Our 24 Favorite Scream Queens in Horror Movie History

There are a lot of different ways to make a horror movie, but many pillars of the genre rely on a fairly familiar concept: a "final girl," or what might otherwise be called a "scream queen." A scream queen can be many things, but we tend to think of it in terms of someone who can be easily identified with an unforgettable, one-of-a-kind horror movie performance. Most of the time that's the main character, but in some cases it might be a side character, or even a cameo. As Urban Dictionary defines the term, a scream queen is "a female star of a horror film; so named because she spends a lot of time screaming."

And as die-hard and casual fans of the genre know, horror movies are eternal. The good ones from the '60s and '70s can hold up just as well as something from 2020 or 2021. If it ever seems sometimes like some of these movies are made with a formula in mind, well, just know that it's a formula that tends to work. That's why we wanted to come up with a list of our top scream queens of all time.

When it comes to this list, there's some important things we want to point out—this list is looking for the performers in the horror movies that had the single greatest per-capita, per-movie impact. Some of the entries on this list have been in multiple horror movies, sometimes it's only one, but one that made a huge impact. We're sort of looking at this list as a hypothetical—based on what we've seen, who would we most want to star in our horror movie?

And while this list can always change, we've seen enough to have a pretty good idea who the standouts are. Without further ado: