After years of increasingly dwindling viewership, Ryan Murphy’s once-hit show American Horror Story returned last week with the first culturally relevant move the anthology series has made since it gave Lady Gaga her debut major on-screen role in 2015: casting Kim Kardashian. The cultural icon plays one of the beloved scream queens in the show’s 12th season, American Horror Story: Delicate.
A non-actress It Girl playing a lead role in a campy horror may sound like a relic of a low-budget, Y2K slasher movie but lately, there’s been a sharp rise in the style icons du jour taking on scream queen roles. In 2021, Bottoms actor and i-D cover star Kaia Gerber made her acting debut in an AHS spin-off show. More recently, the violent stan-horror Swarm featured Paris Jackson as an ill-fated stripper (alongside Chlöe and Billie Eilish), while Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Kyle Richards returned to acting for the final two Halloween movies. Remember 2022’s Alone At Night, the Ashley Benson-produced horror initially only watchable if you bought a $263 NFT? That one starred Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson, Winnie Harlow, Sky Ferreira and a wider cast largely made up of YouTubers and TikTok influencers.
Then of course there’s Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, an upcoming Addison Rae-starring festive slasher about a serial killer working his way through the residents of a small Massachusetts town. And the news that hyperpop girly Charli XCX is joining a cast that includes It Girl turned Euphoria actor Barbie Ferreira for the remake of the messed up snuff movie, Faces of Death. Finally, FKA Twigs is set to be brutally murdered as Shelley in the remake of the dark supernatural superhero movie, The Crow. So many It Girls senselessly murdered! When will this blood lust end?
But Kim’s venture into the genre is the most surprising. Especially given that, of every facet of her already vast resume (lawyer, beauty mogul, reality star, fashion designer, one-hit wonder, selfie-book author, game developer… the list is truly endless), she once revealed that the most embarrassing moment of her career was 2008’s Disaster Movie. In the aptly-named, apocalyptic thriller parody, Kim appeared wrestling Carmen Electra before performing a High School Musical-esque number and ultimately getting hit by a giant asteroid.
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But Kim was seemingly more prepared this time. “It’s really fun to step outside of your comfort zone and try something new and grow. I’m so excited for the experience,” she said to Variety regarding her role in AHS, adding that she’d been taking acting lessons ahead of filming. “It’s a challenge. I like to challenge myself.” In the latest season (which thematically falls somewhere between Rosemary’s Baby and Pretty Little Liars, and also stars fellow It Girl Cara Delevigne), Kim plays Siobhan Corbyn, a blunt, hard-ball publicist (she’s basically playing Kris Jenner) to Emma Roberts’ lead character, an actor. Kim describes her character as “fun, stylish and ultimately terrifying”. While that comment suggests her character might end up all-out villainous, the blasé approach to the sinister happenings around her and a sassy, no-fucks-given persona exhibited in the first episode suggests she’s destined for a gruesome yet iconic death scene at some point – according to the laws of horror, at least.
Historically, due to their lowbrow reputation, lack of critical recognition and low budgets, big-name stars rarely appeared in horror movies. This changed with Scream (1996) and the casting of 90s It Girl and Hollywood starlet Drew Barrymore, as director Wes Craven made the risky decision to make the cast’s buzziest name, the one drawing in audiences, the first kill. But it paid off – the iconic opening scene of the movie has not only become one of the most referenced scenes in horror, cementing the franchise’s thrilling ‘nobody is safe’ energy, it also changed the world of casting in horror movies forever. From I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) to The Grudge (2004) and the rest of the Scream franchise, the leads in many horror movies, particularly slashers, were played by young, up-and-coming and, importantly, attractive stars with an already established icon status. As a result, rather than the cult horror viewers of yore, mainstream audiences flocked for the thrill of seeing whether their faves would survive until the end of the movie or be brutally terrorised and massacred along the way.
The creepy 2005 slasher House of Wax, a movie starring ultimate It Girl of the 00s – Paris Hilton – took this culture to the next level. No longer drawing in audiences with the thrill of finding out the fate of the celebs du jour, the movie’s tagline promised audiences the chance to “see Paris die!”. Playing the secretly pregnant Paige, we watch her strip out of her Juicy Couture tracksuit in an attempt to seduce her boyfriend, before getting chased through the woods, staked through the head and embalmed by the killer.
Many have pointed out the blatant misogyny of the campaign and around Paris’ casting. As E! News stated in an article on the movie’s 15th anniversary, the casting choice was “a tongue-in-cheek capitalisation on the love-to-hate-her feelings the socialite turned sex tape and reality TV star tended to stir up in people”. It didn’t matter that Paris was not an actress (although she does make a surprisingly good scream queen), her role was to entice her fandom to watch their fave on the big screen, and more importantly, entice the morbid desire within her haters to watch the graphic mutilation of “New York’s number one It Girl”. It worked, and despite the movie being poorly received by critics, it earned $70 million worldwide.
But Paris’ own view of her role in the movie is different to that of its critics, seeing it as a moment of pop culture history and having since called it, “the coolest death scene”, much like that of Drew Barrymore’s in Scream (Paris’ character was also memorialised with an actual waxwork figure at Madame Tussauds). From Marilyn Monroe to Paris Hilton and Addison Rae, the It Girl has always been aware of her place and her perception in society and has used that to her advantage in the projects she takes on, her public appearances and her public comments. In understanding both the world in which she is perceived and what people desire from her, she then uses that for promotion, whether to feed the deep-rooted audience desire to see a starlet fall (and turning that into a Hollywood paycheck) or providing gay Twitter with iconic one liners to obsess over for years to come.
Ever self-aware, one step ahead of her image and unafraid to make fun of her fame – her self-deprecating opening monologue on SNL is considered one of the best in the show’s history – there’s no doubt Kim recognises that many will be tuning into the latest season of AHS purely on the off-chance they’ll get to see America’s biggest star either fail as an actor or get brutally murdered. Potentially both. But it’s the same attitude that has fueled much of the public’s love-hate relationship with the Kardashians over recent decades. The camp energy of the scream queen role has already allowed Kim to turn her horror era into a bigger moment though, with her opening line of “suck my clit” already becoming a major talking point across TikTok and news headlines. And we’re only one episode deep!
The It Girls du jour are realising the power of joining the scream queen legacy. No they’re unlikely to take the first step in EGOT status with these projects, but they’ll receive something better: the obsession of horror-obsessed, perpetually-online girls, gays and theys gagging to turn those characters into Halloween costumes that will only be understood by other horror-obsessed, perpetually-online people. I know which legacy I’d prefer.
Besides, if M3GAN becoming the face of Heaven by Marc Jacobs tells us anything, it’s that the horror icons are coming for that It Girl coin too.