madman Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder) repeatedly. To cap things off, she then unloads a shotgun's slug into Crowley's pulverized skull while screaming, "Fuck you!" Who's the victim now?

The popular consensus is that Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho kicked off the slasher movie genre, and that's a fair assessment. But, if you break it down, Psycho only has two on-screen killings, which doesn't exactly qualify it as a fore-bearer to the likes of Halloween and Friday the 13th. The unsung first of that multiple casualty slasher is, in fact, Bob Clark's severely underrated gem Black Christmas, about a killer hiding in a sorority house's attic and systematically slicing through the pretty sisters.

And like the best of slashers, Black Christmas has a formidable, not to mention beautiful, "final girl," Jess Bradford (played by the stunning Olivia Hussey). Before the bodies start piling up, Jess is already stressed out. She's on the verge of having an abortion, even though her boyfriend (Keir Dullea) isn't happy with the decision. So the last thing she wants to deal with is a homicidal loon skewering her girlfriends.

Still, in light of having one truly shitty semester, Jess proves to be the only sorority sister who's able to overpower the killer, whose identity won't be divulged here. The excellent Black Christmas deserves all the curious viewership it can get.

Yes, the never-ending Resident Evil movie franchise is, for the most part, overdone cinematic junk food, marked by incoherent fight sequences, overly ornate visual effects, and obnoxious 3D. Send all the blame toward series director Paul W.S. Anderson, a popcorn-loving shot-caller who, frankly, makes Michael Bay seem like David Fincher. In fact, the only thing that Anderson has ever done right in the Resident Evil films is repeatedly build the flicks around his real-life wife, model turned action hero Milla Jovovich.

As the once-enigmatic and now one-woman-wrecking-crew Alice, Jovovich saves every Resident Evil picture from total failure, though not for her acting chops, which aren't much to write home about. No, Jovovich helps keep the RE movies reasonably entertaining through her abilities to bounce off walls, proficiently empty bullets into monsters, and knock down ghouls with the efficiency of a female Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Is it even worth writing "spoiler alert" when pointing out who the killer is in the original Friday the 13th anymore? If you're still unaware that it's Mrs. Voorhees, not her hockey-mask-wearing zombie son, Jason, who cuts into a bunch of Crystal Lake camp counselors with an ax (and other piercing weapons), you're clearly a horror genre novice.

And, that being the case, you should go and rent Friday the 13th immediately. In doing so, you'll also be introduced to short-haired Alice, one of the aforementioned counselors who makes it all the way to the film's end. That's not what makes Alice such a badass, though. Adrienne King's performance holds up in the scary movie community as one of extreme fortitude because (heed a second "spoiler alert") she decapitates Mrs. Voorhees with a machete.

In a movie full of memorable impalings and dismemberments, Alice's swiftness in turning Jason's crazy mother into the headless matriarch remains the Friday the 13th's coolest moment.

In writer-director George A. Romero's 1968 zombie masterpiece Night of the Living Dead, the main female character, Barbara (Judith O'Dea), starts the film off seeing her brother fatally attacked by a graveyard creeper and spends the rest of the flick in a nearly catatonic state. Whenever she does speak, Barbara sounds as if she's ingested a downer platter, and when the undead finally break into the farmhouse, she's unable to defend herself.

Twenty-two years later, Romero wrote the screenplay for a Night of the Living Dead remake, and, realizing that women had come a long way since the more oppressive late 1960s, he changed the character of Barbara drastically. In director Tom Savini's newer version, she has more in common with Alien's Ellen Ripley.

At the beginning of Night '90, Barbara is a mousy, four-eyed pushover, but as the film progresses, she gets tougher by the minute. Once the violent climax erupts, she's armed with a shotgun, picking off zombies, and heading off into the land of flesh-eaters by herself to get help.

It shouldn't take a Rhodes scholar to figure out which version of Night of the Living Dead is most beloved by feminists.

In every frame, English writer-director Neil Marshall's new millennium horror classic The Descent impresses with technical wizardry, emotionally raw acting, and overwhelming tension. Yet there's one particular image that stands out as the film's crowning achievement in heroine iconography: Rising out of a bloody, gooey pool of muck, Sarah, who's experienced everything from losing her family to learning her late husband committed infidelity with her supposed BFF, looks into the camera with a startling, don't-fuck-with-me intensity.

It's the exact instance when a formerly passive, mentally tortured character becomes a force of vengeful, pissed-off nature. The humanoid crawlers that occupy the caves in The Descent are no match for Sarah's transformative wrath, nor is Juno, whom Sarah injures badly and leaves for the crawlers to savagely overpower. As they say, cheaters never prosper.

There's nothing like a good girl gone bad, even if her reason for going bad is to kill off a homicidal maniac. For most of John Carpenter's slasher movie classic Halloween, high school student/babysitter Laurie Strode listens with envy as her more outgoing, loose-legged girlfriends chat about boys and sex. While they're bumping uglies, she's either hitting the books or minding little Tommy Doyle (Brian Andrews).

Once escaped mental patient Michael Myers (Nick Castle) starts picking off promiscuous teens in Haddonfield on Halloween night, Laurie does what her soon-to-be-slaughtered gal pals couldn't: ward off Myers and wake up on November 1st alive. Using whatever's at her disposal, Laurie stabs the white-masked killer with his own knife, a metal hanger, and a knitting needle.

Sure, she doesn't successfully off the bastard, but at least she survives to regret her inability to finish him. Her flatlined friends certainly can't say the same.

Sidney Prescott is the horror genre's very own John McClane. Like Bruce Willis' hero in the Die Hard action movie franchise, Neve Campbell's character in Wes Craven's Scream series has endured through the actions of multiple lunatics with homicidal tendencies, all while watching loves ones perish and seeing her experiences turned into a successful movie franchise, called Stab.

Over the course of four films, Sidney learns that her mother slept around town, was gang-raped while pursuing an acting career in Hollywood, and was ultimately killed by the crazy brother, born out of wedlock, that Sidney never knew she had.

That's a lot of familial drama, and it would too much for most girls to overcome, but not Miss Prescott. Working through her family's dark past while evading slashers wearing Ghostface masks, Sidney somehow always emerges relatively unscathed. How she's not living inside a therapist's office by the end of Scream 4 is anyone's guess.

Some movies are so evil that viewers are left wanting to take showers and schedule Pixar marathons. And then there’s Thriller: A Cruel Picture, a Swedish eye-gouger that sets the gold standard for unapologetic depravity.

A naïve girl named Frigga trusts a charming stranger, heads back to his crib, and gets drugged up and injected with more heroin than an entire shooting gallery's worth of junkies. Her captor then invites a series of men and women over to have their ways sexually with the kidnapped girl. Each week, she’s given one day off, and it’s during those free days that Madeleine teaches herself how to fight, drive cars, and shoot guns.

Once she lashes back against everyone who’s screwed her (literally and figuratively), Thriller: A Cruel Picture becomes less concerned with graphic sex and focuses more on hideous violence. In one moment, Frigga is blowing the head off of a rapist with a shotgun; in another, she's using her newfound martial arts skills to pummel her way through a group of cops. Her craziest bit of vengeance comes when she ties a rope around one of her assailant's waist and drags him off to his death using a horse.

How do you kill something that doesn't exist in reality? Not very easily, if at all. Which is why several of the teenagers living in the fictional town of Springwood, OH, don't stand a chance against child murderer turned nightmare-dwelling demon Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). Nowhere to be seen when you're awake, Krueger and his blade-fingers only strike whenever you're helplessly drifting through dreamland. And, basically, if you see dude in your dreams, your pulse is a wrap.

The only one who's resilient enough to take Freddy down is Nancy Thompson, a cutie who goes one-on-one against Krueger after her best friend gets sliced open while dragged across a ceiling and her boyfriend gets devoured by a bed.

Cleverly, Nancy grabs hold of Freddy right before she wakes up, bringing him into the real world where her numerous booby traps weaken him, and she's eventually able to set him ablaze. To say that Nancy isn't exactly Freddy's dream girl would be putting it lightly.

FBI agent Clarice Starling is a true badass both in closed quarters and in the field. In regards to the former, Clarice holds her own in mental tugs-of-war with the imprisoned, cannibalistic serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), slowly gaining his trust enough to use his consultations in catching woman-skinning madman Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb (Ted Levine).

And with Buffalo Bill comes Clarice's "in the field" expertise. Trapped inside an unlit basement with Gumb, Clarice never loses her cool, unaware that he's using night-vision goggles to stalk her but able to hear his movements and put a bullet into him.

We’re guessing that I Spit On Your Grave’s writer-director Meir Zarchi would defend his infamous rape revenge shocker with some kind of “female empowerment” nonsense. And nothing says “You go, girl” like three rape scenes that are shown with no cuts or visual inventiveness. Zarchi simply sits back, keeps the camera steady, and lets the sexual deviancy play out. Needless to say, I Spit On Your Grave is just about the worst movie you could ever watch on a Netflix-themed date night.

Fiction writer Heather Mills (played by Camille Keaton, one ballsy actress) heads to a cottage in a quaint countryside town to get some undistracted writing done. There, four sadistic bumpkins disrupt her work by physically assaulting her, perversely brutalizing her, and then leaving her for dead.

Eventually, Heather comes to and gets even with the four hillbillies who defiled her. And here's where the character's incredibly badass (well, that's one way to put it) personality comes into play. She slices off one dude’s nuts with a knife, guts another with speedboat propellers, drives an axe into one’s back, and gives the fourth the old noose necklace treatment. Why call the cops when you're perfectly capable of castration and mutilation your damn self?

Was there ever any doubt? As predictable as it may be, there's really no other choice to top a list of the most badass horror movie heroines that the space-traveling vessel Nostromo's Lt. Ellen Ripley, though her toughness is usually recognized in Alien's sequels more so than in director Ridley Scott's original classic. For this countdown's purposes, it's only right to acknowledge Alien, since, unlike its more action-heavy and sci-fi-minded follow-ups, it's a horror flick in the purest form.

Out of the Nostromo's seven-member crew, Ripley is the only one who's able to survive the Xenomorph's stalk-and-attack killing spree. Furthermore, displaying some of the dominance exhibited to larger degrees in James Cameron's Aliens, Ripley resourcefully keeps the monster in her path long enough to detonate onboard explosives and get the hell out of dodge before things go kaboom.

Nothing beats Ripley's line at the end of Aliens, when she yells at the Alien Queen to protect little Newt, "Get away from her, you bitch!" But all badasses have to start somewhere. For Ellen Ripley, that genesis is Alien.