Why do so many female horror characters completely suck? Remember Sandra from Friday the 13th Part 2? No, you don’t? Oh, well that’s because her entire personality is that she’s Jeff’s girlfriend, and all she does is have sex with him and then get killed. What about Tina, the girl from A Nightmare on Elm Street who…has a bunch of sex and gets murdered? That’s a classic character, right?

Yeah, even the biggest horror fans admit the genre has never treated women very well, and their role in these movies is too often just to take off their clothes. Even in 2015, that’s still a problem. Luckily there are exceptions to this awful rule, women in these genre movies who are well written, three-dimensional characters. Shocking, right? They’re actually allowed to have interesting things to say, complex backstories, and they sure do kick a lot of ass.

These 20 badass women broke conventions and gave a huge middle finger to the genre’s rampant misogyny. They don’t simply run down the stairs screaming or have a lot of sex, they're s a reminder of the kind of writing-for-women that audienceS need to see more of. Here are the all time greatest female horror characters.