Trembling, the young woman is crouching on the floor of the wardrobe. Try not to think about the bodies of their dead friends on the ground floor, not to breathe. Because the killer is still in the house. Blood oozes from a wound on her shoulder, he caught her with the knife as they wrestled below. And she rammed a knitting needle into his throat. How can he still live?

The cabinet door bursts and a hand reaches in. A disguised figure breaks through the wood, swinging a butcher's knife. And the young woman?

She screams.

And quite successful: Like her first movie appearance in "Halloween" as a psychopath followed a babysitter brought Jamie Lee Curtis in 1978 the breakthrough. Actually, Curtis, 19, wanted to become a police officer at the time. But her tennis teacher gave her the audition - and she convinced director John Carpenter. His produced for only $ 325,000 independent film played in the US alone 47 million and became a horror classic.

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"Scream Queens" in the horror movie: The last shout

Curtis was soon to be afraid of knifes in other horror movies, fleeing and screaming - in "Monster in the Night Express" (1980), "Prom Night - The Night of the Slayer" (1980), then in the "Halloween" continuations "Das Horror Returns "(1981) and" The Night of Decision "(1982). A strange job, to say the least. But she did so well, that her title of honor is still attached to her: "Scream Queen".

Screaming woman, invincible man

In essence, Curtis' success in being professionally attacked by killers was not surprising - it was in the family. Curtis was born on November 22, 1958, as the daughter of Hollywood stars Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. And it was Leigh who only two years later put down the probably most famous canvas death ever:

The young woman pulls aside the plastic curtain, takes a shower, lets hot water run over her head with her eyes closed. She does not see the outline of a figure behind the curtain. Always sharper, ever closer. Then a hand tears open the curtain, shrill strings begin, a disguised figure swings a butcher's knife in the direction of the showering. Their shriek drowns out the orchestra until it sinks lifelessly.

In Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960), Janet Leigh played the fugitive Marion Crane, who descends with stolen money in a motel and falls victim to a mental patient. It took seven days to shoot the fast-paced shower scene, today a piece of film history. Thus Leigh would have earned the title "Scream Queen". If he had existed then.

In fact, he did not appear until the late 1970s. Meanwhile, drastic horror movies such as "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (1974), "The Hills Have Eyes" (1977) and other extreme exploitation films had pushed the boundaries of what cinema allowed to show: sex and violence, more explicit than ever and in combination with each other, reached a larger audience than one would have imagined a decade earlier.

Carpenter's "Halloween" led from 1978 to the boom of the Slasher movie. In this horror subgenre murdered a psychopath, mostly with the knife, a number of predominantly young, female victims. Following the example of the played by Jamie Lee Curtis babysitter fled from then on, other women in films such as "Friday the 13th" (1980) or "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (1984) screaming in front of superhumanly strong men with long blades.

"I did not want to serve this kind of role pattern"

Many of these films followed the questionable gender rules that "Halloween" had established: Already at the "Halloween" beginning, psychopath Michael Myers stabs his own sister as a child, because she messed around with her boyfriend instead of taking care of little Michael. According to this logic, sex among the young protagonists of the Slasher movie usually causes the rapid death of all those involved. Slightly (if at all) clothed girls have nothing to oppose to the male aggressor except their cries.

With one exception: the "Final Girl". The last surviving girl succeeds in overpowering the murderer - often by pure luck or the help of male protagonists. Often this "final girl" is the only morally compliant teenager among the main characters: she does not use drugs, does not drink alcohol, has no sex. So she may live.

"Intelligent and jammed," was how Curtis' tennis instructor described the role of Laurie in "Halloween" for which he taught her. Curtis was both so successful and vociferous that she had to live from 1978 onwards with the title "Scream Queen". What she did not like, Curtis said in 2018 to the "FAZ": "I did not want to serve this kind of role model."

She did it anyway, at least for a while: After the success of "Halloween" Curtis screamed for some years through more horror movies, before she got offered more roles from the mid-eighties on increasingly. With the comedy "A Fish Called Wanda" (1988) or the action thriller "Blue Steel" (1990), she now also set foot in genres in which less was screamed.

Stop the slaughter

That is a long time ago. On November 22, Jamie Lee Curtis turns 60, her hair is gray, she does not dye her. Curtis has a great career and a busy life: she was a Hollywood star, a children's book author, a blogger. She struggled for a long time with failed beauty surgeries, alcoholism, tablet addiction and got her life back under control. She campaigned for the rights of homosexuals, supported presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and a charity for AIDS-ill children.

In addition, the former "Scream Queen" in the # MeToo debate was one of the unmistakable voices of Hollywood: In a column for the "Huffington Post" Curtis expressed in October 2017 outraged by the supposition that many victims of sexual assault in the film business would have " asked for it ". She herself, the actress explained, had experienced her "personal versions of sexual assault at work." "Did I ask? No. What I had simply asked for was a job, and what was involved was sexual assault."

The Slasher horror of "Halloween" with the omnipotent killer Michael Myers Curtis has meanwhile not turned his back. And precisely because of their convictions: In the sequel "Halloween", which started on 19 October 2018 (here the trailer), she plays the 40-year-old Laurie Strode as a drawn by her trauma wife.

This time, however, Laurie no longer runs helplessly away from her overpowering pursuer, but lurks on him. And, as much spoiler is allowed, it eventually overpowers him - with the help of other women. The former "Scream Queen" is no longer satisfied with fear and screaming.

Curtis closed her # MeToo protest column with a quote from the song "I Am Woman," which Helen Reddy sang in 1971: "I'm a woman, hear me roaring, too big to ignore."

From the Sexist Cliché to the Avenger in the Sexual Battle: On the occasion of the 60th birthday of the "Queen of Screams" Jamie Lee Curtis, one day of the photo series will show the most famous, most shrill and defensive professional screechers in film history .