Vote up the coolest queen facts that have you screaming for more!
2022 saw the rise of a new generation of scream queens, from Mia Goth, to Jenna Ortega, to Anya Taylor Joy and more. But as we learned new things about the freshest faces in horror, we also found ourselves looking back to the OGs like Jamie Lee Curtis and Neve Campbell, and finding out they still had a few surprises in store for us as well.
Ironically, quite a few actresses who made their names in horror have also admitted they aren’t particularly fond of the genre. Legendary scream queens Neve Campbell and Jamie Lee Curtis have said they’re typically too freaked out by horror movies to watch them, while other spooky faves like Mia Goth and even Toni Colette have said they’re more drawn to the genre’s characters than to the scary stories surrounding them.
That being said, Ortega breaks the mold. She enjoys watching horror movies just as much as she does acting in them, saying, “I love blood and guts. I love to run for my life.” She even listed her top five horror movies of all time in an interview with Rotten Tomatoes: Prom Night (1980), Insidious (2010), Possession (1981), The Witch (2015), and Persona (1966).
About her dark choices in roles, the actress said, “I think I’ve always kind of been internally drawn to that stuff, so it’s nice that my work is able to reflect that. I would also love the opportunity to be the villain.” A horror movie with Jenna Ortega as the bad guy? Sign us up!
In Alien: Resurrection,Sigourney Weaver actually made the “impossible” behind-the-back, half-court shot. However, the shot was almost ruined when Ron Perlman, as well as most of the cast and crew, started laughing and applauding soon after the take. Luckily, there was enough room for an edit.
Collette specifically picks roles that swerve away from tired stereotypes of mothers. Although she's played a mother several times in films like The Sixth Sense and Little Miss Sunshine, she doesn't see the parts as typecasting because she chooses her roles based on who the character is, not because they do or don’t have children.
Having two children of her own, she likely knows a thing or two about people attempting to make motherhood her identity. While being interviewed about the movie Fun Mom Dinner, Collette had a response for such stereotyping:
In the past, I've done interviews where they just start the interview saying, "So you play a mom," and I'm like, "I play a really f*cking complex human who also has a relationship with a couple of kids she's pushed out."
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was a defining film for horror and the slasher subgenre. It made an indelible mark on the public, as well as - unfortunately - its cast. The film set was reportedly plagued with vomit-inducing odors, an uncomfortable lack of wardrobe changes, and a particularly unpleasant injury for the film’s final girl, Sally Hardesty, played by Marilyn Burns.
During the notorious dinner scene, Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) was meant to slice Sally's finger, and Grandfather (John Dugan) would suck up her blood. However, the prop knife, outfitted with a tube of fake blood, refused to function properly. After many failed takes, the prop knife was exchanged for a real one, and an impatient Hansen covertly sliced Burns's finger for real, which resulted in Dungan sucking actual blood from her finger.
The filming process was so terrifying for Burns, she didn’t even realize what had happened until years later.
Before she made a living running from Ghostface, Campbell once had to run away from something much scarier: a wild animal high on Coke (-a Cola, that is).
Campbell shared the harrowing tale on The Kelly Clarkson Show, where she detailed being 17 years old on a film set in Canada, and shooting a scene where she was meant to run from a bear. In a somewhat shocking lack of precaution, not only did the filmmakers have a real bear on set for teenage Campbell to interact with, but they also gave her, in her words, “a big bottle of Coke to feed it. So now this is like a bear on a sugar rush.”
They then told her to dip her hand in a pot of honey and run to a nearby tree to bait the bear into chasing her. She was supposed to touch the tree, turn around, and reach out her hand so the bear would, in theory, stop running and start licking the honey off. That’s where it all went wrong.
Described Campbell, “He grabs me by the leg, and he pulls me through the forest. My mother happens to be visiting set, so she’s screaming. The whole crew is frozen because no one can believe what’s happening. All I can think to say is, ‘He’s biting me!,’ like it’s not obvious.”
Luckily the bear’s handler was able to draw the animal away by throwing rocks at it, and Campbell miraculously escaped with no major injuries. On that same set, however, she also got bit by a wolf and thrown from a horse.
On top of her wide range of acting accomplishments, Heather Langenkamp runs AFX Studio, a special effects company, with husband David Leroy Anderson. Anderson has won three Academy Awards for his work, and an Emmy for special effects on American Horror Story: Freak Show.
For her part, Langenkamp has acted as special makeup effects coordinator for a number of films including Dawn Of The Deadand The Cabin In The Woods. The AFX website states the studio can make its clients creature suits, fake heads, life-like animals, and "anything else that Hollywood can dream up." Langenkamp and Anderson's work on American Horror Story has been one of their longest-running projects to date.
