Scream Queen
Scream-Queen is a term coined by the media and the studios for actresses who, when appearing in horror films, often make shrill sounds of horror and shock in threatening situations.
Even in the silent film era, women threatened by monsters were an important element in horror films. Presumably the term was first used for the actress Fay Wray . In the first half of the 1930s she played roles in horror films several times, in which she uttered loud screams in threatening situations. Her best-known appearance of this type was in 1933 in King Kong and the white woman .
With the advent of talkies, some actresses were confronted with a problem: They couldn't scream the bloodcurdling way their role required. This is how the profession of "screamer" came about for a short time in Hollywood. She screamed for the actress in question - mostly live in the studio, in later years she also dubbed the scene and supported actresses who were unable to scream. The corresponding screams were technically amplified as early as the 1930s and accompanied by additional noises.
The attractive but approachable Scream Queen typically appears as a haunted innocence in the horror genre. Lloyd Kaufman , co-founder of Troma Entertainment , described the roles as varied and demanding.
In later horror films such as Halloween - The Night of Horror from 1978, actresses - in this case Jamie Lee Curtis - were so closely associated with the term "Scream Queen" that afterwards they mainly received offers for similar roles for a long time. From the 1970s onwards, the image of women in films changed. For example , while filming the film Zombie , Gaylen Ross refused to obey the director's instructions to scream when in danger, because she wanted to portray the character she played, Francine Parker, as a strong woman. Director and screenwriter George A. Romero took up this in the further course of the shooting and expanded the role in this direction.
Web links
- Scream Queens (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c Thomas Arnold: Three screams for these stars , usatoday.com. April 27, 2007. Retrieved October 26, 2007.
- ^ Sharon Macdonald, compare Electrified Voices: Medial, Socio-Historical and Cultural Aspects of Voice by Dmitri Zakharine, Nils Meise
- ^ Debbie Rochon: The Legend of the Scream Queen . GC Magazine. Archived from the original on August 13, 2007. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved October 26, 2007.
