JA from
MNPP here, guest-blogging the Top 10 for this week.
The way I reckon it, I don't want to step on any toes while guesting here, so I want to choose a topic that Nathaniel would never do on his lonesome. But I also want to choose a subject that'll tickle y'all's fancy at the same time. And it's gotta be something I know something about (which narrows the field down
considerably). So taking into account
The Film Experience's general love for the actresses (hence Nat's delightful term "actressexuality"), and
my own love for horror movies, and (bless his scaredy-cat lil' heart) Nat's aversion to the same... well, a list was born unto us this day!
To the Year One, y'all. Tis a list of what I have deemed
The Top 10 Leading Ladies of Horror. Basically... these are my 10 favorite female horror movie performances. I went for just leading ladies here, which kept stellar supporting characters (Hiya, Minnie Castavet!) from stealing the spotlight (again). I tried to cover all the bases - we've got the victimized types of course - where would horror be without 'em? - but also our tough chicks, and then there's those loveable crazies too. So without further...
10) Heather Donahue in The Blair Witch Project - “I am so sorry! Because it was my fault.“ – It’s easy to hate on Heather… she brings it on herself, really. Like so many of the characters in this most recent wave of first-person horror (think
Cloverfield) that picked up from
Blair’s 10-year old success, Heather was labeled annoying and self-centered and
well won’t you just put the camera down, lady?
But horror would be nothing without its determination to show us the lesser sides of ourselves – people making terrible decisions and being punished so we the viewers don’t have to is par for the course. Hell, sometimes
it's the whole course. And Heather, in her justifiably famous snot-faced soliloquy, turns the camera in on that side of ourselves that we’d like to think we wouldn’t be in that situation but 9 times out of 10 will, most assuredly, be. And if one of the most vital parts of what I consider to be a great horror performance is the ability to truthfully convey real fear – an uncensored, wide-eyed terror – Donahue earns her spot on this list for that alone.
9) Linda Blair (and Mercedes McCambridge... and Ellen Burstyn) in The Exorcist - "Keep away. The sow is mine." – It just doesn’t feel right leaving off credit to McCambridge, the woman who gave voice to little Regan McNeil’s demonic possession. So I had to include her name. That said, as horrific as the second-half of this film is (where credit must be paid not only to McCambridge but the make-up and effects people as well) I find the medical examination scenes of the first half nearly as terrifying as the later blasphemies, and all we have there is tiny Regan thrown into the midst of a bunch of loud machinery, so obviously Blair is doing some heavy lifting on her own. And then I find I must add on Ellen Burstyn’s fine performance as Regan’s helpless mother who can only look on… all said, it’s difficult for me to choose just one aspect to praise here; they’re all inextricably linked. The mother, the daughter, and the unholy spirit, as it were.
8) Kathy Bates in Misery - “God I love you.” – Yes, the film spins Annie Wilkes off into a bit of a hysterical caricature in those final ten minutes or so. But before she becomes an unkillable madwoman, Bates' performance is one of the simultaneously funniest
and saddest portrayals of deranged loneliness ever put on-screen. Because I’ll be damned if she doesn’t just know that the writer named Paul Sheldon’s literal fall into her lap wasn’t a gift sent from cockadoodied wherever, and she’s gonna make it bitchin' worthwhile. Why shouldn’t the fans have their say, anyway? I’m not going to be the one to argue
that point and make her feel all oogy.
7) Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween - “It was the boogeyman, wasn't it?” – She set the archetype in stone. The Final Girl.
Sally may’ve screamed louder (and longer... and earlier), and
Nancy might’ve built exploding light-bulb booby-traps, but nobody personified exactly what the Slasher genre needed better - the female yin to the male killer's wang - than JLC's Laurie Strode. Almost too smart for her own good – she felt it coming, annoyed everybody, but still couldn’t stop it all the same – there’s myriad reasons Curtis is, to my mind, still the greatest straightforward Final Girl, but none moreso than the first half-an-hour or so as we watch Laurie spot the boogeyman behind the bushes or in the backyard, and see her preparedness despite herself click defiantly into place.
6) Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs - “Some kind of screaming, like a child's voice.” - Sweet Clarice Starling, just trying to bury the sounds of those lambs to the slaughter. Little girls, they go next, off to the dressmakers... somewhere in America there is a pit in a basement with a Senator's daughter all holed up. Loose skin. Come and get it, Precious.
5) Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley - “Get away from her, you bitch!“ – Of the first two
Alien flicks, I only really consider Ridley Scott’s original film to be a horror film. But Weaver’s Ripley doesn’t emerge as the main player until the very end. She’s most obviously the main character of James Cameron’s
Aliens, but that’s an action movie with monsters. So how do I justify placing her on a list? By just mushing the entire quadrilogy’s worth of her performances together. Yes, I’m cheating. But this list just seemed wrong without her. Where maybe too many of the women on this list are of the victimized sort - immediately previous company excluded, of course - I needed to include a woman who rocks off an acid-spewing alien’s face with a gun larger than my entire torso to even things out. And then, like a full half of this list, she's Mother, too. And if there's one thing this list proves - and
this list, too! - nothing is scarier than mommy-hood.
4) Shelley Duvall in The Shining - “We're all going to have a real good time.” – Always overshadowed by Jack Nicholson’s Jack Nicholson-sized performance, Duvall’s Wendy Torrence is and always will be my favorite part of Kubrick’s coolly malignant flick. Duvall was always channeling her gawky physiognomy to great effect with her characters, whether it was her hysterical Olive Oyl stroll or just the way she held a cigarette in
3 Women… but nowhere to my mind was she more brilliant than here. Has anyone ever held a knife or an axe more awkwardly? And watch the way her occasional outbursts of positive energy – always so sadly forced - quickly slide back into a slumped-over shell of a woman, beaten down both literally and figuratively, and then the eventual, probably Kubrick-inflicted real-seeming terror that courses across her bug-eyed face… it’s a vanity-free, often humiliating role, which Duvall upends and owns with her every silent scream.
3) Ellen Burstyn in Requiem For a Dream - “I like thinking about the red dress…” – Like the invisible arm of Death itself that kills so many teenagers – and so imaginatively! - in the
Final Destination flicks, the horror of
Requiem is of a different breed - it’s the mental demons inside these characters that tear them to shreds. But make no mistake – this is a horror film, and one of the most horrifying ever made. And nowhere does that horror manifest itself more cruelly than in the guise of a lonely Coney Island widow that can’t let go of a dream long dead. Burstyn’s physical deterioration as she’s swallowed whole by her addictions is haunting enough – the final shots of the film rend my heart every time – but Burstyn makes it clear from the start that Sarah Goldfarb has one foot over the precipice just looking for anything that might offer her even the briefest of smiles.
2) Sissy Spacek in Carrie - “It was bad, Mama. They laughed at me.” – The most spellbinding moments in DePalma’s 1976 classic for me are the ones where we see Carrie White begin to come out of her shell – the way her inherent good-nature peeks around that shy smile… a flurry of compliments from Billy the cute boy asking her to the prom and from her teacher who means so well… all of which lead to that spinning-out-of-control on the dance-floor moment. And then falls the crown. And we all know what horror lay beneath that heavy load. Carrie White is horribly human… until she’s not human at all anymore. And then she’s back again… but it is too late. After all, sin never dies... and Spacek makes us understand every step of the way, with a most terrible accuracy, what has gone so very wrong.
1) Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby - “This is no dream! This is really happening!” – Is it simply the paranoia of a young lady with too much time on her hands, or is there something sinister going on with that too-friendly old couple next door? Is her husband distracted with work, turned off by her constant sickness, or has he perhaps made a Faustian trade-off with the soul of little Andy-or-Jenny? In the book, Rosemary Woodhouse is described as a large-hipped Midwestern girl, built for breeding, but in one of the very few deviations from page to screen, Polanski cast Farrow (once Tuesday Weld backed out) and the character clicked into perfection. Because the story is about watching the span of pregnancy as if in the nightmarish reflection of a fun-house mirror, it’s vital that Rosemary look like someone devoured by that giant belly, and tiny little Mia in her yellow sun-dresses with the face of a ghoul poking out fit the bill, and then some. But even beyond the physical perfection of the casting, Farrow nails every note of paranoia, and as we watch her flail about under the arms of all those she’s trusted as they drug her into unconsciousness, we truly know what helplessness is.
Well that was fun/painful. And if you want to see who
just missed the cut, you can
head over to MNPP where I spit out Ten More Lovely Ladies (Wah-ah-ah!) that are also worth their weight in carnage.
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