Annie Always Dies!
The Top 5 Annie Kills in Horror History

by Annie Riordan

I have a shocking confession to make: my first name is NOT Annie. I started going by my middle name of Ann about 20 years ago for reasons that would bore the shit out of you if I were to get into it at length. My given name is none of your goddamned business. I have been “Annie” for so long that it feels like I’ve never been anything else.

However, it didn’t really occur to me until the first years of the 21st century just how many movie characters named Annie get killed off during the course of the films they find themselves cast in. Annie Sullivan (Jennifer Jason Leigh) gets gunned down by Daniel Craig in Road To Perdition. Annie Johnson of Imitation Of Life suffers mightily before expiring in time to have Mahalia Jackson sing at her funeral. And let’s not forget Annie Blackburn from Twin Peaks, who…wait, did she really die? Gawd, who knows for sure with that show?

But for the vast majority of cinematic Annie’s unlucky enough to find themselves in a horror movie, death comes quickly and – more often than not – quite gruesomely. From major horror franchises to direct-to-video forgettables, the name “Annie” has become interchangeable with the word “victim.” Don’t believe me? Read on…

#5 – Annie Chapman, aka “Dark Annie” – second victim of Jack the Ripper. Hoping to turn a quick trick for enough coin to rent a bed, 47 year old Annie Chapman hit the alleyways of Whitechapel in the early morning hours of September 8th, 1888. She was last seen alive at approximately 5:30am, chatting up a “customer.” By 5:50am, Annie was laying in a pool of her own blood, throat slashed, stomach cut open and uterus removed. Most recently portrayed by Katrin Cartlidge in 2001’s From Hell as a hot-tempered lesbian, Annie Chapman was, in fact, a good natured (if not terribly attractive) widow with three children who had turned to prostitution only as a last resort. Annie, it turns out, had tuberculosis at the time of her death and probably did not have much longer to live. Thanks to the dubious fame that comes with being slaughtered by a serial killer, Annie Chapman has a permanent niche in the annals of horror for all time.

#4 – Annie – Friday the 13th (1980). Portrayed by a perky, chipmunk-cheeked Robbi Morgan, Friday the 13th’s Annie is a wholesome good-girl who makes the mistake of hitchhiking to Camp Crystal Lake, where she plans to spend the summer cooking for 50+ children. Good thing the camping season was cancelled, otherwise those brats would have starved to death. Annie lasts all of five minutes (if that) before having her throat sliced wide open. Left to bleed to death beneath a tree, Annie’s up close and personal murder sets the stage for the gore which follows.

#3 – Annie Lansing – Creepshow 2 (1987). Of all the arguments against extramarital affairs, perhaps the strongest is the “don’t drive out to your boyfriends isolated house in the middle of the night for a quickie, because you may hit a hitcher on the way home and get murdered by his vengeful corpse” argument. Annie Lansing (Lois Chiles) finds this out the hard way when her speeding Mercedes-Benz plows into a hitchhiking bum. Reasoning that nobody saw it happen and no one will miss the old guy, Annie continues on her way. If the wages of sin is, indeed, death, Annie paid big time for breaking both the 7th and 8th Commandments in record-time.

#2 – Annie Hayworth – The Birds (1963). Another smoldering brunette (have you noticed that all of our Annie’s are brunettes? Did “Dark Annie” inspire the trend?). Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette) is Bodega Bay’s resident spinster, beloved elementary school teacher and throaty pack-a-day smoker, all of which mark her as a victim before she can light her first on-screen cigarette. Annie Hayworth dies a painful but heroic death late in the film when, in a desperate effort to save her ex-boyfriend’s kid sister, she sacrifices herself to an angry flock of crows and seagulls who peck her to death and take her pretty brown eyes with them as souvenirs.

#1 – Annie Brackett – Halloween (1978). With her smartass remarks and active sexual life with boyfriend Paul (she gives him her aaaalllllll), Annie (originally played by the hardass horror icon Nancy Loomis) is a very obvious victim from the moment she literally stalks onto the screen. She also set a standard for the slasher film, a genre she helped to kickstart, by wandering off alone into a dark room without her pants on. It goes without saying nowadays that girls in horror films will be dispatched the moment their undergarments become visible, but it was a trend that Annie made famous. She dies, panties on prominent display, in the backseat of a station wagon, half strangled and throat slashed. Such are the hazards of premarital sex.

Honorable Mentions

Annie – Masters of Horror: Cigarette Burns (2005). This Annie ups all the Annie’s that came before by being dead when the film starts. But her coke-addicted, blood-splattered ghost shows up repeatedly to torment her boyfriend Kirby with memories of his failings and her suicide. Zara Taylor was another one of John Carpenter’s Dead Annie’s, and determinedly trooped through this debut episode of Showtime’s hit series Masters of Horror totally naked and covered in congealed blood. But she got to be naked with smolderingly sexy Norman Reedus so she gets zero sympathy from me.

Annie Knowby – The Evil Dead 2 (1987). Left to clean up the demonic mess that her parents inadvertently began, Annie (Sarah Berry) shows up at the cabin in the woods and teams up with Bruce Campbell and his mighty chin to battle the Deadites, summoned in the first film by an evil incantation. But Bruce Campbell’s girlfriend’s never last long, and this one is named Annie so you know she’s double screwed. However, Annie manages to save the day – and the world as we know it – by reading yet another incantation before getting stabbed in the back by a disembodied hand and sucked into a vortex of Hell. I guess that’s what happens when you mess with the king, baby.