Seek out anyone’s short list of the greatest screamers in horror movie history and you’ll bump into the wide-mouthed likes of Fay Wray in King Kong (1933), Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960) and Marilyn Burns in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)… and who could argue with those choices?  Those screamers are more than just damsels-in-distress… the manifestation of their mortal terror is emblematic for us as moviegoers and as heirs to a legacy of dark-themed folklore and cautionary tales going back beyond The Brothers Grimm.  I won’t contest the classic status of those screamers but I would like to honor my own choices, my dark horse candidates… lesser voices that nonetheless particularize their terror in a way that continues to haunt me and make me think long after the nightmare is over. In no particular order… 

This young abductee (played by Juliette Mayniel) from Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1960) has just come face-to-faceless with Edith Scob’s tragic, disfigured heroine… and while she probably doesn’t realize that her own face is about to be cut from her head to be used to resurface Scob’s mutilated mug, there’s still plenty to scream about… and she does!  I love the way she rises into the camera as if she’s about to swallow it.

In the “Drop of Water” vignette from Mario Bava’s terror triptych I tre volti della paura (Black Sabbath, 1963), Jackqueline Pierreux plays a provincial woman hired to sit watch by the body of a dead medium.  Short story shorter, she steals the dead woman’s ring and then spends the rest of this creepy little chamber piece paying for it in full on throaty terror.  

It would be crass to call Ellen Burstyn a scream queen based on her performance in The Exorcist (1973) but she certainly does put in the hours.  What makes Burstyn’s response to horror so indelible, so scarring, is the context of standing alongside a mother as her only child turns into something unrecognizably horrific.  In this particular moment, Chris McNeil has witnessed the unbelievable bordering on the unendurable and her scream seems to open up an escape hatch into blessed unconsciousness.  This reaction really does live up to that great line from the silent Phantom of the Opera:  “Feast your eyes, glut your soul, on my accursed ugliness.” 

I might have first seen this image in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, well before I ever saw The Monster That Challenged the World (1957), and it stuck with me.  There’s something very non-Hollywood about this reaction to seeing (he does, we don’t) the title critter, which doesn’t go the way of a booming man-scream but short bursts of incredulous air, as if this poor bastard’s brain can’t even fully compute what he’s looking it.  It’s an interesting choice and it really does make you wonder (I mean, if you haven’t seen the poster, which pretty much spells it all out for you) what this damn thing is going to look like. 

Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) isn’t a horror movie but it is arguably science fiction.  Anyway, Cloris Leachman appears at the top of the film, flagging down Ralph Meeker’s surly Mike Hammer.  Nude under a trenchcoat, she’s brilliant in a short scene where Hammer drives her to safety, getting his goat and his number before the villains force their car off the road.  Hammer comes to later and sees the woman’s legs hanging as she is tortured.  I don’t know if it’s actually Leachman dubbing her own screams but the scene is nightmarish, like something out of Open City (1945).  While nongraphic, the killing of Leachman’s character really propels the rest of the film.  Even at the fadeout, you haven’t forgotten the sad and horrible fate of this unfortunate woman. 

I don’t believe the performer pictured above is credited for her work in Jigoku (1960), Nobuo Nakagawa’s nightmarish depiction of a graduate student’s descent into madness in the aftermath of a hit-and-run accident.  The movie concludes with an overwhelming depiction of the Underworld, of which this image is one of the tamer manifestations. 

That director Jacques Tourneur denies us a view of what happens to Teresa Delgado (Margaret Landry) at this classic moment of the Val Lewton-produced The Leopard Man (1943) only intensifies the horror of the scene.  As Teresa begs to be let back into the house, her mother scolds her for being a scaredy cat and in so doing dooms her oldest child to a horrific death.  Teresa’s screams are simply unforgettable and her final words – “If you love me, open the door” – are heartbreaking.  I’ve never wanted so much to jump into a movie and save a character’s life.

A decade before Poltergeist (1982), Craig T. Nelson found something to scream about when he fell victim to the vampire’s bite in The Return of Count Yorga (1971).  He plays an LAPD detective who stumbles into Yorga’s lair with no particular belief in the supernatural… and pays dearly for it.  Nelson’s reaction is just so perfectly in proportion to this macho meathead, as if he’s pouring all of his might into the ultimate expression of his helplessness. 

In Gary Sherman’s Deathline (US: Raw Meat, 1972), Sharon Gurney plays a British university student who, along with American boyfriend David Ladd, stumbles upon a cannibalistic man, the descendant of diggers trapped by a cave-in during the last century, living deep within London’s Underground.  Abducted by this loathsome creature (whose only words are a maddening repetition of the phrase “Mind the doors!”), she herself devolves from an intelligent and resourceful modern woman into a living, breathing personification of a Primal Scream… she has no intelligible dialogue for the last twenty minutes of the movie, which speaks volumes about our tenuous grip on civilization.  

Edward Woodward isn’t a typical victim in The Wicker Man (1973) but victim he is.  He goes to his doom with more than a few things to say to his captors/tormentors/killers and his anguish in his final moments is commanding stuff.  I’ve never heard a dying man proclaim “Jesus Christ!” with so much conviction in all my life. 

As the 2 quid hooker of MIchael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), Brenda Bruce is introduced from the protagonist/killer’s POV, a perspective that doesn’t change through her subsequent murder but is complicated by the placement of a movie camera between the characters.  What follows implicates the viewer in the act of homicide so long as the viewer continues to watch… and watch he (or she) does through to the bitter end.  Bruce’s scream is pretty good from a technical standpoint but adding to her terror is the kink of the camera… and the understanding that it’ll never be just murder anymore, that as a culture we’re through the looking glass and mesmerized by the playback of our own destruction.

Jose Larraz pulls a nasty little trick out of his horror hat for the final moments of Vampyres (1974) by having its ostensible heroine (Sally Faulkner), characterized throughout as being curious, artistic and investigative (if a little middle class and dull) subjected to one of the cruelest and most savage attacks I’ve ever seen.  It’s not that the murder is particularly graphic (it’s pretty demure as throat slittings go) but that the encounter is captured with such frenzy and unrelenting despair on the part of the victim, who is not even articulate enough to beg for her life.  Whenever I return to this scene I invariably find myself holding my breath from the sheer monstrousness of it all.   

I think the death of Faye Daniels (Francesca Ciardi) in Cannibal Holocause (1980) just might be the most supremely upsetting onscreen death I’ve ever watched.  Mind you, the character is not so nice… she condones cruelty, rape and even murder for the sake of her film project and protests against the sexual violation of an Amazonian village girl only because it’s a waste of film.  She’s pretty vile, if no more so than her male companions, and yet her comeuppance at the hands of the same jungle natives is disturbing in the extreme.  It must have been hell for the actress to film this, as the extras certainly aren’t treating her with kid gloves, and it shows.  I don’t know if director Ruggero Deodato is to be commended for capturing on film what seems to be the ultimate brutality or if he should be beaten with an ugly stick.  Maybe a little of both.  And speaking of Cannibal Holocaust… 

 … The Blair Witch Project (1999) availed itself of the earlier film’s biggest trick, the conceit of the discovery of found footage (a narrative torch carried forward to this day by such films as Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead and [REC]) following the disappearance of several young people (in this case, documentarians stamping the Maryland backwoods).  Yet for all it borrows, The Blair Witch Project gives back plenty more, including a commanding central performance by Heather Donahue as an A Type overachiever who is ultimately hoist on the petard of her own hubris.  (Go ahead, quote me.)  Donahue took a barracking on the Internet and in subsequent spoofs of the film for her openly emotional performance but it’s one of the most startlingly naked portrayals of fear and despair in the history of cinema (let along horror films).  With brine pouring from her nostrils and screaming in a high pitch that makes your throat raw to hear it, Donahue deserves her place in the screamer’s pantheon for the humanity she brought to what could easily have been just another victim.