Despite their importance to the genre, there are numerous female characters within horror that have fallen between the cracks of the canon. Ones who aren’t enshrined on merch or shouted out in every countdown, but whose performances linger long after the credits roll. They might come from forgotten exploitation flicks, international nightmares, direct-to-video oddities, or cult classics that never quite crossed into the mainstream—but they matter. In this list, you’ll find scream queens who deserved bigger pedestals, final girls who survived hell only to be ignored by history, and the rare female monsters who weren’t defined by seduction or sympathy—but by raw, unsettling power. These characters don’t just react to horror. They shape it. They weaponize fear, grief, sexuality, trauma, and rage, often in ways that are far more complex than their male counterparts are ever allowed to be.
These are the 100 Most Underrated Female Characters of Horror Cinema.
80. Beth Parchin (Rebecca Hall) | The Night House (2020)
Rebecca Hall gives a devastating performance as Beth, a woman unraveling after her husband’s sudden death who then starts to suspect his presence might still be in their house. Beth is what comes after the trauma, when the world expects you to be functional again while your soul is still clawing at the walls. Her grief is sharp, sarcastic, and openly hostile. She drinks too much. She snaps at well-meaning friends. She laughs at the idea of therapy. And yet there is a quiet precision to everything she does—like she’s holding herself together with spite, cigarettes, and a refusal to collapse for anyone else’s comfort.
When Beth discovers her husband’s secret life, the film doesn’t pivot into cheap shock—it spirals into existential terror. This isn’t betrayal as melodrama; this is betrayal as annihilation. Every revelation feels like a blade sliding between ribs. The man she loved wasn’t just hiding infidelity—he was trying to outsmart death itself, and he was willing to sacrifice other women to do it.
Beth is left with the unbearable realization that she was never protected—she was almost next. And then comes the real horror: the presence. Not a ghost. Not a demon with a face. But a cosmic nothingness that wants her back. The void doesn’t threaten Beth—it recognizes her. It whispers to the part of her that already wants to disappear. This is horror at its most intimate: the monster isn’t chasing her through the woods—it’s sitting in the same dark room she can’t leave. Beth’s power is not in bravery. It’s in refusal. She stares into the abyss and chooses rage over surrender. She chooses to stay. To exist. To keep hurting, if that’s the price of being alive. She’s a survivor of metaphysical betrayal. A woman who learns that love can be a trap, that grief can open doorways, and that sometimes the scariest thing in the room is the part of you that wants to stop fighting.
79. Jennifer Baylor (Lisa Pelikan) | Jennifer (1978)
Nothing aggravates me more than the legion of stupid assholes who parrot the same thing over and over again every time a remake is announced. It’s the same shit every time– “Hollywood is out of ideas” and “Why can’t they come up with new ideas?” It drives me crazy because none of them say shit when their favorite horror film gets another sequel and because we wouldn’t have a ton of horror gold if it wasn’t for remakes and rip-offs. There’s no Godzilla without The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, no Friday the 13th without Bay of Blood and Halloween, no Orca, Alligator, or Piranha without Jaws, no Abby without The Exorcist, and no Jennifer without Carrie.
There’s no point in recapping the plot because the two films are identical, but where they differ is in the two girls’ powers. Carrie had psychokinesis, or the ability to move objects with her mind, and Jennifer has, well, they don’t have a name for her power. She can manifest snakes. Many snakes. An army of psychic, vengeful vipers that she uses to dispatch everyone who gave her shit. Hollywood doesn’t need new ideas. It just needs fun ones, and Jennifer fits the bill. She’s a girl who uses snakes to get revenge on everyone that did her wrong. She should’ve gotten a million sequels and a reboot by now.
78. Phoebe Crenshaw (Ashley Bank) | The Monster Squad (1987)
Before Stranger Things, there was The Monster Squad—and for a lot of film fans, the latter still reigns supreme. Steve may have great hair, Dustin may be fun, and Eleven may have cool powers, but they can’t touch the effortless cool of leather-jacketed Rudy, the natural leadership of Sean, or the pure, scene-stealing sweetness of Phoebe.
The youngest member of the group, Phoebe doesn’t officially “join” the squad until she shows up at one of their meetings with a literal monster in tow: Frankenstein’s creature (Tom Noonan). Their bond becomes the heart and soul of the film. It echoes the relationship between Gertie (Drew Barrymore) and E.T.—tender, protective, and rooted in a child’s instinctive empathy for something strange, misunderstood, and in need of love.
She offers him kindness, he offers her friendship, and when he inevitably has to go, it’s genuinely heartbreaking. In a movie obsessed with proving how “cool” it is, Phoebe is the emotional center everyone else forgets to protect. She’s younger, kinder, and framed as the tag-along kid sister—but she sees the truth faster than anyone else. While the boys collect lore and build weapons to fight evil, she recognizes that some monsters are made, not born. Ashley Bank plays her with stillness and sincerity, never winking at the camera, never breaking the spell. Because of her, we buy everything in the movie. Her earnestness and kindness are the film’s anchor. For a second, Frankenstein’s Monster remembers what it was like to be human. For a second, horror hesitates. Phoebe Crenshaw is proof that compassion is the most dangerous weapon in the room—and the one no one ever sees coming.
77. Thelma (Eili Harboe) | Thelma (2017)
Joachim Trier’s Thelma is a slow-burn supernatural awakening disguised as a campus drama, and at its center is one of modern horror’s most quietly devastating heroines. Thelma arrives in Oslo from a suffocating Christian household to attend university, carrying a lifetime of rules, guilt, and fear inside her. She is polite, withdrawn, visibly uncomfortable in her own skin. She doesn’t drink. She doesn’t touch. She doesn’t look for too long. Every instinct has been trained toward obedience. Then she meets Anja—and everything changes.
Eili Harboe plays Thelma like a baby lamb afraid of breaking the imaginary rules imposed upon her by others. Her body is rigid, her voice hushed, her eyes always searching for permission that will never come. When she begins experiencing violent seizures, the film slowly reveals that they are not medical episodes but psychic ruptures. Thelma’s suppressed desires—especially her attraction to Anja—manifest as uncontrollable telekinetic power. When she fears someone will leave her, they vanish. When she imagines them harmed, reality obeys.
What begins as confusion spirals into horror when Anja suddenly disappears and Thelma uncovers the truth about her childhood: her father has been drugging her to suppress her abilities, and she once used the same powers to erase her younger brother after believing he was more loved than she was. Her entire life has been a containment strategy, not for her safety—but for everyone else’s. The monster isn’t inside her. The monster is the ideology that told her she was sinful for wanting, broken for feeling, and monstrous for existing outside the script she was handed. Her power is not evil—it is the natural result of a soul that has been caged for too long. Thelma is not a witch, not a demon, not a freak of nature. She is the cost of repression made flesh—and the proof that liberation is the most terrifying force of all.
76. Alberta Jackson (Glenn Close) | The Deliverance (2024)
Lee Daniels has built a career on bold, sometimes baffling, and often inspired casting choices that refuse to play by Hollywood’s usual rules. He doesn’t just cast for star power or type; he casts for disruption. One of the most striking examples is Shadowboxer, where Daniels pairs Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Mo’Nique as a married hitman-and-hitwoman duo. The casting is so unexpected it almost feels confrontational—two performers from entirely different cinematic worlds sharing an intimate, violent, and emotionally complex relationship. It shouldn’t work on paper, yet that friction becomes the film’s defining energy. In The Butler, Daniels turns stunt casting into a kind of cultural collage by having a rotating lineup of famous faces play U.S. presidents, almost none of which should work but all kind of do in their own weird way. Then there’s Mariah Carey in Precious—a casting choice that initially raised eyebrows, only to become one of the film’s most haunting surprises.
His films don’t often work, but his casting is always on point. A perfect example of this is The Deliverance, a forgettable horror movie with an unforgettable performance by Glenn Close, an actress who is clearly unafraid to do anything in front of a camera. She plays Alberta Jackson, a woman carved from judgment and self-righteous fire, the kind of matriarch who believes God speaks directly to her because she’s as crazy as she is hungry for power. She’s the type that doesn’t find comfort in faith; she finds a weapon. A weapon she uses to control everyone around her. She’s a grade A villain long before she becomes possessed, but once she does, the film fully belongs to her. If you were shocked by the words coming out of young Linda Blair’s mouth in The Exorcist, you’ll be equally aghast by the wild shit Close says. Like all of his films, The Deliverance is less than the sum of its parts but the parts that are great, are really great. And all of the parts in this film that are great belong solely to Close.
75. Nancy Fowler Archer (Allison Hayes) | Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)
Nancy Fowler Archer is the beating heart—and towering id—of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, a character whose rage is so justified the movie can barely contain it. Played by Allison Hayes with wounded dignity and mounting fury, Nancy starts out as the town joke: a wealthy woman dismissed as hysterical, drunk, and unreliable by her cheating husband, his mistress, and an entire community eager to write her off. The genius of the film, accidental or otherwise, is that Nancy is right. She really did encounter something impossible, and the punishment for telling the truth is humiliation and gaslighting. A movie about a woman who turns gigantic and uses her newfound abilities to wreak havoc on a town she has learned to hate shouldn’t be as progressive as it is, but clearly the filmmakers wanted to inject a shlocky tale with some actual depth.
Instead of making her a monster, they made her a victim and then gave her the power for retribution, which makes the film far more interesting. Once she grows to colossal size, it’s less a monster transformation than a release. The film’s famously clunky effects can’t fully sell the spectacle, but Hayes sells the emotion. Giant Nancy isn’t a mindless creature; she’s a woman who has finally become too big to ignore. Her march through town is powered by betrayal, resentment, and the refusal to be silenced any longer. Based on that poster, you most likely assumed the film was campy or dated, but there’s a reason Tim Burton is obsessed with it and wants to remake it—it’s a surprisingly deep movie for having such a ridiculous premise.
74. Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) | Dressed to Kill (1980)
In Dressed to Kill, Brian De Palma very deliberately positions Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) as his Marion Crane from Psycho—an elegant, sexually restless woman who feels like the film’s star, only to be ripped away just as the story seems to be settling in. At first, Dressed to Kill appears to be Kate’s movie. She’s a wealthy, bored Manhattan housewife trapped in a passionless marriage, drifting through therapy sessions and fantasizing about something—anything—to make her feel alive again. When she impulsively hooks up with a stranger she meets at the museum, the film follows her in lush, voyeuristic detail, encouraging the audience to invest in her longing and her reckless bid for connection.
Then De Palma pulls the rug out.
Just like Hitchcock did in Psycho, she is brutally removed from the narrative in a shocking elevator murder, just when it seems she’s about to change her life. Her death doesn’t just provide a jolt—it completely reorients the film. The story pivots to Liz (Nancy Allen), a call girl who witnesses the killing, and Peter (Keith Gordon), Kate’s teenage son, as they try to uncover the truth behind the mysterious razor-wielding figure stalking the city. It’s their film (as well as Michael Caine’s), so all the critical attention went to them, but that twist doesn’t work if you’re not immediately invested in Kate’s life. Dickinson had a fraction of the narrative, but she, along with De Palma, created a fully fleshed-out character. She isn’t the star but through sheer force of will refuses to be forgotten.
73. Jen (Matilda Lutz) | Revenge (2017)
Jen arrives in Revenge the way so many “final girls” do: she’s warm, playful, almost aggressively sweet. Which is precisely why Coralie Fargeat’s film makes her transformation feel less like survival and more like a divine punishment unleashed on men who assumed softness was weakness. At first, Jen is an accessory. She’s the girlfriend brought along to her rich boyfriend Richard’s desert hunting retreat, a sex object for the camera and a novelty for his friends. The men leer. The men comment. The men feel entitled. And when Richard leaves her alone with Stan and Dimitri, the situation curdles into violence. The assault is brutal, but the real horror is what comes after: the casualness with which the men decide she is a problem to be erased rather than a human being to be protected. Richard, in the ultimate act of cowardice, pushes Jen off a cliff and leaves her to die on the rocks below. But Jen doesn’t die.
She is reborn. What follows is not a crawl back to safety—it’s a baptism in blood. The desert that once looked like a luxury playground becomes a gladiator arena, and Jen becomes its apex predator. Every wound she survives makes her more monstrous, more unstoppable. She stalks her attackers one by one, turning their hunting fantasy back on them. Guns, glass, traps, blood—so much blood. The men who thought they were gods in this empty landscape are reduced to animals, screaming and scrambling as the woman they tried to discard refuses to stay buried. By the end, Jen is no longer the girl in the opening scene. She is something elemental—bloodied, breathing, unkillable. Revenge doesn’t ask if she’s gone too far. It asks why we ever thought she shouldn’t.
72. Tricia Albright (Julia Stiles) | Orphan: First Kill (2022)
Tricia Albright is living a life that looks good on paper — responsible mom, stable home, attentive partner, and a blended family she’s trying her best to hold together. She loves her kids, genuinely wants peace, and reads every parenting book she can find. Tricia is the kind of woman who fixates on order because chaos feels like it could take everything away.
Orphan: First Kill opens with a shocking inciting incident far from Tricia’s tidy life: a young woman named Esther escapes from a remote psychiatric facility in Estonia. Her plan is audacious — she heads to the United States to pose as the missing daughter of a wealthy family. And because she’s polished, manipulative, and terrifyingly confident, she almost slips right into their lives without anyone noticing something is off.
The husband/father is over the moon that his little girl is finally back, but Tricia has suspicions that something is wrong with Esther. We, as the audience, understand why she’d have reservations because we know she’s a murderous lil moppet, but we find out quickly that Tricia is hiding a secret. She doesn’t believe Esther is her daughter because she knows her son accidentally killed her. So now she and her son have to put on a facade because they don’t want their husband/father figuring it out. Putting Esther smack dab in the middle of a rattlesnake den instead of another helpless family is a perfect direction for the sequel, and Julia Stiles is clearly having a ball playing a villain for the first time.
71. Pamela ‘Hitch’ Rushworth (Jamie Lee Curtis) | Road Games (1981)
Played by Jamie Lee Curtis at the point where she was actively swerving away from Final Girl typecasting, Hitch barrels into the film with sharp instincts, sharper sarcasm, and an accent that immediately marks her as an outsider who refuses to sit quietly in the passenger seat of someone else’s movie.
Hitch is a hitchhiker, a traveler, and a constant disruption to Stacy Keach’s grizzled, obsessive trucker. Where he broods and fixates, she pokes holes. Curtis plays her as alert and amused, always clocking the absurdity of the situation even when things turn genuinely dangerous. She doesn’t exist to be rescued or impressed; she’s there to add a counterbalance to the non-stop tension and paranoia.
What makes Hitch memorable is her intelligence. She’s curious without being reckless, skeptical without being dismissive. Curtis gives her a playful confidence that feels lived-in, not performative. Even when the movie leans into voyeurism and suspicion, Hitch remains a participant, not a prop. She watches, listens, and reacts like someone who knows the rules of thrillers but refuses to be punished for knowing them. Richard Franklin later admitted that he should’ve beefed up the role once Curtis was cast, but even with her limited screen time, she definitely leaves an impression. This is far and away the best horror film she’s been in that doesn’t involve a killer wearing a William Shatner mask.
70. Mima Kirigoe (Junko Iwao/Ruby Marlowe) | Perfect Blue (1997)
An animated Hitchcockian thriller that deals with the duality that exists between the person and the avatar, Perfect Blue explores what happens when the online persona, the stage persona, and the real-life persona of a pop star become indistinguishable from each other in the mind of a deranged fan and what happens to one of them when he doesn’t like how another one is behaving. It’s about the metaphorical masks we all adopt to adapt to our surroundings. The ones we wear at work or the ones we wear when conversing with friends and family. They’re all different and they all serve a purpose, as are our online masks, and for some of us, the mask of celebrity. Every celebrity is putting on an act. Everything they do while being in the spotlight is a calculated act to get you to buy whatever the hell they’re selling.
There’s no better example of this than pop stars. It’s no coincidence that every boy band has that specific type of guy that appeals to every girl in America. They’re all specifically picked to fill a niche and then they’re tasked with maintaining that “character” for as long as they’re in the band. It’s all an act. But to some, it’s not. Some have a hard time distinguishing between the person on stage or screen and the character they’re playing. That’s where the stalker comes in. This film is about duality; it’s about personas and it’s about obsession. And in the middle is Mima Kirigoe—a pop idol having a breakdown who represents the ghost of every young woman ever chewed up by an industry that sells innocence, then punishes you for outgrowing it. If the only villain of the movie was the heartless industry that treats entertainers like disposable meat, that would be enough but she also has to contend with a very real serial killer. Perfect Blue isn’t always a horror movie but when it is, it’s terrifying.
69. Ruth Harker (Alicia Wit) | Longlegs (2024)
Ruth Harker is the soft-spoken mother standing just offscreen while the horror unfolds — the one who smiles too tightly, who prays too often, who looks like safety but smells like rot. While her daughter hunts the serial killer known as Longlegs, Ruth is already deep inside his orbit. Not a victim. Not a pawn. A collaborator. A woman who chose the monster because he promised order in a world that terrified her. Longlegs plays like a curse passed down through bloodlines. The killer doesn’t just stalk families — he infiltrates them, turning mothers into disciples and daughters into sacrifices. Ruth’s loyalty to Longlegs is rooted in twisted faith and desperate control.
She believes she’s protecting her child by feeding the machine that will eventually devour her. That contradiction is the film’s most poisonous idea: that love, when filtered through fear, becomes indistinguishable from cruelty. Her betrayal cuts deeper than any blade because it comes wrapped in motherhood. When the truth surfaces, it isn’t just a plot twist — it’s an exorcism. The mask of the nurturing parent is torn away, revealing a woman who chose a myth over her child, obedience over love, a monster over her own blood. Cage ran away with all of the attention from critics and horror fans due to it being his best performance in years but for my money, the biggest monster of the movie is Ruth Harker and Witt’s performance stands as a reminder that she can run away with any movie if you give her the right material.
68. Irena Gallier (Nastassja Kinski) | Cat People (1982)
Paul Schrader didn’t just remake Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 classic — he stripped it naked, drenched it in neon, and turned repression into a full-blown psychosexual nightmare. And at the center of that fever dream is Nastassja Kinski, wide-eyed and feral, moving through the world like a cursed relic trying to pass as a woman. In the original film, fear lived in shadows. Irena Dubrovna was a suggestion, a whisper, a silhouette that might become a panther if desire crossed the line. Schrader’s version takes that subtext and rips it open. This Irena is no longer just afraid of herself — she is defined by the terror of what she is. The monster isn’t implied. It’s biological, inherited, and hungry. The film opens with Irena traveling to New Orleans to reunite with her estranged brother, Paul (Malcolm McDowell), after their parents’ deaths. She is innocent in the way only someone completely unprepared for the truth can be. Paul, however, knows what she is: part of a cursed bloodline in which sexual awakening triggers a transformation into a black leopard.
Once changed, the only way back is to kill. Love, in this world, is a death sentence. She wants connection, warmth, normalcy — but her body is a loaded gun. Every kiss is a countdown. Schrader stages her desire like a horror film and a perfume ad at the same time: sweat, shadows, glowing eyes, Giorgio Moroder’s synth score pulsing like a suffocating heartbeat. Cat People is about the lie that women are either pure or dangerous, never both. Irena is punished not for violence, but for wanting. Her transformation isn’t just physical — it’s symbolic of how female sexuality is treated as something monstrous, something that must be caged or destroyed. The panther isn’t her curse. The curse is a world that tells her she cannot exist as both lover and human. By the time Irena accepts what she is, there’s no triumph — only inevitability. She becomes the thing everyone feared, not because she wanted to, but because there was no space for her to be anything else. Like the best tragic monsters, she isn’t evil.
67. Tina Shepard (Lar Park Lincoln) | Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
By the time The New Blood rolled around, the Friday the 13th series was deep into sequel hell: masks, machetes, horny teens, rinse, repeat. It needed a major shake-up. Fans really responded to the Tommy Jarvis trilogy, so the obvious route would have Jason go up against someone competent. Enter Tina Shepard. She’s what happens when the Friday the 13th franchise finally admits it’s bored of its own formula and decides to do a mashup. There’s no way around it; The New Blood is 100% Carrie White versus Jason Voorhees. It is an almost unapologetic ripoff of King’s beloved character but set in this universe and the fact that anyone thought this was a good idea to begin with almost makes it work. Her story is pure melodrama. As a child, Tina accidentally kills her abusive father when her powers erupt during a fight on a dock.
Years later, she returns to Crystal Lake with her manipulative doctor, who wants to exploit her abilities, not heal her. Tina believes if she can confront the lake, she can make peace with her past. Instead, she resurrects Jason Voorhees — because this franchise refuses to let anyone rest, living or dead. What follows is the most gloriously unhinged entry in the series: Jason versus a girl who can throw furniture with her mind. It’s not survival anymore — it’s combat. For the first time, Jason isn’t the unstoppable force. He’s the thing being hunted. Tina doesn’t just run, scream, or outlast — she fights back, using grief, rage, and psychic power as her arsenal. Where Alice, Ginny, Chris, Trish, Megan, and Tommy’s surrogate allies were defined by endurance, Tina is defined by defiance. She doesn’t just survive Jason — she tries to break him in half. The other final girls learned to hide, adapt, and endure the nightmare. Tina storms into it like she’s ready to burn Crystal Lake down. The world was robbed of a Tommy and Tina team-up movie.
66. Brenda Bates (Rebecca Gayheart) | Urban Legend (1998)
Brenda Bates is what happens when grief puts on lip gloss and decides to make trauma everyone else’s problem. Unlike typical slasher boogeymen that stalk from the shadows, she’s nothing but smiles and a bubbly personality. She laughs. She flirts. She cries in bathrooms. She is the friend who listens, the classmate who understands, the wounded girl who knows exactly how to weaponize sympathy. And that’s what makes her so lethal. She doesn’t look like death. She looks like your best friend.
Brenda is the invisible constant. She’s the main character’s roommate, her emotional support system, the girl always just off to the side when things go wrong. But behind the mascara and nervous giggles is a survivor of a secret tragedy: a car accident years earlier where her fiancé died because a group of drunk teens fled the scene — including the main character and her friends.
Brenda didn’t forget. She curated her pain, sharpened it, and waited for revenge. Soon, students at Pendleton University begin dying in ways ripped straight from urban myths: Pop Rocks and soda, the dog in the microwave, the kidney theft. It’s a ’90s slasher; they all need a theme on top of a revenge plot, and Brenda easily has the best. Her kills are spectacle, chaos, and vengeance dressed up as campfire horror. She turned folklore into a murder mixtape, remixing childhood fears into performance art. The sequel reveals that she survives the ending of this movie, and it’s a shame they never rebooted it with her coming back for seconds. In a world of lazy Scream knockoffs, Urban Legend stands apart for having a great hook and an even better villain.
65. Alice a.k.a. Lola_Lola (Madeline Brewer) | Cam (2018)
Alice is not a “cam girl” in the sanitized, TikTok euphemism way. She is a product, a brand, a laborer, a dreamer, and a sacrificial offering to an algorithmic god that does not care if you are human, only if you are clickable. She wakes up, puts on a face, slips into a character, and sells fantasy by the minute. Her online persona, Lola_Lola, is not just an alter ego—it is the only version of herself that pays the rent, gets attention, and feels powerful.
At the start of the film, Alice is chasing rank. She wants to crack the top 50 on her cam site because the leaderboard is her gospel. It promises visibility, money, validation, transcendence. She believes that if she just performs harder, pushes further, invents something shocking enough, she will finally become untouchable. Then she logs in one night and discovers herself already live.
Not a glitch. Not a hacker. Not a prank. Her exact face. Her voice. Her body. Her room. Her mannerisms. A perfect copy.
This double—still calling herself Lola_Lola—takes over Alice’s account, climbs the rankings, and performs with a cold, fearless intensity Alice can’t compete with. The clone is everything the system wants: tireless, shameless, endlessly available. Alice is locked out of her own digital body, watching as the world rewards the version of herself that no longer needs her. And that is the real horror of Cam. Not the doppelgänger. Not the stalking. Not even the loss of control. The horror is that the system prefers the version of you that isn’t human. The internet does not recognize souls. Only streams. Cam offers a new type of horror that will only age like wine as the years go by, and Alice will be seen as one of the first victims/final girls of this new, terrifying age.
64. Enid Baines (Niamh Algar) | Censor (2021)
Enid sits behind the desk at Britain’s Video Archive Corporation in the 1980s, where her job is to watch people get stabbed, dismembered, and often far worse, then judge whether the public deserves to see it. Imagine grading nightmares like they’re essays: that’s Enid’s 9-to-5. She watches the gore so you don’t have to, and she does it with a clinical precision that makes you wonder if she’s made of steel, but Censor isn’t content to let her stay anesthetized in that detached critic mode. After watching a particularly brutal tape — a home movie involving a missing sister from her own childhood — the walls between reviewer and participant start to crumble. Suddenly, horror isn’t something she watches — it’s something she lives, something that starts to mimic and mock her deepest wounds.
Plotwise, Censor takes us through what feels like two movies in one: the first is a slow-burn mystery about Enid tracing the origins of this unsettling film reel and its connection to her past. The second is a hall of mirrors where reality, memory, and nightmare reflect into each other until you can’t tell which is which. Enid Baines isn’t a monster (though Censor absolutely toys with that idea); she’s the aftermath of too many horrors watched, filtered, and archived. And by the end, you understand that the scariest part isn’t the violence on screen — it’s the way looking at horrors can turn someone into a kind of ghost within themself. Essentially, it’s Evil Ed (1995) by way of A24, which sounds like a bizarre mashup on paper, but it actually works like a dream.
63. Karla Wilson (Brandy) | I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998)
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer is a terrible horror movie, but as a ridiculous sequel, it’s a ton of fun. Not only does the plot hinge on the audience not knowing the capital of Brazil, but the villain’s name is Will Benson (Ben’s Son, do you get it!?). Oh, and not a single main character dies. It honestly makes nothing but bad or woefully inept decisions, but casting Brandy as the best friend wasn’t one of them.
Karla Wilson is the kind of character who walks into a slasher sequel and immediately upgrades the whole vibe. Played by Brandy at the height of her late-’90s pop-goddess era, Karla isn’t just “the friend.” She’s the moral compass, the voice of reason, the final-girl energy siphoned off and redistributed with style, intelligence, and just enough fear to make it real. After Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) wins a suspicious radio contest for a free trip to the Bahamas, guess who’s coming along? Karla, her college roommate and best friend, who is already side-eyeing the whole thing like, girl, the math is not mathing. A deserted resort, a storm cutting off all communication, and a killer picking off guests one by one? Karla clocks the danger faster than anyone else in the room.
What makes Karla iconic is that she never pretends this is just “bad luck.” She knows it’s personal. She believes Julie when everyone else doubts her. In a genre that so often sidelines the Black best friend as comic relief or early body count, Karla survives by being observant, resourceful, and emotionally present. She’s not fearless—she’s terrified—but she moves anyway. That’s the difference. There’s also something radical in how Karla’s arc unfolds. She doesn’t exist to prop up Julie’s pain; she challenges it, questions it, and ultimately shares it. When the bodies start dropping and the truth of the Fisherman resurfaces, Karla becomes Julie’s anchor to reality. Their bond isn’t just survival—it’s solidarity. She’s a much better character than this film deserves. Oh, and the fact that the film’s soundtrack has a song by Jennifer Love Hewitt and not Brandy is almost as ridiculous as having Jack Black play a Rastafarian stoner. Almost.
62. Alexia (Ella Rumpf) | Raw (2016)
Played with razor-wire intensity by Ella Rumpf, Alexia is living proof that some hungers are hereditary. She walks into Julia Ducournau’s cannibal coming-of-age nightmare already on fire, already burned, already too far gone to be saved. If Justine is the story, Alexia is the thesis statement.
Raw follows Justine (Garance Marillier), a lifelong vegetarian who enrolls in veterinary school and is immediately plunged into a sadistic hazing culture. After being forced to eat raw rabbit kidney, something inside her awakens — a craving for flesh, blood, and sensation that she can’t name but can’t ignore. While Justine spirals into her own monstrous self-discovery, Alexia is there like a living mirror of the future: reckless, seductive, self-destructive, and already aware of the appetite that runs in their family.
Alexia is what happens when you grow up knowing you’re different but never being given the language to survive it. She masks her hunger with sex, violence, and nihilistic bravado. She is a walking scar, all bruises and smirks, daring the world to look closer. Where Justine is innocence cracking open, Alexia is innocence long since devoured.
The sister dynamic is the beating heart of Raw. Alexia is cruel, yes — she humiliates Justine, pushes her too far, drags her into danger — but it’s a cruelty born from knowing what’s coming and wanting to harden her for it. She is both tormentor and protector, abuser and guardian angel. Every time she looks at Justine, you can feel the weight of legacy, the horror of inevitability. She doesn’t want her sister to become her… but she also knows she will.
61. Countess Nadine Carody (Soledad Miranda ) | Vampyros Lesbos (1971)
Countess Nadine Carody is not a character, but a spell; a fever dream wrapped in velvet, blood, and Euro-sleaze. Played by the tragically luminous Soledad Miranda (credited as Susann Korda for some reason), Nadine is a woman who knows she is the fantasy and the nightmare at the same time.
Jess Franco’s cult classic follows Linda (Ewa Strömberg), a prim and proper attorney sent to Istanbul to handle the estate of the mysterious Countess Nadine Carody. If this sounds eerily similar to Dracula or Camilla, you’d be correct. Franco pulled from multiple vampire stories to create this slow-moving mood piece. Plot was always secondary to the images and the style, and this is no different.
In fact, many critics at the time compared Franco to Ed Wood due to his methodical pacing and the actors’ dreamlike performances, but time has been far kinder to his works. He was making spaces for his incredibly gorgeous female leads to shine, while providing the most beautiful spotlights imaginable. They may be slow by today’s standards, but I think the intention was to make it feel like you’re stuck with this dangerous beauty and you can’t escape. And as dangerous beauties go, Soledad Miranda is a revelation. What makes Nadine so intoxicating is that she never chases. She beckons. She doesn’t stalk her prey; she invites them to kneel. Miranda plays her with a soft, melancholic grace, as if immortality itself is a curse she carries with bored elegance. Every glance feels like a promise. Every touch, a damnation. She is the embodiment of Franco’s obsession: the erotic as both liberation and doom. Nadine is not evil in a conventional sense. She is hunger. She is compulsion. She is the shadow self Linda is too afraid to acknowledge until she can’t look away anymore.
100-81 | 60-41
Who do you think are some of the most underrated female characters in horror movies? Maybe they will show up later on this list!
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