(Credits: Far Out / ShareGrid / Georgi Kalaydzhiev)
Sun 24 August 2025 3:30, UK
Hollywood has always had a habit of making icons, but the realm of horror is one of the most notorious for making unforgettable stars that become intrinsically associate with the genre.
In 1896 Georges Méliès created what most generally accept as the first ever horror film, Le Manoir du Diable or The Devil’s Castle, kickstarting a cinematic trend that has never really waned. The emergence of cinema as an art form coincided with the period’s interest in gothic and macabre literature – Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published in 1897, for example – so it didn’t take long for this new medium of moving images to look towards these spine-chilling stories for inspiration.
Those incendiary years of cinema – that many of us wish to have experienced in real time – were predominantly led by adaptations of familiar stories and figures, like The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Frankenstein. Soon, horror became a popular aspect of the cinematic landscape, and you seemingly couldn’t avoid a gothic story on your trip to the cinema. As a result of horror’s popularity, certain actors started to become known for their frequent performances in villainous roles – but was this a potentially fatal idea for stars, who now ran the risk of being typecast?Â
Limiting themselves almost entirely to horror films might’ve looked like a daft move on paper, but Boris Karloff – forever stitched to Frankenstein’s monster – and Bela Lugosi, tied at the hip to Dracula, carried it off without breaking a sweat. They didn’t fight it; instead, they leaned into the shadows and made it their patch. Before long, they’d become the go-to faces of the macabre, fronting a bold era when cinema-goers could sit in the stalls and watch their worst nightmares lurch about right in front of them.
Horror has given us many iconic women, too, often dubbed ‘scream queens’. While these women are often the victims of a vicious killer, like Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween or Neve Campbell in Scream, they’re hardly damsels in distress. Defining the genre with their defiant presence and ability to fight back (this often leads them to become ‘the final girl’), many of these actors have become just as tied to horror as classic heavyweights like Lugosi.
But who is the most iconic horror star of all time? You might say, ‘well, it depends who you ask,’ but luckily for us, a scientific study has determined an objective answer. In 2018, Livio Bioglio and Ruggero G Pensa carried out a study, published in Applied Network Science, which identified the most iconic stars of certain genres, including horror. With that, we can trust science to tell us that Vincent Price is the winner here, which is hard to dispute – even if we were trying to argue with science. Â
Price was a horror aficionado, dominating a terrifying landscape where audiences’ biggest fears came to life. The uncanny reared its ugly head in The House of Wax while paranoia came to a fever pitch in the British folk horror Witchfinder General and bodily transformations reached new levels of grotesqueness in The Fly. With his recognisable thin moustache and cunning eyes, Price had the perfect look for horror, and he appeared in these films with an effortless and unforgettable presence.
A prolific star, Price’s legacy as a horror icon has long been established, so much so that his voice can even be heard in Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. So, even if you somehow haven’t seen a classic horror film featuring Price (you’re missing out) then you’ve certainly heard his distinctive voice – a haunting presence that encapsulated the most iconic scares in Hollywood history, from the supernatural to the chillingly realistic.
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