Scream Queen: Maika Monroe

The following is an exceprt from my essay ‘What makes Maika Monroe the perfect modern day scream queen?’

Maika Monroe has been in the horror game for about 10 years by this point. She exploded onto the scene in 2014 with a double-hitter: Adam Wingard’s The Guest and David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, two now-iconic genre pictures that hit cinemas in the same year as The Babadook, and along with it signalled a fresh era of quality, indy, arty horror movies. These are two incredibly significant and impressive roles for a young actress.

Since she helped usher in a reinvigorated period for genre cinema, Maika Monroe has appeared in the AI kidnapping sci-fi film Tau and psychological thriller Greta, both in 2018, romantic comedy/home-invasion-gone-wrong movie Villains (2019), low-fi alien invasion film Significant Other and paranoid stalker movie Watcher, both in 2022, brutal cult drama God Is a Bullet (2023) and this year, the scary serial killer movie currently smashing the box office, Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs.

With this latest release in mind, it feels like a good time to take a look at what makes Maika Monroe such a perfect fit for genre cinema.

With each role, she delivers a vision of a woman caught up in some creepy, often violent, goings-on, expertly portraying her characters with heart, empathy, a little sex appeal, and most often discernible terror. Just what audiences look for in their final girls and scream queens.

To read the full essay, sign up to my Patreon (tiers £5+)