10 Horror Movies Where The Final Girl Was The Villain

Ti West's thrilling new horror series -- the X trilogy -- returns for another dose of blood and nostalgia in Pearl, following up last year's X with a surprisingly welcome prequel.

Starring as the titular Pearl, Mia Goth once again takes up her mantle from the first film in the trilogy, in what is in many ways a technicolour ode to the early 20th century. But chorus girls, movie magic and saturated palettes aside, it isn't long before Pearl -- a coy farmgirl oppressed by her mother's strictness and her father's illness -- comes unstuck and starts spraying the landscape with blood.

A Lizzie Borden-type, Pearl is at once aggressively amoral and piously repentant, and by the time we hit the credits she has killed every other character in the film. Far from murder for the sake of villainy, however, this chain of events brings upon her quite the moment of reckoning. Pearl winds up alone in a house of rotting corpses struggling to confront herself and reconcile what she's done, with the film ending on a long shot of her face descending from jubilation to misery.

Both final girl and all-consuming psychopath, she lives to tell the tale of the darkness that overcame her, without the power to truly defeat her demons, or the wherewithal not to do it again.