10 Best Non-Final Girls In Horror Movies
The top tier of the supporting ladies who never made it to the closing credits.
Sad fact of life; most of the people you are introduced to in a horror movie won't make it to the credits. After all, if all the monsters and serial killers out there decided to take a pacifistic stance, the horror industry would be out of a job. Heartbreaking deaths are good business, and as such, business is booming.
While heartbreaking deaths are one trademark staple of the industry, another brings into sharp focus the fact that horror is not the most progressive of genres. More often than not, another trademark is that the lead female figure (let alone any of the supporting ones) is relegated to an empty character whose only role or development involves screaming in terror. In addition to this, it is often their promiscuity that results in their gruesome deaths, historically resulting in stereotypical typecasting of air-headed bimbos.
Fortunately, there remains a curtain call of badass women who sadly don't make it to the end of their respective film due to a delightful combination of slashers, monsters or demonic puppets. Be it laser focused wit, an ability to hang tough through the most appalling of scenarios or sacrificing themselves in the hope of providing their comrades a way out of their hellish predicament, many formidable ladies have gone down in the annals of horror history as "gone too soon".
Having left their viewers wanting more for an iota of reasons, here are some of the more badass non-final girls to feature in horror canon over the years.
10. Saw I, II & III - Allison Kerry
Kicking off the list is a character whose fate is so unfair it makes your writer wince.
Allison Kerry is an exemplary police officer, one of the very first assigned to work the Jigsaw case in the Saw franchise. Yes, she's also a workaholic, but that comes with the territory when tracking down serial killers with a penchant for nightmarishly twisted games.
Kerry demonstrates her ability as an investigator throughout her run on the franchise, spotting clues where others fail to; she is the first person to realize that Jigsaw watches his "games" when she finds his peephole. She is also seen to be extremely loyal; she is haunted by the disappearance of former flame and partner Eric Matthews, to the point where she hallucinates him.
In a horrifically twisted turn, Kerry is captured and locked into one of the iconic traps; her career is thrown in her face as the reason for her predicament, as she is informed that she prefers the company of dead bodies to live ones. Her task is to retrieve a key from a beaker full of acid, which she manages to do despite the searing pain. In utterly depressing fashion, Kerry discovers the useless key was a red herring. She has just enough time to look up and see Amanda, the architect of her situation, before her rib cage is torn apart by the trap.
An empowered detective who hung tough for a long time in a brutal cinematic universe, Kerry deserved better than a barbaric trap she had no hope of escaping.