Do Scream Queens Still Get Nude? The Tale of Linnea Quigley.
Note: Not Safe For Work. Some nudity and mature topics.
“They said if you did nudity, you wouldn’t be able to ever act again. Well it’s not true. You can.”
I am a feminist in that I believe in the liberation of women and people of all genders from a male-oriented system. But I also believe in the liberation of boobs. On camera, in horror movies, with actor consent and crew support, for the enhancement of the film.
With the rise of the conservative Reagan-80’s came the fall of the second wave of feminism, the movement now marred by a new preoccupation with sex. Also known as the porn wars, feminist activists were divided on viewing pornography and prostitution as male-dominated violence against women or as another choice.
That framework also began to apply to the movies, particularly of the horror genre (working concurrently with Video Nasty censorship1).
The ‘80’s Queen of Scream
Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) was picketed for its crude and extreme violence perpetrated by a traumatized Santa Claus impersonator, much of that violence being taken out on a character played by Linnea Quigley in what would become a breakout role. While topless, she’s thrown around by Santa Claus and eventually impaled by deer antlers.
Concerned parents, feminists, and critics chided the cast and crew for the film’s perversion of family values - Siskel and Ebert allegedly went through the credits and yelled ‘Shame!’ at every name.
Quigley, filming another movie at the time, thought the controversy to be silly, and continuing making films throughout the 1980’s where it became her signature to get naked and get weird with it.
Quigley’s ‘80’s career is defined not only by her comfort with baring her breasts, but the extreme physical feats and the unique body horror that creators were able to achieve thanks to her comfort with her body on camera. In Return of the Living Dead, her horny-for-death character performs a nude erotic dance for her punk friends in a graveyard. In Night of the Demons, she shoves a lipstick into her nipple, the skin newly pliable from demon possession.
Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout
In 1990, Quigley released a horror workout tape with then-trendy aerobics-style choreography that included a zombie dance party, an all-girls barely-clad slumber party hunted by a killer, and a solo fireside workout. Plus stabbings and a decapitation.
Produced by Quigley herself, she shows her breasts within the first three minutes. For the re-release of her workout tape, she added, “They said if you did nudity, you wouldn’t be able to ever act again. Well it’s not true. You can.” Quigley is beloved and working primarily, if not solely, in the horror community.
Contradictions on Nudity in Horror Today
Body horror needs a body.
Sans boobies, you can still get real weird with it. Giallo has eyeball trauma up the wazoo, Stephen King’s hobbling and Achilles-slicing radiate pain through the screen, and Cronenberg just makes up new holes and appendages to incite horny curiosity and disgust.
I doubt we’ll ever get another actress whose signature is to get naked & weird. Hollywood has a dark history with the age-old threat of never going back to a non-nude class of work and only a recent addition of an intimacy coordinator.
For a new Linnea Quigley to rise, there would have to be a slew of parts available that necessitated bad taste nudity - no nip peeking out of a sheer white bodice in a field at golden hour - and with the fall of the low-budget B-movie Quigley made her name on, independent films are getting too clean/slick/cold/domestic for knockers that turn into sharks and eat people.
Maybe it’s a good thing that ‘20’s horror icons like Samara Weaving, Jenna Ortega and Mia Goth have barely done nudity, in the eyes of Hollywood, allowing them to dabble or even transition to other film genres. Maybe a career solely in horror can seem like pigeonholing, when to me, it feels like an honor.
There’s still great body horror. But. The more body, the more freaky. And what are we, as humans, as lovers of film, if not following in the naked, dancing footsteps of Linnea Quigley to push the boundaries of freaky?
Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout (1990) 3.5/5
Tubi, Internet Archive
This is very fun, albeit an ad for Quigley’s movies, with an actual workout somewhere in there. I forgot how much of aerobics is just looking at your hot sweaty body. More workouts videos should have zombies.
The original VHS tapes are a small fortune, but there was a recent DVD/Blu-ray release by Terror Vision and the soundtrack is now available by Mondo on vinyl.
For you if you love: Funny women, boobs, the ‘80’s, kitsch
Thanks for reading!
xo,
your frenemy, allie lembo’s dust-covered furby she just left here decades ago that lives in your parents’ attic with dead batteries and every full moon likes to croak out ‘yippee’
Defined here:
