10 Best Horror Movie Final Girls NOBODY Talks About

7. Sarah Carter - The Descent

Kirsty Cotton Hellraiser
Pathe Distribution

One element that helps to craft a great final girl, is having said character get vengeance on those who have wronged them. That can be taking down the bogeyman that's stalked them, avenging the loss of a loved one, or, in the case of The Descent's Sarah Carter, leaving your dead husband's mistress to die amongst a dank and dark cave filled with savage monsters.

Still grieving the loss of her hubby and young daughter in a car crash, Shauna Macdonald's Sarah was convinced to partake in a cave diving trip with her friends as a way to take her mind off things and as a way for the group to maintain an annual tradition of meeting up. Unfortunately, said cave was riddled with blind, flesh-devouring beasts known as crawlers.

When this group of six comes down to just Sarah and Juno - the woman who had an affair with Sarah's husband and is suggested as being partly to blame for his car crash - Macdonald's character sticks a pickaxe into the leg of her 'friend', leaving her to face a gnarly demise. From there, Sarah makes her break for freedom.

Of course, the fate of Sarah is entirely dependent on which version of The Descent you watch. While the US version of the film ends with Sarah escaping the cave and making it to safety, the more dour UK cut of the picture sees that escape rendered as a hallucination - with Sarah instead trapped in the cave alongside a hallucination of her dead daughter, while crawlers circle in on her.

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Senior Writer

Once described as the Swiss Army Knife of WhatCulture, Andrew can usually be found writing, editing, or presenting on a wide range of topics. As a lifelong wrestling fan, horror obsessive, and comic book nerd, he's been covering those topics professionally as far back as 2010. In addition to his current WhatCulture role of Senior Content Producer, Andrew previously spent nearly a decade as Online Editor and Lead Writer for the world's longest-running genre publication, Starburst Magazine, and his work has also been featured on BBC, TechRadar, Tom's Guide, WhatToWatch, Sportkskeeda, and various other outlets, in addition to being a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic. Between his main dayjob, his role as the lead panel host of Wales Comic Con, and his gig as a pre-match host for Wrexham AFC games, Andrew has also carried out a hugely varied amount of interviews, from the likes of Robert Englund, Kane Hodder, Adrienne Barbeau, Rob Zombie, Katharine Isabelle, Leigh Whannell, Bruce Campbell, and Tony Todd, to Kevin Smith, Ron Perlman, Elijah Wood, Giancarlo Esposito, Simon Pegg, Charlie Cox, the Russo Brothers, and Brian Blessed, to Kevin Conroy, Paul Dini, Tara Strong, Will Friedle, Burt Ward, Andrea Romano, Frank Miller, and Rob Liefeld, to Bret Hart, Sting, Mick Foley, Ricky Starks, Jamie Hayer, Britt Baker, Eric Bischoff, and William Regal, to Mickey Thomas, Joey Jones, Phil Parkinson, Brian Flynn, Denis Smith, Gary Bennett, Karl Connolly, and Bryan Robson - and that's just the tip of an ever-expanding iceberg.