Scream Queens

Reece Shearsmith's Hall of Horror

1925. Mary Philbin plays a silent scream queen opposite Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera

1931. Helen Chandler and Francis Dade fall under the spell of Bela Lugosi's Transylvanian count in Tod Browning's version of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

1931. Mae Clarke is terrorized on her wedding day by Boris Karloff's Frankenstein monster in James Whale's version of the story. The gentlemanly Boris waggles his fingers offscreen so Mae won't be too frightened by his make-up.

1933. Zita Johann plays a reincarnated Egyptian princess to whom Boris Karloff takes a shine in The Mummy. In real life Zita is a fervent believer in reincarnation.

1935. Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley and the bride of the monster in the most delightful horror sequel ever made -- Bride of Frankenstein.

1936. London-born Gloria Holden gives a mesmerizing performance in Dracula's Daughter, though she doesn’t think much of the role.

1941. In The Wolf Man Marya Ouspenskaya warns Lon Chaney Junior of the perils of lycanthropy but he gets bitten anyway.

1942. Simone Simon plays Irena, the victim of an hereditary curse in the Val Lewton classic Cat People.

1945. Sally Ann Howes encounters a ghostly child and Googie Withers buys a haunted mirror in the Ealing Studios masterpiece Dead of Night.

1956. Lovely Hazel Court marries Peter Cushing's Baron Frankenstein, but he prefers to spend all his spare time in his laboratory stitching corpses together.

1958. The British censor grows nervous over Melissa Stribling and Carol Marsh falling victim to Christopher Lee's Dracula appearing in their bedrooms.

1958. Kim Novak returns from the dead in Hitchcock's Vertigo, a story which owes more than a little to Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher”.

1960. In Psycho Janet Leigh as Marion Crane steals 40,000 dollars and takes a shower in the Bates Motel. She doesn't live long enough to regret it.

1960. Myrna Fahey climbs out of her coffin in Roger Corman’s version of “The Fall of the House of Usher”.

1961. Deborah Kerr is the governess haunted -- or is she¬? -- by malign spectres in The Innocents, Jack Clayton’s spellbinding version of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw”.

1963. It's banging at the door, demanding to come in . . . Claire Bloom and Julie Harris confront spectral goings-on in The Haunting, based on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

1963. Tippi Hedren plays a Hitchcock blonde attacked by our feathered friends in The Birds.

1967. Barbara Shelley communes with five-million-year-old Martians in Quatermass and the Pit.

1968. Niké Arrighi plays the beautiful Tanith, the plaything of the occultist Mocata in The Devil Rides Out, from Dennis Wheatley’s book.

1970. Ingrid Pitt sinks her fangs into Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampire yarn “Carmilla”, filmed as The Vampire Lovers.

1971.Another meaty vampiric role for Ingrid Pitt as Countess Dracula.

1973. In The Exorcist Linda Blair’s Regan MacNeil hears rats scuttling in the attic, but the noises turn out not to be rats. Levitation, projectile vomiting, murder and appalling language ensue.

1974. In The Wicker Man Edward Woodward’s virginal police sergeant is ensnared on Summerisle by Britt Ekland, Diane Cilento and Ingrid Pitt. There are worse ways to go.

1976. Nastassja Kinski gets tangled up with satanists in To the Devil . . . a Daughter, from Dennis Wheatley’s chiller.

1976 If you haven’t got a taste for terror then don’t take Sissy Spacek's Carrie to the Prom

1978. Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of the aforementioned Janet Leigh, comes up against a knife-wielding psycho of her own in Halloween.

1980. “Here’s Johnny” and there goes Shelley Duvall running for her life around the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.

1984. If Heather Langenkamp doesn’t wake up screaming she won’t wake up at all in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

1996. Don't Answer The Phone. Don't Open The Door. Don't Try To Escape. That's good advice for Neve Campbell in Scream.

1999. Heather Donahue films herself apologizing to the co-producers of her Blair Witch Project, believing that something terrible is hunting her and her friends

2001.In The Others Nicole Kidman plays the mother of two light-sensitive children living in a haunted house on post-war Jersey.

2002. Naomi Watts watches a mysterious cursed videotape in The Ring.

2004 In The Grudge, Sarah Michelle Gellar discovers that It never forgives and it never forgets – where’s Buffy when you need her?

2005. At last, girls get their own horror movie. In The Descent a group of female potholers encounter the hideous underground Crawlers.

2007. What happens when Katie Featherston sleeps? She’s disturbed by a nightly demonic presence in Paranormal Activity.

2012. Hammer rises from the grave with The Woman in Black.

Compiled by Roger Dobson