10 Most Hysterical Characters In Horror Movie History
They're overwrought, emotional and wildly uncontrolled. But it's not as simple as you think.
Historically, the hysterical character in a horror movie has been a woman, trading on not only their ability to conjure the most blood-curdling screams, but an archetype and stereotype popularised and perpetuated by Alfred Hitchcock. The advent of the scream queen in the 1970s brought a change in the perception of women in horror, edging out this worn gender trope and transposing them from the set-upon damsels to fully-realised ass-kickers in their own right.
But we're not here to talk about them. We're here to talk about the characters who are, more often than not, insensible in the face of looming evil, their brains going to mush and their instincts telling them to go absolutely apeshit at the first sign of a long shadow. While this is seen by many as their greatest character failure, in truth this would be the vast majority of us in the same situation. Let's face it, we're not exactly Purging on the weekends and summering at Camp Crystal Lake.
Many of these characters are just ordinary folks who let their emotions get the better of them, though sometimes the hysteria in these films arises as a symptom of an underlying mental illness. And, contrary to Hitchcock's approach, many of the most hysterical horror characters in the years since his reign have been men.
10. Jesse Walsh - A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
Elm Street victims aren't known for their stoicism, but some are less equal than others.
A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge brings the dream demon back with a vengeance. Five years after the events of the first film, Freddy (Robert Englund) returns to haunt Jesse Walsh (Mark Patton), who has moved into the former home of the last attack's sole survivor, Nancy Thompson. Requiring a host to enact his vendetta on the town's teens, Freddy possesses Jesse and corrupts him from the inside out.
Ostensibly set up as the film's straight man, Jesse is anything but. Beside the fact that many have interpreted Nightmare 2 as a metaphor for Jesse's repressed homosexuality (something supported in no small part by the BDSM killing of his gay coach in the showers), Jesse reacts indifferently to some of the horrifying things happening around him, but goes completely bananas at others, screaming and howling.
That the sound production team didn't have Patton record his scream more than once or twice only makes things stranger – or at least more comical – as every one of Jesse's absurdly high-pitched, OTT screams sounds almost identical.
To be fair to him, Nightmare 2 has the scariest and least wacky Freddy in the entire series, and it can't exactly be easy growing claws and a jumper out of your skin.