The Best Horror Movies: Maika Monroe, Jennifer Tilly, and More Scream Queens Share Their Picks

From the carefully considered outline of a Final Girl to the intoxicating nebulousness of the Scream Queen moniker, women are the bloody, brooding, beating heart of the horror genre.On screen and off, women have long proved an essential linchpin to the success of scary movies.

Actresses have served as horror’s marquee-topping centerpieces since even before Elsa Lanchester became Universal’s “Bride of Frankenstein” in 1935, and the subjects of many women’s fears — abuse, stalking, subjection, birth, motherhood, the patriarchy, etc.

— have inspired the works of countless creepy classics directed by men: take Brian de Palma’s “Carrie” or Dario Argento’s “Suspiria,” just for starters.And yet, it’s only been in the last few decades that women have more fully and frequently taken over telling their own nightmares: writing, directing, and producing contemporary masterpieces such as Mary Harron’s “American Psycho,” Karyn Kusama’s “Jennifer’s Body,” Julia Ducournau’s “Raw,

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