8 Final Horror Movie Girls Who Ended Up Dying Anyway

Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is the perpetual survivor of the Alien series, making it out of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), James Cameron's Aliens (1986) and into David Fincher's misguided Alien Cubed (1992) with barely a scratch on her. With each entry, Ripley becomes more the all-action final girl archetype, a figure capable of taking down every size xenomorph while delivering some of space horror cinema's most iconic lines in the process.

Until Fincher knocked her off.

In Alien Cubed's closing scenes, Ripley sacrifices herself so that humanity may live unencumbered by the xenomorph growing inside her -- or at least so evil incorporated Weyland–Yutani don't get their hands on what they hope to turn into the next generation of biological superweapon. Never mind the fact that Ripley's final moment is almost certainly a rip-off of the T-8000's death in Cameron's T2 (released just a year earlier in 1991), this seems an unfortunate end for such a major pop culture figure.

But, of course, in the world of popular cinema, the end is never truly the end. A clone of Ripley appears in the very next franchise instalment -- Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Alien: Resurrection (1997) -- and makes it to the end of the film, alas no longer the final girl.