Saturday Scream Queen: Karen Black

While Karen Black would probably want to be remembered for her roles in critically acclaimed dramas like "Easy Rider" and "Five Easy Pieces", or even for her role in Alfred Hitchcock's final movie "Family Plot", most film lovers of my generation, and horror fans in general, remember her as the woman menaced by an African fetish doll in "Trilogy of Terror", or as the ill-fated wife in "Burnt Offerings".

Since the mid-1970s, Black has split her career between dramas and horror films, with a few bizarre offerings mixed in--such as the low-budget Rollerblade Seven trilogy during the 1990s ("The Rollerblade Seven", "The Return of the Rollerblade Seven", and "The Legend of the Rollerblade Seven"). She nearly 200 film credits to her name, and roughly half of those are horror films or thrillers. Any horror fan who came of age in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s can almost certainly mention a Karen Black film they cherish.

Black is over 70 years old now, but she is still going strong. She worked on seven movies in 2007, including the soon-to-be-released horror films "Some Guy Who Kills People" and "The Ganzfeld Experiment".