50 Great Scream Queens Part 4 of 4: The Queens of Scream

  

50 Great Scream Queens Part 4 of 4: The Queens of Scream      

            In part one of this series we looked at European Scream Queens of the 70s and 80s. In part two we looked at those actors who are known for creating memorable characters. Part three was devoted to those Scream Queens that maybe don’t get all of the credit they deserve.

            This last installment is a kind of best of the best list. Every genre has them, those indispensable actors without whom the entire genre would be different. Imagine Westerns without John Wayne or Clint Eastwood? Imagine martial arts without Jackie Chan. Imagine science fiction and fantasy from the 80s and 90s without Schwarzenegger or Tim Burton’s career without Johnny Depp!

            Horror is a much more diverse genre and would survive even without its major players but the impact would have been felt on the subgenre’s and niches. How would the vampire genre have evolved without Bela Lugosi? Think about the impact that Anthony Hopkin’s Hannibal had on thrillers. Likewise, the actors below have had immeasurable impacts on the genre.  All of the women below have devoted major chunks of their careers, in some cases their entire careers, to horror. For a few of them that started in childhood!

            You’ll notice a disproportionate number of 80s Scream Queens on the list. That’s not coincidental. Horror experienced a kind of renaissance in the 1980s thanks to the proliferation of video stores. Genre movies that would have had a hard time finding theatrical distribution found a new way to reach the public. As a result, there were a lot of high quality horror movies (and by extension, a lot of great Scream Queens).

            If your favorite Scream Queen isn’t on this list, there are 35 others on the preceding volumes of this series. Check those and you may find her there.

The Queens of Scream     

-Brinke Stevens- Brinke’s career began with a small role sharing the screen with Orson Welles in Necormancy. Her next horror outing was over a decade later with a small but memorable role in Slumber Party Massacre. She appeared in the sexy Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity before starring in a pair of films with Michelle Bauer and Linnea Quigley, which cemented her legacy as a scream queen.

 She has been a favorite of Jim Wynorski and Fred Olen Ray, appearing in numerous films by each. She has stayed busy and is still knocking out films, often several per year. Some of her other notable appearances are in Delta Delta Die and Transylvania Twist.

-Michelle Bauer- Along with Brinke Stevens and Linnea Quigley, Michelle was one of the more prominent faces in 80s and early 90s horror. Her best role, in my opinion, was as the sexy murderous cult member in Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers. She shared the screen with her fellow 80s Scream Queens, Linnea Quigley and Brinke Stevens on multiple occasions.

She has been a favorite of director Fred Olen Ray, starring in Dinosaur Island, Beverly Hills Vamp, Evil Toons and more. Other highlights of her career are Puppet Master 3 and Demonwarp.

-Veronica Cartwright- Veronica’s horror career began as a child actor in Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone and then Hitchcock’s The Birds.  She is best known as Lambert, one of the doomed crew members in Alien and for her role in the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

She had a memorable supporting role in The Witches of Eastwick and revisited the body snatching genre with 2007’s The Invasion. She’s had several modern TV horror appearances including Supernatural, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and several episodes of The X-Files.

-Danielle Harris-Danielle was one of the youngest scream queens ever (though I think Veronica Cartwright has her beat by a year or two), making her first horror movie at the age of 10. She starred as Jamie Lloyd , the niece of ,Michael Meyers, in Halloween 4 and 5. She stayed busy starring in mainstream productions over the course of the next decade before returning to horror in Urban Legend. 

For about the next decade she starred in several forgettable movies all the while making herself a permanent fixture in the minds of children everywhere as the voice of Debbie Thornberry in The Wild Thornberrys cartoon series (how’s that for versatile!).

Danielle returned to horror in a big way in 2007 starring in both of Rob Zombie’s Halloween movies (though not as her character Jamie Lloyd).  Since then, she seems to have embraced the scream queen mantle and stayed busy making numerous horror films including Stakeland and playing the protagonist in three of the four Hatchet films.

-Winona Ryder- Winona is very familiar to horror fans for her appearances in the dark comedies Beetlejuice, Heathers and Edward Scissorhands. Even if she had never made another movie, her character of Lydia Deetz would be a fan favorite forever.

But Winona also has some impressive roles in actual horror films. She was the protagonist and love interest in Francis Ford Coppolla’s opulent Dracula and she starred in the turn of the century thriller, Lost Souls. For the last few years, she has starred as Joyce Beyrers in Netflix’s excellent horror series, Stranger Things. Though not one of the more prolific scream queens, she has maintained a loyal and ever growing fan base for the past 30 years.

-Adrienne Barbeau- Adrienne’s career has been long and varied but she will always live in the hearts of genre fans for her 80s work, specifically Creepshow, Escape from New York, Swamp Thing and John Carpenter’s creepy ghost story, The Fog.

Adrienne’s buxom silhouette coupled with her own screen assertiveness made her a perfect leading, She bucked the tendency of genre films to feature 20 somethings, as Adrienne was in her late 30s when making all of those films. In the modern era she had a memorable regular role in the unfortunately short lived Carnivàle.

 

-Lina Romay- One of those most prolific performers in exploitation cinema, Lina made over a hundred movies, most of them with her lifelong partner, Jess Franco. Her first appearance was as the Countess in Female Vampire. She didn’t drain her victim’s in the traditional way.

The heyday of Lina’s career was the 1970s and early 80’s when porn and art mingled and there wasn’t much difference in production values between a Hollywood B movie and an upper tier porn movie.  Most of her roles involved nudity and often sex. 

Some of the highlights of her career include;Barbed Wire Dolls, Exorcism, The Perverse Countess, the aforementioned Female Vampire and starring opposite of Dyanne Thorne in Wanda the Wicked Warden

-Dee Wallace- Her most famous role is as the mother in Stephen Speilberg’s family film, E.T., but horror fans know Dee as a pure blood scream queen. She has starred in many horror films, her most famous being Critters, Cujo and The Howling.  She was perfect as the emotionally unhinged reporter that finds herself in the middle of a werewolf conspiracy. She continues working steadily and has become a favorite of Rob Zombie, starring in many of his films.

Barbara Crampton- Barbara took her place in horror history with her very first horror film, Re-Animator. The unforgettable scene where she is molested by a decapitated head held by its headless body is one of the high points of 80s horror.

 She quickly followed that film with a kind of spiritual sequel, From Beyond, where she was also unforgettable. Since then, Barbara has graced two of the venerable franchises of B-movie cinema, starring in installments of the Puppet Master and Trancers sagas as well as the much beloved Castle Freak. Though her most famous work was in the 80s, Barbara has continued to work and contribute steadily to the horror genre.

Caroline Munro- Caroline is one the more widely recognized of the Hammer starlets due to her extensive work outside of the studio. She had roles in both of Vincent Price’s Dr. Phibes movies. She had two memorable non-horror appearances; the so bad its good Star Crash and the genuinely excellent Golden Voyage of Sinbad.

Unlike a lot of the other Hammer starlets, she continued to act in horror films after her stint at Hammer, most notably the exploitation film Maniac. That movie was a big switch for her, lacking any of the good natured camp of some of her earlier work.  In a move that would have made Steve McQueen proud, she played a high school student in the 80s slasher , Slaughter High, even though she was already in her mid-30s (good genes)!

Like a lot of other Hammer starlets she was also a Bond girl, though more prominently featured than most. However, her most beloved work is from her two Hammer appearances. She was ChristopherLee’s first victim in Dracula 1972 A.D. Her role was small but images from the film have filled horror blogs and magazines for decades. She had a much bigger role in the vampire action film, Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter.

 

-Evelyn Ankers- One of the first women to devote a sizable chunk of her career to horror movies, Evelyn is one of the first scream queens.  She’s also one of the most prolific in terms of quality films that have remained relevant, decades after their release.

Her most famous role is starring opposite of Lon Chaney Jr. in The Wolfman.  Evelyn starred in several movies with Lon Jr. over the course of her career including The Frozen Ghost, Weird Woman, Ghost of Frankenstein and the very gloomy Son of Dracula. Supposedly, despite so much work together (or perhaps, because of it) Ankers and Chaney Jr. didn’t get along well. I suppose this either speaks to their professionalism as actors or maybe they were sublimating that conflict into on screen chemistry.

Besides Lon Chaney Jr. she also starred in movies with Basil Rathbone, John Carradine, Lionel Atwell, Bela Lugosi and Abbott and Costello.  Along with the aforementioned films, she also appeared in The Mad Ghoul, Captive Wild Women, Jungle Women, and The Invisible Man’s Revenge.

The concept of “final girl” didn’t exist in Evelyn’s time. She’s one of the first scream queens to serve as a leading lady in most of her films.  All of her horror/ mystery work was with Universal and she had as many Universal screen rolls as her better known male counterparts. So while Bela, Boris and Lon are the names that come to mind when folks think of Universal Monsters, a place needs to be reserved for Evelyn Ankers.

 

-Hazel Court- One of her first horror roles was a leading part in the wonderfully titled Devil Girls from Mars, in 1954. A few years later she had the honor of a leading role in Hammer’s Curse of Frankenstein, which was kind of an inaugural film for the studio’s decade long dominance in horror. She returned to Hammer two years later for The Man Who Could Cheat Death.

In 1962 she joined Roger Corman for The Premature Burial. The next year, she joined a who’s who cast of horror in The Raven. This was all leading to her greatest horror role as Juliana in The Masque of the Red Death. Juliana was a devotee of Satan who spends the movie trying to convince Vincent Price to induct her into the deeper mysteries of the Dark Prince. This was a really dark and gutsy role for 1964.

Like Evelyn Ankers, Hazel was not background scenery, she was a leading lady. She starred with the heavyweights of the genre; Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Vincent Price. That’s an impressive resume by any standard.

 

 

-Linnea Qu giley- Linnea is efinitely the queen of the 80s horror scene. Linnea spent almost a decade showing up in small parts in various B movies (including a memorable death scene in Silent Night Deadly Night) before making herself a permanent part of our collective unconscious with her memorable role as Trash in Return of theLiving Dead (1985).

1988 was her most prolific year, starring in Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, Nightmare Sisters (both of those movies also starred her fellow scream queens Michelle Bauer and Brinke Stevens), Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, and Night of the Demons. That film has developed a strong fan following of its own and is mandatory Halloween viewing.

Other notable 80s appearances include Creepazoids, Witchtrap and the non-horror spoof series, Vice Academy. Linnea has had a prolific career, making movies for almost 45 years, but she will always be synonymous with 80s horror.

 

-Jamie Lee Curtis- Jamie has a great horror pedigree, springing from the loins of Janet Leigh who gave us the memorable shower scene in psycho. But Jamie has made her own indelible mark. She has amassed broad appeal over the years with non-horror movies like Trading Places, A Fish Called Wanda and True Lies.

But to horror fans she will always be a Scream Queen. Her greatest contribution to horror has been as Laurie Strode, the chief adversary of Michael Myers in the Halloween movies. Not only has she played the part 6 times, she has played it in EVERY decade since she started: 1978, 1981, 1998, 2002, 2017 and in the upcoming 2021 installment.

 In addition to the Halloween franchise she has had memorable roles in The Fog, Prom Night and Virus.  Her career is the gold standard for Scream Queen longevity.

-Barbara Steele- Barbara isn’t just the greatest Scream Queen ever; Barbara is one of the pillars that the horror genre is built on. Though she is British, she is most closely associated with Italian Gothic cinema. Her break out role was Mario Bava’s 1960 film, Black Sunday (also known as The Mask of Satan). She played two roles (something she did several more times in her career). She was a vampire/ witch returned from the grave to seek revenge. The vehicle for that revenge would be her virtuous descendant (also played by Barbara). This movie created an explosion in gothic cinema and its impact on horror cannot be overstated. Through the rest of the 60s, she made many more Gothic horror films playing ghosts, witches and vampires.

Like, the importance of Black Sunday, I don’t know if it’s possible to fully describe the impact of Barbara on horror. She’s not like anyone else on this list. Unlike many Scream Queens who tend to stick with a particular role (the victim, the final girl, the temptress etc.), Barbara played everything. Sometimes she was the victim sometimes the villain. As previously stated, in many of her films she was both, playing dual roles.

Barbara’s movies were rather restrained compared to the Italian cinema of the 1970s. Though her beautiful curves were often covered by period piece dresses, she radiated a sexuality that could be alternately demur and dangerous. Her eyes, which seem almost like anime in their size and expressiveness, draw you in, making it impossible to look away. She had the sophisticated sex appeal of Lugosi, but with the potential for menace of Christopher Lee.

By the 1970s, the horror world had changed and she was no longer a gothic leading lady. She would, however, play a different role with supporting parts in low budget exploitation films made by a few directors no one had heard of. She starred in Caged Heat, Shivers, and Piranha which were made by Jonathan Demme, David Cronenberg, and Joe Dante respectively. By the 1980s she had moved behind the camera (winning an Emmy) and in the early 90s teamed up with Dan Curtis for a Dark Shadows revival.

If there were a Mt. Rushmore of horror, Barbara would be on it alongside the likes of Lugosi, Price and Cushing. For a more detailed biography and links to reviews of her movies, lookhere.

So that’s it, that’s the end of my list of 50 Great Scream Queens. Thanks for reading! If you want to check out the previous volumes, just look here:

50 Great Scream Queens Part 1 of 4: The Euro Queens

50 Great Scream Queens Part 2 of 4: The Character Creators

50 Great Scream Queens Part 3 of 4