The Scream Queen as Author

Call an actor a scream queen and you have described her output and dismissed her method in the same breath. The phrase implies that the work is involuntary — that she arrived on set with a good pair of lungs and the film did the rest. It has been applied to Barbara Steele, Jamie Lee Curtis, Adrienne Barbeau, Marilyn Burns, Barbara Crampton and about two hundred others, and in almost every case it is describing the least interesting thing those women did on camera.

Here is what the job actually is. You stand in a corridor on a soundstage at two in the morning. There is nothing at the end of the corridor. There is a grip holding a stick with tape on it, or nothing at all, or a man in a rubber suit that will look convincing for four frames and ludicrous for the rest. The camera is going to hold on your face for six seconds — considerably longer than it will hold on the monster, because the monster cannot survive scrutiny. Your face is the special effect. If you undersell it, the film has no threat. If you oversell it by ten per cent, the film is a comedy. And you have to do it eleven more times, from different angles, at diminishing energy, while the crew eats.

That is a technical discipline of a high order, and the genre has spent seventy years calling it screaming.

The face is the monster

The mechanics deserve spelling out, because it is where the argument lives.

A horror film has a structural problem: the thing it is about cannot be shown for long. Show the creature and you convert dread into assessment — the audience starts appraising the latex, and appraisal is the opposite of fear. Jaws is the famous case, and its solution works because of Roy Scheider’s face on the beach, doing a dolly-zoom’s worth of horror before Spielberg cuts to anything. Val Lewton built an entire unit at RKO on the same principle in the 1940s — terror routed entirely through a performer’s reaction because he had no money for anything else, and the poverty turned out to be a method.

Which means the performer is supplying the horror. The audience’s information about how bad the thing is comes from her calibration and nowhere else. Adrienne Barbeau spends Carpenter’s The Fog alone in a lighthouse talking into a microphone at a town she cannot see, and the film’s entire sense of an advancing menace is generated by a woman modulating her voice for an unseen threat, in a booth, by herself. That is a radio play performance carrying a feature. Take her out and you have some illuminated mist.

Marilyn Burns in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is the extreme case. The dinner sequence was shot over a punishing stretch in unventilated Texas heat, on a set dressed with rotting material, and the shoot’s reputation for brutality is one of the best documented in American independent film. What is on screen is a genuine physiological collapse being shaped into a performance. Burns is managing an actual terror and giving Hooper usable takes out of it, which is a much harder thing than indicating one, and the reason the film reads as evidence rather than fiction is largely her.

The scream itself is a technique

Since the label rests on the noise, the noise is worth taking seriously for a moment.

A scream that reads on a soundtrack is a constructed object. It has to survive a microphone, sit inside a mix that also contains a score and a sound effect, and communicate a specific quantity of terror without tipping into the register the audience finds funny — and the gap between those two registers is narrower than almost any other in screen performance. It also has to be repeatable, because the film will want it from three angles, and a voice that goes at take four costs the production a day. The performers who lasted in this genre were the ones who learned to produce the sound from a place that did not destroy them, which is a trained skill and one that stage actors are taught explicitly.

Fay Wray, who was doing this in 1933 for King Kong, recorded her screaming separately from the shoot in a dedicated session, which tells you the studios understood perfectly well that the noise was a performance being engineered rather than a reflex being captured. They simply declined to say so in the credits.

And the most famous instance is not a scream at all. Janet Leigh’s shower sequence in Psycho took roughly a week to shoot across something like seventy camera setups — a piece of assembly-line precision in which an actress had to deliver fragments of terror out of order, naked, cold, for days, with no scene partner to play against and no way of knowing what the cut would do with any of it. The result reorganised the medium. Leigh got a Best Supporting Actress nomination and a lifetime of being asked about a shower.

Steele, and the refusal

Barbara Steele is the one who breaks the category open, because she was doing authorial work while being marketed as a set of eyes.

Mario Bava cast her in Black Sunday (1960) in a dual role — the witch and the descendant — and the film’s whole gothic engine is that you cannot always tell which one you are looking at. Steele plays the difference with almost nothing: a change in the stillness, a shift in where the gaze lands. Bava’s masterpiece of two faces is a film about doubling that only works because one actress is doing the doubling honestly. She followed it into Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and became, for about a decade, the emblem of European gothic — a status she was consistently, publicly impatient with. Steele spent years saying she did not want to be a horror actress, took the work anyway, and kept turning up in the genre’s smartest films rather than its most lucrative: Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975), Dante’s Piranha (1978).

The impatience is the point. The scream queen label describes a career an actress is presumed to have chosen because nothing else was available. In Steele’s case it describes an actress who kept being offered the genre because she was extraordinary in it, which is the reverse of the story the label tells.

Jamie Lee Curtis inherited a version of the same trap and a literal one — her mother was Janet Leigh, whose forty-five minutes in Psycho (1960) remain the single most consequential performance in the genre. Curtis did Halloween (1978), The Fog, Prom Night (1980) and Terror Train (1980) inside about twenty-four months and was crowned before she was twenty-two. The crowning was a ceiling. It took decades and a Halloween legacy sequel for the industry to notice that the survivor she plays has an interior life the form never asked for.

The case against my own case

I should be honest that the label is not pure invention. There were performers in the 1980s direct-to-video boom whose casting was frankly cosmetic, hired for a poster and given four lines, and pretending otherwise would be sentimental. The genre’s economics produced a great deal of bad, exploitative work, and some of the women labelled scream queens were victims of a marketing category rather than practitioners of a craft.

But look at where several of them ended up. Barbara Crampton was the ingénue in Re-Animator (1985) and Gordon and Yuzna’s sensory nightmare From Beyond a year later — films that demanded she play absurd material with total conviction while the effects department did unspeakable things around her. Re-Animator survives as a comedy classic precisely because its cast refuses to wink. Decades on, Crampton moved into producing and started making the films she wanted to be in. The career answered the label.

There is a structural reason the label stuck to women and slid off men. The horror lead who fights is an action performance and gets read as one; the horror lead who endures is read as a condition rather than a choice. Endurance has never scanned as craft to an awards body, which is why the genre’s most demanding performances — the ones that require a person to be terrified, wet, filthy and legible for a fortnight — collect nicknames instead of nominations.

Where the argument lands

The last twenty years have made the demotion untenable, mostly by producing performances the industry could not file.

Isabelle Adjani in Possession (1981) — Andrzej Żuławski’s divorce-as-apocalypse — gives what is arguably the most physically committed performance in any horror film, and Cannes gave her Best Actress for it in 1981. Sigourney Weaver was Oscar-nominated for Aliens (1986), which forced the Academy to acknowledge that a woman with a pulse rifle could be doing acting. Then the run: Essie Davis in The Babadook, a performance of maternal exhaustion so exact the monster is almost redundant. Toni Collette in Hereditary, whose dinner-table scene is the best acting in an American horror film this century and went unnominated, which tells you the prejudice survives. Florence Pugh in Midsommar, doing grief in daylight with nowhere to hide.

And then the literal version of my title: Mia Goth co-wrote Pearl (2022) with Ti West and plays the lead, and the film ends on a held smile that runs the length of the end credits — a piece of endurance acting written by the person performing it. The scream queen took the pen.

The genre always knew these women were essential. It just needed to stop describing the essential thing as a noise. If you want to see how much of horror’s history has been routed through women who were not permitted to direct it, start there and work backwards. The faces were always doing the authorship. The credits were slow.