Long Live the Queen

Kandace burst through the door of the darkened bedroom, slamming it behind her and frantically twisting the lock shut. Scanning the room, she dove for a nearly undetectable space between the twin bed and the wall, wedging her body into the corner and pulling her knees to her chest. With her head swimming from panic, she tried to force a long, slow breath in and another one out in an effort to stay quiet and keep the wooziness at bay.

Maybe it hadn’t heard her. Maybe it had left. 

For a brief eternity, there was silence. 

WHAM!

The top left panel of the door exploded, sending shards of flimsy birch and a sickly stream of yellow light spilling onto the mid-century shag carpet. The Shambler withdrew his axe, its sticky, blood-covered head now speckled with wood dust. With an impossibly long and rattling breath, he wedged his scarred arm up to the shoulder through the jagged hole in the builder-grade door. Kandace stifled a gasp as the Shambler began fumbling with the doorknob, his gnarled hand slick with blood.

CLACK. CREEEEEEEEEAK.

What was left of the door swung slowly open and the Shambler stepped over the threshold, hefting the axe with both hands. His hulking frame eclipsed the anemic glow of the hallway bulb and the last shred of hope in Kandace’s heart promptly dissolved, like flesh bubbling in a bucket of acid. 

She screamed. 

It was steady, searing, and built from a low hum into a pulsing, throbbing energy which seemed to go on for a lifetime, getting louder and longer and filling the room with an auditory blast of sheer, unadulterated terror. Dropping the axe, The Shambler clapped his hands to the sides of his filthy, masked head in a futile effort to protect his ears.

“Jesus!” he exclaimed. “What the fuck, Sheila?”

“Cut!” yelled Les Plummer. 

“That’s a cut!” echoed the first AD. “Back to one, please.” As the crew sprang to their tasks resetting the scene for a second take, an expression that was equal parts confused and apologetic adorned the face of Sheila Whalen, the actress playing Kandace Kane. Les rose wearily out of his director’s chair and approached the Shambler.

“What the fuck, Todd?”

“Sorry, Les,” said Todd, removing the shapeless brown Shambler mask and rubbing his ears. “You know me, I don’t blow a take for anything. I just never heard a scream like that before. I thought I felt my eardrum rupture.” Todd stuck a massive pinky in one ear and wiggled it around as location sound recordist Will Francis approached the huddle. 

“Doesn’t matter, Les,” said Will. “It was NG for sound.”

“What the fuck, Will?” asked Les.

“She buried the needle,” said Will. “Might’ve even blown out the mic.” Les sighed and turned to Sheila, still tucked away in the corner, her chin resting on the bed. 

“It’s probably just as well,” he said to her. “Give your pipes a chance to recover while we fly in a new microphone.”

“I’m fine,” Sheila said with a shrug. The men looked at one other. What the fuck?

“You don’t want a cup of tea?” asked Will. “Or a lozenge or something?”

“Oh, no thank you,” she said brightly. “I’m good to go again whenever you are.”

“Listen, honey,” said Les. “We might have to do a few of these until we nail it. Can you really keep screaming like that for the rest of the night?”

“Sure,” Sheila replied. “That’s the job, isn’t it?”

Les looked back at his beautiful young ingenue, and a smile began to spread across his face.

- - -

When THE SHAMBLER first hit theaters in 1977, Sheila Whalen knew her life had changed. No more nameless bikini babe roles, no more day player gigs on soap operas, no more shaking her lustrous hair after finally having found the right shampoo and conditioner in one. The horror movie offers were stacking up like corpses at a summer camp, from TERROR TROLLEY to BLOOD PROM: LAST DANCE to the EVIL BRUNCH trilogy, the first and third of which any horror fan could tell you were stone cold classics.

She was promoted from the curvy figure in the corner of the grindhouse poster to dead center, full face and larger than life. Before long, her name and likeness were splashed all over dozens of the cereal-box-sized VHS cases in the video store horror section. Star-making roles outside the genre remained elusive, but Sheila was having a ball sharing her special gift with horror fanatics all over the world. The crown of the scream queen was resting firmly on her head, and one of the greatest final girls to ever grace a drive-in screen was screaming all the way to the bank.

But right around the time the Backstreet Boys were dominating MTV, something even more unthinkable happened: horror movies got respectable. In a turn of events no less shocking than a sledgehammer to the ankles, they were even winning Academy Awards. It looked like curtains for the scream queens of the 70s and 80s, and for a lot of them, it was. But Sheila Whalen, her once glorious physical attributes now akin to Kryptonite in the eyes a perpetually youth-obsessed industry, had no intention of going quietly.

Supplanted as she was onscreen by a never-ending supply of bubblegum clones from the Disney-Channel-to-Pop-Star pipeline, Sheila quickly learned that not one of them had the chops when it came to the scream queen’s raison d'être. ADR, or automated dialogue replacement, is a process where actors in a controlled studio environment re-record lines (and screams) that were botched on set, and it was in these recording booths where Sheila wrote the second act of her career.

You don’t make a living in horror movies without a sense of humor, and Sheila accepted the transition with grace and aplomb, trading acting work and convention appearances for a steady gig as the in-house screamer at Wilhelm Studios. After hundreds of hours behind the mic, she even felt secure enough to treat herself to a small home recording booth, which saved her the trip back and forth to Wilhelm on the days when she was really feeling her age. All things considered, Sheila was grateful for her life and her career, especially after having heard the bell toll for so many of her era and gender.

But in 2026, the bell finally tolled for Sheila Whalen, in the form of a ringing telephone...