Freddy, Jason, Michael and all you other killers better take note: hell hath no fury like a woman stalked.
\.\’()'(JSI Alan Morrison
SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN
who can’t act, who’s always running up the stairs when she should be going out the front door,’ is Neve Campbell’s evaluation in Scream.
Campbell has earned the right to voice her own opinion. After surviving countless attacks in Wes Craven’s post-modern slasher and its sequel, she’s fallen in with a new crowd of up-and-coming young American actors, all of whom are breaking through courtesy of the latest wave of horror movies. Campbell, Michelle Williams, Jodi Lyn O'Keefe, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Love Hewitt -- the Splat Pack, if you like. No topless psycho _ fodder here; these girls are smarter, 5'. funnier, tougher than their *5? _ predecessors. ‘
Only one leading lady from the video generation deserves to be acclaimed role model for today’s heroines: Jamie Lee Curtis, star of Halloween, The Fog and Prom Night. And how neatly it all ties up, now that she is swinging the axe in battle with her old nemesis Michael Myers in Halloween H20. Curtis’s co-star, Michelle Williams, remembers the older actress in the original. ’I was really drawn to her intellect, and how sharp she was,
No sooner had the silents stopped than the screaming began. It's one thing to terrorise an audience with scary monsters, said the old-style Hollywood moguls; just think what we could do if a piercing shriek from the leading lady was let loose on frayed nerves. And so the Scream Queen was born.
Now, no one likes a man with a hairy back, but Fay Wray let out a particularly loud lungful when she first spotted her new beau in King Kong. Even Elsa Lancaster's vocal reaction was unexpectedly acute when she was betrothed to the monster in Bride Of Frankenstein. Decades later, it was Janet Leigh‘s open mouth, frozen for eternity as violins did the screaming for her, that rose to become an iconic image from Hitchcock's Psycho.
But the Scream Queen didn't really come of age until the horror exploitation cycle took off in the 705. The blood and guts got gorier, the plot became a means for setting up a series of brutal, inventive deaths, usually involving a knife-wielding (penis substitute) maniac and a group of scantily-clad girls whose every line of dialogue read ’aaarrrrggghhh’.
When the video market got going, well, these Scream Queens became national treasures — but only for the salivating boys in the audience. They haven’t fared so well under the scathing female eye at this end of the 905. ’Some stupid killer is stalking some big-breasted girl
Shower power: Jane »I; U ’
,, f can” straw "W
and that she wasn’t the helpless victim,’ says Williams. ’She stood up and kicked ass.’
Halloween H20 brings together three generations of screamers: the new breed, Curtis and Psycho’s Janet Leigh (Curtis’s real life mum). With that line-up, no male maniac stands a chance. The Scream Queen has regained her throne.
’N’ Who's killing who and how in the most essential slasher movies ever made
FILM BODY COUNT SEX SCENES GORE SCORE ‘ KILLER POO-YER-PANTS MOMENT
RATING
§ Norman Bates: cross- dressing, mother loving split personality
.1 Janet Leigh's shower comes " to a brutal end
Psycho (1960)
Leatherface: grunting A, . cannibal With a DIY approach to the abhatoir
Marilyn Burns being hung on
The Texas a meatliook ready for dinner 5
Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
>§~>§~
Surer dead by now, Michael 3 sits up mechanically behind '1} sobbing Jamie Lee Curtis
ii Michael Myers: six-year- ; old mind in the body of 1’ an unstoppable murder machine
Halloween (1978)
Mrs Vorhees: traumatised ~ mother of drowned Jason
‘0 (the resurrected killer in
. the interminable seouelsi
An arrowhead pokes through one oversexed campers 3 throat from beneath the bed,
Friday The 13th (1980)
That bladed glove popping .3 up between Heather _ ~ Langencamp’s legs in the bath :
Freddy Krueger; fried- faced child molester from ; your worst nighmares
A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)
Scream (1997) Billy and Stu: two nutters
‘ Rose lvlcCiowen getting 3 I in Death’s Skeletal mask
1 caught in the garage door
Halloween H20
(1998) -- Michael Myers: older, but
i Jodi Lyn O’Keele trapped in the dumb waiter
Nil Mil N N“ N l
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. not Wiser
. “"98 THE LIST 13