At horror book shops and in gaudily decorated conference centres they will miss her this summer: the prim English lady from Sutton Coldfield who became the “Queen of Scream”.

Hazel Court, who died on Tuesday of a heart attack, aged 82, had a varied career as pin-up, television actress and sculptor. But her loud and bloody roles in a handful of films created a monster cult following that will carry her memory far beyond the grave.

On fan forums the tributes poured in, for she was an icon who deigned to talk to her devotees. “I am truly devastated,” wrote one. “Tears are pouring out of my eyes! I got to become very good friends with her by phone! I could not wait to meet her!”

Another wrote: “This news hit me like a ton of bricks! A love of mine since childhood was watching Hazel strut her stuff in The Raven, The Man Who Could Cheat Death, Premature Burial, Masque of the Red Death, and many more. What a loss for us.”

In her final years, four decades after she had retired as a film actress, she still received at least 100 letters a month from her horror fans. Her daughter said that she replied to every one, as well as attending conventions to converse with her following.

Having completed her autobiography, Hazel Court – Horror Queen, she had been eagerly awaited at scores of specialist bookshops across Britain and America and was due at the Monster Bash convention outside Pittsburg this summer.

Among her original fans was the horror writer Stephen King: her name would crop up repeatedly in his stories. In his recent memoir, On Writing, he described the thrill of encountering her at a horror film screening. “Who could ask for more?” he wrote. “You might even get Hazel Court wandering around in a lacy low-cut nightgown if you were lucky.”

A new generation of fans grew up long after her screams had died. Robert Simpson, 27, who runs unofficialhammerfilms.com, first saw her in a television rerun in the mid1990s. “Fundamentally she was very much of the English rose generation but she was also” – he pauses, choosing his words carefully – “she was also quite voluptuous as well. There is a sexual element to it, that underpins it.”

In The Man Who Could Cheat Death, she played an artist’s model in an opening scene. “In the European version there is a brief glimpse of her topless. It hasn’t been seen since the Sixties, but someone managed to track down some stills and they are very much in demand in the community.”

Bruce Sachs, her publisher, said: “These films were done in the early Sixties as America particularly was entering the psychadelic era. They were just incredible films.”

She was the star of an age when horror film heroines could still be strong characters. “That is the only instance in which she is physically exploited that I am aware of and there was a context for it,” Mr Simpson said. “I think she managed to be the Queen of Scream without being exploited, partly perhaps because she left the business in 1964, but she stayed pure and that was part of her attraction.” The Devil Girl From Mars (1954), in which she played a leather-clad Martian in arriving on Earth to take men back to her female-dominated planet, was a low-budget classic. Then came colour film, and The Curse of Frankenstein: her red hair and flashing green eyes captivated audiences.

She took the screaming seriously. “One can’t just scream,” she said in 2000. “To give a good scream one has to take an enormous breath, and suck one’s stomach in, and fill one’s lungs and let go.” At conventions, fans impressed by the prim and proper manners of the elderly Court would never have dared to ask her to demonstrate.

Ingrid Pitt, another Hammer horror heroine, would join Court on stage at conventions. “She was the very, very first Hammer star,” she said.

The Hammer company has been bought by private equity investors with plans to revive the brand. Pitt features in their first production, Beyond the Rave, published this week on MySpace. The Queen of Scream may be dead, but the horror legacy lives on.

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