Despite their importance to the genre, there are numerous female characters within horror that have fallen between the cracks of the canon. Ones who aren’t enshrined on merch or shouted out in every countdown, but whose performances linger long after the credits roll. They might come from forgotten exploitation flicks, international nightmares, direct-to-video oddities, or cult classics that never quite crossed into the mainstream—but they matter. In this list, you’ll find scream queens who deserved bigger pedestals, final girls who survived hell only to be ignored by history, and the rare female monsters who weren’t defined by seduction or sympathy—but by raw, unsettling power. These characters don’t just react to horror. They shape it. They weaponize fear, grief, sexuality, trauma, and rage, often in ways that are far more complex than their male counterparts are ever allowed to be.
These are the 100 Most Underrated Female Characters of Horror Cinema.
20. Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) | Freaks (1932)
Few films from the early 1930s caused the kind of outrage that Tod Browning’s Freaks did, with its disturbing subject matter, real sideshow performers, and refusal to soften the lives of the people society preferred to stare at from a safe distance. MGM heavily cut the film after its notorious reception, but even in its truncated form, Freaks remains one of the strangest and most unsettling films of its era. Olga Baclanova’s Cleopatra is the beautiful trapeze artist at the center of its twisted story, a woman who discovers that Hans, one of the little people in the circus troupe, has inherited a fortune.
Rather than genuinely falling for him, Cleopatra marries Hans for his money while carrying on an affair with the brutish strongman Hercules, plotting to poison her new husband and take everything he owns. Baclanova makes Cleopatra wonderfully contemptible, playing her as vain, calculating, and openly disgusted by the very people who accept her as one of their own. What makes her downfall so satisfying is that Hans and the other performers eventually discover the betrayal and turn the tables on her, transforming the circus community she mocked into a terrifying force of revenge. Cleopatra may be the most conventionally glamorous person in Freaks, but Baclanova makes her easily one of its ugliest souls.
19. Katherine “Rita” Veder (Angela Bassett) | Vampire in Brooklyn (1995)
It’s easy to forget that Wes Craven, the man behind A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, once made a vampire comedy with Eddie Murphy. Vampire in Brooklyn has spent years sitting in the shadows of Craven’s better-known work, which is a shame because there’s plenty of strange fun buried in this wonderfully oddball horror-comedy.
Angela Bassett plays Katherine “Rita” Veder, a sharp, skeptical NYPD detective who becomes the target of Maximillian, the last surviving vampire from a Caribbean island. Maximillian comes to Brooklyn searching for Rita because she carries vampire blood in her ancestry, hoping to seduce her, awaken her supernatural side, and make her his immortal companion.
Rita, meanwhile, is trying to make sense of a string of bizarre supernatural encounters while investigating the mysterious deaths surrounding Maximillian. Bassett brings a welcome toughness and intelligence to Rita, never allowing her to become just another horror heroine waiting to be rescued. She has a genuine sense of independence, and her growing awareness of what she is makes her journey surprisingly compelling beneath all the camp, romance, and Eddie Murphy silliness. Vampire in Brooklyn may be one of the forgotten corners of Craven’s filmography, but Bassett gives the movie a strong center and makes Rita a heroine worth remembering.
18. Tansy Taylor (Janet Blair) | Night of the Eagle (1962)
Night of the Eagle is one of the few horror films about witches where they’re not a source of evil but are actually a force of good. The witch at the center of this film is Tansy Taylor (Janet Blair), the devoted wife of psychology professor Norman Taylor (Peter Wyngarde), who secretly uses witchcraft to protect her husband from the forces she knows are lurking around him. Norman, naturally, thinks all this occult business is nonsense and insists that Tansy abandon her rituals, only to discover that removing her protection may have been the worst decision he could have made.
As strange events begin piling up and Norman’s carefully ordered life starts collapsing, Tansy becomes the one person who understands what is really happening. Blair gives her a terrific mixture of tenderness, fear, and quiet determination, making Tansy feel less like a traditional horror-movie witch and more like a woman desperately trying to save the man she loves from something he refuses to believe exists. Night of the Eagle gets plenty of mileage out of the clash between cold logic and ancient superstition, but Tansy is what gives the film its emotional bite.
17. Lady Claudia Hoffman (Sigourney Weaver) | Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997)
Before Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey ushered in a wave of public-domain horror movies, Snow White was there first. Snow White: A Tale of Terror takes the familiar fairy tale and drags it into gothic horror, with Sigourney Weaver having a deliciously sinister time as Lady Claudia Hoffman. The film follows Lilli Hoffman, a young woman whose life is turned upside down after her father marries the beautiful but increasingly unstable Claudia, whose jealousy and obsession with Lilli eventually turn murderous.
Weaver’s Claudia isn’t simply a wicked stepmother in a fancy dress; she’s a deeply bitter, possessive woman whose descent into madness gives the character a much darker edge than the traditional fairy-tale villain. With its haunted forests, decaying castles, and nasty little twists on the story everyone knows, Snow White: A Tale of Terror remains one of the few examples of Hollywood taking a childhood classic, asking “What if this was actually terrifying?”, and actually succeeding.
16. Kendra (Loretta Devine) | Urban Legend (Franchise)
Black heroines in horror have historically been far rarer than they should be, which makes Loretta Devine’s Kendra Johnson such a welcome presence in the Urban Legend series. A campus security officer with a sharp sense of humor and plenty of common sense, Kendra first appears in Urban Legend, where college students are being murdered in ways inspired by familiar urban legends while Natalie Simon and her friends try to figure out who is behind the killings. Kendra isn’t the central heroine, but Devine gives her enough personality to make her feel like someone who could have carried a horror movie of her own. She returns in Urban Legends: Final Cut, this time working at an elite film school where a group of students is making their thesis movies while someone begins killing them according to various cinematic and urban-legend-inspired scenarios.
Kendra again provides some of the movie’s personality and comic relief, but there’s something especially satisfying about seeing a Black woman simply exist as part of a horror ensemble without her identity being reduced to trauma or stereotype. From Pam Grier and Grace Jones to Kelly Rowland and Angela Bassett, Black women have given horror some unforgettable heroines, yet substantial roles for Black women—especially characters who get to be funny, capable, and fully integrated into the story—remain frustratingly uncommon. Kendra may not be the final girl of the Urban Legend movies, but Loretta Devine makes her memorable enough that you wish the series had given her a little more room to become one.
15. Grace (Naomie Harris) | 28 Days Later (2002)
Naomie Harris brings a warmth and toughness to Grace, one of the more grounded characters in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, a film that helped redefine the modern zombie movie without actually calling its infected creatures zombies. After Jim awakens from a coma to find London seemingly abandoned following the outbreak of a virus that turns people into violently aggressive creatures, he eventually joins forces with Selena and Frank as they search for safety and answers.
Grace enters the story as part of Frank’s group, and while she isn’t one of the film’s central survivors, Harris gives her an immediate sense of humanity that makes the increasingly bleak world feel even more real. 28 Days Later is ultimately about survival, fear, and the fragile bonds people form when society collapses, and Grace’s presence adds another reminder that these aren’t just disposable survivors wandering through an apocalypse. Naomie Harris would go on to become one of Britain’s most recognizable actresses, but seeing her early in her career here is a terrific reminder of how much talent was packed into Boyle’s terrifying reinvention of the infected-horror movie.
14. Yukionna (Shiho Fujimura) | The Snow Woman (1968)
Japanese folklore is packed with ghosts, demons and things that would make you think twice about taking a nighttime walk, but few are as hauntingly beautiful as the Yukionna. In Tokuzō Tanaka’s The Snow Woman, Shiho Fujimura brings this legendary spirit to life as Yuki, a mysterious woman whose presence is both comforting and terrifying. The story begins when young sculptor Yosaku encounters the Snow Woman during a deadly blizzard, witnessing her freeze his master to death before she spares him on the condition that he never reveals what happened.
Years later, Yosaku falls in love with and marries the gentle Yuki, unaware that his new wife is the very spirit he encountered in the snow. As their life together unfolds, Yuki becomes a loving wife and mother while quietly carrying the burden of her supernatural identity, but when Yosaku eventually breaks his promise and discovers the truth, the fragile life they have built together begins to unravel. Fujimura gives Yuki a wonderful mixture of otherworldly mystery and genuine warmth, making her far more than a traditional horror villain. She can be frightening one moment and deeply sympathetic the next, and that contradiction is what makes this particular Snow Woman linger in the memory long after the snow has melted.
13. Song-hee (Bang Eun-jin) and Yoon-hee (Hwang Shin-hye) | 301, 302 (1995)
301, 302 is the kind of Korean psychological horror that can make something as ordinary as dinner feel deeply unsettling. Park Chul-soo’s 1995 film centers on two women living in neighboring apartments who could hardly be more different. Song-hee is a passionate but obsessive chef living in apartment 301, who is fascinated by food and constantly prepares elaborate meals. Yoon-hee, on the other hand, is the writer next door in 302, who suffers from a severe eating disorder and can barely bring herself to consume anything. Their uneasy relationship begins when Song-hee starts trying to feed Yoon-hee, but beneath their strange neighborly exchanges is a much darker story involving loneliness, abuse, trauma, and the painful experiences that have shaped both women.
As the film moves between the present and their pasts, Song-hee’s troubled marriage and obsession with food are gradually revealed alongside the childhood trauma that left Yoon-hee so emotionally and physically withdrawn. Bang Eun-jin gives Song-hee a wonderfully unpredictable performance, making her seem eccentric and almost comically enthusiastic one moment before revealing the sadness and desperation underneath, while Hwang Shin-hye plays Yoon-hee with an icy stillness that makes her suffering all the more affecting. Together, they make 301, 302 less a conventional horror movie than a disturbing character study about two damaged women who slowly recognize their own pain in each other. It’s bizarre, uncomfortable and surprisingly moving, with food becoming the perfect symbol for everything these two women desperately want but struggle to accept.
12. Yuko Moriguchi (Takako Matsu) | Confessions (2010)
Some revenge stories are loud and bloody; Confessions is far more unsettling because Yuko Moriguchi barely has to raise her voice. Takako Matsu plays the middle-school teacher at the center of Tetsuya Nakashima’s icy psychological thriller, which begins after Yuko’s young daughter is found dead in the school swimming pool. What first appears to be an accident is revealed to be murder, and Yuko comes to believe that two of her students are responsible. On her final day as their teacher, she calmly tells the class that she knows what they have done and that she has already put a plan into motion.
From there, Confessions keeps shifting perspectives, revealing the troubled lives of the students, their classmates, and the people around them while slowly filling in the horrifying circumstances behind the girl’s death. Most thrillers would’ve made the investigation into who killed her daughter the focal point, but this movie gets that out of the way by the beginning of the second act. Confessions is wildly unpredictable and works not just because its plot unfolds like an intricate origami but because the central performance is incredible.
Yuko is the film’s most fascinating presence because she never behaves like the conventional revenge-movie protagonist. Matsu plays her with an almost frightening calmness, delivering her words with such control that every quiet pause feels more threatening than a scream. She is grieving, calculating, and completely consumed by what happened to her daughter, yet the film leaves us to wrestle with the consequences of her choices rather than turning her into a straightforward hero. Yuko Moriguchi is the kind of character who walks into a classroom, starts talking, and immediately makes you realize that something terrible is coming.
11. Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish) | The Night of the Hunter (1955)
There are plenty of terrifying adults in The Night of the Hunter, but Rachel Cooper is the rare one who makes you feel like everything might actually be okay. Lillian Gish plays Rachel, a tough, compassionate woman who takes in children who have been abandoned or left without anyone to care for them. The film follows John and Pearl Harper, two children hiding from their terrifying stepfather, Harry Powell, a murderous preacher obsessed with finding the money their father stole and secretly hid before his death. After the children escape, they eventually find refuge with Rachel, who immediately sees that Powell’s pious act is hiding something much darker.
When he comes looking for them, Rachel refuses to be intimidated and becomes the children’s fiercest protector. Gish is magnificent because Rachel never feels like a helpless old woman waiting for someone else to save the day. She has a sharp tongue, a strong moral backbone, and plenty of courage, and when danger arrives at her doorstep, she meets it head-on. Her confrontation with Powell gives the film one of its most satisfying shifts in power, because the supposedly harmless grandmother figure turns out to be made of considerably tougher stuff. In a movie filled with nightmares, shadows, and religious hypocrisy, Rachel Cooper is the warm light in the window—the person who proves that kindness doesn’t have to mean weakness.
10. Mumsy (Ursula Howells), Nanny (Pat Heywood), and Girly (Vanessa Howard) | Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1970)
There are dysfunctional families, and then there’s the nightmare household at the center of Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly. Hidden away in a sprawling country house, Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly live inside their own bizarre fantasy world, where everyone has a childish nickname, and life is treated like one endless game. The trouble begins when Sonny and Girly venture out into the real world to find new “friends” to bring home, only for these unfortunate strangers to become unwilling participants in the family’s twisted games.
Mumsy rules the household with an unsettling mixture of maternal sweetness and cold authority, Nanny is the stern, devoted presence keeping the whole madhouse running, and Girly is perhaps the strangest of them all—a seemingly innocent, giggling young woman whose childish behavior hides something considerably more sinister. Vanessa Howard makes Girly especially memorable, turning sweetness into something creepy without ever needing to overplay it. The real horror of Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly comes from watching these characters treat their warped little fantasy as perfectly ordinary, creating a bizarre mixture of black comedy, psychological horror and sheer British eccentricity.
9. Valerie (Natalia Solián) | Huesera: The Bone Woman (2022)
Pregnancy has been used as horror-movie fuel plenty of times, but Huesera: The Bone Woman turns it into something much more personal and unsettling. The film follows Valeria (Natalia Solián), a young woodworker who becomes pregnant with her first child, only to find the dream of motherhood quickly turning into a nightmare. After witnessing a terrifying supernatural figure and experiencing increasingly disturbing visions, Valeria becomes convinced that something is following her. As the haunting grows more intense, so does the pressure surrounding her new life, forcing her to confront the desires, fears, and pieces of herself she buried in order to become the person everyone expected her to be.
Valeria is the heart of the film, and Natalia Solián gives her a wonderfully vulnerable performance as a woman caught between genuine fear and the realization that she may not actually want the picture-perfect future she has been building. The horror works because La Huesera isn’t simply some monster waiting in the shadows; it becomes tangled up with Valeria’s identity, her relationships, and her complicated feelings about motherhood. What begins as a supernatural nightmare gradually becomes something far more intimate, making Valeria’s journey through Huesera both frightening and painfully human.
8. Alma Borg (Liv Ullmann) | Hour of the Wolf (1968)
Ingmar Bergman made plenty of films about tortured souls, fractured relationships, and people staring directly into the darkest corners of themselves, but he rarely stepped into outright horror. Hour of the Wolf is the big exception, and what an exception it is. This psychological nightmare follows Alma Borg (Liv Ullmann), a pregnant woman living with her artist husband Johan on a remote island. Johan is suffering from insomnia and increasingly disturbing visions, while Alma begins to realize that the strange people and terrifying events surrounding them may be connected to the demons consuming her husband. When Johan is drawn into the orbit of an eccentric group of aristocrats, the line between hallucination and reality practically disappears, leaving Alma caught in a nightmare she can’t quite escape.
Alma is the film’s emotional center, and Ullmann gives her a remarkable performance as a woman who begins as a loving, composed wife but gradually finds herself confronting something she cannot understand. She watches Johan deteriorate while trying to hold onto her own sense of reality, and the film’s horror becomes just as much about psychological collapse as any supernatural threat. Hour of the Wolf feels like Bergman wandering into a haunted house and deciding that the scariest thing inside isn’t the monster—it’s the human mind. It’s a rare horror outing from one of cinema’s greatest filmmakers, and perhaps all the more unsettling because Bergman approaches the genre on his own strange, dreamlike terms.
7. Rocky (Gloria Lynne Henry) | Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1994)
It’s strange how overlooked the Phantasm series has become. Don Coscarelli’s bizarre blend of cosmic horror, surrealism, dark humor, and sci-fi helped create one of horror’s most distinctive franchises, yet it rarely gets the same attention as Halloween, Friday the 13th, or A Nightmare on Elm Street. Across its sequels, the series built an increasingly strange mythology around the Tall Man, deadly silver spheres, and a nightmarish dimension that never quite plays by the rules. Even when the movies get weirder, cheaper, or more experimental, there’s always something uniquely Phantasm about them. It’s a franchise that feels like it exists in its own little nightmare—and considering how influential and recognizable its imagery is, it deserves far more love than it gets.
The first should be ranked high on a list of the best of that decade and the sequels (not the fifth one) should be in the rotation of any horror fan that needs a fun franchise to rewatch. They get weirder with each entry, with Lord of the Dead shaping the franchise from that point forward. The film picks up with Reggie once again battling the Tall Man, who continues his plan to transform the dead into an army while Mike remains caught in his sights. After crossing paths with a young survivor named Tim, Reggie finds himself joined by Rocky, a tough-as-nails survivor who has already lost plenty to the Tall Man’s reign of terror.
Rocky isn’t there to be rescued or reduced to the usual horror-movie damsel; she can fight, shoot, and hold her own when the Tall Man’s deadly silver spheres come rolling into the picture. Gloria Lynne Henry gives Rocky a confident, no-nonsense personality that makes her immediately likable, and she becomes one of the film’s most memorable additions to the bizarre mythology. In a franchise filled with killer spheres, undead armies, and one of horror’s strangest villains, Rocky manages to stand out simply by being one of the few people who looks at the insanity and says, essentially, “Fine, let’s fight.”
6. Sasha (Sara Montpetit) | Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023)
Vampires are usually pretty good at the whole killing-people thing, but Sasha never quite got the memo. In Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, Sara Montpetit plays a young vampire who simply can’t bring herself to kill anyone, much to the frustration of her family. When Sasha’s refusal to hunt leaves her without a reliable source of blood, she crosses paths with Paul, a lonely teenager who is willing to make an unusual deal with her. Their arrangement sends the two of them on a strange nighttime adventure as Sasha tries to help Paul while also figuring out how to survive as a vampire who doesn’t fit the traditional mold.
Sasha is what makes the film work so well: she’s awkward, sensitive and genuinely compassionate, making her almost the complete opposite of the typical bloodthirsty vampire. Montpetit gives her a wonderfully understated performance that captures Sasha’s loneliness without turning her into a cliché. Beneath all the dark comedy and vampire absurdity, she’s really a character trying to find her place in a family and a world that expect her to be something she isn’t.
5. Klára / Viktoria (Iva Janzurová) | Morgiana (1972)
Few films look quite as strange and dreamlike as Morgiana, Juraj Herz’s Czech Gothic nightmare. Much of its power comes from Iva Janžurová playing both of its central sisters. Klára and Viktoria are sisters who couldn’t be more different, but their already troubled relationship becomes poisonous after their wealthy father leaves his fortune to Klára. Consumed by jealousy, Viktoria decides that the only way to get what she wants is to remove her sister from the picture, secretly poisoning Klára and waiting for the effects to take hold.
As Klára’s health deteriorates, reality begins to feel increasingly unstable, with hallucinations, unsettling imagery, and the mysterious presence of the cat Morgiana turning the story into a full-blown fever dream. Janžurová is phenomenal in the dual role, making Klára’s sweetness and innocence completely distinct from Viktoria’s bitterness, cruelty, and obsession. Viktoria is the real monster of the story, but Morgiana isn’t interested in making her evil for the sake of it; her envy slowly consumes her until she becomes trapped inside the very nightmare she created. It’s a beautifully macabre character study disguised as a Gothic fairy tale, with Janžurová giving the film its unforgettable split personality.
4. Birgit Suomaa (Mirja Mane) | The Witch (1952)
In The Witch, Birgit is discovered during an archaeological excavation after being buried in a swamp roughly three hundred years earlier, having been branded a witch after rejecting the advances of a powerful local man. When a young woman matching Birgit’s description suddenly appears, the locals become convinced that the witch has returned, and Mirja Mane gives her an eerie mixture of innocence, sensuality, and complete unpredictability.
Birgit isn’t your typical cackling movie witch who spends the entire picture plotting everybody’s demise; much of her power comes from the fact that she barely seems to need to do anything at all. The men around her become increasingly obsessed with her, turning the supposedly supernatural threat into something that also exposes their own desires, jealousy, and stupidity. Mane understands exactly how much mystery the character needs, because Birgit never feels completely explainable, even when the movie starts giving you reasons for what is happening.
There’s also something wonderfully subversive about the character’s history: Birgit was condemned as a witch after refusing the advances of a powerful local man, meaning the label of “witch” was placed on her long before she ever had the opportunity to prove whether she actually was one. By the time she returns, the people who buried her have created their own legend around her, and Birgit becomes the walking embodiment of everything they are afraid she might be. Mane carries the whole thing with an almost hypnotic calm, and considering The Witch is one of Finland’s earliest horror films, Birgit is a surprisingly memorable creation—a mysterious woman pulled out of the mud who doesn’t need to scream, cast spells or chase anybody around with an axe to cause absolute mayhem. Sometimes all you need is to come back from the dead and let everyone else completely lose their damn minds.
3. Julia Lofting (Mia Farrow) | The Haunting of Julia (1977)
Since they had thirteen collaborations together, Mia Farrow’s filmography will forever be associated with Woody Allen. They made many wonderful dramas and comedies together, but I’d argue her horror work is where she really shines. Rosemary’s Baby is obviously the high watermark, but she also made the underrated See No Evil, had a creepy cameo in The Omen remake, and gives a tour de force performance in The Haunting of a Julia.
In the film, she plays Julia, a woman trying to rebuild her life after the death of her young daughter. Emotionally shattered and desperate for somewhere to start over, she moves into an old London house, hoping the change of scenery will give her a chance to put the past behind her. But her past is clearly not finished with her yet. Julia begins experiencing strange occurrences and becomes convinced that the house is haunted by the ghost of a murdered child, eventually uncovering a disturbing connection between the spirit and the home’s previous occupants.
What makes Julia such an effective character is that Farrow never plays her as a conventional horror heroine who suddenly develops supernatural detective skills; she is fragile, grieving, and often completely out of her depth, but she keeps digging because finding out what happened to the ghost becomes tangled up with her own need to understand death and loss. The deeper Julia gets into the mystery, the more isolated she becomes from the people around her, particularly as those closest to her begin questioning whether she’s actually encountering something supernatural or simply losing herself in grief. Farrow gives Julia a tremendous amount of vulnerability without turning her into a passive victim, and that balance makes her increasingly desperate investigation feel believable.
The Haunting of Julia is a remarkably restrained ghost story, and Julia is the reason it works, because the horror isn’t simply that something dead has followed her home. It’s that Julia may have finally found something that understands exactly what she has lost—and may not want to let her go.
2. Mother Joan of the Angels (Lucyna Winnicka) | Mother Joan of the Angels (1961)
Joan is the abbess of a remote seventeenth-century convent where the nuns are supposedly possessed by demons, and she is considered the worst case of the bunch, having already defeated several priests sent to perform an exorcism. When Father Józef Suryn arrives to deal with the situation, Joan immediately becomes the center of his attention because it’s never entirely clear where Joan ends and the possession begins. She can be frightened, seductive, theatrical, vulnerable and downright terrifying within the same conversation. Her obsession with sainthood gives the character another layer beyond simply being “the possessed nun.” Joan desperately wants to be extraordinary, even if becoming extraordinary means becoming damned, and her increasingly complicated relationship with Suryn turns the whole possession story into something much more psychologically uncomfortable.
Mother Joan of the Angels is one of the greatest films about possession because it dismantles the distinction between religious devotion, repression, desire, and madness. This isn’t your typical horror film. It isn’t concerned with scaring you as much as it wants to slowly introduce themes and philosophies that are terrifying all by themselves. They don’t need images to back them up. All it needs is ideas and a strong central performance, and it has both in spades.
Winnicka is terrific because she never plays Joan as a generic horror-movie monster; even when Joan is behaving in ways that should make her seem completely inhuman, there is still a lonely woman underneath it all who desperately wants somebody to understand her. And that is what makes the character stick with you. The demons might be real, but Joan’s real horror is that she seems almost relieved to finally have something inside her powerful enough to explain everything she has been feeling. By the end, Mother Joan of the Angels has turned its supposedly supernatural villain into something considerably more complicated, and Winnicka gives her just enough humanity that you can’t simply dismiss her as another evil nun waiting for an exorcism.
1. Roma Courtney (Carole Lombard) | Supernatural (1933)
Carole Lombard’s career is usually remembered for her rapid-fire screwball comedies and glamorous screen presence, which makes Supernatural such a wonderfully bizarre detour. Lombard plays Roma Courtney, a woman whose body becomes the vessel for the spirit of an executed murderer, allowing her to dip her toes into supernatural horror and occult melodrama. Lombard gets to spend much of the movie playing a woman who is essentially losing control of her own existence, and that’s what makes Roma such an interesting character. She isn’t some fearless horror heroine who marches into danger because the script needs somebody to do it; she’s vulnerable, trusting, and genuinely desperate to reconnect with someone she’s lost, which makes her eventual possession feel particularly cruel. Once Ruth takes over, Lombard completely changes the energy of the character, turning Roma from a grieving heiress into something far more aggressive and unpredictable, while the people around her struggle to figure out whether they’re dealing with Roma, Ruth, or some particularly nasty combination of the two.
The fun of the character is that Roma’s greatest problem isn’t simply that a ghost has decided to haunt her. It’s that the ghost has decided to take over her life, and suddenly everybody who knows Roma has to wonder whether the woman standing in front of them is actually Roma at all. Lombard is particularly good at selling that uneasy split between the frightened woman trapped underneath and the much more dangerous personality controlling her body, giving Supernatural one of the more memorable possession performances of the early sound era.
And for a movie made in 1933, there’s something pretty damn entertaining about watching a séance go horribly wrong, a dead murderer hijack the body of a wealthy socialite, and everyone slowly realize that maybe they should have found a less questionable way to deal with grief. It’s strange to think that one of Hollywood’s great comedy stars briefly wandered into haunted-house territory, but Supernatural is a fascinating reminder that Lombard’s career was a lot more eclectic than her reputation suggests.
40-21 | Top 100 Female Horror Characters
Who are some of the most underrated female characters in horror movies that didn’t make this list? Share them with us down in the comments!
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