Random Luckiest Survivors From Horror Movies (12 items)

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  (#1) Wendy Torrance

  • The Shining

  Wendy Torrance has a tough run of things in The Shining. Not only is her husband an abusive alcoholic, but her son is suffering from seizures, and she's in a haunted hotel in the middle of winter - that's not a recipe for surviving a horror movie. As she's chased through the Overlook by her husband, who's powered by ghosts, the best she can do is run as fast as she can and scream her head off. 

  The most she does to warrant her survival is scream for Jack Torrance to stop, which of course, he doesn't. The only way she manages to get away is Scatman Cruthers showing up and catching an ax in the back.
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  (#2) Dwight 'Dewey' Riley

  In a fair and just world, Dewey wouldn't have made it out of Scream alive and his sister Tatum would have at least made it to the sequel. Dewey is incompetent at best, and just straight up terrible at his job on his worst days. When Ghostface shows up and starts knocking off teens, he's more concerned with flirting with Gale Weathers than solving the case.

  Somehow, his intelligent, cool sister winds up smushed in a garage door, and even though he's stabbed in the back and left without a medical care for hours, he not only lives through the film, but he survives through every sequel and becomes town sheriff by the fourth film. Talk about failing up.
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  (#3) Sally Hardesty

  • Boogeymen: The Killer Compilation, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

  As far as characters in horror movies go, Sally isn't particularly skilled. You don't have to know how to work a chainsaw or be a skilled safecracker to survive in the genre, but it doesn't hurt. Sally is just a teenager who's on a road trip with her friends when she runs into Leatherface and his vicious, backwoods family. 

  Every one of her friends are dispatched by various means, but Sally escapes the family and lives to tell the tale. She's manhandled, hit in the head with a meat tenderizer, and cut up after jumping through a glass window thanks to what can either be considered gumption or just pure chance.
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  (#4) Paxton

  • Hostel: Part II, Hostel

  It's clear from the moment that Paxton and his friends set foot in Europe that they're woefully unprepared for being in a foreign country, and if these guys can't handle making their way through clubs in Eastern Europe, then there's no way that Paxton can deal with a super wealthy cabal of psychos. 

  After he's captured by the group that brutally does away with tourists, Paxton is restrained and some of his fingers are removed. Paxton is locked in a torture chamber, bleeding out, and he lucks out when his manacles are accidentally released. He somehow makes his way through a basement filled with guards and people who are super excited to commit evil deeds, and he ends up making it home. 
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  (#5) Ash Williams

  • The Evil Dead, Army of Darkness, Evil Dead II, Evil Dead: The Musical, The Evil Dead Fictional Universe

  Ash is great. He's one of the most popular characters in horror cinema, but there's no way that he should have made it out of The Evil Dead, let alone The Evil Dead II or Army of Darkness.

  Regardless of his charm and wit, Ash is completely out of his depth when facing the Deadites. Not only are they a group of demons that can assume any form, from your deceased girlfriend to a basement-dwelling monster, but there are so many of them that Ash would be consumed by these creatures if he weren't incredibly lucky. 
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  (#6) Kirsty Cotton

  • Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, Hellraiser, Boogeymen: The Killer Compilation

  Kirsty Cotton is completely out of her depth with the Cenobites, her evil stepmother, and the uncle who's come back from the grave that's eating people up in the attic. Having just moved to England with her father, she's not even prepared to contact the authorities when things go belly up and her stepmother starts bringing men home while she's sleeping with the reanimated cadaver of her uncle. 

  After she unlocks the Lament Configuration, opening a portal between her world and that of the Cenobites, the only thing that keeps her from being dragged to hell is the fact that Pinhead and his minions are interested in seeing what they can do for her. If they were having a bad day (whatever that is in the underworld), they would have flayed her alive. 

  As the film comes to a climax and the Cenobites are closing in on Kristy and her boyfriend, having ripped her uncle's soul apart, she only manages to survive when a wooden beam falls on one of the monsters. 
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  (#7) Tommy Jarvis

  • Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

  Jason Voorhess, the unstoppable, beefy, hockey-mask-wearing undead psychopath has mowed through scores of teens throughout the Friday the 13th series, but he never managed to take down Tommy Jarvis. Is it because Jarvis was so canny and ruthless that he could match Jason move for move, or was he just really lucky? 

  Jarvis first manages to avoid the slice of Jason's machete in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter by shaving his head and apparently appealing to the straight-up undead monster's sense of self. Jarvis basically confuses Jason long enough for his sister to deal a "final" blow to the monster. That's not even the luckiest move from Jarvis. In Jason Lives, Jarvis manages to wrap a chain attached to a large rock to Jason while the two fight on a boat. Jason throttles Jarvis so hard that they both fall in the water and Jarvis' plan to stick Jason to the bottom of Crystal Lake technically works out. 

  Jason drags Jarvis under the water with him so Jarvis has to play possum until Jason lets him go. To make it worse, Jarvis's love interest Megan actually deals a striking blow to Jason when she jumps in the boat, turns on its engine, and uses the propellers to slice into the monster's face. 
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  (#8) Jesse Walsh

  • A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge

  When the powerful supernatural slayer Freddy Krueger specifically targets Walsh as his earthly counterpart, it's clear from the start that this kid has zero chance of making it out alive. Krueger spends the movie taking over Walsh's body and forcing him to commit more and more depraved acts until he literally rips out of his body. 

  It's unclear how the mechanics of Krueger's plan works, but he's a dream demon so a minimum of linear explanation isn't such a big deal, it's Walsh's ability to survive this onslaught that's mind-boggling. In the end, he survives through the power of friendship, but it seems more like luck than anything else that saved this teen. 
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  (#9) Casey Connor

  At the beginning of The Faculty , Casey is a hapless nerd who can't speak to the girls he goes to school with and he sure as heck can't fight off an alien incursion. By the end of the film, he's one of the sole survivors of the Herrington High alien catastrophe of 1998.

  In spite of being chased by the alien queen, nearly drowned, and having little alien worms put into his face, he manages to overcome his intense shyness and weakling status to become not only a final boy, but a cool guy. How this happens is lost on the audience. There's no training montage, no surprise reveal that he knows kung fu or that he's an alien from a different planet, it's just a fluke.
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  (#10) Mia Allen From ‘Evil Dead’ (2013)

  Realistically, no one should be able to put up a good fight with the Deadites, those Sumerian demons who inhabit the bodies of anyone who's unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of the Necronomicon. Mia Allen is going through massive withdrawals when one of her friends reads from the book, she's in no state to put up a fight with these psychotic demons. 

  When confronted by the Deadites, Mia should be the first person that's wiped out by the creatures, and while she's taken over by them, she not only manages to rid herself of their control, but she does away with them in a torrential downpour of blood. This isn't just a fluke, it's proof that Mia is preternaturally gifted with some kind of intense beatific spiritual power. 
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  (#11) Alice

  • Resident Evil: Extinction, Resident Evil, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Resident Evil: Afterlife, Resident Evil: Retribution

  If you’ve seen all of the Resident Evil movies, then you know that a lot of stuff happens to Alice over the course of the series. She survives a zombie onslaught, she’s genetically repaired, and she gains telepathy. By Afterlife, the third movie in the franchise, her powers fade which means that she shouldn’t be able to survive T-Virus zombies and soldiers within the Umbrella Corporation, but this is where luck factors in. 

  In the finale of Retribution (the fifth film in the series), she’s injected with a sample of the T-Virus, which returns her super powers. If that hadn’t happened, returning her to super Alice status, she’d be in a ditch by the climax of The Final Chapter. 
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  (#12) Caleb Colton From 'Near Dark'

  Caleb is just a farm boy from the middle of nowhere when he meets Mae, a beautiful young vampire who sucks his blood and turns him. Their fateful meeting sends Caleb down a rabbit hole filled with bloodsuckers who range from being just plain ornery to straight-up psychopathic. 

  When these vampires, some of whom are hundreds of years old and have no problem wasting people, decide that they don't want Caleb in their family they don't just chase him away, they do everything in their power to snuff him out. Purely by coincidence, the sun comes up while Caleb escapes with his sister. If he ended up in a vampire fight an hour earlier, he'd be roadkill. 

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