10 More Horror Final Girls Who Didn't Survive Their Movie

The Cabin in the Woods is of course a film that thoroughly toys with the tired tropes and conventions of the horror genre itself.

Case in point, Dana Polk (Kristen Connolly) seems to fit the mold of the prototypical Final Girl, with her clean-cut look, pleasant personality, and generally demure demeanour suggesting her to be a typically moralistic, even virginal female lead.

Yet Dana parades around in her underwear near the start of the movie and has just gotten out of an illicit affair with a married professor, ensuring she's actually far from the stereotypical Final Girl.

Late in the movie the villainous Director (Sigourney Weaver) even attests that they had to fudge the rules of their world-saving ritual and "work with what they have" re: Dana's lack of virginity.

And so, at film's end Dana is given the opportunity to live if she kills her pal Marty (Fran Kranz) and completes the ritual that will keep the subterranean deities known as the Ancient Ones at bay.

But Dana, infuriated at having been used as a pawn in the ritual, ultimately decides that humanity isn't worth saving at this cost, and so smokes up a joint with Marty before they're both killed along with the rest of the world by the rising Ancient Ones.

For a horror film that so aggressively and hilariously subverted genre expectations, it was absolutely fitting that the Final Girl decided to let herself die and take all of humanity with her.