Horror's Final Girls Are Finally Winning

A new generation of scream queens hold the power (and axes).

Do you hear that menacing sound? There’s something wicked out there, and it’s inching closer: a new era of horror It girls. They’re here, brandishing machetes, waging psychological warfare, and raising heartbeats—not just because they’re terrifying, but also because they’re undeniably alluring.

While portraying the quintessential scream queen or resilient final girl in a slasher film hasn’t traditionally launched actresses into superstardom, in the last few years, horror films have become a springboard. The genre is turning a new cohort of talent into A-listers: from Jenna Ortega’s bone-chilling scream in X to Samara Weaving wearing blood like a trophy in Ready or Not and Anya Taylor-Joy charming her way out of death in The Menu. In this modern age of horror, “woman” is no longer synonymous with “victim.” Not only are the final girls more emboldened, but women are assuming the position of attacker and wreaking grisly havoc on screen. In the words of the iconic Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) from Maxxxine, they declare, “I can take care of myself,” and they mean it.

As the appetite for horror movies grows, actresses are turning to the genre to diversify their resumes with cool kid–approved indie flicks that raise their social currency. Some of them are seeing lucrative box-office success, too, like A Quiet Place: Day One. The third installment of the sci-fi horror trilogy, which sees Lupita Nyong’o triumphantly determine her own fate in a post-apocalyptic world full of monsters, is the 10th highest-grossing film of 2024.

“Newer actors in the business see what a calling card a successful genre film can be for them, because they're never boring,” says Nancy Nayor, the casting director behind horror films like Strange Darling and Barbarian. “The roles always give an actor such a meaty, juicy opportunity to sink their teeth into.” Nayor says actors who haven’t been overexposed in film bring a grounded realness that makes audiences think, Wow, this could be me, which is part of the reason she landed on Willa Fitzgerald for Strange Darling and Georgina Campbell for Barbarian.

The same went for casting director Jessica Kelly when she booked Goth in the X trilogy and Florence Pugh in Midsommar.  “[To] experience somebody that you haven’t seen before makes it even more scary,” she says.

Goth, who plays all three leads in director Ti West’s X, Pearl, and Maxxxine films, not only frightened viewers with her performance, but won over their hearts, with images of her maniacal smile and pleads of “I’m a star” going viral. Kelly calls Goth a “chameleon”—not only does she have dynamic emotional range, but also the ability to convincingly transform into a 90-year-old woman. On top of her wide-ranging acting chops, Goth picked up credits as a writer and producer on the latter two spine-chilling films.

“There’s depth to the characters and what they want in their life and what they’ll do to get it, instead of ‘I’m just angry’ or ‘I’m just a villain,’” Kelly explains. “When you meet Mia in person, you could never really believe that she could ever put a knife in somebody, but she’s able to do it because she’s just such a good actress and she goes from the heart of what the character wants.”

Goth’s girl-next-door charm is palpable from her late-night interviews alone—she speaks with a gentle, soft demeanor while wearing a seemingly ever-present smile, holding perfect posture, and making fierce red carpet appearances.

Horror storytelling requires more than the ability to go from glam to guts, though. To Kelly, showing fear in a convincing way is all in the eyes. A robust leading lady has “edge and appeal, and the ultimate thing: star quality.” A scream queen also needs, well, “a fantastic quality scream,” Nayor says. To her, having a compelling, blood-curdling scream can be the difference between the audience caring or not caring if a character dies.

In addition to offering opportunity to newcomers, the genre is also proving to be one that established actors flock to to deepen their skill sets—and subsequently boost their star power.

Fresh off the success of Euphoria, Hunter Schafer recently made her film lead debut in Cuckoo, a horror-mystery picture that sees her banged up, bloodied, and bandaged. On the heels of The White Lotus and Anyone But You, Sydney Sweeney returned to her horror roots (The Ward, Along Came the Devil) as the star of the sinister movie Immaculate this spring. Lily Rose-Depp will come into her own as the haunted front woman in the upcoming gothic tale Nosferatu.

A good horror film requires a vulnerable actor to go to dark places and subject themselves to fear in a realistic way. Taylor Russell, for instance, grotesquely eats her boyfriend at his request in Bones and All; Maika Monroe’s heartbeat races to 170 bpm upon seeing the occult serial killer haunting her in Longlegs; Dakota Johnson monstrously splits her chest open during a witchy ritual in Suspiria.

Arkasha Stevenson, writer and director of The First Omen, says horror movies give viewers an opportunity to “process trauma.” The genre presents an “honest arena” that can be comforting and therapeutic.

“Horror is really effective when it's very grounded and realistic. Unfortunately, there's more than an abundance of things to draw from, especially when you're a woman. Our country is raging a war on women right now,” Stevenson says. “With more women taking charge in the genre, it's about to get really, really personal. That’s what The First Omen was for me.”

Stevenson pitched her debut full-length feature, starring Nell Tiger-Free, in Texas when the six-week abortion ban was passed in the state in 2021. On the surface, The First Omen might seem like a story about the devil incarnating, but really, the movie explores themes of birth, rape, and the atrocities inflicted on the female form. Telling the narrative from the female perspective was Stevenson’s way of reclaiming the genre.

Historically, slasher films have framed sex—consensual or not—as an act women should pay the price for, usually by punishing them with a gruesome, blood-splattering death at the hands of a psycho maniac wielding a chainsaw, gun, or other phallic weapon.

Meanwhile, the women who lived to tell the tale—Clarice (Jodie Foster) in Silence of the Lambs, Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) in Halloween, Ellen (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien—didn’t lead with femininity or embrace their sexuality. Now, scream queens are hotter than ever, having lots of fictional sex, and directing the movie they star in.

Jack Halberstam, professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University, says women leads don't have to be masculine in order to be credible predators in modern horror movies. “These films want to depict horror as coming from a place of femininity," he explains, citing Goth, Ortega, and Nyong'o as prime examples.

Stevenson turned the horror genre on its head by showcasing a range of emotions that women are told are unbecoming. In The First Omen, Margaret, a nun who quite literally gives birth to the devil, experiences all the characteristics “we are not allowed to feel as women”—clumsiness, simmering sexuality, and “mucus-spewing ferality.” The best part? Margaret lives in the end.

"It's taking the scream queen as a victim, and it becomes like war cries instead of screams of fear. - Arkasha Stevenson, writer and director of The First Omen"

In Maxxxine, Maxine flips the script, too, by commanding a man who corners her in an alley to strip naked, lay face down on the pavement, and suck on the barrel of her handgun, before stomping on his testicles with her white pointed-toe stiletto. In French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat’s debut Revenge, lead Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz attacks her rapist while he’s naked in the shower, Psycho style.

“I couldn’t think of a better twist than for horror films to become a strong feminist expression,” Fargeat says. “Women directors do reinvent horror by putting their own traumas, fears, and relationship to their body and to society in general in those films.”

Fargeat does this again in her provocative body horror film The Substance, in which recently-fired aerobics show star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) uses a black market drug that temporarily creates a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” version of herself (Margaret Qualley)??—with horrifying side effects. "I wanted to make the inside violence that [women] are dealing with blow up in the face of everyone to say: Wake up! Look at what you are doing to us!” Fargeat says.

Zo? Kravitz underscores these themes in her twisted directorial debut Blink Twice, which, despite being categorized as a thriller, reads like a horror picture. In the film, a group of women (Naomi Ackie, Adria Arjona, Liz Caribel, Trew Mullen, and Alia Shawkat) are whisked away to a private island where everything seems fine on the surface but horrible atrocities are happening just below it, prompting them to take vengeance in their own ways.

“We are just at the very beginning of these topics being shyly allowed to have an existence in the public space,” Fargeat says. “We have to put [female rage] in their face so they can realize that it’s here! It’s still a huge fight to get those topics on screen and to allow them to become something that is discussed, analyzed, and hopefully understood properly.”

Halberstam says that with most horror films of the ‘80s and ‘90s, “It was hard to imagine female rage as anything more than a kind of exclamation point at the end of the film," such as when Vanita “Stretch” Brock (Caroline Williams) finally picks up the chainsaw in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 after being terrorized by Chop Top in an amusement park. He adds that depictions of female rage began to change with movies like Silence of the Lambs, where the female victim turns the tables on the predator and defends herself.

In recent years, the genre has moved into an epoch “showing women not just as defending themselves from rape or other forms of savagery, but actively pushing back on a system,” Halberstam explains. “The system that was terrorizing women in slasher films was very clearly patriarchy. It was a representation of the way in which all day, every day, the female body comes under certain forms of scrutiny and attack. To turn the tables on that…that's very powerful.”

Halberstam says horror is further evolving into a sophisticated, psychological “artistic canvas,” where women lead the narrative. “Why is it that people want to hold onto the horror genre as a genre in which men victimize women? Why is it a thriller when it's the woman who's going on the rampage? Why can't the woman be the author of horror?” Halberstam posits. “One answer could be that we still live in a male-dominated world, and therefore there is no system that terrorizes men in the same way.”

Even as the genre has become more cultivated, horror has narrowly received recognition. A horror movie hasn’t won the Oscar for Best Picture since 1992 with Silence of the Lambs, which is one of six horror movies nominated for the category in the awards show’s 96-year history.

Kelly says it’s about time high art horror films get their flowers and the same respect as any other big picture: “There’s no differentiation whether it’s horror, whether it’s comedy, whether it’s a big sweeping Oppenheimer-type movie. It’s great, watchable actors who you believe are going through this.”

Today’s leading ladies of horror signal a culture shift. Although these frontwomen make being the deviant villain or taking nasty retribution look easy and seductive, Stevenson views them as soldiers. Their characters have women shouting, “‘Fuck yes, go girl!” at every kill, instead of grasping onto their crush’s bicep with each jump scare.

“It's taking the scream queen as a victim, and it becomes like war cries instead of screams of fear,” Stevenson says. “I really start crying when I hear women screaming on screen, so to take that feeling and get excited by hearing a woman scream is a very new thing. It's very empowering.”

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