8 Final Horror Movie Girls Who Ended Up Dying Anyway

The Descent supplied horror fans with a whole new breed of horror in 2005, setting the majority of its action in an underground cave system and making liberal use of the inherent darkness to plant and reveal its sub-human, orc-like creatures.

Protagonist of this inventive feature is Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), whose credentials as a bona fide final girl are established by her surviving a first act car crash that kills her family. To take her mind off things, she goes spelunking with her friends in a remote cave system. As you do. While the friends are picked off one by one, Sarah fights through to the credits.

The US cut of the film snipped away the ending where Sarah escapes the caves only to find she has been hallucinating and is still down there, and the sequel The Descent Part 2 (2009) canonised it, with Sarah escaping during its opening -- two days after the events of the first film. Unfortunately for her, Sarah has no memory of what happened in the dark, and is compelled to go back down to find her friends by a local sheriff who thinks she might have murdered them.

While it was perfectly conceivable that Sarah might survive a second time, the audience's patience with a third film would not be such a safe bet. Thus, after surviving almost to the film's conclusion, Sarah nobly sacrifices herself to let Rios (Krysten Cummings), the only other survivor and this film's final girl, escape.