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JAMIE LEE CURTIS
A second-generation scream queen, Curtis, daughter of Psycho's Janet Leigh, shrilled her way to stardom as the babysitter stalked by malevolently mad Michael Myers in John Carpenter's suburban slasher opus Halloween. But Curtis didn't stop shrieking there - going onto Terror Train and the Canadian-made Prom Night as well as Carpenter's The Fog and the regrettable Halloween II. (She'd later return to the franchise two decades later with Halloween H20: 20 Years Later and then, in a small role, in the otherwise irredeemable Halloween: Resurrection.)
DREW BARRYMORE
As with Leigh's demise in Psycho, Barrymore's role in Scream smartly subverted the assumption the movie's star is impervious to death -- at least until the final climatic seconds. By killing Barrymore off in the prologue, director Wes Craven not only paid bloody homage to Alfred Hitchock, but brazenly informed audience members no one onscreen was safe.
NANCY ALLEN
The former Mrs. Brian DePalma antagonized Sissy Spacek in Carrie, then starred as a hooker targeted by a cross-dressing sociopath in the director's Dressed to Kill.
JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT
Let's not hedge around the obviousness of Hewitt's breasts, displayed most prominently in a clingy wet T-shirt in I Know What You Did Last Summer. Ample bust-sizes have been, after all, a mainstay of the genre since the first scream queen was splattered with stale tomato sauce.
NEVE CAMPBELL
Often referred to as the Jamie Lee Curtis of her generation, Campbell may never escape the shadow of the Scream trilogy, in which she starred. Our prediction? Scream 4, sometime in the next decade with Campbell in the supporting role of the new teenage heroine's nightmare-plagued mom.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
After appearing with Hewitt in I Know What You Did Last Summer, Gellar went on to stake vampires and demons as Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Later, she segued to big-screen scares in the hit Asian horror redo The Grudge - more than earning her stripes as slayer and screamer.
JANET LEIGH
The recipient of arguably the most harrowing death in cinematic history, Leigh met her high-pitched demise at the hands of Norman Bates in Hitchcock's Psycho.
TIPI HEDREN
Another blond, another Hitchcock thriller. In The Birds, Hedren survives one fowl-feathered attack after another. Supposedly Michael Bay is going to produce a remake.
VERONICA CARTWRIGHT
Sigourney Weaver was the enduring warrior woman who vanquished the extraterrestrial phalanx-inspired predator of Alien, but it was Cartwright who spent a good portion of Ridley Scott's 1979 thriller apparently unaware that in space no one can hear you scream.
SHERRI MOON
Moon comes to carnage through marriage - her husband is musician-turned-horror filmmaker Rob Zombie, writer-director of The Devil's Rejects and a House of 1,000 Corpses. Next up? Playing the mother of Michael Myers in Zombie's re-invention of Carpenter's Halloween.