Caroline Williams

One part shaped everything, and Williams has been sporting enough about it to keep building on top. She played Vanita 'Stretch' Brock in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 in 1986, a sequel that runs as a comedy right up until it stops being funny, and Stretch is why it holds up: a woman who spends the film being hunted and never once behaves like a victim in the way the genre expected. She screams, she thinks, she keeps moving.

The 1980s and 1990s after that were working-actor territory. Woman in Pickup in The Legend of Billie Jean, Matty Crimmins in Stepfather 2, Jennie Burns in Days of Thunder, Loretta in Leprechaun 3, an uncredited reporter in Leatherface, and guest spots across American network television from Murder, She Wrote to ER.

Then horror came back for her, as it tends to. She was Dr. Maple in Halloween II in 2009, Sam's mother across both Contracted films, Amanda in Hatchet III, a segment lead in Tales of Halloween, and Vanessa in Renfield in 2023. Sharknado 4 cast her as a character called Stretch, which is the genre paying its own peculiar kind of compliment.

She works constantly, mostly at the low-budget end, and she is nearly always better than the material around her. That is a specific type of professional, and horror could not function without them.