Shrieking Success : Brinke Stevens, revered by horror film fans for her screaming prowess, now looks to make her mark behind the camera

Brinke Stevens has been skewered by a 12-inch power drill, ripped apart by sorority sisters and shot in the back with an arrow. Her throat has been slit, she’s been buried alive, and a hand grenade has exploded in her mouth.

A “Jeopardy” question has even been written about her: “Actress Brinke Stevens’ work in horror films has earned her this rhyming title.” The contestant shouted out the right answer: “What is a Scream Queen?”

After suffering gruesome deaths in 16 low-budget horror films with names such as “Attack of the B-Movie Monster,” “Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-rama” and “Bad Girls from Mars,” Stevens, 37, finally broke her chains as the innocent ingenue and entered horror filmmaking’s traditionally all-male realm behind the camera.

Although she started off earning a master’s degree in marine biology, now she is writing, directing, producing and starring in her own scary flicks. Her film, “Teenage Exorcist,” is scheduled for release in November, and her four-part “Shock Cinema” series is already in local video stores.

“I’m the only scientist-actress-writer-producer in Hollywood,” said the husky-voiced, 5-foot-4 actress who attributes her wickedly seductive eyes to her German and Mongolian roots. “People are so surprised when they meet me. They say I seem so nice to be so evil.”

Her neighbors in West Hollywood put up with bloodcurdling screams coming almost daily from her apartment as she rehearses. In any given week, at least one of her films is shown late at night on some cable channel, so her neighbors understand. “I’m surprised no one has called the police, with all the screaming coming from my place,” Stevens said.

Movie magazines and horror periodicals all over the world have featured her--a German magazine said she has a big following right now in that country--and Stevens is credited by various horror publications with having the most violent deaths and the most shower scenes, sometimes simultaneously, of any actress. She is an unabashed self-promoter who tours comic, horror and movie conventions across the country, speaks to classes and has made recent appearances on “Showbiz Today” on CNN, “NBC Nightly News” and “Entertainment Tonight.”

“Directors say I’m the equivalent of Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr. or Boris Karloff in modern horror films,” Stevens said. “I like looking at it that way.”

Fred Olen Ray, who has directed 30 horror and action adventure films, gave Stevens a large dramatic role opposite Karen Black in “The Haunting Fear,” due out in December. In it, Stevens, who plays a mousy housewife whose husband tries to bury her alive, is transformed into an insane murderess.

Ray is convinced that actresses are the stars of fright films today.

Male horror stars nowadays are generally faceless monsters such as Jason, the masked “Friday the 13th” serial killer, or Leatherface, the buzz-saw fiend of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”; or actors under a lot of makeup, such as Freddy Krueger of “The Nightmare on Elm Street” movies, Ray said. “Now, audiences want to see strong female characters who fight back and don’t get bumped off so easily. Female villains are in too.”

Ray, who has put Stevens in five of his films--including “Spirits,” with Erik Estrada, and “Warlords,” with David Carradine, agreed that she deserves the title of horror’s reigning scream queen. “She’s one of the better screamers,” he said. “And people like her because they identify with her. She’s not a stereotype of a playmate or rock ‘n’ roller.”

Stevens says she has a mailing list of 800 for her self-written fan club newsletter, and gets about 10 letters a week that she said she answers personally. She also gets 30 calls a day on her own phone line (1-900-246-FILM, which costs $1.50 a minute and from which she gets a percentage), recently named the most innovative 900 number in a book called “The Best 900 Numbers.” Callers make Touch-Tone selections such as “Scary Bedtime Stories With Brinke,” a horror memorabilia collectors swap line, a personals line for horror fans to meet, and a gossip line of what’s happening in “Horror-wood.” Stevens’ late-night television commercials for the line show her coming out of a coffin in a graveyard and exchanging cards with zombies.

Aspurt of free publicity came to her last summer because die-hard comic fans knew she posed for the body of the vampy girlfriend in the cartoon version of “The Rocketeer,” created by her former husband Dave Stevens and made into a Touchstone Pictures feature. The role was toned down for the film.

“We were childhood sweethearts, but we were married for only six months, and after we became friends again, I modeled for him for eight years, all tied up and in all sorts of outfits,” she said of Stevens.

Stevens said her cartoonist ex-husband didn’t like her posing for spreads in Playboy and Penthouse, and although she said she isn’t ashamed of the photographs, her parents have yet to see them.

“I grew up in an intellectual family in San Diego, always proving I was brains, but no body,” Stevens said. “I was an ugly little scrawny kid with glasses, so posing for those magazines made me feel beautiful.”

A nerdy child hooked on science fiction, Stevens dressed as the cartoon character Vampirella one year at a comic convention. The clapping and cheering that followed helped her become confident about her looks and sparked a new possible career move.

But while modeling in her spare time, Stevens earned a master degree in marine biology from La Jolla’s Scripps Institute of Oceanography and studied different fish species for the National Marine Fisheries in San Diego. She worked there toward her doctorate, studying the eyesight of seals, but was booted out for an unauthorized study of dolphin communication. Then she worked as an environmental consultant for the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

When she had difficulty finding a science-related position in 1981, she tried modeling again and stumbled across a role as an extra in Peter Falk’s film “All the Marbles.” Then, in 1986, she posed in a slinky black outfit as a fictitious character “Evila” for Monster Land Magazine and became a cult figure by making public appearances at bookstores. After making half a dozen horror films, she developed a following and was featured in magazines with such names as Fangoria, Femmes Fatales and We Are the Weird.

Last year, a teacher in North Carolina confiscated a horror magazine from a student and read a story about Stevens’ background as a science major. He invited her to appear at a science fiction convention and to speak to biology and drama classes at his school. Stevens has since volunteered to speak at other schools and has had bookings throughout the country.

“I don’t want to blow away the teachers, so I don’t wear my costume to classes, but I think biology is so important because of the environmental problems we’re facing now,” Stevens said.

Her parents, who have moved to Arizona, continually ask when she will complete her doctorate. “It’s as if I went off to join the circus,” Stevens said. And although she edits out the more violent murder scenes or more explicit bathroom scenes when showing her parents her films, she says they have begun to approve of her career.

“When I was 9 years old I was convinced I was dropped off by aliens from another planet, I felt so out of touch,” Stevens said. “But now, I’m in Hollywood and doing movies and I feel totally at home.”

Her first big scream came in Roger Corman’s “Slumber Party Massacre” in 1983; she was power drilled to death while hiding in a locker. “I drank six cups of coffee to get the Adrenalin rush for that scene, and I get that feeling back even now when I watch it,” Stevens said. “I screamed for 45 minutes until I got it right.”

She got it right to the point that future roles were written specifically for her, and now she is writing movies for herself. She plays several roles in “Teenage Exorcist,” which sports such special effects as a bizarre smorgasbord of bleeding lettuce, breathing milk and a pizza that bites back.

“I go from a demure co-ed to a whip-cracking dominatrix from hell,” Stevens said slyly. “There are savage, scale-eyed zombies, virgin sacrifices and demonic possessions, and when I turn into a gorgeous, va-voom woman I say the line I’ve always wanted to say, ‘Behold the new queen of hell!’ And I say it with relish.”

The Wald-Way Films effort also stars wide-eyed, Jerry Lewis-like nerd Eddie Deezen and tall, bald, pop-eyed Michael Berryman, both favorites on the horror circuit.

“I’m not evil in any way, really,” Stevens said. “Everyone has a dark side; my dark side is campy. I love starting out as the victim and ending up the villain--that’s the best of both worlds.”

Now hitting video stores is “Shock Cinema,” a four-volume “shockumentary” narrated and produced by Stevens and showing an inside look at B movies

On a typical workday, Stevens might be in a Northridge warehouse preparing to be hunted on a jungle planet, as she was in “Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity.” For that film, she ran barefoot through potted plants and smoke all night, and then slept when the sun rose.

“You start feeling like a real-life vampire on that schedule,” Stevens said.

Although she has worked steadily, Stevens hasn’t had an actor’s agent in 10 years and said she resents directors who don’t consider her work real acting.

“These are real movies in every aspect,” Stevens said. “Sex and gore is what sells. I love doing cheesecake, but I have turned down roles that have excessive sex or violence. Everyone likes to be scared. Humans like to get these rushes from time to time and horror is such a rush.”

Although writing, rather than acting, may be Stevens’ only way into mainstream movie-making, she predicts that her horror career will always haunt her.

“I firmly believe that 20, 30, 40 years from now these horror movies will still be cult movie classics, and even when I’m 60 years old I’ll be invited to conventions in costume,” Stevens said with a wink.