20 Most Badass Female Horror Characters Ever
Because female characters in horror movies don't always have to suck.
Why do so many female horror characters completely suck? Remember Sandra from Friday the 13th Part 2? No, you don’t? Oh, well that’s because her entire personality is that she’s Jeff’s girlfriend, and all she does is have sex with him and then get killed. What about Tina, the girl from A Nightmare on Elm Street who…has a bunch of sex and gets murdered? That’s a classic character, right?
Yeah, even the biggest horror fans admit the genre has never treated women very well, and their role in these movies is too often just to take off their clothes. Even in 2015, that’s still a problem. Luckily there are exceptions to this awful rule, women in these genre movies who are well written, three-dimensional characters. Shocking, right? They’re actually allowed to have interesting things to say, complex backstories, and they sure do kick a lot of ass.
These 20 badass women broke conventions and gave a huge middle finger to the genre’s rampant misogyny. They don’t simply run down the stairs screaming or have a lot of sex, they're s a reminder of the kind of writing-for-women that audienceS need to see more of. Here are the all time greatest female horror characters.
20. Lola Stone - The Loved Ones
In terms of greater roles for women in horror, it's not that they all have to be strong heroines that do no wrong and take everyone down. It's just that there needs to be a greater variety of characters, with female roles that go all across the board just like roles for men, and that includes the role of the villainous psychopath.
The Loved Ones has a great example of that in Lola. She's completely insane, a character who seems innocent enough at the beginning but who quickly becomes terrifying. When Brent turns her down for the prom and embarrasses her, she decides to take her revenge by kidnapping and torturing him. It's absolutely brutal.
Robin Mcleavy is incredible in the film, starting off as a wide-eyed young girl and then immediately flipping the switch to this insane, vengeful murderer. One minute she'll be smiling at Brent and the next she's screaming at the top of her lungs like some sort of female Joker.
It's also great that the character doesn't need to abandon her femininity in order to be scary, and the image of Lola wearing that bright pink dress and crown while holding out a drill to torture Brent is the kind of thing that makes The Loved Ones so special.