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As spooky season officially begins, the Letterboxd crew (with a little help from some filmmaker friends) scares up twenty-plus of our favorite horror performances—from Shelley Duvall and Claude Rains to Nicole Kidman and Snoop Dogg.
It goes without saying that performing in a horror movie is not a feat for the scaredy-cats. Not only do these actors have to live in a constant state of—manufactured—terror, they do it while covered in sticky fake blood and claustrophobic prosthetics, the result of being trapped in the makeup chair for hours each day. And they do it all with a scream on their face and a (prop) knife in their heart.
To celebrate the ominous month of October, we asked a potpourri of actors and filmmakers to share the love for their favorite horror performances. Here’s a small sampling of those included in the video above, many of them alumni of the genre themselves: Longlegs’ Maika Monroe and Osgood Perkins, Pearl herself Mia Goth, MaXXXine’s Halsey, Us’s Lupita Nyong’o, Hereditary’s Alex Wolff, Hush’s Mike Flanagan, Speak No Evil’s James McAvoy and Mackenzie Davis, Cuckoo’s Dan Stevens, The Faculty’s Elijah Wood, Gothika’s Halle Berry, Interview with the Vampire’s Christian Slater and The Sixth Sense’s Haley Joel Osment praising his own co-star Toni Collette.
We also asked our crew and contributors to write about the horror performances that wriggled under their skin and left the most extensive scars on their psyches. The range in submissions ricochets from the campiness of Bruce Campbell to the steeliness of Rebecca Hall, from underseen deep-cuts like Carol Kane as a killer office worker to spine-chilling staples like Sissy Spacek as a telekinetic prom queen—in short, there’s something for every level of scary movie fan. Happy spooky season!
Forgive me for my bluntness, but there’s no use beating around the maypole: Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle fucks. As the aristocratic leader of a pagan cult, he presides over his deliriously horny island with a silky magnetism, all apple-besotted, 6’5” id heralding as enlightenment. He philosophizes to mating snails, revels in drag and generously reminds outsiders to keep their sacrificial appointments, errant hair whipping around in the Hebridean winds while his cheerily disarming mask slips off into a menacing chill.
Later reflecting that The Wicker Man was his best film, Lee believed in the folk horror musical so much that he took the role without pay. Watching the Hammer Horror icon boom into a bawdy song, tickling the ivories in a resplendent red kilt, I know I’m basking in the presence of someone in it for pure love of the game.
Horror has long been a shelter for the disenfranchised, and this is no doubt true of Clearcut. Ryszard Bugajski’s 1991 feature follows Indigenous activist Arthur (Graham Greene) as he kidnaps a liberal lawyer (Ron Lea) who failed to protect the land of Arthur’s community from a logging mill manager (Michael Hogan)—and then he kidnaps the latter as well. “Clearcut is all the proof you need to understand it’s best not to fuck with Graham Greene,” Dave writes, a warning that these two men would have been wise to heed as Arthur methodically tortures them in the woods in an attempt to instruct them on “listening to Mother Earth.”
An ethereal, uniquely disturbing picture, Angelica says that “Clearcut doesn’t simplify or soften for the white imagination… And how refreshing is it to watch a film about oppressed people who utilize anger that doesn’t cater to whiteness with neat explanations and morality?” The power of this relentless film is all centered in the calm, simmering rage of Greene’s performance, which Darryl describes as being “equally terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking in nearly every scene.”
While I initially wanted to shout out Marina de Van’s underrated work in In My Skin—a New French Extremity body-horror she directed, wrote and starred in—it wouldn’t be a Letterboxd roundup without a Possession celebration. Isabelle Adjani stars in Andrzej Żuławski’s psychological, psychosexual nightmare as Anna, a spiraling housewife seeking a divorce from her husband (Sam Neill). Her madness culminates in the West Berlin subway: clad in a gothic indigo dress, she walks along wide-eyed and smiling maniacally before slamming her body (and her grocery bag of milk and eggs) against the tiled wall.
Unhinged laughter morphs into anguished wails as her limbs writhe to the arrhythmic beat of their own Danse Macabre. Not only did Adjani have to pull off the physically demanding choreography while screaming wildly, she then had to ooze blood and milk from every orifice. By challenging her mind, body and soul, the artiste fully commits to a primal performance that grabs you by the rib cage. Her bravura work earned her Best Actress at Cannes, and left a lasting cultural imprint: contemporary artists from Mitski to Rosamund Pike have paid homage by recreating the famous scene in music videos—minus the gush of fluids. Cowards.
Cindy Sherman’s pitch-black comedy/workplace slasher Office Killer is notable for a few things: it’s Sherman’s only feature film, it’s the only slasher movie co-written by Todd Haynes and it features the imminently charming, always funny Carol Kane as a murderer named Dorine Douglas. The pantheon of horror cinema is rife with histrionic female lead performances—from Isabelle Adjani in Possession to Kathy Bates in Misery to Megan Fox in Jennifer’s Body—but Kane, in both Karen Arthur’s The Mafu Cage and Office Killer, manages to be equally timid and terrifying.
Channeling her now iconic mousy demeanor into a vehicle for exceedingly gruesome acts of violence is Kane’s—and Sherman’s—greatest trick: creating an antagonist that is simultaneously empathetic and, well, just a bit creepy. If nothing else, Kane makes sure that you’ll forever look at your co-workers differently.
I might be a victim of recency bias, but few performances in the past couple of years have stuck with me as deeply as Rebecca Hall in Andrew Semans’ Resurrection. Here, Hall is Margaret, a controlling biotech exec whose life revolves around teenage daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman). Her carefully orchestrated routine begins to unravel once she starts seeing glimpses of her abusive ex David (Tim Roth)—her tight, polished demeanor crumbling under increasingly primal instincts.
Semans’ psychological thriller provides the perfect platform for Hall’s penchant for finding the haunting in containment, her performance anchored on an eight-minute monologue so superbly executed it makes one beg the question as to how she isn’t one of the most in-demand working actresses today. Chris puts it perfectly: “Rebecca Hall [delivers] the performance of several lifetimes. The Night House feels like a warm up for what she gives here.”
One of the crown jewels of 1960s British cinema, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents terrifies its audience without spilling a single drop of blood. Based on Henry James’s novella about a governess convinced that the children in her care are possessed by ghosts, Clayton’s film showcases wonderful visuals and creepy sound design—but its greatest special effect is its star, the sensational Deborah Kerr.
Best known as the saintly schoolteacher in The King and I, Kerr in The Innocents subverted her wholesome image, revealing the sexual repression lurking beneath Victorian good manners. Her performance, a thrilling blend of naturalism and melodrama, keeps us enthralled until the final frame. Are the ghosts real, or a product of Miss Giddens’ fevered imagination? Kerr’s luminous eyes, beautifully lit by cinematographer Freddie Francis, reveal horrors scarier than any chainsaw massacre—the fears and desires bubbling inside all of us that cannot be controlled.
Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others has always stuck with me for quite a few reasons, most prominently because of Nicole Kidman’s lead performance as Grace Stewart. As she maneuvers through the echoing halls of her empty home, Grace embodies sensations of isolation and mourning so tangibly, especially when those feelings are packaged through her relationship to faith and motherhood.
Kidman’s depiction of these heavy feelings is something that demands a standing ovation on its own merit, but when entwined with the devastating twist within the film, her work here skyrockets into a whole new league. A performance so impactful that it comes to mind whenever I encounter another horror mother embroiled with grief. My love for Essie Davis in The Babadook and Toni Collette in Hereditary and Anna Diop in Nanny can all be traced back to the lasting power of Kidman’s anguished wails in The Others.
Peter (Michael Shannon): “How long were you married?”
Agnes (Ashley Judd): “Long enough to still get scared at night.”
Only a special sort of actor can hold their own as the steely straight-woman to Michael Shannon’s supersized on-screen presence, but Ashley Judd lives up to the challenge with aplomb in William Friedkin’s late masterpiece, Bug. As Agnes (in a performance that absolutely should have been Oscar-nominated), Judd embodies the inherent tragedy of being a stoic Southern woman who simply survives, delivering dialogue from lips bruised by domestic violence. Agnes has endured a number of waking nightmares, and though such horrors may have left her in pieces, she still craves connection—and finds it in another deeply broken person.
Judd has the impossible task of balancing Shannon’s pervasive paranoia with an earthy presence that grounds their dangerous dynamic, but she personifies Agnes’s marrow-deep pain in movements that most remind me of a traumatized animal just trying to trust again. Agnes and Peter’s amour fou, of course, only has one inevitable conclusion, but watching Judd and Shannon exalt then destroy each other makes for captivating, character-driven horror that feels truest to real life.
The subject of an documentary from Severin Films, Indonesian horror queen Suzzanna lived up to her on-screen reputation. She often played witchy women in the movies, and was a witchy woman in real life as well, with a special affinity for the fearsome Queen of the South Seas. Even more than that, she was a living embodiment of women’s rage—and the male fear of it. Although she’d been acting since the late ’50s, 1981’s The Queen of Black Magic is the film that established Suzzanna as the steely-eyed face of female vengeance.
She’s soft and vulnerable in the first half, in which her character is falsely accused of practicing sorcery after a disaster at her ex’s wedding. Then she decides to lean in and actually become the evil witch they’re accusing her of being to spite those who have wronged her. (Fuck yeah.) A fiery occult energy emanates from Suzzanna as she straightens her posture and tightens her body, transforming into a lightning rod vibrating with righteous anger. She’s terrifying and magnetic, and her star power is undeniable.
Before Snoop Dogg transformed from hip-hop bad boy to Martha Stewart’s fine-living wingman, he made a brief bid for horror film immortality as slain numbers runner Jimmy Bones in Ernest R. Dickerson’s gruesome blaxploitation flick Bones. That role was my introduction to Snoop. It started a multi-year “association” that continued throughout my teens of him invading into my dreams.
Bones was betrayed by white cops, and his absence caused his Black neighborhood and his girlfriend Pearl (Pam Grier) to suffer. When he returns to enact revenge, he is unmerciful—unleashing a swarm of maggots, throats slits and trips to hellish landscapes. He’s also suave, sporting an immaculate perm, a dashing black fedora and leather coat. Snoop simply gives horror style. If you haven’t watched Snoop in Bones, Robyn says it best in their four-star review: “I am so sorry I never watched this sooner. Every day this wasn’t in my life is now meaningless.”
I just absolutely love Claude Rains as Dr. Jack Griffin, aka the titular Invisible Man in James Whale’s 1933 adaptation of the classic H. G. Wells story. Due to the nature of the character—spoiler alert: he’s invisible!—the entire performance is done through the impeccable intonations of Rains. He is a stylish, sassy, self-absorbed maniac who is so convinced of his own genius that he doesn’t care whom he harms for the sake of proving his scientific prowess (including himself).
It’s implied that this guy has killed around 200 people (he derails a enger train just for kicks), yet somehow Rains manages to make his mania so incredibly alluring you almost root for his reign of terror to continue indefinitely. He’s a man, with a deranged laugh to prove it, but Rains is so charming and his voice so commanding that for a while you believe maybe he is right, and that all his destruction will be worth it in the end.
One of my favorite tropes found in horror movie performances is the inevitable cry of: “Why is this happening to me?”—best served tear-streaked and lobbed directly at the source of evil. This is brilliantly turned on its head in Talk to Me, with Sophie Wilde’s Mia being the architect of her own doom, unable to stop using the sinister embalmed hand through which she hopes to speak to her dead mother. As Mia’s addiction pushes her to the edge of sanity, her journey is telegraphed so sensitively by Wilde that, despite us knowing the hand should probably be incinerated forever, it’s impossible not to empathize with her desperate, grief-stricken attempts to keep the dead alive.
Throughout the film, Wilde’s range is staggering: heartbreakingly fragile as her friends start to abandon her, horribly menacing when possessed by the dead. Underneath it all is Wilde’s wide-eyed terror in the face of existential loneliness, the tragic core of Talk to Me’s story of bored teenagers and a party game gone wrong. As CURAGAAAA puts it, Wilde is “marvelous as a girl with a big heart, stricken with profound sadness and loneliness. She offers us a powerful picture of the lowest depression in her teenage character’s life, in which the allure of death is quite literally reaching out to her like a hand looking for another to hold.” Watching Mia reach back, with Wilde’s hands, is utterly mesmerizing.
Tilly, my doll! Let’s talk about it. I like my horror stupid. Layered, meta, self-referential. It’s an inherently queer genre. The villains, the deviants, the corrupted—we know they’re almost always queer-coded. Seed of Chucky is an iconic moment in our history. The combination of the (waaaay ahead of its time) gender fuckery from Glen/Glenda and the delicious camp of Jennifer Tilly’s performance as both Tiffany and herself altered my DNA. “I’m an Oscar-nominee, for God’s sake. Now look at me, I’m fucking a puppet.” Amaya said it best: “Sometimes a family is a killer doll, Jennifer Tilly, and their non-binary child.”
Have you ever talked to a corpse? It’s boring—unless the corpse you’re talking to is Jack Goodman, brought to life by Griffin Dunne in An American Werewolf in London. After being attacked by a creature in the moors of Yorkshire, American tourist David Kessler (David Naughton) finds himself confronted by his recently deceased and now rotting frat brother Jack, who heeds a word of warning: David must kill himself to lift the curse of the werewolf and relieve the undead victims of their waking limbo.
It’s a bleak thought—that voice in your head telling you that you’re better off dead. What if it was right? What if those words came from your best friend? Aided by Rick Baker’s Academy Award-winning makeup, complete with nauseating flapping flesh, Griffin Dunne’s screen presence carries the jovial lightness of an afterlife in which he’s most concerned with an ex getting laid after his funeral, while also capturing the gravity of David’s grave circumstances. Beware the moon, you guys.
With a name that may as well be “anagram,” Toni Collette’s mourning artist Annie Graham scrambles to reassemble the pieces of her life in an order that makes sense when her mother dies, yielding a deeply discomforting performance. Annie crafts miniature dioramas with unwavering focus, shrinking her painful past down to a manageable size, but the sudden, brutal death of her daughter (Milly Shapiro) sends her into a harrowing tailspin.
In an era where Hollywood horror is defined by metaphors for trauma, Hereditary places that trauma front and center, allowing Collette the chance to let loose at the peak of her thespian powers: she not only captures the shattering impact of the worst thing a mother can go through but she also channels larger, deeper, more damaging wounds through her festering grief. “I just want to die!” Annie wails, with skin-crawling desperation—but she can’t, leaving her to deal with an ungrateful son (Alex Wolff), whom Collette lambastes in a now-iconic dinner table scene where she embodies, with stunning precision, the bitter frustrations of a woman coming apart at the seams.
You cannot even utter the words “best horror performance” without Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness coming to mind. We were introduced to Ash Williams in The Evil Dead but were absolutely not prepared for the amount of camp and insanity Campbell would bring into the second installment, Evil Dead II. From his unhinged laugh while drenched in blood, to cutting off his possessed hand, to the best line of the film—“Groovy!”—Ash himself descends deep into the same level of madness as the evil that torments him.
In Army of Darkness, which is arguably the most quotable horror film of all time, he literally spirals into a new dimension of England’s Dark Age, where he finds himself defending a village against the horrors of the undead. Suspirliam writes, “Bruce Campbell delivers some of the greatest one liners ever spoken on screen here.” And with that, I leave you with, “This is my boomstick.”
Watching Carrie on a school night when I was eleven years old was a surprising (and quite disturbing) pivotal moment in my cinematic journey. While I was yet to resonate with the high school angst, I was specifically enamored with Sissy Spacek’s performance as the titular telekinetic. The fragility in Spacek’s work made the climactic prom scene all the more terrifying—her piercing, wide blue eyes and body covered in pig’s blood haunted my nightmares for months.
Her performance had such an effect that I ended up doing a seven-minute speech assignment about Spacek’s career as a whole, trying to convince my class to see this film from 1976 (the first of many school speech assignments that I used to ionately make a case for films from years’ past to my unsuspecting classmates). Also, more horror performances should be nominated for Oscars, like Spacek was for this film!
I stumbled upon this horror-thriller on late-night cable and dove in blind. Little did I know the roller coaster ahead. Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz from the get-go mesmerizes as the lollipop-sucking eye candy on the arm of her wealthy (and married) boyfriend (Kevin Janssens). Vacationing at his designer desert den, things turn sticky when two random men show up, and Jen is subjected to various acts of violence before being left for dead, impaled at the bottom of a canyon. That’s when Coralie Fargeat’s masterful scripting and filmmaking kicks in, and it’s Jen’s time to remold and go full Amazon.
I don’t want to give away too much, but the hero’s journey involves peyote, a beer can phoenix logo and buckets of blood back at the den. Thank you for helping prepare me for Fargeat’s The Substance, Lutz—only by having previously watched you in Revenge was I able to cope with the go-for-broke viscerality of meeting Jen’s sanguinary sisters on the big screen in this year’s feminist body-horror instant classic.
Jack Nicholson is usually ed as the acting powerhouse in The Shining—but it’s Shelley Duvall’s absolutely unhinged and petrified performance as Wendy that grounds both the film and its horror. The “Here’s Johnny!” scene, I believe, is so impactful not because of Nicholson but because of Duvall’s equally deranged and utterly mind-boggling vulnerability. It’s Duvall whose abject terror makes this high stakes, larger-than-life situation disturbingly real: she’s just a normal person in this hellish nightmare—and if it can happen to her, maybe it could happen to you, too?
Let me get this out of the way: I’m not one for horror. However, Taylor Russell in Escape Room bewitched me. I the first time I watched it, alone on a cold Monday in January 2019 (thank you, Snapchat memories). I should’ve been in class, but the movie sounded so good, and to me, it was. Again, I don’t usually seek out horror films, so Taylor Russell as Zoey Davis was the first Black final girl I had seen on-screen. She was quiet, smart and endearing, yet strong when she needed to be. Since that day in 2019, this movie has become a comfort film, and my crush on Taylor Russell has only grown. Just like Gage writes, “Taylor Russell, I will always you!”
“Oh, Gabriel’s just a puppet,” you say. Excuse me, but I believe it’s Madison (Annabelle Wallis) who is the puppet in James Wan’s delightfully bonkers 2021 horror movie. In a film that manages to keep topping itself, Akela Cooper’s brilliant screenplay knows that it’s tough to top a parasitic twin who lives in the back of your skull and commits murders while you’re unconscious. While horror has found a way to become more ethereal in the 21st century with hits like It Follows or the eerie cults of Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar, Malignant’s Gabriel took us back to a better time when what you needed to fear wasn’t the world itself; it was grimy little dudes who pop out and go, “Boo!”
Follow our Horrorville HQ for more spooky treats all year long.
