10 Horror Movie Final Girls Who Suffered The Most

Alien's Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is rightly held up as one of the toughest and most resourceful heroines in the history of not just horror but cinema as a whole.

In the first film, she's forced to make tough decisions and employ her sly cunning to survive, all while her fellow Nostromo crew members are summarily picked off by the alien Xenomorph.

In Aliens, Ripley awakens from cryo-stasis almost 60 years later to learn that her daughter Amanda died while she was asleep, and beyond that she has to contend with a grilling from the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, who are none-too-happy that she scuttled the Nostromo while making her escape.

Ripley is then convinced to join a group of Marines to check on the terraforming colony Hadley's Hope, where she encounters a fleet of Xenomorphs and again survives alongside surrogate daughter Newt (Carrie Henn) and Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn).

But at the start of Alien 3, Newt and Hicks die, and to pile on the heartbreak, she's impregnated with an Alien Queen embryo, forcing her to kill herself by jumping into a giant furnace at film's end.

Yet even this isn't the end for Ripley: despite being dead, she's brought back to life as a clone who, due to the Xenomorph's ultra-convenient genetic memory, retains some of the original Ripley's memories.

And that's all she wrote for now - the original Ripley is dead, her attempts to end the Xenos were futile, and she now lives on as a genetically enhanced clone. Suffering isn't even the word.