As Halloween approaches and screen audiences are saturated with the sights and sounds of screaming women in horror films and TV shows, it’s a great time to look at the women whose vocal artistry created genuinely effective screams on screen.

Behind every memorable cinematic scream lies a vocal performance that is often reduced to a natural, unreflective outburst. But that assessment obscures the women behind its most powerful manifestations. For example, think of the work of Shelley Duvall in The Shining, Janet Leigh in Psycho or Toni Collette in Hereditary.

Certain screen actors have made the scream their calling card to fame and notoriety, under the designation “scream queen.” These queens are the unsung heroes of the horror industry through their dedication to the vocal performance of the fear and terror in the many guises of horror.

Long live the (scream) queen

As onscreen horror proliferated in the 1970s, the term “scream queen” became popular, most notably through Calvin Beck’s 1978 book Scream Queens: Heroines of the Horrors. Later, in popular culture, “scream queen” applied to “any female star who has made a career playing women who survive extreme trauma or peril.”

Hollywood actress Jamie Lee Curtis qualifies to bear the mantle of “scream queen,” alongside others like Lin Shaye, Brinke Stevens, Michelle Bauer, and Linnea Quigley.

While Curtis is well-known, the other actors may be less familiar even though they collectively have hundreds of film credits to their names, predominantly in low-budget horror productions. Those films occupy a robust and commercially significant segment of........

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