10 Horror Movie Characters Who BARELY Survived

10. Anna Assaoui - Martyrs

Martyrs is one of the most downright unhinged horror movies of the last 20 years, and asks the audience to consider what survival really means anyway.

Though protagonist Anna (Morjana Alaoui) does make it to the end of the movie alive, it's fair to consider whether death would've actually offered her some sweet release. 

You see, Anna ends up taken hostage by a secret society who are attempting to discover the nature of the afterlife through the use of "martyrs."

That is, torturing people to the brink of death, believing that such pain will allow them to envisage what lies beyond the mortal realm.

Anna is their latest subject, then, and after being summarily abused, she ends up being surgically flayed, all of the skin being removed from her body from the neck down.

In the final scene, Anna is catatonic but still very much alive, and though the long-term prognosis for a skinned human being isn't good at all, she's still hanging in there the last time we see her.