10 Women in Horror Who Scare Us to the Bone

There have been many, many “scream queens”, but there is only one Jamie Lee Curtis. In her iconic role as Laurie Strode, Curtis presented a new model for women in horror. Halloween redefined the slasher genre by introducing Strode as the “final girl” archetype, the lone female survivor who confronts the killer. As the franchise matured (Curtis starred in seven of the 11 Halloween movies) Strode's capabilities as the final girl improve; in the 2018 release, she defeats the killer herself and takes back the narrative of her own life. Curtis also broke down barriers for women in the entertainment business, with last year’s Halloween sequel reeling in the biggest horror movie opening with a female lead and the biggest movie opening with a female lead over 55.

Related: 12 Most Badass Women in Horror 

In a genre dominated by male filmmakers, Karyn Kusama has easily made a name for herself. Her breakthrough film was Jennifer’s Body, a horror comedy starring Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried. Although sadly mis-marketed and misunderstood, Jennifer’s Body made subversive hay out of the idea of a teenage girl becoming a succubus and murdering the many male classmates whose obsession with her outweighed their common sense and morality. This cheeky horror benefited greatly from its utterly female perspective. 

Kusama also directed the horror thriller The Invitation, one of our favorite films, and co-directed the film XX—a critically-acclaimed horror anthology with four shorts by female directors. While Kusama hasn’t limited herself to horror, we hope to see her continue to thrive in the genre and shake up expectations.

Foster’s performance as Clarice Starling in the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs was groundbreaking. Although the character benefited from the smart writing of both original author Thomas Harris and screenplay writer Ted Tally, Foster breathed life into the multi-dimensional character, an FBI trainee searching for clues to track down Buffalo Bill, a maniac on the loose who murders women and skins their corpses. Rather than being forced to watch our protagonist suffer gratuitously, Starling uses her wits and courage and triumphs over gendered violence. 

Explaining why she was drawn to the story, Foster explains, “95 percent of women's experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive ... That's why 'Silence' is such a big departure, because it stands for all the same things, but you have a real female heroine.” Foster’s performance landed Clarice Starling on the American Film Institute’s list of 100 greatest heroes, clocking in as the number one ranking heroine in film history.

Ducournau directed Raw, a French film about a vegetarian’s increasingly desperate appetite for flesh—even if it’s human. Not many directors can brag that their film made people faint, but this meditation on primal hunger is so intense and graphic that people did just that at a showing in Canada. While she didn’t intend for such drastic consequences, Ducournau is on a mission to show more facets of femininity than gentleness: When a young man told her that female directors bring “softness” to the genre, she retorted, “Softness? Have you seen my movie? When you make horror, it’s the expression of a form of violence that you feel inside of you—and it’s important we recognize that women feel violence and anger as well.” Though Raw is her only project in the horror genre thus far, hopefully this is the beginning of a fruitful and terrifying career for Ducournau.

Though the actress has been successful across a variety of genres, Farmiga is best known for her work in the horror world. She played real-life paranormal investigator Lorraine Warren in The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2 (the second-highest grossing horror film of all time) and will reprise her role, alongside Patrick Wilson’s Ed Warren, in the upcoming third installment in the Annabelle series. 

Farmiga also starred as Norma Bates in Bates Motel, a television series prequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Farmiga was nominated for an Emmy for her portrayal of the deeply flawed woman who raised a disturbed murderer. She has effortlessly made iconic characters come to life, dominating the horror genre. It must run in the family—her sister Taissa Farmiga is in American Horror Story and recently took her own star turn in The Conjuring universe, in 2018’s The Nun.

We have writer and director Kent to thank for the horror masterpiece The Babadook. The film, about a widowed mother and her relationship with her son, used a storybook drawing to terrify all its viewers, as the mother slowly becomes unhinged. Rather than rely on jump scares or freaky noises, Kent showed us the way to make horror resonate deeply, by centering the audience’s fears on human emotion and loss. As Kent herself stated, “I don’t think a lot of the filmmakers making horror now know its worth, or realize the potential of the genre ... Just because it’s a horror film doesn’t mean it can’t be deep.” Kent’s sophomore film is due out in summer 2019, and we can’t wait to see what’s next.