BY WHITNEY PASTOREK

Eight years ago, Kings of Leon f rontman Caleb Followill was taking a drunken stroll through Nashville with his lawyer, who offered the tipsy teen some indispensable advice. “I said, ‘I wanna be so famous that when I walk down the street, people know who I am,’” he recalls. “And he looked at me and said, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’”

The Kings now understand that adage vividly. Two Ten­nessee brothers (Caleb, 27, and drummer Nathan, 30) born to a traveling Pentecostal minis­ter formed a band in 1999. They then recruited their younger brother (bassist ]ared, 22) and a cousin of the same last name (lead guitarist Matthew, 24), and released their debut in 2003. After three albums of rangy Southern rock made them critics’ darlings and superstars abroad, they finally conquered America with the release of last September’s Only by the Night, a hook-laden, uncharacteristically

dream of doing anything to that guitar. It’s moments like that where you realize you need to take a break.”

For now, the boys may just have to brace themselves instead. Over the next few months, riding the success of Night’s second hit “Use Some­body,” the Kings will headline the Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits music fests and crank up an arena tour-events that are unlikely to resolve their struggles with

All this may sound conveniently feminist—the intellectual-izing of a violent genre. And frankly, it should be noted that just as young male moviegoers seem addicted to seeing stuff blow up, young females in the audience have a predilection of their own: They like to cuddle. Horror movies give teen girls in particular an excuse to inch a little closer to their beloved, as Hollywood learned years ago when The Ring and The Grudge grossed $129 million and $110 million, respectively. “Both movies were really scary and PG-13, which is the age of those early first dates,” says Mandate Pictures president Nathan Kahane, who exec-produced the Grudge series and Drag Me to Hell. “Girls are driving the ideas for those early dates. There aren’t that many social opportunities to be in the dark holding hands, and that’s what the PG-13 horror film offers.” Network Issues

As female filmmakers—buoyed by female audiences—keep making scary movies, the genre will morph in important ways. “When a woman has sex in a horror movie, forget about it, she’s going to die,” Cody says of writing Jennifer’s Body. “The protagonist is always virginal, and I wanted to put a stop to that.” Males in the audience likely won’t object to more sex. And Cody, for one, has no intention of scaling back on blood: “If I do another horror movie—which I want to— I need to write a lot more kill scenes.” ■

“I don’t think there was anyone who expected that women would gravitate toward a movie called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” says Chainsaw producer Brad Fuller of the 2003 remake, which became a female-driven $81 million hit. “For us, the issue now is that it’s harder for us to get young men into the theater than women.” And female audiences stay loyal. “I’ve seen married women who are, like, 35 years old at horror movies and they’re like, ‘Oh, our husbands are with the kids and we all came out together,’” says Clint Culpepper, the president of Screen Gems, which is releasing a remake of the 1987 slasher film The Stepfather in October. “Men stop seeing horror at a certain age, but women continue to go.” RocketThemeTemplate

Even the movies popularly known as torture porn, in which hot babes in hot pants are often subjected to medieval tor­ture devices, apparently hold an appeal for young women. Executives preparing to unveil the video-on-demand channel FEARnet didn’t expect women to have the stomach for a sub-genre often considered exploitative. “When we launched the network, we went out and did focus groups and it was the women in the room who really wanted a horror channel more than the guys did,” says FEARnet president Diane Robina. “I actually thought that the women would be less into the Saw films, but they were much more into them.”

Compton faces off against the masked murderer Michael Myers; Zombieland, which finds Abigail Breslin and Emma Stone fending off the undead; Antichrist, in which Charlotte Gainsbourg battles her own demons; and, of course, Jennifer’s Body. “Women have become more comfortable being anyone they want to be,” says director Sam Raimi, who recently returned to his horror roots with Drag Me to Hell. “Maybe

The trend has not been lost on movie studios, which have responded by cranking out a steady supply of scary movies with female protagonists. The latest is Orphan, which stars Vera Farmiga (The Departed) as a grieving mom forced to defend her family from her newly adopted child. The actress is a jolt junkie herself. “I grew up loving to scare and be scared,” says Farmiga. “It elicits this surge of adrenaline you don’t get with any other genre. Maybe women are so drawn to it because we’re more emotional creatures and it’s such a visceral experience.”

The quaint notion of being “ladylike” is about as relevant to today’s teens as boom boxes and cassettes. Over the next few months, we’ll see a Halloween sequel in which Scout Taylor­women always liked horror films, but it may have been a little bit unacceptable in the past because they were considered a boyish guilty pleasure.”

The truth is that if you look beneath horror’s gory surface you’ll often find a stealth empowerment message, thanks to some canny ingenue who claws her way out of danger. “The appeal is in watching women in jeopardy and, most impor­tantly, fighting back,” says Bob Weinstein, who, as the head of Dimension Films, has overseen a slew of horror franchises, including the Halloween reboots and the Scream movies. “When I first met with Clive Barker on Hellraiser, I’m going, ‘It’s a guy audience, heavy-duty, rock & roll.’ And he goes, ‘Bob, it’s all about women. You have a female at the center

“My primary reasons for writing Jennifer’s Body were that I knew about the female horror audience and am a fan myself,” Cody says of the movie, which slashes into theaters Sept. 18. “Growing up, I was Car Video absolutely mesmerized by the horror section at the local video store. It wasn’t a particularly feminine compulsion, and my parents didn’t want me watching that crap.”

Cody’s parents—and the parents of young women everywhere— have lost the battle big-time. For decades, it seemed the sole purpose

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“I was at acarnival this summer and somebody screamed, ‘Hey, Nurse Jackie!’” she says. “I almost broke down. It wasn’t ‘Carmela!’ which it’s been for 10 years. I thought, Wow. There really is a passing of the chapter here, right in front of my eyes.” C download

Warm and friendly in person—at one point she chats giddily about her fascination with tough-guy docuseries like COPS—Falco is vocally grateful for the fact that Showtime has renewed Jackie for a second season, even though with an average of 891,000 viewers for Monday’s 10:30 p.m. airing, it falls far short of The Sopranos’ ratings highs. At the same time, she has no interest in drawing any attention to herself off screen. The VIP treatment she received from doctors during her 2003 battle with breast cancer, for example, made her extremely uneasy. “It was a result of having been on Sopranos” she recalls.

“I’d never been treated like that in my life.” (She’s now cancer-free.) Resolutely no-nonsense, the 46-year-old single mom lives by a simple rule: Go to work, then go home to her kids, Anderson, 4, and Macy, 1, whom she adopted in 2004 and 2008, respectively. (“I’m just not one of those people who thought having biological children was that important,” she told Parade in May. “To me it was more about wanting to raise a child.”) And even when the praise is flowing, she never, ever reads her own press. “There’s really no way to stay sane and read stuff that’s written about me,” she says. “It’s better if I just do my job as best I can.” In that department, she couldn’t be more fulfilled. She appears in nearly every scene of Nurse Jackie, and, she says, “[the producers] ask and they are generally interested in my input—I feel like such a grown-up!”

As season 1 heads to its Aug. 24 finale, Jackie will face serious consequences for her behavior, with her adultery and drug use leading to dramatic confrontations at work. But as far as next year’s story line goes, Falco is blissfully ignorant. “I haven’t the foggiest,” she says. “I love having no idea. I love that it’s not my job and I won’t find out until we start shooting again in September.” And if she’s lucky, by then everyone will be calling her Jackie. ■