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Alien

This October, Decider.com is going to celebrate Halloween by honoring horror movies, and in particular, the characters who manage to survive the guts and garrottes and emerge at the end: the Final Girls. Each Friday, we’re going to profile a different Important Final Girl in horror history and pay tribute to what makes their finality truly special. Sometimes it will be one character, sometimes it will be an actress whose roles spanned multiple Final Girls.

This week’s Final Girl is Ellen Ripley.

NOTE: Spoilers for the Alien movies follow.

The Final Girl

Ripley, as played by Sigourney Weaver, in all four Alien movies.

The Killer She’s Evaded

Ridley Scott’s horrific and iconic, chest-bursting aliens. All that Ripley wanted to do was peacefully return to Earth aboard Nostromo. Instead, one deadly shipment for a black market client led to over 200 years and four films of intergalactic terror.

Why She Slays

Ripley isn’t just an iconic example of a final girl. She paved the way for the ass-kicking action heroines we celebrate today. When Alien hit theaters in 1979, Ripley was an odd figure in the world of horror and sci-fi. Weaver portrayed a highly competent and dimensional working woman. Ripley has never been nor will she ever be a person who defers to the men around her. She was aggressive, rude, calculating, and believably emotional. In other words, Ripley was allowed to be a fully fleshed out character complete with flaws in a genre that likes to limit its women. Not only that, but Ripley refused to hide and scream like so many final girls before and after her. Ripley was a woman of action and it was through this character that we learned who the villains really were in the first Alien.

However, Ripley’s ass-kicking legacy didn’t end there. Over the course of the franchise’s four movies, Ripley became invaluable in controlling and destroying the intergalactic threat she unintentionally helped unleash. Ellen Ripley’s story is one that is powerful, believable, and sympathetic, largely because this is Ellen Ripley’s story. It’s no one else’s. Throughout the franchise we see Ripley angry, maternal, suffering from PTSD, and tired but always determined. Forget about gender. Ripley is an amazing and compelling character all in her own right.

Alien also saw the evolution of Ripley from smart but desperate survivor to a Terminator-level destruction machine to a self-sacrificing goddess. In 1979, Ripley’s only goal was to survive Nostromo. In the 1986 movie Aliens, Ripley re-emerged from stasis stocked to the nines in weaponry to defeat the hive. In David Fincher’s 1992 movie, Aliens 3, Ripley gave herself to save mankind from this horror. So it when more of those pesky embryos showed up 200 years in the future, the only logical reaction would be to clone our butt-kicking champion in Alien: Resurrection. Basically Ripley is our deserving queen, and we should all bow down.

Her Best Moment

Ripley has a lot of killer moments, often literally, but the character’s strongest moment occurred in the first movie. When a terrified but determined Ripley prepared for her inevitable encounter with the creature by singing “You Are My Lucky Star,” Sigourney Weaver captured everything amazing about this character.

What makes Ripley such a great hero isn’t that her heroics come naturally to her, though they often do. Ripley is incredible because she is an empathetic and painfully relatable character who is forced to defeat an unstoppable force of evil. According to the film’s commentary, it was Weaver’s idea to have Ripley shakily singing these lyrics, and this one moment added a vacuum of depth to this character and Weaver’s performance. This wasn’t Ripley at her most badass, but it was her at her most human. It’s a moment that’s still chilling to think about to this day. Whenever you want to come back to the franchise, Weaver, we’re there.