Linnea Quigley ate my brains, and I've been stupid crazy for her ever since.
Let me explain: It was 1985, I was 19 years old, and Dan O'Bannon's wickedly subversive zombie-punk rock-comedy of terrors, The Return of the Living Dead, had just opened at the Varsity Theater at 24th and Guadalupe. I was as penniless as Death's ferryman Charon on a slow boat to nowhere, but Paul "Black Cat Lounge" Sessums and I figured out a way to scale the roof and slip in through the tiny door that opened onto the marquee ledge.
That night – and more to the point, that film and Quigley's role in it – she played the pink-haired punkette Trash, and no girl has ever freaked me out more by getting naked, dying, and returning with a lust for "Braaiiinnns!" Wicked, sexy, utterly out of control, she epitomized proto-goth bloodlust, and I dug it like it was my own gorgeous grave, with a satin-lined casket built for two. I mean, which boneyard did this erotically rotting babe-thing come from?
"When I was a little kid I'd have my girlfriend over and watch Creature Features," reveals Quigley, by phone from her Florida home. "We'd order pizzas, and then when the movie ended, we'd have contests to see who could die better!"
Clearly the seeds of mayhem were sown early for Quigley, a former Playboy Playmate and committed animal rights activist (which prompts the question: Is PETA aware of her cannibalistic sinematic urges?) who's crafted a career out of every kid's urge to die better than the other guy/girl. With roles in more than 100 crimson-drenched genre films, this blond bombshell-from-hell is the No. 1 "Scream Queen" working today. Take that, Fay Wray.
Any kid can flail and fall, gasping their last, mortally wounded for moments eternal (boys favor the joyously spastic pirouettes of the bullets 'n' bombshells ballet), but kidhood Quigley? Nothing so pedestrian for the future star of Corpses Are Forever and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama.
"Usually, when I died, it was something to do with stabbing. Never guns, always big knives."
That's kinda Freudian, yeah?
"It is! It is! But, you know, I was never strangled either, for some reason."
Kids are little monsters at the best of times, but asking Quigley why, exactly she identified with these women who were, on the razored face of it, seeming victims, trapped, taunted, terrified, and facing the unsettling idea that, soon enough, even they might end up leaking red from the sort of gash that even Carrie White would have been unable to plug up, garners an answer straight out of the Sisters Grimm:
"It sounds weird and terribly unfeminist, but I identified, in a way, with these women in horror and monster films who were – how should I say this? – they were very vulnerable, but then again, they were almost always protected, in the end, by the hero. Except, of course, if they were bad, and then they'd end up dead, just like they do now. And they got to wear all these cool clothes, too. So that was an attraction, for sure."
Quigley's had more horrific things done to her in the name of genre filmmaking, but she's just as often given as nastily good as she gets within the cinematic world of mad men, bad women, and the chain saw-whine that is their uncommon tongue (or lack thereof), an important distinction in an increasingly sadistic reality, and never mind the 35mm brain-eaters onscreen.
The Return of the Living Dead, with Linnea Quigley and Don Calfa in attendance, screens at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Saturday, Oct. 21, at 10pm.
