Infographic: The Movies’ Most Stranded Protagonists

Some movie characters have all the luck—they get to be teenagers navigating high school, harried single moms looking for love, even plucky underdogs facing off with corporations. Sure it’s challenging, but, all things considered, they’ll be okay. Of course, plenty of protagonists aren’t so lucky. They get stuck chasing serial killers who insist that “it puts the lotion on its skin,” fighting off zombies in dystopic futures, or just find themselves mired in a melodrama where all the cards are stacked against them. But then there those special few— characters so profoundly screwed by their circumstances and so isolated from any help or salvation that they put any non-grindhouse resident to shame. Recently, we provided an unranked list of those characters, but here’s a visual aid that compares the relative direness of their straits.