There’s a point in Ari Aster’s brilliant 2022 horror film X, when amateur director RJ confronts his executive producer Wayne, protesting the idea that his girlfriend Lorraine (played by Jenna Ortega) should appear in the porn film the movie revolves around. “Lorraine is not like the other girls in there,” he pleads. “She is a nice girl!” “I hate being the one to tell you this,” says Wayne, “but there are no nice girls.”

X challenges some well-established rules of classic horror films, where women are rarely permitted to have sex, do drugs or have fun without being brutally killed in a way that signifies punishment for their ‘depravity’.

Of course, Lorraine is just one example. With her roles as Wednesday Addams, Astrid Deetz, Tara Carpenter, Cairo Sweet and Ellie Alves, Ortega is redefining the roles that women play in scary entertainment. The actor is a new kind of scream queen, an A-list star with a penchant for blood and a Gen Z icon who owes it all to horror, riding the crest of the wave as the genre enters a new golden era.

Need jenna ortega to be in at least 1 horror movie a year pic.twitter.com/20TkX4QQ6I

— ortegay 🥝🎧 (@Roxdk7) January 24, 2025

But Ortega is not the dark heroine to blacken our screens. Far from it. For more than a century, women have been crucial to horror. From classics like Dracula, Frankenstein and Psycho to cult franchises like Halloween and Friday the 13th, women have provided horror films with fresh blood, and no shortage of screams and dramatic escapes. They’ve birthed cinematic archetypes like the final girl, the innocent victim, the sexually liberal roommate and the Mary Sue, whose wits and wisdom save the day.

Our beloved Ortega hasn’t really been any of these. The new kinds of movies that she stars in are genre-bending and defy stereotypical archetypes. Yet without them, she probably wouldn’t be where she is today, as these heroines laid the crucial groundwork for her success. So how does she stack up against the pantheon of scream queens who came before her?

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Ortega’s erotic thriller from last year, Miller’s Girl, is not horror as such, but it’s dark enough to be considered horror-adjacent. Its premise puts student Cairo Sweet (Ortega) under the watchful tuition of her English teacher Mr Miller (Martin Freeman). Despite the age gap, forbidden sexual tension bubbles beneath the surface of their relationship, a dynamic familiar to all horror fans, especially between a young girl and an older man.

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Among the first stories to immortalise the malevolent attraction trope was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in which the titular Count Dracula preys on the vulnerable Mina Seward for her blood and innocence. Many actresses have played Mina on screen, but among the most notable is Greta Schröder who graced silver screens in an unauthorised, low-budget, silent German adaptation called Nosferatu (1922).

More than a century before Lily-Rose Depp donned that black wig, Schröder’s Ellen Hutter fell victim to the film’s Count Orlok. While not much is known about Schröder, you can see Orlok have his wicked way with her on YouTube, and her visceral torment is a large part of what made the film so terrifyingly good.

Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok on the set of Robert Eggers’ ‘NOSFERATU’ pic.twitter.com/bUHGHHwjv6

— Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) February 12, 2025

‘NOSFERATU’ wins Best Cinematography at the #CriticsChoiceAwards pic.twitter.com/lLCNzioMk2

— Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) February 8, 2025

There’s another clandestine May-December relationship in Tim Burton’s original Beetlejuice, as Michael Keaton’s titular bio-exorcist coerces Winona Ryder’s teenage goth Lydia into marriage (despite their 600-year age gap). Ortega has said that she watched the film as a child and used to have nightmares about Keaton’s ghoulish sleazebag swinging down upon her from the top bunk of her bed. “I was terrified of everything when I was younger,” she told The New York Times last year, which must have given her some decent practice for all the shudders and jump scares in her adult roles.

catherine ohara and jenna ortega filming the dance sequence in “beetlejuice beetlejuice” pic.twitter.com/7jb9OmUmYt

— kira (@rydervks) October 11, 2024

But perhaps horror’s most celebrated young scream queen is Linda Blair, whose transformation into the possessed devil child Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist (1973) is nothing short of skin crawling. Blair’s career is not known for much else, but her performance remains the gold standard of how children can terrify adults onscreen.

Writing in the The New York Times, Lulu Garcia-Navarro called Netflix’s Addams Family adaptation Wednesday: “A good message for young girls, and for women, for all of us, that you don’t have to be liked all the time.” Wednesday might not be horror, but it is gleefully gothic. As teenage outcast Wednesday Addams, Ortega displays the diabolical charisma of both a hero and a villain, sometimes without even moving her eyelids.

During filming, director Tim Burton noticed his star hadn’t blinked for an entire scene. “Tim said ‘I don’t want you to blink anymore’,” Ortega told Teen Vogue. The actor added that Burton liked it when she looked at other characters through her eyebrows, known as “the Kubrick Stare” (as seen in A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and many pictures since), indicating a knowledge and appreciation for cinema that can’t have done her any harm as she’s conquered Hollywood.

The idea that girls don’t have to be nice might subvert the horror norm, but it’s not unheard of in the genre. Betsy Palmer claimed scream queen status after her turn as Mrs Vorhees in the eerie forest slasher Friday the 13th (1980). Although many remember her son Jason for his devilish deeds in the film’s many sequels, it’s Betsy’s middle-aged maleficent who torments the campers in the franchise’s first (and best) instalment. Not unlike Norman Bates in Psycho, it’s Mrs Vorhees’ charming and wholesome exterior that makes her all the more scary.

Speaking of Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic gave us possibly the most iconic scream in cinema history in Janet Leigh’s shower scene as Marion Crane. Modern horror—in fact, modern cinema—owes a lot to Hitchcock, but his treatment of female stars was often horrible. On the set of The Birds (1963), Hitchcock misled his lead actress Tippi Hedren about the filming of the final scene—in which Hedren’s character was attacked by crows in a phone booth—replacing mechanical birds with live ones at the last minute.

The Birds (1963 dir. Alfred Hitchcock) (Cinematographer: Robert Burks) pic.twitter.com/kk5EWChDJO

— Ebru Yıldırım (@Ebruyldrm_88) August 15, 2022

Ortega has spoken about the dangers of Hollywood in interviews, expressing her gratitude for her parents’ protection as she rose from child actor to adult superstar. The leering patriarchy of the film industry underwent a reckoning after the #MeToo movement (or maybe men are now “just better at hiding it,” as one line goes in Barbie), but the horror genre was critiquing such behaviours way before 2017.

In Scream 3 (2000), scriptwriter Ehren Kruger created a seedy film exec who spent the 70s hosting parties where men could take advantage of young actresses. The character bears a passing resemblance to Harvey Weinstein, who was an executive producer on the first four Scream films. The movie highlighted how horror villains are often based on the monsters we encounter in real life, hiding in plain sight, disguising as our bosses, mentors, friends, neighbours, and partners.

The Scream franchise brought postmodernist metafiction to horror and established Neve Campbell as a scream queen for the Y2K era. Her character Sidney Prescott is a horror sceptic who thinks scary movies are “all the same, some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can’t act who’s always running up the stairs when she should be going out the front door.” In one of countless references to classic horror films, Sidney’s friends ask her to choose a film to watch: “The Fog, Terror Train, Prom Night,” she says. “How come Jamie Lee Curtis is in all of these movies?”

The daughter of Psycho star Janet Leigh, JLC is considered by many the ultimate scream queen. Thanks to the three aforementioned films and—most notably—the Halloween franchise, she became known as one of horror’s best “final girls,” an archetype referring to the last survivor in films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Alien and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Like Ortega, JLC is invariably lovely and likeable, but also smart, cunning and endlessly resilient.

Ortega and co-star Melissa Barrera became final girls themselves as the Scream films received their latest two instalments. In doing so, they provided horror with some much-needed diversity; Hispanic stars in a genre dominated by white actors for far too long. The fifth Scream film is not called Scream 5, but simply Scream: as its characters helpfully explain. The film is a prequel rather than a sequel, revisiting all the classic tropes of the original film without strictly being a remake.

HORROR MOVIES 📞📱

SCREAM (1996)
JENNIFER'S BODY (2009)
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) pic.twitter.com/Vx4M7yabfw

— damien usher (@mrspookyhorror) November 30, 2023

In its first scene, Ortega’s teenage character Tara Carpenter says she likes “elevated horror”, dismissing the old classics before rattling off her newer favourites—The Babadook, It Follows, Hereditary. It’s a nice nod to horror’s recent resurgence, embodied by Get Out’s screenplay win at the Oscars and ending years in which critics refused to take the genre seriously. Now thanks to Ortega and contemporaries like Mia Goth, Maika Monroe and Samara Weaving, horror is thriving.

There can be little better evidence for that than Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Taste’ video, which invokes the knife-wielding tropes of many a classic slasher. Ortega wields a shotgun, a defibrillator, a scythe and a chainsaw in ‘Taste’, before that famous smooch with the singer. The actor’s collaboration with one of the biggest pop stars of the moment is an indication that Ortega can pretty much do anything she wants right now. With any luck, she’ll be making horror films for years to come, reimagining the genre one flick at a time.

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