After who knows how many movies featuring a fiendish man stalking pretty young women, it’s a welcome change to see the tables turned in Jennifer’s Body. When a fame-seeking rock band uses Jennifer (Megan Fox) in a Satanic ritual, the high-school hottie turns into a literal maneater. It’s a story as old as time—Medieval times, to be precise. That’s where the legend of succubae, demons that take the form of women to prey on men, first got started. This new twist on an old tale sets the demon loose on the hormone-drenched hell that is high school.
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Meanwhile, Jennifer’s former best friend, the aptly named Needy (Amanda Seyfried), gets the fun task of keeping her ex-BFF from chowing down on the boy she likes and getting revenge on the band that demonized her friend in the first place. Lucky for Seyfried, her earlier work in Mean Girls prepared her for epic, cinematic girl-on-girl violence.
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The scariest movie for a male audience since Fatal Attraction, 2007’s Teeth played with the myth of vagina dentata, the idea that a woman’s private parts are equipped with a set of choppers ready to attack any male visitors. Dawn O’Keefe (Jess Weixler) is a “clean teen” determined to save herself for marriage, until her boyfriend gets tired of their vows of chastity and forces himself on her. From there things get bloody, and a feminist antihero is born.
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Even when her poor, innocent gym teacher gets flambéed in the grisly destruction at the end of Carrie, it’s hard not to feel sympathy for the title character, played by Sissy Spacek. Raised by a total whack-job of a mother, ostracized at school, and dealing with unexplained telekinetic powers, Carrie was bound to snap eventually, and it’s hard not to be just a little satisfied when she finally gets revenge on her cruel classmates.
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You’ve gotta be pretty badass to have a monster like Freddie Krueger consider you his arch nemesis. Heather Langenkamp was a staple to the ’80s slasher franchise, playing Nancy Thompson in two installments and herself in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. What makes her such a great scream queen is that, instead of waiting to get picked off the same way her friends were by the fiendish dream-stalker, Nancy set traps to try and beat the monster at his own game. Of course it didn’t work—otherwise there would be no franchise—but hey, points for trying.
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Kevin Williamson played with the “final girl” trope in his Scream series, giving Sidney (Neve Campbell) all the qualities valued in a scream queen—brains, vulnerability, sass, and a great set of pipes. Even when he toys with the audience, laying out the rules of the slasher genre and then alternately upending them and following them to the letter, his Sidney remains a character the audience roots for.
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Creator Joss Whedon decided to play with the stereotype of the young, blond girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed by a monster by making the blond girl the thing the monsters should fear. Though most people better remember Sarah Michelle Gellar for her portrayal in the television series, Kristy Swanson’s movie Buffy is a great example of a female character who starts out looking like cannon fodder—she is, after all, the kind of vapid, self-absorbed “As if!” Valley Girl who usually dies before the opening credits have rolled—and winds up saving the day.
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Eliza Dushku oozes bad-girl grit and fierce charm, so it’s no surprise she’s turned up in a number of horror franchises, from playing rogue slayer Faith in TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer to fleeing from hillbilly cannibals in Wrong Turn. As Turn’s Jessie, she scales mountains, climbs trees, hides behind waterfalls, and dodges flying arrows, all while keeping her wits about her and never devolving into a shrieking mess, proving not all scream queens have to, well, scream.
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The rape revenge fantasy I Spit on Your Grave got a lot of critical flack for its drawn-out, graphic assault sequence, where Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton) is repeatedly violated by a group of men in the woods. The film starts out playing into every bad horror movie stereotype where the woman is punished for embracing her own sexuality, but it ends with Jennifer taking the law into her own hands in a series of bloody, but satisfying, paybacks.
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Emma Collingwood (Monica Potter)’s strong nurturing instinct is what leads her to take in a group of strangers when they appear at her door late one night, claiming they were in a car accident. And when she discovers these same strangers raped her daughter and left her for dead, well, she wastes no time helping her husband take them down one by one. Lesson learned? Don’t mess with momma.
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Seriously, though, don’t mess with momma. When Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) realizes she’s been cursed by a videotape, she doesn’t sit around and whine. Oh, hell no. She instead goes on the offensive, hunting down all the information needed to ensure the safety of her son and herself.
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On the flipside, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) doesn’t do much proactively to save herself in 1978’s Halloween. In fact, she pretty much cowers in a closet waiting for Dr. Loomis to save her. But without her prototypical scream queen, we wouldn’t have the ass-kicking horror girls we have today. And that would be a fate worse than death-by-machete.
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