The 14 greatest horror scream queens of all time
These ladies are a real scream.
The horror genre would be nothing without the illustrious scream queen.
The female lead in a horror film or other project, the scream queen will be chased through the woods, abandoned buildings, a haunted city, her dreams and nightmares, her own home or maybe even on a spacecraft by a sadistic killer, monster, ghost, alien or otherworldly entity hellbent on making her life miserable or, as in most cases, ending that life altogether.
And she’ll scream, oh how she’ll scream, as she fights to survive until the final credits, hoping to last just long enough to be the “final girl” standing.
In the early days of horror, the scream queen was weak and meek: a damsel in distress who needed to possess a virginal innocence to survive. She was often the sidekick and not the leading lady. But things have changed.
The scream queens of today are no longer willing to sit back and play the victim. These queens are their own heroes. Giving the audience someone to root for, modern-day scream queens are brave, in charge of their own salvation and a symbol of hope against all odds. Yes, they may still be required to have a healthy set of pipes. But they are complex, bold and don’t need a king to reign supreme.
Behold a list of the best scream queens, from the small and big screens.
Neve Campbell
Earned her crown in “The Craft,” “Scream,” “Scream 2,” “Scream 3,” “Scream 4” and “Scream” (2022)
After bursting onto the scene in the hit Fox series “Party of Five” (1994 to 2000), opposite then-unknown actors Lacey Chabert (“Mean Girls”), Matthew Fox (“Lost”) and Jennifer Love Hewitt (“9-1-1”), Neve Campbell earned her slasher stripes playing the ultimate “final girl.”
As high school teen Sidney Prescott in Wes Craven’s “Scream,” Campbell was able to thwart the virginal trope when she had sex with her boyfriend and ultimately went on to beat not one, but two Ghostface killers menacing the fictional town of Woodsboro, California. Campbell would later star in the next five “Scream” films before handing over her knifed baton to fellow Scream Queen Jenna Ortega.
Jenna Ortega
Earned her crown in “Insidious: Chapter 2,” “The Babysitter: Killer Queen,” “Scream” (2022), “Studio 666,” “X,” “Scream VI,” and “Wednesday”
Jenna Ortega has quickly become Gen Z’s reigning scream queen transcending into the “It Girl” of the horror genre. Ortega had her first taste of blood and gore at just 11 years old as a young star in 2013’s “Insidious: Chapter 2.”
Less than a decade later she solidified her stronghold on the horror genre in 2022, starring in four horror films: “Scream,” “Studio 666,” “X” and “American Carnage.” But it was her role as the titular character in Netflix’s “Wednesday” that truly made a household name when her iconic dance from the series went viral inspiring everyone to dance, dance, dance with her hands, hands, hands.
With upcoming roles in horror films like “Beetlejuice 2” and “Scream 7,” Ortega shows no signs of stopping and the actress admits that the gore genre is where she feels at home. “If I’m going to speak up about anything,” Ortega told Elle, “or put my two cents in about anything, I’m definitely the actress who’s like, ‘More blood.'”
Lupita Nyong’o
Earned her crown in “Little Monsters” and “Us”
Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o is new to the horror genre, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t already left her mark.
In Jordan Peele’s masterful 2019 psychological horror film “Us,” the Mexican-born Kenyan had the daunting task of playing two characters who were literally quite the opposite of one another.
“I had to flip back and forth,” Nyong’o told Deadline of playing both Adelaide Wilson and her doppelgänger Red. “I was the offender and the offended; I was the hero and the villain,” she said. “I was playing both sides of an argument, coming for each other. That was the conflict. The conflict was between these two people. So, it was very complicated in my head. For the most part I wouldn’t shoot the same character on the same day. So at least I’d have a Red day and then an Adelaide day. On some rare occasions I had to do both.”
Thankfully, Nyong’o had the skill to pull it off and the film was a success. “I had to prepare and develop a roadmap for myself for their emotional and mental life,” Nyong’o said. “With Adelaide for example, we spoke a lot about her pursuit of normalcy. She doesn’t want anything but to pass. That’s her thing. She has a deep, dark secret, and she’s not trying to gain any attention. For that reason, I approached her with a more naturalistic performance sensibility. I tried to always hold her with more diagonal posture, twisted, in a way. She’s got something she’s hiding. She’s never straightforward in the way she stands.”
Red with her crimson boiler suit landed on the opposite end of the spectrum. “She is who she says she is,” Nyong’o said. “She’s misunderstood, for sure, but she’s straightforward. And Jordan had talked about her having this regality, and also a cockroach quality to her. The way she moves, you can’t tell what direction she’s going to go, and cockroaches move in a very skittery manner. But then, also, her resilience.”
Jamie Lee Curtis
Earned her crown in “Halloween” (1978), “The Fog,” “Prom Night,” “Terror Train,” “Halloween II,” “Halloween H20,” “Halloween: Resurrection,” “Scream Queens,” “Halloween” (2018), “Halloween Kills” and “Halloween Ends”
Without Jamie Lee Curtis there would be no such thing as a scream queen. She is literally the OG. As the daughter of horror royal Janet Leigh (“Psycho”), it was almost destined that Curtis would one day ascend the throne and she did when she took on the iconic role of Laurie Strode in 1978’s “Halloween.” For 44 years, Curtis would lead the “Halloween” franchise thwarting the murderous attempts of her psycho killer brother Michael Meyers until 2022’s “Halloween: Ends.”
“You call me the Scream Queen,” she wrote in an essay published in People. “I don’t call myself that, but I get it. Not the queen part. The scream part. For 44 years, I have tried to figure out why and how the confluence of a young girl and a monster came together in the 13 films titled ‘Halloween.'”
“Halloween” would go on to become the most successful independent film at that time and Curtis was paid only $8,000 for the movie — $2,000 a week for four weeks, but her performance was priceless.
“I can’t tell you why Laurie Strode became OG Final Girl. I assume it has something to do with her intelligence and strength of character, quick mind and profound bravery. I have tried over the years to inculcate those aspects of Laurie’s character into my own, to carry that mantle and represent survivors of all types of unimaginable horror and trauma, pain and suffering, who stand up to tyranny and oppression — real and imagined.”
She continued: “What I can tell you is that I now know the reason why I’m so good in horror films. It is because I’m not acting. When I look scared in a movie it’s because I am scared. I am scared right now, as I hang up my bell-bottoms and say goodbye to Halloween. Life is scary. But Laurie taught me that life can also be beautiful, filled with love and art and life!”
Janet Leigh
Earned her crown in “Psycho,” “The Fog” and “Halloween: H20″
One of the most famous scenes in all of cinematic history is that of Janet Leigh full of fright playing Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” Co-starring John Gavin and Anthony Perkins, the 1960 film reached its climatic peak when Leigh would be murdered at the Bates Motel. Most shocking and sadistic of all was the timing. Leigh’s character was defenseless and naked in the shower when she met her ultimate demise. It was a moment that reminded all of us that no where is safe, not even the bathroom in what should be a moment of tranquility in our own home.
Leigh received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance, but it was one that traumatized her for the rest of her life.
“I stopped taking showers and I only take baths,” Leigh told Woman’s World of the scene where her character is stabbed to death. “And when I’m someplace where I can only take a bath, I make sure the doors and windows of the house are locked. I also leave the bathroom door open and shower curtain open. I’m always facing the door, watching, no matter where the shower head is.”
Despite the trauma, Leigh was happy to have starred in the career-defining film. And her youngest daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, would go one to have a horror career of her own.
“I’ve been in a great many films, but I suppose if an actor can be remembered for one role then they’re very fortunate,” she told the New York Times. “And in that sense I’m fortunate.”
Sarah Michelle Gellar
Earned her crown in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” “Scream 2,” “The Grudge” and “The Return”
In the ’90s, Sarah Michelle Gellar was an epic role model for girls who wanted to kick ass and take names. She played the titular Buffy Summers in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” for seven seasons from 1997 to 2003. As a stake-wielding high schooler ready to take on vampires and all other baddies in Sunnydale, she reminded everyone that a heroine could save the world without a white knight by her side.
“Buffy dealt with the horrors of adolescence,” Gellar told the Guardian this year. “Our monsters, the scary part, is the manifestation of the mental health crisis we’re facing, the isolation, and then, on a lesser note, what we’re doing to our planet.”
“A lot of the demons are a little cheesy now,” she added of the 20-year-old show, “because of how far graphics have come – but it doesn’t change how the story makes you feel.”
Gellar would later cement her status in the horror genre with a leading role in 2004’s “The Grudge.”
“Women can’t open a comedy the way Jim Carrey can or open an action film the way Tom Cruise can,” she explained to PopEntertainment about the importance of scary movies to her. “The horror genre seems to be where women shine, like Naomi Watts in ‘The Ring.’”
Angela Bassett
Earned her crown in “Vampire in Brooklyn” and “American Horror Story”
Just two years after Angela Bassett transformed herself into Tina Turner, earning an Oscar nomination for her starring role in the 1993 biopic “What’s Love Got To Do With It,” the actress starred opposite Eddie Murphy in Wes Craven’s cult classic horror-comedy “Vampire in Brooklyn,” once again transforming herself into an otherworldly woman: a detective who soon becomes a vampire.
During her expansive career, Bassett would continue to play a number of prominent real-world women, including Betty Shabazz in “Malcolm X” (1992) and Voletta Wallace in “Notorious” (2009). So it’s no surprise TV megaproducer Ryan Murphy picked Bassett to play a take on Louisiana Creole folk hero Marie Laveau in the third season of his FX franchise “American Horror Story.”
After her series debut as the Voodoo queen in 2013’s “American Horror Story: Coven,” she returned to play other haunting characters in the next three “AHS” seasons — “Freak Show,” “Hotel” and “Roanoke” — and a reprisal of Marie in the 2018 season “Apocalypse.”
Heather Langenkamp
Earned her crown in “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” and “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare”
Heather Langenkamp solidified herself as a horror icon taking on Freddy Krueger and winning in Wes Craven’s 1984 flick “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” Even better, as Nancy Thompson, she outlasted her boyfriend, Glen, who was played by Johnny Depp in his first acting gig.
“I’m your boyfriend now, Nancy,” Krueger (Robert Englund) tells Nancy before he sucks her boyfriend into his water bed and turns him into a bright-red geyser of blood.
Depp would go on to become one of the biggest names in Hollywood and Langenkamp recently found a role just as intriguing as Nancy, playing Dr. Georgina Stanton in Netflix’s “The Midnight Club,” which follows a bunch of terminally ill young adults who meet up at midnight to share scary stories.
“I knew nothing could be as good as Nancy. I’ve always felt that as a teenager and as a woman who grew up looking for good roles, it was really hard to find roles as good as that one,” she told Collider. “Except for now. I really feel like I found a role that’s just as good as Nancy.”
Emma Roberts
Earned her crown in “Scream 4,” “Scream Queens,” “American Horror Story” and “Abandoned”
You can’t have a list about scream queens without including Emma Roberts. Not only did Julia Roberts’ niece star in the fox slasher comedy “Scream Queens” from 2015 to 2016, opposite fellow queen Jamie Lee Curtis, but she has also taken the lead in “American Horror Story: Coven,” “Freak Show,” “Cult,” “Apocalypse” and “1984.” This season, she stars in “AHS: Delicate” opposite Kim Kardashian.
On the big screen, Roberts continued to make her mark in the horror genre, starring in 2011’s “Scream 4,” 2020’s “The Hunt” and 2022’s “Abandoned.” She recently spoke about the thrill of making thrillers.
“It’s funny,” she told Screen Rant. “No matter how long I leave, or how far I leave, I always come back. I mean, I don’t know. I’ve just always gravitated towards like thrillers and horror, and even like horror comedy, whether it’s like books or articles or movies or TV shows. So when this got sent my way, just from the title, I was like, I hate that I already love it … Well, what I love about horror in general, is I feel like you can say so much more with horror. Because you’re saying it but you’re also letting the audience interpret it how they want. It’s kind of like, ‘What do you think?’ Like, do you think this, do you think that, what are your theories?
“We’re not telling you it’s one thing or the other,” she continued. “And I love that with all horror. I feel like it’s meant to be kind of like thought-provoking. Everything has a double, if not triple meaning. And that to me is what makes the genre so fun and what makes me always want to go back to it.”
Shelley Duvall
Earned her crown in “The Shining,” “The 4th Floor” and “Boltneck”
Despite her numerous films, Shelley Duvall is best known for her role in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” In the 1980 film, she plays Wendy Torrance, a mother and wife who sees her dreams for a normal life slip through the cracks when her husband, Jack (Jack Nicholson), descends into madness and tries to murder her. When Jack chops through a bathroom with an ax and screams, “Here’s Johnny,” Duvall and the audience screamed together in horror.
Years after “The Shining” became a classic, Duvall opened up about how mentally taxing filming the movie actually was. “[Kubrick] doesn’t print anything until at least the 35th take. Thirty-five takes, running and crying and carrying a little boy, it gets hard. And full performance from the first rehearsal. That’s difficult,” she told the Hollywood Reporter.
To get into character, she would “listen to sad songs. Or you just think about something very sad in your life or how much you miss your family or friends. But after a while, your body rebels. It says: ‘Stop doing this to me. I don’t want to cry every day.’ And sometimes just that thought alone would make me cry. To wake up on a Monday morning, so early, and realize that you had to cry all day because it was scheduled — I would just start crying. I’d be like, ‘Oh no, I can’t, I can’t.’ And yet I did it. I don’t know how I did it. Jack said that to me, too. He said, ‘I don’t know how you do it.’”
Duvall later fled Hollywood in the late 1990s but returned after more than two decades away, with the 2023 indie horror movie “The Forest Hills” from writer-director Scott Goldberg.
“We are huge fans of ‘The Shining’ and it’s honestly one of my favorite horror movies of all time, up there with John Carpenter’s ‘Halloween’ and George A. Romero’s ‘Day of the Dead’ with the dark tones they delivered in their movies, along with perfect scores and elements that make them my personal favorites,” Goldberg told Deadline. “Shelley contributed to ‘The Shining’ being an absolute masterpiece by giving her all, and performing in way that really showcased the fear and horror of a mother in isolation.”
Sigourney Weaver
Earned her crown in “Alien,” “Ghostbusters,” “Aliens,” “Alien 3,” “Alien: Resurrection,” “The Village” and “The Cabin in the Woods”
As Ellen Ripley in one of the greatest sci-fi horror movies of all time, Sigourney Weaver made us truly feel all the despair and fright her character was going through while fighting for her survival in 1979’s “Alien.” In the 1986 sequel, “Aliens,” she was so convincing as an action hero that she garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, which, to this day, is not an easy feat in the horror genre.
“The best-constructed story for the character to tell was in ‘Aliens,’ just because Jim [Cameron] has such an amazing sense of structure of story,” Weaver told Collider. “To take this character out of hyper-sleep, have no one believe her, have her be exiled into this limbo land where no one believes her and her family’s dead. The whole set-up for Ripley in ‘Aliens’ and then what she ends up doing and what it, finding this new family by the end. The whole structure of that story, to me, was gold. I always felt that I could jump up and down on it. It was such a great, supportive, arc for the character. In that sense, the second one for Ripley is probably the most satisfying.”
Linda Blair
Earned her crown in “The Exorcist” and “Exorcist II: The Heretic”
Linda Blair will forever be known as a little girl possessed in her breakout role as Regan MacNeil in 1973’s “The Exorcist.” She was only 14 years old when the film was shot and watching a young lady turn into a demon child who spit obscenities and masturbated with a crucifix terrified the nation. It was a film so disturbing it reportedly caused audience members to faint, vomit and flee the theater in terror.
Blair would go on to win a Golden Globe and receive a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role. She was recently brought on to serve as a consultant in the new “The Exorcist: Believer.”
“We brought her in as an advisor because we’re dealing with young people, and we want to take them to dangerous places safely,” director David Gordon Green told the Independent.
In his 2013 biography, the original film’s director, William Friedkin, acknowledged the dangers Blair herself faced on set all those years ago.
“It was only by grace of God that nobody was injured or killed on those pictures,” he said of “The Exorcist” and 1971’s “The French Connection,” with its notoriously treacherous car chase. “’The French Connection’ was life-threatening in many ways. ‘The Exorcist’ was threatening to the sanity of that wonderful, 12-year-old girl.”
Lin Shaye
Earned her crown in “Alone in the Dark,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Critters,” “Critters 2: The Main Course,” “Amityville: A New Generation,” “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare,” “Dead End,” “2001 Maniacs,” “Snakes on a Plane,” “2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams,” “Ouija,” “The Grudge” and the “Insidious” franchise
Lin Shaye’s roster of horror movie credits is quite impressive, but most recently the actress has solidified herself starring as medium Elise Rainier in the “Insidious” films.
“It scared the daylights out of me,” Shaye told Entertainment Weekly of filming “Insidious: Chapter 3.” “I read it in bed, and when I finished, I took it downstairs and locked it in the closet. I really was chilled to the bone by the story.”
When Shaye is not busy reading disturbing scripts, she’s working hard to deliver a performance that is disturbing on camera, which often entails being drenched in blood, as she was in the 2017 horror comedy “The Black Room.”
“In terms of my work, I have zero vanity,” she said. “Actresses spend so much time trying to look beautiful in Hollywood, but I don’t approach it like that. If someone is sad or miserable they look sad or miserable. You’re not supposed to look beautiful — that’s not how people look when they’re suffering.”
Samara Weaving
Earned her crown in “Ash vs Evil Dead,” “Mayhem,” “The Babysitter,” “Ready or Not,” “The Babysitter: Killer Queen” and “Scream VI”
Australian actress Samara Weaving entered the horror genre with 2017’s “The Babysitter,” joining Jenna Ortega and Emma Roberts as this generation’s new batch of scream queens.
“I feel very flattered that I’m part of the Scream Queen group of gals,” she told Cinema Blend. “I really like to pick eclectic jobs to do.”
Despite notable roles outside the horror genre in films such as “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” Weaving has shined in darker roles like playing newlywed Grace Le Domas, an unlikely “final girl” in “Ready or Not.”
“We tried to make sure that any time she survives it wasn’t too miraculous,” she told GQ of her character. “Her background just means her fight or flight response really kicks in. It’s believable since she was growing up in and out of foster care. The unraveling of the family, being that some of them are just bumbling idiots, is a factor, too. I just really love her. I didn’t want it to just be this accident that she survives these big moments — she has to fight for that.”
