10 Worst Fates Suffered By Final Girls In Horror Movies

Wait a minute.

Doesn't The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's final girl Sally Hardesty survive her encounter with the stomach-churning Leatherface?

While Sally's fate doesn't sound too unspeakable on paper, the sheer levels of suffering that Marilyn Burns' final girl undergoes in the iconic original installment make death seem like a far more attractive alternative - we'll be discounting Olwen Fouréré's revival of the character based on the inherent atrociousness of the franchise's 2022 offering.

After witnessing her disabled brother Franklin's gruesome murder, Sally is subjected to excruciating physical and psychological torture by the Sawyer brothers. The family "dinner", as Sally howls in horrified dismay while her tormentors howl back with equally demented delight, is notable for being unequivocally harrowing on every level imaginable. The Hitchhiker's Edwin Neal later claimed he would prefer another tour of Vietnam to one more second on this sequence.

Using Sally as a depraved plaything for their cadaverous "Grandpa", the brothers slice her finger open for him to drink her blood - a spectacle so appallingly disgusting that Sally passes out. When they later present him with a hammer to bludgeon her to death, the shrieking Hardesty is spared only by the fact that the repellent old man's strength has rendered him too weak to lift it.

While Sally does eventually escape her abhorrent captors, her hysterical laughter reveals that she's far too broken for it to even matter.