2026 has blessed us with back-to-back, big-time horror releases about traumatized women with strained relationships with their sisters. This is notable to me, because in most commercial horror releases that I’ve seen, the Final Girl — the last woman standing in a horror movie — usually arrives at the end point solo dolo. Hell, her survival usually depends on distancing herself from others. 

Sidney in Scream and Laurie in Halloween survive by getting as far away from everyone else as possible. The camera reinforced this independence, isolating them in frames and their hiding spaces of choice.

But like Nina Simone once sang, it’s a new dawn, it’s a new day and 2026 Final Girls are alone no more. 

In a pair of recent horror-action-comedies, the Final Girl has a lil’ sis, and their relationship is jacked up by the time we meet them. There’s no masked psychopath or devious billionaire with an immortality fetish that breaks them apart. That fateful split happened decades ago — for pretty similar reasons in both films — and the Big Bad forces them to make amends to avoid an express trip to the afterlife.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come and They Will Kill You are “twin films” — the Deep Impact/Armageddon of 2026 — aka two movies released within spitting distance of each other with nearly identical plots: they’ve got estranged sisters (a proactive eldest, a reactive younger one), rich satanic villains, over a dozen bloody kills and they take place in one luxurious location.

In the Ready or Not scream-quel, Grace wakes up in a hospital bed hours after taking out/dodging death blows from her new in-laws, a wealthy family who tried to sacrifice her to satisfy their ghost granddaddy and his whole satan-worshipping thing. Grace survived, which creates a new problem because how does one explain the dead bodies strewn about the half-burned-down estate and her wedding dress soaked in said dead people’s blood? Her wide-eyed innocence and Margot Robbie doppelgänger-ness don’t score her the benefit of the doubt from the suspicious detective posted beside her hospital bed, ready to take her to the station for processing once she awakes from her mini-coma.

As Grace struggles to explain herself, her emergency contact/estranged sister Faith arrives. Faith is aggravated by the whole situation and doesn’t want to be there, except she absolutely does, because why else show up unless you kinda cared?

They haven’t spoken in seven years (if memory serves), which raises the obvious question: Why is Faith still her emergency contact? Is it because Grace has no other friends? Forgot to swap Faith with her now-dead fiancé? Or is it because Faith is the person who matters most, even if that relationship hit a brick wall years ago? Yes, mostly.

They grew up in a foster home that neither of them escaped without some residual trauma. When Grace turned 18, she left for New York with a plan, a strategy that we’re all too familiar with in films centering on estranged siblings. She was gonna build something stable in the Big Apple and come back for Faith. On paper, she’s a paragon of virtue, but IRL, she abandons her little sister, and it’s a hard thing to shake, well-intentioned or not. Faith needs to show Grace some grace, and when the shit hits the fan, Grace needs to have a little more faith in Faith.

Side bar: The names are on-the-nose in a way that I appreciated in Project Hail Mary, but not so much here, and now I’m questioning my internalized misogyny.)

Despite Grace’s attempts to stay connected, Faith opted to go no contact. Curiously, she winds up in NYC, and even saw her big sis at Whole Foods once with her rich beau, and assumed she had moved on to greener, wealthier pastures. Once we’ve received our exposition dump, the film kicks into gear, and another deadly game begins, this time orchestrated by a network of wealthy families who are also involved in ghost granddaddy’s satanic games. Handcuffed together and forced to survive a no-holds-barred hunt on the premises of a ritzy hotel with a giant golf course, they’ll need to confront the demons of the past and the rich jerkholes trying to kill them to become — dun dun duunnn — Final Sisters.

They Will Kill You — a mashup of Blaxploitation, AfroSamurai, Kill Bill, John Wick and Evil Dead with the Hunt the Poor theme of Ready or Not — builds a pretty identical emotional story engine with a different starting point. We meet Asia Reaves and her younger sister, Maria, as they are fleeing an abusive father who refuses to let them go. When he catches up to them at a gas station convenience store, the situation goes from 0–100 with the quickness. Asia draws an impossibly large Glock and shoots him in the solar plexus to protect them both. The police arrive (shockingly fast) as he goes down — but not before he grabs little Maria’s ankle.

Asia has seconds to decide whether to stay and get arrested or run and hope she can fix it later. Either way, she leaves her sister behind.

Asia flees, leaving Maria with their abuser. (The police catch Asia shortly after, so fleeing was pointless.) Years later, adult Maria finds employment at a luxury high-rise run by desperate servants and filled with wealthy tenants sacrificing poor people in exchange for immortality. According to writer-director Kirill Sokolov, the building is designed like Dante’s Inferno, with each floor representing a different circle of hell, a killer metaphor that I wish they had explored more.

In both films, the younger sister inherits the aftermath of the elder’s decision, an abusive parent and an unstable foster home, respectively. When they reunite, the youngins’ harbor resentment. Because why wouldn’t they? 

Horror thrives on pressure, and these films apply it with precision. As they fight for their lives while protecting their siblings, they are forced to reckon with the “necessary” choice they made and the harm it caused their loved ones.

Horror often relies on romantic relationships for emotional stakes, but those relationships are typically disposable. If we’re keeping it real, a boyfriend or girlfriend could be killed or revealed as untrustworthy without collapsing any of the films that give us the heebie jeebies. You can’t write a sibling out so easily. Even in Halloween, the grandaddy of tortured sibling horror, Laurie hesitates to kill her big bro multiple times, despite him being an exceptionally prolific murderer who would very much like to gut her. Since the girlies are not trying to kill each other in these 2026 films, the tension lies in one life-or-death question: Can they overcome the betrayal of abandonment when survival requires them to? Wealthy families and ritualized power structures replace the randomness of a masked killer, further complicating matters. 

In Ready or Not 2, survival is tied to a game controlled by out-of-touch richie rich’s with a history of violence (David Cronenberg pun intended). In They Will Kill You, class hierarchy determines who is expendable, and those at the bottom are the first to go. The isolated and desperate staff is groomed to lure in others like them for sacrifices in exchange for immortality. Kinda like the bodyguards who plan to accompany the oligarchs into their bunkers when the aliens come/asteroid hits/AGI wages war on humanity/someone breaks out the nuclear football frfr. 

Against this kind of organized villainous scheme, independence is more of a weakness for these Final Girls than their predecessors. Grace barely made it to morning the first time around, and benefited from the guilt/love of her groom — until he chose family over her. Asia is able to hold her own with her sword and goody bag of weapons, but she needs an assist from a guilt-ridden social equal and her kid sister to survive.

These horrors are based on systems that thrive on imbalance, separating people into those who are protected and those who aren’t. If the sisters already lived that split, then the horror is amplifying something that was already there. They’re fighting each other and for their lives, and the childhoods that hardened them come in handy. I can hate your guts for making a stupid decision, but we’ll deal with it in a hushed conversation after one of us saves the other’s life. Right now, it’s go time.

Despite the fun and games and sheroes kicking ass, something’s missing: complexity and specificity. Neither of these sets of sisters feels related once they’re reunited as adults. Is it because the horror genre doesn’t have time for that type of character work? Absolutely not! And it wouldn’t take much.

Walk with me for a sec. One of my faves to ever do it is Julia Ducournau, a Cronenberg-inspired auteur who specializes in devastating family dramas peppered with horror elements. 

In her pitch-perfect debut Raw, a young, introverted vegetarian goes off to veterinary school, eats meat for the first time, and unlocks a mortifying craving, one her older sister already knows a little too well. Ducournau builds tension between the siblings through proximity instead of estrangement or distance. Their relationship is deliciously nuanced, living in a more grounded gray area than the black or white of Ready or Notand They Will Kill You. They love each other but their bond is complicated, streaked with moments of cruelty, and the tension revolves around the younger sister’s growing understanding of her — and her sister’s — appetite for flesh. It’s weird and exceptional. Highly recommend.

The sisters aren’t Final Girls in the classic sense (there’s no external killer for them to survive), but they are cannibal relatives in a horror-forward coming-of-age film, so please just let me cook. My point is about their relationship! 

The 2026 Final Girls, on the other hand, act brand new with their sibs. Outside of exposition, there’s nothing to suggest that these women were ever each other’s lifelines, so these relationships feel more functional than emotional. Sisterhood is like an unexplored add-on. In Raw, the sisterly bond is both inescapable and revelatory. 

Maybe the modern Final Girl sits somewhere between those extremes. She’s not truly alone in her heroine’s journey, but she’s not fully connected either. It’s painfully timely. The fantasy of total independence is fraying, with economic pressures and shifting social structures pushing us back toward community, post-pandemic. We’re clumsily relearning how to rely on each other because, like Asia and Grace, our survival depends on it.

The Final Girl trope, as established in the ‘70s, is the last survivor of a worst-case scenario. The estranged Final Sisters of the 21st century show that survival is no longer a solitary endeavor. It’s a negotiation between two women who understand each other’s shortcomings and strengths and risk everything to save each other.