Scream Queens: Top Ten List Includes Unexpected Choices (original) (raw)

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Top Ten Scream Queens: Barbara Steele, who both emitted screams and elicited same, is in a category of her own.

Top Ten Scream Queens

Halloween is over until next year, but the equally bewitching Day of the Dead is just around the corner. So, dead or alive, here’s my revised and expanded list of cinema’s Top Ten Scream Queens.

This highly personal Scream Queens compilation is based on how memorable – as opposed to how loud or how frequent – were the screams. That’s the key reason you won’t find listed below actresses featured in gory slasher films. After all, in such movies the screams feel as hollow as the plots and the characters themselves.

You also won’t find any screaming guys – i.e., Scream Kings – on the list below even though I’ve got absolutely nothing against guys who scream in horror, whether in movies or in life.

There are no Scream Kings on my list simply because the vast majority of movie heroes (and antiheroes) suffer from emotional constipation. They’re too cowardly and/or uptight to demonstrate those qualities that help to make human beings human.

Their loss – and really, ours as well, in case we’re stupid enough to take those castrated psyches as something to be admired and/or emulated.

Women, on the other hand, have usually been allowed to let it all out. So here they are, my Top Ten Scream Queens.

Below: Top Ten Scream Queens: Mary Philbin in ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ (1925), silently shrieking after unmasking a horribly deformed Lon Chaney in the title role.

10. Mary Philbin in ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ (1925)

Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera is a silent film. That means top Universal star Mary Philbin’s piercing scream after she unmasks The Phantom (Lon Chaney) is nowhere to be heard. All the same, it worked beautifully – or rather, creepily, even though the film generally available after the advent of talking pictures is not the same one that thrilled U.S. audiences back in 1925.

In the last eight decades or so, available prints of The Phantom of the Opera have been either poor, choppy transfers of the 1925 film, or copies from a negative created for the George Eastman House in 1952, featuring elements from one of two reissues released at the dawn of the sound era. From here on, the story here gets a bit complicated, with different explanations for the different versions of the film.

Until recently, the most commonly available version of The Phantom of the Opera 1925 was apparently created from the print sent to international markets, shot by a camera placed next to the one filming the domestic version. (That was a not uncommon procedure during the silent era.)

The now mostly lost reissue print – which featured dialogue sequences (except for Lon Chaney, by then in ill health and an MGM contract star) – included scenes and characters not found in the original domestic cut.’

‘The Phantom of the Opera’ 1925 on Blu-ray

Besides Mary Philbin and Lon Chaney, who died of cancer in 1930 after making only one sound film (a remake of his own silent hit The Unholy Three), the 1925 The Phantom of the Opera also features popular silent era leading man Norman Kerry as Philbin’s love interest, the Vicomte Raoul de Chagny.

Kino Lorber released a special The Phantom of the Opera Blu-ray in Sept. 2015, featuring “the 1929 theatrical version” and “the original 1925 cut,” in addition to “rare, lengthy excerpts of the partially-lost 1930 sound re-issue version.”

Hollywood horror story

Although devoid of Scream Queens, here is a true horror story. Keep it in mind next time you hear the usual b.s. about Old Hollywood moguls as “businessmen with a passion for movies.”

In 1948, a difficult year for the major studios – what with fast-rising competition from television and the U.S. government forcing them to chop off their exhibition arm – the powers-that-be at Universal Pictures ordered the destruction of the extant nitrate prints of all but a handful of their silent films.

Why? Because the films themselves – starring by then long-forgotten names such as Priscilla Dean, Marie Prevost, Frank Mayo, Laura La Plante, Reginald Denny, and The Phantom of the Opera 1925 actress Mary Philbin – had no financial value, but their nickel silver content did. Also, safety vaults for nitrate prints are costly.

Coincidentally, Universal is the studio – now part of the NBCUniversal conglomerate – that to this day makes it incredibly difficult for anyone to have access to their (and Paramount Pictures’)* old movie library.

* Universal owns the rights to most of the Paramount films from the dawn of the talkie era to 1948.

Top Ten Scream Queens: Patricia Owens in ‘The Fly,’ cries in horror while staring at her new but hardly improved husband for the first time. Shades of the Edvard Munch painting The Scream.

9. Patricia Owens in ‘The Fly’ (1958)

In Kurt Neumann’s 1958 version of The Fly, Patricia Owens – hands to face just like Edvard Munch’s The Scream subject – lets out a mad, seemingly endless holler in the film’s climactic moment, which was clearly inspired by the Mary Philbin-Lon Chaney to-do in the 1925 The Phantom of the Opera.

Don’t blame her. Wouldn’t you also scream your head off if you saw a fly named Andre – who also happens to be your husband – coming straight at you?

Besides Scream Queen Patricia Owens’ vocal prowess, what makes this scene indelible is Neumann’s camera, which allows us to witness Owens howling in horror through the compound eyes of the giant fly head itself. In other words, the screen is split into multiple areas, each featuring a close-up of the bellowing fly-wife.

David Hedison (later one of the stars of the long-running 1960s TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) plays the unlucky Andre, a scientist who accidentally swaps heads with a buzzing fly. Veterans Herbert Marshall and Vincent Price round out the cast.

Perhaps due to its very unpretentiousness, I find this 1950s B movie more engrossing than David Cronenberg’s darker, more complex 1986 remake starring Jeff Goldblum as the scientist and Geena Davis as his love interest.

Top Ten Scream Queens: ‘Jaws’ first victim Susan Backlinie is the movies’ greatest unheralded Scream Queen.

8. Susan Backlinie in ‘Jaws’ (1975)

Few people know the name of the naked young woman who becomes shark breakfast at the beginning of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 summer blockbuster Jaws.

On the other hand, just about everyone is familiar with her moment of screen glory, which is far more memorable than the segments featuring nominal leads Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw (who becomes shark dinner later on), and Richard Dreyfuss.

Unheralded Scream Queen Susan Backlinie didn’t have much of a movie career – a mere seven appearances, as per the IMDb, including a bit in Spielberg’s 1979 critical and box office flop 1941. Yet thanks to her protracted death scene in Jaws, Backlinie’s place in film history is assured.

Note: Denise Cheshire played the tasty white shark meal in some of the swimming sequences.

Top Ten Scream Queens: Rape victim Jane Wyman in ‘Johnny Belinda’ with Stephen McNally. In early 1949, Wyman became the talkie era’s first ’silent’ Oscar-winning Best Actress.

7. Jane Wyman in ‘Johnny Belinda’ (1948)

Johnny Belinda isn’t a silent movie, but Jane Wyman’s screaming as she gets raped by Stephen McNally was all in my head. In Jean Negulesco’s effective psychological drama, the eventual Best Actress Academy Award winner plays a young, deaf-mute small-town woman who becomes a victim of the local psycho.

A surprising box office hit at the time of its release, Johnny Belinda consolidated Jane Wyman’s stardom after more than a decade in Hollywood, having risen from bit player in the mid-’30s (King of Burlesque, My Man Godfrey) to leading lady in the mid-’40s (The Lost Weekend; The Yearling, which earned her a Best Actress Oscar nomination).

Besides Jane Wyman and Stephen McNally, the Johnny Belinda cast features Oscar nominees Lew Ayres, Charles Bickford, and Agnes Moorehead, in addition to future Best Supporting Actress nominee Jan Sterling (The High and the Mighty, 1954).

‘Silent’ Best Actress Oscar winners

Note: Jane Wyman was the first – all or nearly all – “silent” Best Actress Oscar winner during the talkie era. Almost four decades later, she would be followed by Marlee Matlin (Children of a Lesser God, 1986) and later on by Holly Hunter (The Piano, 1993).

Janet Gaynor remains the only Best Actress Academy Award winner in a silent movie – or rather, silent movies. Gaynor won for three films released during the 1927–28 period: 7th Heaven, Sunrise, and Street Angel.

Top Ten Scream Queens Julie Harris and Claire Bloom in ‘The Haunting’: Knock, knock. Who’s there? Evil forces and some lesbian interest.

6. Julie Harris and Claire Bloom in ‘The Haunting’ (1963)

I first saw Robert Wise’s sex-themed horror classic The Haunting on television, when I was a little kid. I had nightmares for weeks.

What am I saying? I’ve been traumatized for life. Every time I see a locked (or even an unlocked) Gothic door I wonder if some powerful, evil force is awaiting me on the other side – like the one out to get terrified Julie Harris and roommates Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, and Russ Tamblyn in Wise’s haunted house creepfest.

And to think that another sex-themed classic, Debbie Does Dallas, wouldn’t have been acceptable for me to watch on television – or anywhere else, for that matter – because of its graphic copulation scenes. Yet I have no doubt that Dallas’ Debbie and her sexually liberated pals would never have made such a strongly negative impact on my young and impressionable psyche.

I should add that Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), starring Deborah Kerr as a sexually repressed Christian governess who sees ghosts (and sex) everywhere she turns, didn’t help matters any.

Kerr isn’t included on this Top Ten Scream Queens list simply because her sex-starved governess is so uptight that her shrieking, much like her libido, is wholly internalized.

Top Ten Scream Queens: Janet Leigh ‘Psycho’ shower scene remains one of the best known – and most cleverly edited – sequences in the history of cinema.

5. Janet Leigh in ‘Psycho’ (1960)

I don’t recall myself recoiling in horror while watching Janet Leigh’s iconic shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho – in my humble opinion, one of the most overrated movies ever made – but I do recall quite vividly one night long ago when I was showering at an acquaintance’s place and imagined myself facing the same fate as Leigh’s less-than-principled bank clerk. So I guess that sequence did have a lasting effect.

Until then best known for fluff like Little Women, Confidentially Connie, and Fearless Fagan,† Janet Leigh deservedly earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her Psycho performance. She lost to fellow good girl gone bad Shirley Jones (as a sex worker) in Richard Brooks’ Elmer Gantry.

‘Scream Queens’ TV series actress Jamie Lee Curtis

I should add that about two decades after Psycho, Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis’ daughter Jamie Lee Curtis became Hollywood’s unofficial Scream Queen thanks to a series of mostly low-grade slasher flicks:

• John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and The Fog (1980), the latter also featuring Leigh in a supporting role.
• Paul Lynch’s Prom Night (1980), with Leslie Nielsen.
• Roger Spottiswoode’s Terror Train (1980), with Ben Johnson.
• Rick Rosenthal’s Halloween II (1981), co-written by John Carpenter.

Unsurprisingly, Jamie Lee Curtis is one of the stars of the Fox series Scream Queens, also featuring Emma Roberts, Lea Michele, Keke Palmer, Abigail Breslin, Niecy Nash, and Glen Powell.

Not too long ago, a Like Mother, Like Daughter picture was released showing Curtis screaming in the shower while holding a photo of her mother screaming in the shower in Psycho.

The article linked to in the paragraph above also includes a handful of images from a Vanity Fair photographic essay featuring Marion Cotillard in an homage to Janet Leigh and the Alfred Hitchcock horror thriller.

‘Psycho’ cast, sequels & remake

Besides Scream Queen Janet Leigh, the Psycho 1960 cast consists of Anthony Perkins in the title role, in addition to Vera Miles, John Gavin, and Martin Balsam.

A 1998 remake starring Anne Heche in the old Janet Leigh role, plus Julianne Moore, Vince Vaughn, and Viggo Mortensen was a critical and commercial bomb.

There were also three Psycho sequels, all starring Anthony Perkins, none of which well received and now all but forgotten: Psycho II (1983; basically a rip-off of the 1964 Joan Crawford B thriller Strait-Jacket), Psycho III (1986), and Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990).

† Released in 1958, Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil presented an unsuspected Janet Leigh; one quite unlike her peaches-and-cream heroine of the previous years.

Below: Scream Queen Emeritus Fay Wray screams, faints and screams some more in ‘King Kong.’

4. Fay Wray in ‘King Kong,’ ‘Doctor X’ & ‘Mystery of the Wax Museum’

To Fay Wray belongs the title of Hollywood’s Scream Queen Emeritus chiefly thanks to a giant ape with a healthy appetite for young, good-looking, curvaceous blondes.

Wax figures and mad doctors also triggered Wray’s acute stress response – in her particular case, scream and faint – in two Warner Bros. releases, Doctor X (1932) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933).

Although not as effective as Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 blockbuster King Kong, Michael Curtiz’s Doctor X and Mystery of the Wax Museum should be more widely known. As usual, Fay Wray is thoroughly convincing as both screamer and fainter in these two early two-color horror movies co-starring the ever untrustworthy Lionel Atwill.

More than a Scream Queen

Indeed, screaming and fainting – or at the very least looking breathlessly distressed – would seem to be pretty much all Fay Wray did throughout the ’30s, in films such as The Clairvoyant, Woman in the Dark, The Vampire Bat, Black Moon, and Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel’s The Most Dangerous Game – in which bloodthirsty hunter Leslie Banks does exactly what so many bloodthirsty hunters the world over can only dream of doing: he hunts “the most dangerous game,” i.e., other human beings.

In truth, however, Fay Wray was much more than a Scream Queen. To label her a “horror movie heroine” would be doing an injustice to her range as an actress during that time.

Invariably sincere in her performances, no matter how nondescript the role or movie, Wray is excellent in Gregory La Cava’s 1934 comedy The Affairs of Cellini and holds her own opposite Miriam Hopkins – no easy task – in another 1934 release, William A. Seiter’s The Richest Girl in the World.

Top Ten Scream Queen Edwige Fenech vs. a mysterious pursuer & kinky sex in the Italian giallo ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh’: Making Alfred Hitchcock movies look like child’s play.

3. Edwige Fenech in ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh’ (1972)

Here’s an ideal entry for any Day of the Dead or Halloween Movie Series: A mix of kinky sex, suspense thriller, and more kinky sex, Sergio Martino’s giallo The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (a.k.a. Blade of the Ripper / The Next Victim!) makes most Alfred Hitchcock movies – including the revered Psycho, Vertigo, and Rear Window – feel as thrilling, complex, and “perverse” as a Mickey Mouse cartoon.

The scene in which the stunningly gorgeous Edwige Fenech is caught off guard after waking from a long slumber made me not only jump but also scream louder than she did.

Besides Edwige Fenech, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh cast includes George Hilton and Alberto de Mendoza.

Top Ten Scream Queens #2 Barbara Stanwyck in ‘Sorry Wrong Number,’ for which she received her fourth and final Best Actress Academy Award nomination – and for which she should have taken home that year’s Oscar statuette.

2. Barbara Stanwyck in ‘Sorry Wrong Number’ (1948)

Every plot hole in Anatole Litvak’s mix of melodrama and film noir is forgiven as a result of Barbara Stanwyck’s unsettling performance as Burt Lancaster’s shrewish invalid wife who believes there’s someone out there who wants to kill her.

Thanks to Stanwyck, one of the greatest film actresses ever, and to her vocal stamina, the last few moments in Sorry Wrong Number are some of the most disturbing ever recorded on film.

For her efforts, Barbara Stanwyck received her fourth and final Best Actress Academy Award nomination. Although Jane Wyman was excellent in Johnny Belinda (see Top Ten Scream Queens no. 7), that particular 1948 Oscar statuette should have gone to the veteran Stanwyck (Ladies of Leisure, 1930; The Bitter Tea of General Yen, 1933).

For the record, Barbara Stanwyck’s previous Oscar-nominated performances were for:

• King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937).
  Winner: Luise Rainer in The Good Earth.
• Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire (1941).
  Winner: Joan Fontaine in Suspicion.
• Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944).
  Winner: Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight.

Stanwyck finally took home an Oscar statuette – an Honorary Award for her career – at the 1982 ceremony.

Below: Top Ten Scream Queens #1 pick: Lee Patrick (with Bette Davis) in ‘The Sisters,’ letting out a piercing scream during the cataclysmic 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

1. Lee Patrick in ‘The Sisters’ (1938)

Another Anatole Litvak effort, The Sisters is sheer – but highly watchable – melodrama, what with Bette Davis (instead of the originally announced Kay Francis) and Errol Flynn meeting and parting ways, not to mention all the emotional travails faced by Davis’ siblings Anita Louise (instead of Miriam Hopkins) and Jane Bryan.

Apart from all the personal drama, one particular sequence in The Sisters stands out. That’s when the ground starts to violently shake in San Francisco (it’s the morning of April 18, 1906). The special effects are remarkable, but what makes this disaster scene unforgettable is, gasp!, a performance.

Neighbor Lee Patrick, best known for her wisecracking assistant to Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade in the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon, comes running into Bette Davis’ crumbling apartment. While clinging on to Davis, Patrick lets out a blood-curdling cry the likes of which I’ve never heard elsewhere on film – and that I hope I’ll never hear in life.

The lonely earthquake

In Mother Goddam, Bette Davis biographer Whitney Stine wrote that Lee Patrick, as reported in a 1972 _Los Angeles Times_’ West magazine article, “appeared surprised that Davis had called her autobiography The Lonely Life, but went on with the opinion that those featured players who worked with Davis during those early years thought that she never knew they existed.”

According to Stine, Patrick added that “although she appeared in the earthquake sequence in The Sisters with her, Davis gave the impression in her book that she had appeared in the scene by herself.”

Alongside Stine’s narrative, Mother Goddam is peppered with comments by Bette Davis herself. This is what she had to say about Patrick’s remark:

Not until I read this book of Mr. Stine’s did I ever know of Lee Patrick’s feelings about me. Dear Lee: You and I worked together many times. I always felt you were one of our very best actresses and therefore felt very fortunate when you were in a film of mine. Quite the contrary, the record shows how very many times I fought for featured players not only to be cast with me because they were good actors but stood up for them when difficulties arose during shooting. If I failed to mention your name in connection with the earthquake sequence in my book The Lonely Life, it was an unintentional oversight. I offer my apology. You certainly suffered through it with me!

Anyhow, it’s understandable that, while reading Bette Davis’ autobiography, Lee Patrick would have been less than pleased to find herself erased from _The Sisters_’ sensational climax, especially considering that Patrick steals the San Francisco earthquake scene not only from Davis but from the earthquake itself.

Lee Patrick: Actress best remembered as Sam Spade’s no-nonsense secretary in John Huston’s ‘The Maltese Falcon.’

Top Scream Queen Lee Patrick movies with Bette Davis

For the record, Lee Patrick and Bette Davis didn’t exactly work “many times together.” Besides The Sisters, they were seen in two 1942 Warner Bros. releases:

• John Huston’s In This Our Life.
  Also in the cast: Olivia de Havilland. George Brent. Dennis Morgan. Charles Coburn. Billie Burke. Hattie McDaniel.
• Irving Rapper’s Now Voyager.
  Also in the cast: Paul Henreid. Claude Rains. Gladys Cooper. Bonita Granville. John Loder. Ilka Chase.

During the course of her acting career, the New York City-born Lee Patrick (Nov. 22, 1901) was seen in about 70 films (e.g., Music for Madame, Saturday’s Children, Kisses for Breakfast), 40 television shows (e.g., Kings Row, The Untouchables), and two dozen plays (e.g., Blessed Event, Stage Door).

Patrick’s less frequent film credits from 1950 onwards include:

• John Cromwell’s women’s prison drama Caged (1950), starring Eleanor Parker.
• Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Vertigo (1958), starring James Stewart and Kim Novak.
• Her final film, David Giler’s The Black Bird (1975), a comic reboot of The Maltese Falcon, toplining George Segal and Stéphane Audran.

Lee Patrick died in the Southern California resort town of Laguna Beach on Nov. 26, 1982, four days after her 81st birthday.

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Universal’s systematic destruction of its silent films: Via Michael Binder’s A Light Affliction: a History of Film Preservation and Restoration.

Silent Scream Queen Mary Philbin and Lon Chaney The Phantom of the Opera unmasking sequence: Universal Pictures.

Giallo Scream Queen Edwige Fenech The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh / Blade of the Ripper image: Devon Film.

Scream Queen Emeritus Fay Wray King Kong image: RKO Pictures.

Scream Inducer Barbara Steele Black Sunday / The Mask of Satan / Mask of the Demon image: Galatea-Jolly Film.

Film Noir Scream Queen Barbara Stanwyck Sorry Wrong Number image: Paramount Pictures.

B Horror/Sci-Fi Scream Queen Patricia Owens The Fly image: 20th Century Fox, via the From Midnight, with Love blog.

Showering Scream Queen Janet Leigh Psycho scream image: Paramount Pictures, via Giphy.

Haunted House Scream Queens Julie Harris and Claire Bloom The Haunting image: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Stephen McNally and Soundless Scream Queen Jane Wyman Johnny Belinda image: Warner Bros.

Jaws first victim and Unheralded Scream Queen Susan Backlinie image: Universal Pictures.

Top Scream Queen Lee Patrick and Bette Davis in The Sisters San Francisco earthquake sequence: Warner Bros.