Top Female Badasses in Horror
Awesome Ladies of the Horror Genre for Halloween
As you settle down tonight for Halloween horror festivities, we at Legendary Women have some suggestions that are more entertaining and far more fleshed out than some other fare you might be stuck with like the tepid (at best) Scream Queens. Below, we’ve listed some of our favorite women in horror, some bad, some good, and all fun to watch. Maybe these will be the ladies you’ll be spending your night with…as long as you keep those lights blazing and the dark at bay.
10. Ganja Hightower (Zaraah Abrahams) in Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
Spike Lee’s 2015 horror movie is a reimagining of the 1970s cult flick, Ganja and Hess, and is technically not a vampire movie. It follows the trials and tribulations of Dr. Hess Greene who has been cursed by an ancient African artifact, which forces him to live beyond death and consume the blood of the living. See, technically not a traditional vampire with fangs, but that’s splitting hairs. While Stephen Tyrone Williams brings a pathos and noble suffering to the formerly religious Dr. Greene, who now is horrified by his long looming immortality, it is Ganja who’s the more captivating character. She’s brought to us as the wife of a colleague that Greene’s unfortunately eaten. She’s had a rough life and scrabbled for everything, including marrying a man she didn’t love to at least have the advantages of his money and position for her own. Seduced by Greene and eventually cursed herself, she’s a marvel to behold. Where her lover falters and eventually commits suicide, she grows strong in her own power and abilities and steps out to face eternity with the same fighting spirit she used to make it through life.
9. Regina Stevens (Carly Oates) in Pretty Dead
Zombies have been done to death. Okay, so in this film, she’s not technically a zombie just like Ganja above isn’t technically a vampire. However, she is infected by a parasitic fungus that makes her crave and consume the flesh of the living while she rots away herself. A rose by any other name and all that. The zombie genre is one that’s hard to make feel fresh and original. By taking a semi-scientific approach, writer Benjamin Wilkins elevates the material to start. However, it’s Oates’s sympathetic performance and tearful pleas eventually to her father on her video diary to understand and embrace the choices she’s made that really move us. We follow her from her initial curiosity over her condition to dawning horror over her cravings to resignation on her fate, all as her actions become more and more horrific. A good horror tale and a fairly slow burn with pathos at its heart.
8. Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina) in Audition
Appearances are deceiving in this horror classic. While widower, Shigeharu Ayoma, thinks that holding auditions for a new girlfriend after suffering the loss of his wife will bring him a winning relationship, he’s wrong. Audition is famous for being a haunting piece with a final ten minutes that make any Eli Roth or Saw film seem downright tame by comparison, but it’s all sold by Shiina’s Asami who is gifted in her deceit. At first, she appears the perfect, sweet and compliant girl but as everything is ripped away, she’s revealed as one of the most horrific onscreen monsters in movie history.
7. Brigitte (Emily Perkins) in The Ginger Snaps Trilogy
Okay, finally a horror movie monster that’s not a spin or a scientific exception. Brigitte and her sister, Ginger, are werewolves and no doubt about it. The genius of the Ginger Snap trilogy is that each installment is fresh and has something to add to its treatment of the classic movie monster. Nothing is a retread and everything ends on perfectly bleak, horrific notes. However, what really makes the series as a whole unique is that it deals with a female werewolf at all. From Teen Wolf (both film and TV show) to Oz from Buffy to An American Werewolf in London, the lycanthrope has been used traditionally as the world’s least subtle metaphor for a boy hitting puberty. However, the Ginger Snaps films are smarter than that. They actually draw the parallel with female heroines and treat werewolfism (especially in the first film) as a corollary to sexual awakening and power in women. (SPOILER ALERT) the reason that I’m choosing Brigitte over Ginger, though, is because I feel the arc from Ginger Snaps to its sequel, Ginger Snaps: Unleashed, is really Brigitte’s story. In the first film, she tries desperately to save her sister but must kill her to stop the carnage. In the second, she’s suffering with the aftermath of Ginger’s bite and is struggling to stop herself from turning as well. The greatest horror of the trilogy lies in Brigitte’s end. She becomes trapped as a pet and tool by someone she trusted and spends her life locked beneath the basement floor in wolf form. An amazingly high price to pay for sisterly loyalty.
6. Miriam Blaylock (Catherine Deneuve) in The Hunger
A vampiress alive since the time of ancient Egypt, Deneuve’s Miriam exudes seduction, sex and power. She’s captivating enough to entrance both David Bowie and Susan Sarandon so you know she’s a force of nature. However, the most disturbing thing about Miriam is the way she draws in unsuspecting lovers who, even once they realize the price they pay to be her companion, will gladly spend eternity eventually rotting away as mummified remains just to be in her orbit.
5. Santanico Pandenmonium (Salma Hayek) in From Dusk till Dawn
A vampiress in control of her underlings and her club, she’s one that doesn’t bow to anyone else. Eventually able to turn one of the two criminal brothers who have entered the club, she’s more than content to lay out the rules for how he’ll be treated once a part of her vampiric fold:
I’m not going to drain you completely, you’ll be my slave because I don’t think you’re worthy of human blood, you’ll feed on the blood of stray dogs. You’ll be my footstool and at my command you’ll lick the dog sh** from my boot heel. Since you’ll be my dog, your new name will be…Spot.
She’s independent, cruel, and a demon not to screw with, and she makes From Dusk till Dawn a truly fun ride.
4. Jeryline (Jada Pinkett) in Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight
A crazy good time and a film sorely underrated that feature Billy Zane being an engaging villain long before Titanic came out, this madcap tale from the crypt keeper features a demon gone rogue trying to find and control the only two things that can stop him — the Demon Knight (William Sadler) and the key containing the blood of Christ. Jeryline (Pinkett) is one of seven or eight poor souls stuck in a hotel where Hell is about to break loose. The only one able to resist the temptation of the demon and someone who uses her smarts instead of just pure brawn more than once to win the day, she’s a heroine you love to root for. I’d have given good money to see a sequel with her kicking ass as the fully initiated Demon Knight.
3. Selena (Naomie Harris) from 28 Days Later
Hardened by surviving the rage virus outbreak in London, Selena is a chemist now turned warrior. She’s cut off her heart to the world and shut off emotions. Selena starts the film believing that survival is “as good as it gets” for any of them. She grows tremendously through the course of the film by being able to show affection towards and bond with both Jim and the young, orphaned Hannah. In the final act, when the soldiers are trying to sexually assault both her and Hannah, it’s Selena who tries her best to protect them both, mentally and emotionally. She’s also the one at the end who creates the large “HELP” letters from sewing together cloth and sheets, making it possible for a helicopter flying overhead to rescue her and her companions.
2. Heather (Heather Donahue) from The Blair Witch Project
I just want to apologize to Mike’s mom, Josh’s mom, and my mom. And I’m sorry to everyone. I was very naive. I am so so sorry for everything that has happened. Because in spite of what Mike says now, it is my fault. Because it was my project and I insisted. I insisted on everything. I insisted that we weren’t lost. I insisted that we keep going. I insisted that we walk south. Everything had to be my way. And this is where we’ve ended up and it’s all because of me that we’re here now — hungry, cold, and hunted. I love you mom, dad. I am so sorry. What is that? I’m scared to close my eyes, I’m scared to open them! We’re gonna die out here!
Probably one of the most famous (and also profitable) horror movies ever made, The Blair Witch Project was ahead of its time by bringing us found footage horror. It had been done before on a smaller scale with films like Cannibal Holocaust but almost a decade before Paranormal Activity, this is the film that proved the format could be a success. Some of the women we’ve profiled have been clear villains and monsters and some are the heroes, Heather’s perhaps a bit of both and one of the most relatable characters on this list. She’s the person we follow all the way until the film’s haunting climax as well as the sole woman in the film. She’s also the one with the ambition, whose constant denial of the dire nature of their situation and insistence that everyone just keep moving forward doom her and her compatriots. However, at the same time, we can relate so easily to her drive. She needs this film completed to be taken seriously as a documentary filmmaker. Instead, she’s confronted by the flaws of her own hubris and arrogance. I dare you to watch the scene where she confesses to the camera (parodied as it has been over the years) and not come away with goosebumps, feeling that you’ve seen the final confession of a doomed woman.
- Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in The Halloween Films*
I’ve already looked at the original 1978 Halloween here. However, I can’t think of the horror movie genre without thinking of Curtis’s Laurie Strode. She’s not just the archetypal final girl and scream queen, but she’s also someone who has been through an amazing growth and redemption arc of her own as a character. First of all, let me say that I’m not talking about Laurie Strode in the Rob Zombie remakes (ugh) or the terrible abomination that is Halloween: Resurrection. However, if you trace the growth of Laurie from Halloween, Halloween II, and Halloween: H20, you get a flawed yet three-dimensional heroine. In the first two films, Curtis is the scared, young virginal damsel in distress whom Dr. Loomis has to save a number of times. However, in the final act with H20, she’s now the scarred, traumatized functional alcoholic and distant mother who has to face her murderous sibling in order to free herself and save her son. To say she kicks Michael’s ass in the final act of H20 is a massive understatement. Too bad the franchise didn’t stay buried on that triumphant note.
None of the images used belong to Legendary Women, Inc. and we do not profit from using them. They belong to their respective studios and releasing companies.
Love what you read? Want to follow us closer to get all the latest Legendary Women news? Then sign up for our monthly newsletter and also our Medium collection.
