20. Alice (Resident Evil)
We might as well begin this list with an example of the classic badass horror heroine. However, for all of the gun-toting and zombie fighting, there may be more to Alice than you first thought.
Alice (played by Milla Jovovich) does not appear in any of the Resident Evil video games to date. Instead, she was first introduced to audiences in 2002’s Resident Evil. She wakes up with amnesia in an opulent mansion. However, the mansion is on top of a secret underground lab owned by the Umbrella Corporation. Said lab has experienced a major breach — a viral agent was released into the lab. The Red Queen, an artificial intelligence represented by a red projection of a creepy little girl, closed down the lab and killed all employees inside.
Alice and a few commandos don’t know all of this, however. They investigate the lab and fight all of the creepy monsters and zombified people they can find. Along the way, Alice learns that she was actually a security officer for the Umbrella Corporation. Horrified by the dangerous and illegal experiments, she began covertly leaking information about the company’s unethical work. The Red Queen had leaked an amnesia-causing nerve agent into the mansion in order to keep Alice and her partner from opening the lab.
Since there are a total of six films in the series, it’s easy enough to guess the ending of the first film. The virus makes its way into the outside world and wreaks havoc. Alice spends the rest of her time roving across a post-apocalyptic landscape, fighting monsters and tracking down those responsible for the end of the world.