7 Horror Movie Characters Who Shouldn’t Have Survived

Have you ever watched the ending of a horror movie and thought to yourself, there's no way that character actually survived? These seven horror movie characters got lucky, because there's no way they would have made it out alive in real life.

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

But First

By nature, horror movies are generally pretty unrealistic. So let's acknowledge up front that it's quite silly to debate the ending of horror movies that are already full of hard-to-believe scenarios. This is just for fun, and these are just our opinions. So take them with a grain of salt.

Marty in The Cabin in the Woods (2011)

In this horror film, five college students think they're visiting a cabin in the woods for a fun party weekend, but are shocked to discover that they're actually being used as human sacrifices in a twisted ritual meant to appease the Ancient Ones.

Each member of the group represents an archetype: the virgin, the athlete, the whore, the scholar, and the fool — that's Marty (Fran Kranz). And fitting with that archetype, Marty isn't the brightest. There's a scene when Marty is stabbed by a zombie. He's dragged off screen, and it seems like he's dead.

However, it's revealed later that he somehow survived. But honestly, it's hard to believe Marty was that smart or that lucky. Realistically, he should have stayed dead.

Noa in Fresh (2022)

In this cannibalistic horror movie, Sebastian Stan plays Steve, AKA Brendan, a doctor who has a nasty side hustle of kidnapping women and surgically removing parts of their body to sell to billionaires on the human meat black market. Daisy Edgar Jones plays Noa, his latest victim.

Trapped in a cell inside Steve's lavish remote home, Steve surgically removes parts of Noa's body, but intends to keep her and his other victims alive as long as possible so their meat stays "fresh" as the title suggests.

But, spoiler alert: Noa gets away in the end. However, it's just a little hard to believe that Noa would have made it out of Steve's clutches alive. First of all, when she and Steve's other victims escape and team up on him, they are all healing from having actual chunks of flesh taken out of their bodies. How are they agile enough to run around the house, let alone the woods outside? They would be in so much pain. And if they had pain killers, they would probably be too numb and woozy to run.

Another sticking point is that after Noa shoots Steve, she gets strangled by Steve's wife, Ann. Noa only gets away by managing to stab Ann in the neck with a set of keys. But would a regular pair of house keys really stab through someone's neck like that? I doubt that Noa would have the strength, while being actively strangled, to stab someone with enough force. Seems like Ann should have easily been able to overpower Noa, since Ann was otherwise healthy.

It's just so hard to believe that Noa managed to survive this ordeal. But good for her.

Matt Hooper in Jaws (1975)

In this classic 1975 thriller, Richard Dreyfuss plays marine biologist Matt Hooper. But we argue that it's pretty unlikely that Hooper would have survived the whole ordeal with the shark.

If you remember, during the final showdown, Hooper goes underwater inside a shark cage in order to try and get close enough to kill it with a lethal injection of strychnine. But the shark chews right through his steel cage, making him drop the spear he was going to use for the injection. It's super hard enough to believe that Hooper could have avoided being eaten by the shark after it bit right through the bars, leaving him totally vulnerable. He should have died right there and become the shark's dinner.

But somehow, Hooper manages to swim away, and he just hides on the seabed during the entire ordeal when the shark savagely devours Quint (Robert Shaw), the shark hunter. Wouldn't the shark have gone and eaten Hooper, too, after eating Quint?

It's just so hard to believe that Hooper could have just calmly swam away from the shark and hid behind some seaweed while it went on its killing spree.

Then, after killing the shark, Hooper and Brody (Roy Scheider), the main protagonist, calmly paddle back to shore despite the water being full of blood. Wouldn't that blood have attracted other sharks? We have a lot of questions.

Lindsay in The Human Centipede (2009)

This has got to be one of the most disturbing horror movies of all time. Without rehashing too many gory details, at the end, Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams) is the only survivor left from a three person human centipede. She is surgically attached to two other people, who both end up dead dead. So even though she technically lives, she couldn't have stayed alive much longer after that, since she wouldn't be able to eat or drink anything.

Also, the two detectives who were trying to bring Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser) — the evil mastermind behind the human centipede experiment — to justice are also both dead by the end of the movie. So there's no one to save Lindsay and she really doesn't stand a chance. Honestly, this barely counts as surviving, because she's basically as good as dead.

Chad Meeks-Martin in Scream VI (2023)

In the sixth installment in the Scream franchise, there's one character whose survival is just a little too hard to believe — Chad Meeks-Martin.

Played by Mason Gooding, Chad is the nephew of original Scream character Randy Meeks and the son of Martha Meeks. In Scream VI, he's dating Liv McKenzie (Sonia Ammar). In one memorable scene, he's stabbed multiple times by two Ghostfaces. Like, really, seriously stabbed with knives. So much so that, as you can see above, he had blood dripped from his mouth. Then he's left there to bleed out.

There's no way a person would survive this in real life, but somehow, Chad gets resuscitated. I'm no doctor, but his survival seems almost inexplicable from a medical standpoint. And thus, we argue, Chad should have died.

John Kramer in Saw II (2004)

In the second installment of the Saw franchise, John Kramer (Tobin Bell), the Jigsaw Killer, gets beat up pretty badly by Detective Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg).

Now, at this point, John Kramer was already old and rather sickly — he was revealed to have a terminal cancer diagnosis at the end of the first movie. How can a cancer patient be beat up that badly and still survive? He got beat up so badly that his eyes are swollen shut. Come on, he was already hanging on by a thread!

Jigsaw should have died right there.

Wallace in Tusk (2014)

Justin Long is unforgettable in the incredibly disturbing movie, Tusk. His character, a podcaster named Wallace, is held captive in the mansion of a creepy old man who turns him into a walrus by fusing his body with a suit made of human flesh — plus some tusks made out of bones from Wallace's own leg.

Although Wallace eventually gets rescued, first he gets brainwashed into believing he's actually a walrus. But instead of being given the dignity of having the walrus flesh suit surgically removed and being restored to his human form, for some reason, Wallace is forced to remain as a walrus forever. We're left with the horrible reality that he lives out the rest of his life in a zoo, despite the tear he cries at the end indicating that he still has some humanity left.

This is why we argue that Wallace probably should have died when Guy LaPointe (Johnny Depp), the Canadian detective, tries to put him out of his misery by shooting him. But Wallace's girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez), who has been cheating on him with his best friend (Hayley Joel Osment), stops LaPointe from killing Wallace.

There's also a question of why he couldn't just be turned back into a human, but perhaps a surgical transformation that intense would have killed him or psychologically been too much for him to handle. Still we think he should have either been mercy killed or risked death in order to be returned to human form. Anything would have been better than zoo life as a weird franken-walrus.

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Main Image: Human Centipede. IFC Films