Some of the best Scream Kings to honor this Halloween

Take a break from the endless lists of scream queens and embrace the kings of horror, the scream kings this Halloween!

Scream queens, or “final girls,” are famous for their ability to remain virgins until the end and survive the big baddie in horror movies. Every popular horror franchise, minus Evil Dead and Final Destination (Alex will always be one of my favorite final guys), has a scream queen covered in blood and wielding a blunt instrument somewhere in there. For all its slut-shaming, the “final girl” trope has somehow made horror a symbol of feminism, even if the entire genre is just a message to girls that basically translates to “sex is bad.”

It’s no secret that Hollywood is run by men, but, in fact, horror is the only genre where women have more screen time and dialogue than men. Some of the “final girls” are pretty dangerous, too. As time went on, the tougher our scream queens became, and we’ve come to a point where some no longer need to be virgins to beat the bad guy anymore. Now, the name of “Scream Queen” can be worn proudly by any woman who lives to kick butt.

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The queen of the queens, Jamie Lee Curtis, is returning to the genre this October in the Halloween remake, something I am most excited about.

However, lets take a moment and forget our screaming women, or just push them aside for a bit, and take a look at the men of horror. There was a time when horror movies ruled the silver screen, unlike today where they’ve become low-budget gore porn, and the men who played the monsters in those oldies were the biggest stars of their time. Where the women were chased, it was usually a man in a mask who chased them.

However, in the past thirty years, there has been an increasing number of horror flicks were we see a “final guy.” As women are seen less and less as victims and more as heroes or the monsters themselves, we’re starting to see a slow change of gender representation in horror.

One day a woman will be James Bond and a half-naked man will get hunted down by a female-Jason Voorhees (Jana Voorhees?). Can’t really picture it, but anything’s possible.

Here are some of the best scream kings, past, and present…