Dark-Sided Teens
A slide show on alternative teen queens.
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The Blood Sucker: Kristen Stewart
Kristen Stewart plays a Pattinson-loving tomboy-next-door in the Twilight movies, but off-screen she’s decidedly less sedate and more I-don’t-give-a-shit punk rock. Or so she tries to be, with the lethal combination of a mullet cut, spiked mini, and an unforgiving attitude toward the masses of young squealers who feed her. As she told USA Today of her Twilight fans: "Girls are scary. Large groups of girls scare the crap out of me. I think half of them are so jealous that they hate me."
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The Gothic Child: Christina Ricci
It’s hard not to become a cult idol when one of your first starring roles was Wednesday in The Addams Family movie, she of the severe middle-part and morose delivery. Ricci followed up childhood stardom with more oddball indie roles in Pumpkin and Penelope. Also, remember a few years back when she played a nymphomaniac and Samuel L. Jackson tied her to a radiator? Let’s just try to forget about that one and rent coming-of-age friendship flick Now and Then.
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The Unemployed Waif: Winona Ryder
Née Horowitz. The darkly pretty Jewish girl from Minnesota transformed into an indie favorite almost overnight when she killed some popular bitches with Christian Slater in Heathers. Later came Edward Scissorhands, followed by a pixie cut, mid-'90s doily dresses, rock-star trysts, and the ultimate role as a post-collegiate, angst-ridden lost soul in Reality Bites.
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The Witch at Heart: Fairuza Balk
Just a few years after playing a sexy vampire in a ZZ Top music video, the tattoo-covered Fairuza found fame as an outcast with a knack for witchcraft in the 1996 high-school vengeance flick The Craft. Later, she exited the Hollywood scene to purchase a Los Angeles occult craft shop (which she later sold).
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The Angsty Teen: Evan Rachel Woods
Woods got her breakthrough role as a teenager tempted by hard drugs and hard sex in Thirteen, and continued to be typecast as the angry, angst-filled daughter in a wide variety of broken-family films (The Upside of Anger and The Wrestler, to name two). She also bedded down with Marilyn Manson at the young age of 19 and starred in his video for “Heart Shaped Glasses,” in which the two followed up a reckless drive along the Hollywood Hills with some breathy choke sex. Gross? Perhaps. But oh-so-alternative.
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The Meta-Bitch: Shannen Doherty
The quintessential bad girl star is known for playing queen bees in both Heathers and as Brenda on 90210, while also being an über-bitch in real life. She had a rep for showing up late to set, often hungover, and eventually got fired from 90210 for her intolerable diva-osity. In 2006, she seemed to find the perfect outlet for her personality in the reality show Breaking Up With Shannen Doherty, wherein she breaks the hearts of unsuspecting boyfriends on behalf of their more cowardly girlfriends.
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The Geek Next Door: Thora Birch
She entered the scene as Harrison Ford’s daughter in Patriot Games, but ended up epitomizing the 1990s alt-girl malaise as an unnoticeable high-schooler in Ghost World. Birch is the sardonic girl who gets overshadowed by her popular, blond friend, but still always manages to draw someone into her tomboy-ish, no-frills existence, be it Steve Buscemi in Ghost World or her neighbor in American Beauty.
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8 of 8 The Quirky Intellectual: Ally Sheedy
At the age of 12, Sheedy wrote a best-selling children’s book titled She Was Nice to Mice, and she spent her early 20s making her way as an author before she dove into acting. In The Breakfast Club, she won the jock’s heart as an outcast kleptomaniac hidden behind dandruff-infested hair and she reunited with members of the Brat Pack in St. Elmo’s Fire, the drama about Georgetown grads drinking through their post-collegiate identity crises. She made an ultimate comeback in High Art, which included super-hot lesbian scenes.
