Try it for yourself if you want, but primal scream probably doesn’t work. The briefly trendy psychological treatment—developed in the early 1970s by psychotherapist Arthur Janov as part of his larger primal therapy theories—was supposed to treat underlying childhood trauma that leads to adult neuroses. Scream, scream, scream, Janov instructed. Scream as loud as you can, and you will connect with a repressed core of your being, thereby allowing yourself to rid inner demons.
Janov thought primal therapy would essentially cleanse the world of mental health issues, which—let me check—OK, yep, didn’t happen. But the concept of primal scream became a sensation after John Lennon practiced it during the making of his first solo record, Plastic Ono Band, to harrowing results. It’s unclear how much Lennon really improved his mental health in the long term by screaming his lungs out. But the art he made in doing so—a song like “Mother,” for example, pushing himself into a dark and vulnerable place, and then capturing what he saw for us to examine—is undeniable. A good scream, whether in music or in film, is hard to fake and difficult to not be moved by when done honestly. “Primal” is the right word. Someone yelling from the core of their being is the sound of society falling apart. It’s the sound of barbarism taking hold, however briefly. And it is compelling to witness.
Horror as a film genre exists to satisfy the compulsion to gawk at the worst imaginable circumstances that can befall others—to watch and listen to them scream, often—while you sit in the safety of your theater seat. It’s as if you’re riding shotgun in a car, passing by a terrible car wreck, and the driver decides to gently press the brakes and roll down the window for you to get a better look. There’s some voyeuristic instinct there that makes you want to see every last detail. And what could be more completely voyeuristic than watching someone shower?
Before the knives come out in Psycho, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is shown to be a Peeping Tom, which, in the grand scheme of his crimes, tends to be overlooked. But it’s a worthwhile detail, given how Alfred Hitchcock moves on from Norman’s perversion by then turning his whole audience into Peeping Toms for a significant couple of beats, as we watch Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh, enjoy her shower. (And she really seems to be enjoying that cheap motel shower experience.) When the curtain is thrown back, and the blood starts to run (chocolate syrup, as it were), Hitchcock snaps us back to the sickening reality of the situation. Gotcha, you freaks.
There’s a lineage for Scream Queens going back to the beginnings of movies; even silent films often had the prototype, simply leaving the actual screaming to your imagination. The development of sound helped, though, and Fay Wray’s panicked cries at the sight of the beast in King Kong made her arguably the first Scream Queen, a phrase that plays on “Screen Queen.” (Wray, starting a long tradition for other future Scream Queens, wasn’t all that fond of her title.)
But Marion Crane’s killing in the Bates Motel was the big bang moment for a distinctly modern type. You’ve undoubtedly seen this character a thousand times by now: She’s typically a smart, good-hearted, attractive woman with a bit of a rebellious streak, who finds herself in some kind of violent trouble, in response to which she often—but not always—hollers like her life depends on it. (And, often, it really does.)
Scream Queens tend to be wholesome—or maybe just wholesome compared to the other characters in the film—but it’s telling that one of the primordial Scream Queen texts, 1972’s The Last House on the Left, was originally developed as a porno. There’s an embrace of the taboo at the core of Scream Queen–led horror movies. If you dig deep enough, you’ll find a foundation of smut.
Don’t let that fool you. Above the foundation is the opportunity for stories with rich, serious meaning and dense, artistic performances. Critics who have dismissed the talents of a good Scream Queen are like people who go to a museum and say, “I could do that,” when looking at a Rothko. It may appear simple—but you could not, and, in fact, did not, do that. Thankfully, however, progress in public perception has been notable. These days, Scream Queens are no longer saddled with a B-movie stigma, and can freely be A-list stars.
Sixty-four years later, the Marion Crane archetype is still being used by filmmakers and actresses, but it’s also in constant motion. And while many Scream Queen contenders can coexist peacefully, royal decree demands that there must be only one ruler at the top at any given time. There are no strict rules: Do you have to scream a bunch to be a Scream Queen? No, but it does help. Do you have to be the Final Girl? Definitely not. Can you be the villain? Sure, I’m open to it, but usually that’s not right. Really, the criteria are a mixture of cultural, artistic, cinematic, and trashy excellence that has to be felt just as much as seen. So I sat down on my couch with a stress ball and watched an obscene number of horror movies to figure out who held their ground at the top, and for how long.
And this is the result of that process. Without further ado, here’s the complete line of succession for the Scream Queen Championship Belt.
Janet Leigh
Psycho (1960)
Reign: 1960-67
What chills me when I’m watching Janet Leigh in Psycho’s shower scene is the fact that it’s all there so early. Not only early in the movie, as Hitchcock tore apart conventions and expectations by having his villain slash his marquee star to bits only a third of the way through the movie. But it’s also early in the way that so many of the tropes of horror films today were present in that shower: the sheer voyeurism, yes, but also the extended violence of it, and the way the killer is shadowy and obscured (the scariest thing of all is that which can’t be seen). It feels as contemporary as any movie made before the New Hollywood scene took hold, which is why it’s no coincidence that, when Gus Van Sant decided to remake it in 1998, he literally did it shot for shot.
In 1960, the counterculture revolution was still years away; the week Psycho came out, “Cathy’s Clown” by the Everly Brothers was the no. 1 song in the country. The screams of Leigh as Marion—hopeless and brief, bellowed out alone, in a cheap motel miles from where anyone could hear her—were a sort of warning shot across the bow of American decency. It captured something lingering in the liminal space beyond Walter Cronkite and Leave It to Beaver that Hitchcock could sense before the rest did. Even with Leigh not leaning into her Scream Queen image following Psycho’s success, it still would be almost a decade before anything came around to knock her out of the top spot.
The contenders: Bette Davis (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?), Tippi Hedren (The Birds)
Mia Farrow
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Reign: 1968-72
It’s appropriate that the performance wild and disturbing enough to finally unseat Janet Leigh from the Scream Queen throne was for an entirely different realm of horror. Whereas Psycho set the template for the tangible dangers of those around us—Norman Bates’s proclivity to kill is neatly summed up by a psychologist at the end of the film—Rosemary’s Baby unleashed the queasy powers of the supernatural. This isn’t just some knife-wielding psych patient after Mia Farrow’s Rosemary. It’s a force far more slippery, driven by powers strong enough to convince Rosemary’s husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), that his perfect life with his beautiful, charming wife, in his giant New York City apartment, which he can somehow afford as a working actor, is actually in need of fixing—and only the devil can do it for him.
There’s a certain irony in Roman Polanski and Mia Farrow being the shepherds of the wave of paranormal movies to come. Farrow filmed Rosemary’s Baby while her marriage to Frank Sinatra was falling apart (Sinatra had the divorce papers served on set), and Polanski was more than a year away from losing his pregnant wife, who was killed by the Manson Family; in time, horror of the real-world kind would continue to be associated with them, in different, terrible ways. But that might partially be why I still find it so skin-crawling to watch Rosemary stagger into the room and ask what they’ve done to her baby’s eyes. When Farrow wails for her kid, I believe her.
The contenders: Sandra Peabody (The Last House on the Left), Vonetta McGee (Blacula)
Linda Blair
The Exorcist (1973)
Reign: 1973
I first watched The Exorcist at a young age, mostly through my hands, and a series of sickening moments have haunted me ever since. (It’s not really possible to un-hear a little girl saying “Your mother sucks cock in hell.”) But what first comes to mind when I think about the movie is the scene when Regan (Linda Blair), early along in her possession by the devil, interrupts her mother’s party by walking out into the living room, gathering everyone’s attention, and then pissing all over the carpet. It’s not exactly representative of the spinning dressers that led to a 14-year-old seizing the Scream Queen crown, but it does capture something about The Exorcist making it particularly unsettling: The devil wasn’t just going after Regan. He was going after the world of hors d’oeuvres and chit-chat. He was going after you.
Ellen Burstyn is essentially a co-winner of the belt on this one—the Shaq to Blair’s Kobe, their screams intertwined (along with that of Mercedes McCambridge, who did the voice of the devil), like a fast break of pain, fear, and pea soup.
The contender: Marlene Clark (Ganja & Hess)
Marilyn Burns
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Reign: 1974-75
It’s almost an hour into the The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that Marilyn Burns’s Sally just starts letting it rip. Leatherface has just jumped out of the woods and annihilated poor Franklin, Sally’s wheelchair-using brother, and now Sally has to run for her life through the woods, with the chain saw grinding behind her—and she’s wearing white pants. Just a bad situation all around.
The Sally chase sequence essentially takes up the last half hour of the movie, as she frantically tries to evade Leatherface—making this a strong contender for highest screams-per-minute of any horror film ever made. Sally spends much of the sequence running aimlessly, having shifted from a young woman on a roadtrip to a wild animal, in an instinctual state of crushing fear.
Writer/director Tobe Hooper took inspiration from the story of serial killer Ed Gein using his victims’ skin as decoration, but Chain Saw feels more abstract and existential than that. As day breaks, and a blood-drenched Sally narrowly gets away from Leatherface, she breaks into deranged laughter. It’s scarier than any of the screams that came before it.
The contenders: Olivia Hussey (Black Christmas), Daria Nicolodi (Deep Red)
Sissy Spacek
Carrie (1976)
Reign: 1976-77
The late ’70s wouldn’t be the last time Brian De Palma and Dario Argento stood in their respective corners and sent formidable Scream Queen contenders into the ring. And Jessica Harper’s nightmare study abroad experience as Suzy in Suspiria (she can withstand her fellow students disappearing one by one but she draws the line at bugs in the dorm!) is one for the ages. That said, Carrie is already standing on that stage—with a crown no less. Who are we to deny it to her? That didn’t work out for those kids the first time.
Not much in the canon of horror can top Carrie’s pig-blood shower—a shower so bad that it’s almost worse than Janet Leigh’s, especially if you have social anxiety. As Sissy Spacek shifts from confused laughing to righteous anger, she doesn’t claim her spot in Scream Queen history by the way she yells. It’s actually for the screams she draws out of others as they slam on the doors of the gym and beg for their lives.
The contenders: Jessica Harper (Suspiria), Linda Blair (Exorcist II: The Heretic), The Cast of House, Dee Wallace and Susan Lanier (The Hills Have Eyes)
Jamie Lee Curtis
Halloween (1978)
Reign: 1978-79
In horror movies, nepotism isn’t a bad word. It’s part of the fun, really, seeing the relatives of horror past carry the flame: Dakota Johnson being in the Suspiria remake echoed back to her grandmother Tippi Hedren in The Birds; Drew Barrymore in Scream drew a line to old Hollywood and her grandfather John Barrymore’s role as a horror originator in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But the definitive horror callback was the genius stunt casting of Janet Leigh’s daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, as Laurie Strode in Halloween. More than any other connective tissue in the genre, this mother-daughter relationship makes it clear that horror movies exist in conversation with each other in a crucial way. But where Marion Crane falls victim to the blade, Laurie Strode turns it on her attacker.
I once had the chance to interview John Carpenter about Halloween, and I asked him if, making a movie just a few years after the Manson murders, home-invasion paranoia might have been an inspiration for the story. Carpenter plainly rebuffed it, saying that his vision was for a “siege movie,” like Zulu or his own Assault on Precinct 13. Laurie is essentially turned into a warrior in Halloween, proving herself sharp and tough enough to withstand the ceaseless siege by Michael Myers, because lord knows the authorities—from the bumbling cops to the psych ward employees who let him drive a station wagon clean off the premises—are not going to catch this dude. There’s a point in Halloween when Laurie stumbles onto a neighbor’s porch, screaming desperately for help. The neighbor peers through the blinds and then turns off the light. Laurie is on her own.
The contenders: Brooke Adams (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), Samantha Eggar (The Brood)
Shelley Duvall
The Shining (1980)
Reign: 1980
1980 was the toughest year to decide in the Scream Queen Championship Belt. Adrienne King gave an epochal Final Girl performance in Friday the 13th; Angie Dickinson brought Psycho-indebted brilliance to Dressed to Kill; and Jamie Lee Curtis went for sheer numbers, with The Fog, Prom Night, and Terror Train all coming out within nine months of each other. But even then, it wasn’t particularly close.
For better or for worse, Shelley Duvall may be the ultimate Scream Queen because her screams were, it seems, somewhat real. How adversarial it really was between Stanley Kubrick and Duvall is hard to parse, but it’s beyond refute that Duvall was pushed to the point of collapse. I mean, she literally collapsed at one point, a moment caught in the film’s making-of documentary. But that’s not giving Duvall enough credit, either: This wasn’t simply a fright connived by a bully director, but rather a performance from someone who so effectively embodied fear—fear of one’s violent spouse, fear for one’s child, fear of interrupting an intimate moment of a furry—that people are convinced to this day that it’s not even acting at all.
The contenders: Adrienne King (Friday the 13th), Angie Dickinson (Dressed to Kill), Adrienne Barbeau (The Fog), Jamie Lee Curtis (The Fog, Prom Night, Terror Train)
Isabelle Adjani
Possession (1981)
Reign: 1981
The early ’80s were stacked with batshit Scream Queen performances, which means you really had to bring the heat to get the crown at this point. Somewhere in a subway tunnel in West Berlin, however, Isabelle Adjani certainly brought ... something. Possession as a whole is just about the most over-the-top movie ever made—the damn thing walked so Vampire’s Kiss could run—but that’s a feature, not a bug. Director Andrzej Zulawski swirls the camera around Adjani until you’re dizzy; he puts a semi-Dutch angle on Sam Neill as the light switch is flipped on and off. The movie is essentially a simulation of both characters losing their minds as their relationship falls apart, and it’ll make you feel like you’re losing it with them.
It’s never clear if Adjani’s Anna is the victim or the villain, which makes her iconic subway tunnel scene especially unnerving. There are no words spoken in that tunnel, no other characters—hell, there’s not even any sense to it. She’s just going bananas, smashing the eggs and milk to create a dirty soup of sadness and confusion. If it only happened in her head, would that make it any less unsettling?
The contenders: Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween II), Dee Wallace (The Howling)
Daria Nicolodi
Tenebrae (1982)
Reign: 1982
I wouldn’t typically peg a Dario Argento movie for subtlety, but Tenebrae has a few tricks up its sleeve. Daria Nicolodi—Argento’s onetime partner and muse—spends most of this Arthur Conan Doyle–inspired murder mystery as the calm, composed assistant to a famous novelist. But in the film’s final moments—big spoilers obviously ahead—Nicolodi starts wailing more than all the murder victims combined.
The twist is that she’s not screaming out of danger to herself, but instead because she’s accidentally impaled her boss (in retrospect, maybe not the safest fine art piece to have laying around), with whom she was having an affair. From the outside, Nicolodi’s Anne could be screaming at a few things: the fact that she’s killed someone, the fact that her boss is actually a murdering psychopath, or the fact that she just slept with a murdering psychopath. But I think what she’s really screaming at—as she takes extra gasps to keep screaming again and again, continuing on as the credits roll—is the man she loves, lying dead in front of her.
The contenders: JoBeth Williams (Poltergeist), Adrienne Barbeau (Swamp Thing)
Dee Wallace
Cujo (1983)
Reign: 1983
Dee Wallace’s biggest claim to fame may be E.T., but she has one of the stronger overall Scream Queen résumés, with roles in The Hills Have Eyes and The Howling both fighting for the belt. But it wasn’t until Cujo that she came out victorious, dripping in blood and slobber. Cujo itself isn’t a masterpiece, but the extended final act—in which Wallace is stuck in her broken-down Pinto with her young son, as the rabid Cujo stalks them—is a remarkably punishing and unique approach toward horror filmmaking.
Some of that success is owed to the touches of wit that Stephen King put into the story’s DNA throughout the book: Cujo takes place as Wallace’s Donna is facing the fallout of having cheated on her husband; Cujo’s assault feels like guilt gnawing at her. But most of the final act’s effectiveness is owed to Wallace’s ludicrous performance, as she is at once maternally protective and impatiently frustrated with the burden of saving her kid alone. The situation is so untenable that she can’t simply sacrifice herself for her little boy to survive. To get him out, she has to find a way to kill the damn dog.
The contenders: Vera Miles (Psycho II), Felissa Rose (Sleepaway Camp)
Heather Langenkamp
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Reign: 1984-85
The general premise of A Nightmare on Elm Street—that dreams can be turned real—is allegorical for how a good movie works, too. You know it’s fake. You know Freddy Krueger can’t hurt you. You know that geyser of blood shooting to the ceiling was created by Wes Craven and a special effects team (and what a team!), and that Johnny Depp is going to live on to have a very bizarre career. And yet—and yet! Even if you, like Nancy, know that it’s only a dream, that doesn’t stop it from feeling very real.
Heather Langenkamp spends most of Elm Street with an unhinged, up-all-night look in her eyes that accompanies a bolder and brasher demeanor as the movie goes on. There’s a futility to the situation that slowly dawns on her: Everyone has to sleep eventually, so she might as well shut her eyes and dive in. On Elm Street—as in Hollywood—imagination can be turned into something legitimately dangerous. (See also: Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.)
The contenders: Kimberly Beck (Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter), Linnea Quigley (Return of the Living Dead; Silent Night, Deadly Night), Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator)
Barbara Crampton
From Beyond and Chopping Mall (1986)
Reign: 1986-91
Barbara Crampton abhors the Scream Queen label. “It’s a catchy phrase and a titillating title,” she wrote in an essay for Fangoria earlier this year, “but does little to make lucid the many nuances that an actor goes through in modern horror films.” Her take is an important caveat to keep in mind in terms of how people can use “Scream Queen” in a pejorative way—but at the same time, it felt more disrespectful to leave Crampton off this list. Aside from Linnea Quigley, who performed in seemingly hundreds of movies with titles like Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama and Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, there’s no one who holds a candle to Crampton in the horror section of the video store. (Also available to rent while you’re there: Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout.) Crampton spent the ’80s seemingly down to do whatever her movies required—and maybe some stuff they didn’t—en route to a sticky, gooey Valhalla of Camp, earning her place among the greats.
In From Beyond, which is sort of like if John Carpenter directed an episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Crampton plays an incredibly irresponsible doctor ... of some kind ... who can’t help but pursue a dangerous experiment that opens a portal to a higher dimension. It doesn’t matter. The setup is an excuse to employ some of the most hilarious and brilliant practical effects you’ll ever see for Crampton to spar with. It can be so difficult for actors to feel like artists in a movie like From Beyond. When it comes to B-movie fun, Crampton is Brando.
The contenders: Heather Langenkamp (A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors), Cristina Marsillach (Opera), Geena Davis (The Fly)
Sheryl Lee
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)
Reign: 1992-95
Even the people who’ve worked with David Lynch don’t know how to reconcile his personality and his work. “He’s just so apple pie, in a way,” Sherilyn Fenn said of Lynch in an interview. “He seems so straight, but then he’s got all these strange things going through his head.” Lynch is the type of guy to adoringly “rescue” a batch of Woody Woodpecker dolls to live in his office, then just as suddenly decide that “certain traits” were coming out in them, and that they had to be bitterly removed.
To some degree, Twin Peaks the show was pulling over to save the dolls, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me the movie was realizing that certain traits were coming out in them. Sheryl Lee, who mostly portrayed a corpse in the television production, is deservedly center stage in the prequel movie, as it reveals just how brutal Laura Palmer’s murder was, and just how desperate her final hours were. The apple—or cherry—pie tastes very different when you know what happened in Twin Peaks before Agent Cooper arrived.
The contenders: Heather Langenkamp (Wes Craven’s New Nightmare), Gwyneth Paltrow (Se7en), Angela Bassett (Vampire in Brooklyn)
Neve Campbell
Scream (1996) and Scream 2 (1997)
Reign: 1996-97
It’s tempting to give the belt to Drew Barrymore, who does a full Scream Queen decathlon in Scream in about 13 minutes, and whose surprise early death is a wonderful nod to Psycho. But the fact that only Neve Campbell could take this title speaks to just how great she is as Sidney Prescott, the quintessential Final Girl of the ’90s. Cool, but not pretentious. Smart, but not nerdy. Beautiful, but not trashy. She loves the Indigo Girls and makes out to weird “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” covers.
The meta angle of Scream—it’s a scary movie about scary movies—makes it feel like a moral response of some kind to the horror movies of the ’70s and ’80s, which, let’s be honest, were pretty twisted at times. (Scream director Wes Craven’s debut, The Last House on the Left, is still shocking to watch today.) Not to get all Tipper Gore here, but mankind probably was not evolved to mainline so much sadism and psychopathy. And, at a certain point, it’s fair to suggest that horror culture has changed people’s DNA a little bit. Scream embraces the genre for what makes it great, and also pokes fun at us for how strange we are for liking it in the first place.
The contenders: Drew Barrymore and Rose McGowan (Scream), Courteney Cox (Scream and Scream 2), Jada Pinkett Smith (Scream 2), Salma Hayek (From Dusk Till Dawn), Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar (I Know What You Did Last Summer), Susanne Lothar (Funny Games)
Jamie Lee Curtis
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)
Reign: 1998
[Halloween theme plays] Bah god, that’s Jamie Lee Curtis’s music!
The Contender: Jennifer Tilly (Bride of Chucky)
Heather Donahue
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Reign: 1999-2000
Top three movies that traumatized me as a kid:
1. Alien: Not sure how I convinced my mom to let me rent this from Hollywood Video for a sleepover in elementary school.
2. Them!: Oh god, this was so fucked up. As giant mutant ants attack, this cop gets all the kids to safety through a tunnel but couldn’t get himself out in time, then a giant ant grabs him with its mandibles and he screams out—it’s so horrible. Oh god.
3. The Blair Witch Project: I don’t know how many adults actually bought this at the time, but to kids in 1999, The Blair Witch Project was a documentary. When I finally managed to watch it on VHS a little after it came out, I thought I was watching a snuff film or something. The fact that the found-footage myth was even semi-plausible to the public is an unbelievable compliment to its cast of legitimate outsiders—Heather Donahue in particular, whose snot-dripping dread seems almost invasive to watch.
The contenders: Toni Collette (The Sixth Sense), Ali Larter (Final Destination), Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins (Ginger Snaps), Eihi Shiina (Audition), Bridget Fonda (Lake Placid)
Naomi Watts
Mulholland Drive (2001) and The Ring (2002)
Reign: 2001-04
David Lynch saw it first. The perfect All-American Girl (it’s fine that she’s actually British) with an inescapable darkness to her. In Mulholland Drive, Watts arrives at the airport in L.A., beaming from ear to ear in the California sunshine, as she sets out on her path to become a Hollywood actress. She’s naive about it in the way that you have to be if you ever want a chance to make it. In the way that Watts had to be to make it herself.
But by the end of Mulholland Drive, Watts is in a Black Lodge of the movie industry’s making, being terrorized by the same old couple who held her hand as she first walked toward the taxi at LAX. The severity of the reversal is what makes Watts’s performance particularly unsettling, almost to the point that it makes her role in The Ring seem like light work. But the twist ending of Gore Verbinski’s remake of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (really? His name is Gore??) reveals Watts’s performance as having a dour depth that you might miss the first time through. The biggest tragedy of The Ring is that this All-American Girl really thought the child in the tape wanted to be saved at all.
The contenders: Sarah Michelle Gellar (The Grudge), Gina Philips (Jeepers Creepers), Jessica Biel (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Naomie Harris (28 Days Later), Sarah Polley (Dawn of the Dead)
The Cast of The Descent (2005)
Reign: 2005-07
Haha, this shit sucks, man. It’s bad enough when they’re just stuck in the cave—breaking their legs, getting trapped in tunnels, freaking out. That’s, like, half the movie! The first time I saw The Descent, I genuinely had no idea there were monsters in it. I suggested it to my friends solely because I knew it was a horror movie. That’s it. (It was ... a simpler time.) Watching it, I was scared enough as it was with what’s essentially the claustrophobic version of Cliffhanger. But that’s how they got us all. I can still remember the actual screams in the theater when that Nosferatu-looking motherfucker showed up on the night vision.
Shauna Macdonald is a great Final Girl, but how could the belt go to anyone in particular? The whole spelunking crew—Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, Saskia Mulder, Nora-Jane Noone, and MyAnna Buring—contribute more than their fair share of screams, too. It was supposed to be a bonding trip, after all.
The contenders: Emilie de Ravin (The Hills Have Eyes), Katie Featherston (Paranormal Activity), Rose McGowan (Planet Terror), Rosario Dawson (Death Proof), Naomi Watts (Funny Games)
Liv Tyler
The Strangers (2008)
Reign: 2008
Seeing The Strangers was a mistake. I was 18 years old, weighed 115 pounds soaking wet, and had eaten one of those newly arrived “medicinal” weed brownies with enough THC in it to bring down a horse—or, at least, put a horse in a really bad headspace. By the time I walked into the theater, I realized this was going to be unpleasant, but I sat down in the seat anyway. How bad could it be?
For the last 16 years I assumed the reason The Strangers was one of the scariest movies I’d ever seen was because of the weed. It was partially the weed, but it’s also still one hell of a scare. The experience is skin-crawling enough to start with the premise that Liv Tyler has turned down your marriage proposal (sorry, Scott Speedman, you now to have to sit there and listen as Liv plays indie-rock vinyl and smokes cigs inside), but then you have to deal with the question of why this pseudo Manson family is torturing you and your very melancholy girlfriend. “Because you were home,” is what one of the invaders says. It’s an answer worthy of a movie that apes a title from Albert Camus. The pointlessness is the point.
The contenders: Lizzy Caplan and Jessica Lucas (Cloverfield), Lina Leandersson (Let the Right One In), Mylène Jampanoï and Morjana Alaoui (Martyrs)
Alison Lohman
Drag Me to Hell (2009)
Reign: 2009-12
Drag Me to Hell is a movie about banking, thus we are already in hell before the carnage begins. (Sorry to all the beautiful bankers reading this—you do important work!) In it, Alison Lohman plays Christine Brown, a loan officer with the pesky trait of having a kind soul. Contrary to her kind disposition, in order to get a promotion, her boss suggests she put her foot down with an old woman asking for yet another extension on her mortgage. If this movie was set in 1940s Bedford Falls and Jimmy Stewart was her boss, the situation would probably resolve itself a little more neatly. But this is housing crisis–era Los Angeles, and writer-director Sam Raimi is at the helm. If you couldn’t tell from the movie’s title, there’s no “richest man in town” speech and happy ending on the way.
Metaphors about the psychic terror of subprime loans aside, Drag Me to Hell is actually a hilarious movie—but it never stops vibrating with a sickening tone. Lohman’s Christine may not have done everything she could to help the old woman, but she didn’t really deserve to have a hex put upon her that would involve watching the devil regurgitate her dead cat, either. The final scene of this movie will be etched into the back of my brain for the rest of my days. And the scariest ending of all is that, after the credits roll, that bank is still open for business.
The contenders: Rose Byrne (Insidious), Megan Fox (Jennifer’s Body), Charlotte Gainsbourg (Antichrist), Vera Farmiga (Orphan)
Jane Levy
Evil Dead (2013) and Don’t Breathe (2016)
Reign: 2013-17
You’d be forgiven for having been skeptical when Sam Raimi handed the keys to his Oldsmobile Delta 88 to Fede Álvarez. But then again, the original Evil Dead was made by an amateur filmmaker in Raimi, who was running such a cheap operation that he slapped a camera on a wooden plank to do the shaky spirit-cam, so who’s to say a first time writer-director couldn’t spice things up?
Álvarez proves himself to be the real deal from the first scene in his Evil Dead—just a dad executing his possessed daughter with fire and a shotgun, no big deal—and that’s before Jane Levy shows up. Levy, who plays Mia, essentially cycles through three characters in Evil Dead: a young woman dealing with addiction withdrawals, a possessed demon, and a chainsaw-rearing Final Girl, each of them requiring her to tap into a different kind of agony. (When Mia’s brother quizzically calls out to her, even after her eyes have turned black and her skin has turned green, Levy makes her tone exasperated, delivering the line like she’s in an Exorcist sitcom: “Mia’s not here, you fucking idiot!”)
Don’t Breathe, made a few years later, proved that it’s not just IP driving the success of the Álvarez-Levy partnership. (In fact, the makers of Barbarian should probably have sent them a check.) There’s no body horror in this one, no shit-talking devils. Just three burglars and a blind man in a house, forcing Levy to be that rare kind of Scream Queen: the one who has to communicate her terror while staying absolutely silent.
The contenders: Maika Monroe (It Follows), Imogen Poots (Green Room), Chloë Grace Moretz (Carrie), Vera Farmiga (The Conjuring), Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch), Betty Gabriel (Get Out), Garance Marillier (Raw)
Toni Collette
Hereditary (2018)
Reign: 2018
Martin Scorsese knows horror, and he saw in Hereditary what separates the cheap from the profound: “The horror aspects of it, they shock you in a good way,” he said. “They shock you into an awakening, in a way, of the real pain of these people.” As in the best examples of the genre, you can take the shocking, violent, supernatural elements out of Hereditary and it’s still a hell of a movie; the core is about how grief can affect a family, how parents aren’t always in a place to forgive when something happens to their child. The husband and father of this household (Gabriel Byrne) going up in flames is just a visual guide for what already happened earlier, when he watched his wife and son destroy their entire relationship over dinner rolls.
Toni Collette works so well in these tragi-horrors because she could carry them even if they were straight family dramas. (Watching HBO’s miniseries version of The Staircase, you might have forgotten she had horror in her bag—until she’s suddenly drenched in blood.) In Hereditary, what makes it especially eerie when Collette is on the ceiling is just how grounded she had been until her feet left the floor.
The contenders: The Cast of Annihilation, Taissa Farmiga (The Nun), Dakota Johnson (Suspiria), Emily Blunt (A Quiet Place)
Lupita Nyong’o
Us (2019)
Reign: 2019-21
Lupita Nyong’o plays two parts in Us: one character who has the ability to scream, and another who’s had that privilege taken from her. The movie is ostensibly about an uprising of doppelgangers, but in doing so it’s an examination of the guilt that people in wealthy countries live with—or should be living with, anyway. “The biggest disservice we can do as a faction with a collective privilege, like the United States,” said writer-director Jordan Peele, “is to presume that we deserve it, and that it isn’t luck that has us born where we’re born. For us to have our privilege, someone suffers.”
There’s a frantic practicality with which Nyong’o plays Adelaide, a wife and mother who grows immediately desperate at the first sign of trouble. After half a century of slasher-movie characters running up the stairs instead of out the front door, it’s refreshing to have a character who puts her shoes on before the glass starts breaking, who calls the cops before the phone line gets cut. But soon Adelaide realizes the mistake of running from her family’s doppelgangers. Some villains are pissed off for a good reason.
The contenders: Samara Weaving (Ready or Not), Florence Pugh (Midsommar), Octavia Spencer (Ma), Elisabeth Moss (The Invisible Man, Us), Annabelle Wallis (Malignant), Agathe Rousselle (Titane), Anya Taylor-Joy and Thomasin McKenzie (Last Night in Soho)
Mia Goth
X (2022), Pearl (2022), and MaXXXine (2024)
Reign: 2022-
Of course MaXXXine, the finale of Ti West’s X horror trilogy, brings it back to the beginning: the Psycho house. Both X and MaXXXine are oozing with love for the cheap and gratuitous horror schlock of the ’70s and ’80s, but underneath it is a franchise indebted to the more psychologically complex ideas of Hitchcock’s masterpiece. This is hinted at a little more overtly in MaXXXine, when the porn star turned actress, Mia Goth’s Maxine, is talking with the director of the movie she’ll soon be starring in. The two are walking around the studio lot, and end up standing in front of the old Psycho set, preserved in spooky amber as a tourist attraction. The director, Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki), explains to Maxine that Psycho unsettled audiences so much because they didn’t expect the killer to be the old woman. As Bender puts it, they didn’t expect to find the devil “facing them in the mirror.”
What Ti West and Mia Goth did with this trilogy is take Hitchcock’s trick and make it even more literal. Goth—whose last name really is “Goth,” thus making her the most appropriately named entertainer since Gore Verbinski—plays the victim and the killer in X. Maxine and the psycho old lady, Pearl, are not related, and no explanation is given (or needed) for why the young woman in Pearl looks just like the young woman in X. Part of that is to Goth’s credit: Even when playing multiple characters across multiple eras, she’s compelling and convincing. Sweet and tender at times, savage and deranged at others, Goth is unflappable as West throws every scenario in the slasher-movie rule book at her. (And there is a rule book, as West understands.) The effect of all this is that, as Maxine grapples with the PTSD of having previously been a Final Girl, she’s stuck seeing the killer every time she looks in the mirror. Hitchcock had it right the first time: You can’t run from a killer after they’ve become a part of you.
The contenders: Jenna Ortega (X, Scream, Scream VI), Sophie Wilde (Talk to Me), The Cast of Bodies Bodies Bodies, Jasmin Savoy Brown (Scream), Georgina Campbell (Barbarian)
Nate Rogers is a writer in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Stereogum, and elsewhere.
