The horror movie Watcher asks and answers ‘Are scream queens still a thing?’

polygon.com:

Does so-called elevated horror have room for scream queens? That affectionate term for actresses like Jamie Lee Curtis, Linnea Quigley, or Danielle Harris, who became known for their work in multiple horror films, usually brings lower-budget slashers and exploitation pictures to mind more than it conjures up indie meta-horror, or even more mainstream-friendly horror, like The Conjuring’s extended universe.

But a number of recent horror movies suggest that a scream-queen career is still a viable possibility, even as the genre evolves away from the era that created the idea in the first place. Jenna Ortega recently proved her horror bona fides by appearing in a slasher a month for the first quarter of 2022, playing variations on female-character tropes in Scream, Studio 666, and Ti West’s porn-horror X. Now, with the release of Watcher, Maika Monroe makes a case for herself as a different, slower-burning scream queen for the A24/Neon crowd.

Watcher isn’t actually an A24 or Neon release. It comes from IFC Midnight, a company that’s shown interest in the artier side of horror for significantly longer than those other two companies. (Its recent releases Hatching and The Innocents are solidly representative.) Nevertheless, it’s easy to describe Watcher in a way that makes it sound like one of those portent-loaded, barely subtextual horror stories about trauma, grief, and/or gaslighting.

Julia (Monroe) moves to Bucharest with her partner (Karl Glusman), a native Romanian who knows the area and speaks the language. He also works long hours at the demanding job that brought him to Europe. Julia, meanwhile, is left unmoored in a strange-to-her city. Alone in their new apartment, she becomes convinced that someone’s watching her