10 Worst Fates Suffered By Final Girls In Horror Movies

While the dismal sequel to the exemplary 2005 subterranean horror The Descent reveals that Sarah Carter did actually survive her appalling predicament depicted in the film's climax, we'll let that slide on the basis of how utterly petrifying her apparent fate in the original film is.

The Descent follows a group of friends who become lost in an unmapped cave system. The party subsequently find themselves hunted by nightmarish humanoid creatures that have survived underground for millennia. Protagonist Sarah was already having a rough go of things beforehand, having tragically lost her husband and young daughter Jessica in a car-crash that she survived.

Sarah seemingly makes her getaway in the film's climactic sequence, only for director Neil Marshall to pull the rug out from under audiences in the most horrifying of fashions. Sarah has hallucinated the entire escape and is still trapped in the cave system, with the creatures closing in around her fast. The light she perceives to be radiating from candles on her daughter's birthday cake is actually the flickering glow of her torch - slowly dying out and poised to plunge her into eternal nightmarish darkness.

Sarah's fate is so morbidly depressing that the US version of The Descent featured an entirely different ending to the UK's. The American take actually does see Sarah make it to freedom over fears that the ending would come across as overly bleak.

The phrase "no sh*t, Sherlock" comes to mind.