Seven days of IndieWire's Scream Queens!

Welcome to IndieWire's Seven Days of Scream Queens! October flies by faster than Mary Sanderson on a vacuum cleaner, so we're taking a beating to honor the impact women and queer people have had on the horror genre since its inception.

“Scream queen” is an infuriatingly nebulous term with fairly simple origins. The phrase was popularized among casting directors after Fay Wray's iconic performance in 1933's 'King Kong' and would be used for decades to describe genre actresses from Janet Leigh in 1960s 'Psycho' to her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis in 1978's "Halloween" and Beyond. These days it gets mixed up with some frequency, used interchangeably - and incorrectly - with the term "last girl": the last character (most often played by women, but they can be of any gender expression!) Alive in a slasher movie.

The scream queens, it seems to us, are more than that.

Femininity and expressions of femininity have left an indelible impact on the horror genre: the helpless domesticity of 'Rosemary's Baby' as sharp and painful as the sadomasochistic instruments of torture of Pinhead in 'Hellraiser'. The horrors women face may be uniquely cinematic, and the temptation to mix beauty and blood is too tempting for most filmmakers. In 2022 – a time when the future of horror has never looked so dreadful while the future of women is historically and terribly unstable – motherhood, sexual security, autonomy, freedom and womanhood appear as the prophesied next steps in the ever-changing cinematic space. .

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Over the next week, we're going to get poetic by candlelight about the true meaning of the trope; unearth feminist favorites like "Teeth" from their nostalgic crypts; choose the brains of scream queens on screens big and small, from Cassandra Peterson to Leslie Grossman; listen to horror favorites from over a dozen horror filmmakers and actresses who emailed us ahead of Halloween; celebrate the final (???) triumphant chapter of David Gordon Green's "Halloween" trilogy; and more.

Good haunting, ghoul friend.

SUNDAY

9am ET: What is a Scream Queen?

3:00 p.m. ET: 25 of the most memorable girls in Horror History's finale

MONDAY