Smartest Protagonist Horror Movie Character | Horror Lovers Challenge

One of the biggest cliches in horror is the dumb, fumbling and always falling down at just the wrong time, character. Heck, they have even made fun of it in car insurance commercials. 

But to find the smartest one, we must look no further than Ellen Ripley is one of the greatest heroines to ever grace the big screen. She was definitely the smartest of the bunch in the original Alien, which unsurprisingly made her the sole survivor on the Nostromo spaceship. Ripley understands how to get out of a sticky situation, and is able to somehow defeat the unstoppable and terrifying Xenomorph monster by using her brains instead of her brawns.

It’s clear that this alien creature is not easily defeated, so Ripley decides that her best course of action is to send it into deep space. While the subsequent sequels would turn her into more of an action icon, it was Ridley Scott’s original masterpiece that showed a horror protagonist relying on their intelligence more than anything else.