8 Final Horror Movie Girls Who Ended Up Dying Anyway

One of the first major exploitation horror flicks, and an unwitting agitator for the moral panic of the video nasty era that followed, Meir Zarchi's I Spit On Your Grave (1978) is a challenging watch with few artistically redeeming qualities. Nevertheless, it offers a final girl quite unlike any other, who turns the tables on her attackers and wreaks bloody mayhem and murder.

Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton) is on a private writing retreat out in Connecticut when she's set upon and violently raped. Rather than turning her ordeal into fiction or internalising her trauma, she enacts an extensive regime of vengeance, castration, disembowelling and murder against her attackers. Thus, she comes out on top, living to tell the tale.

For better or worse (definitely worse), I Spit On Your Grave has had various reboots and sequels in recent years, retreading old ground for another generation, with increasingly more inventive tortures and kills. Unfortunately for Jennifer, it also spawned a direct sequel, I Spit on Your Grave: Deja Vu (2019). She returns as a counsellor who made big on the back of a memoir of her experiences in the first film, but is drawn again into something similar by the families of her original attackers.

This time, after experiencing further humiliation and punishment from a whole new set of marauding ne'er do wells, she is decapitated and paraded around through various scenes like a trophy... Nice.