20 best badass women of horror movies
4. Melanie (The Girl with All the Gifts)
Not all badasses have to be adults. Indeed, some kids in horror films can redeem their age group from all of the whiny child victims that populate lesser movies. Take the protagonist of ParaNorman, for example, or Drew Barrymore’s character in Firestarter. Of course, kids in horror are perhaps most often creepy villains (like in Pet Sematary), but we’ll ignore that for the time being.
Thankfully, there’s a recent addition to the girl badasses of horror films with The Girl with All the Gifts (2016). And don’t let the post-apocalyptic zombie conceit of this movie turn you off. This is some seriously unique and affecting.
You see, the zombies of The Girl with All the Gifts aren’t victims of viruses or mysterious comets. Rather, they have been infected by a mysterious fungus which turns them into mindless ravagers known as “hungries”. Uninfected humans are forced to wall themselves into protected compounds, slathering themselves with scent-blocking lotion to evade detection.
It gets much, much weirder when the survivors discover a group of second-generation infected children. These little hungries are just as ravenous as their infected parents but possess the ability to think, learn, and communicate like uninfected humans — provided you’ve bought stock in blocker lotion. Some are held at a military compound, locked into cells and secured wheelchairs, but taught by educator Helen Justineau.
One of those children, Melanie, soon displays a practically genius-level IQ. She proves to be especially capable when Dr. Caroline Caldwell decides to remove Melanie’s brain for study. Melanie escapes, thanks in large part to a breach in the compound’s fence and the subsequent flood of hungries. She rescues her beloved teacher, Helen, and agrees to accompany a small group of survivors.
Though Melanie proves her badass nature thanks to her smarts and bravery, her true fate is equal parts weird and affecting. All of those second-generation children are in fact a new kind of human. They can rebuild society if only the remaining original humans die out. To that end, Melanie releases a cloud of fungal spores and ushers in a new era of humanity.