Horror icon Adrienne Barbeau, not a fan of the genre, will revisit four of her films during ZombieFest VII, starting tonight at Lehighton’s Mahoning Drive-In Theater, located on Seneca Road off Route 443.

“I love doing them, but I’m not an audience member,” the actress said. “I have a strong startle reflex. I do video captioning for the blind. I get a lot of Blumhouse movies that I have to do. I’ve seen theirs.

“I saw ‘Halloween’ once, when it first came out,” she continued. “I’ve never seen ‘Psycho.’ I think I did see ‘The Exorcist’; I sorta laughed my way through that one. ‘A Quiet Place’ was very well done.”

Barbeau will attend tonight’s screening of the 1981 sci-fi action film “Escape From New York.” As rough and tough Maggie, she stars opposite Kurt Russell and Harry Dean Stanton. Barbeau will also attend Friday screenings of 1980’s “The Fog,” 1990’s “Two Evil Eyes” and 2000’s “The Convent.”

While not a zombie feature, John Carpenter’s dystopian “Escape …” includes cannibalistic gang “The Crazies,” a nod to the same-titled 1973 film screening Saturday at the theater, with star Lynn Lowry in attendance. ZombieFest concludes its four-day 35 mm run on Sunday.

Barbeau cited the “Escape …” bridge scene, following the demise of Stanton’s “Brain” character, as her favorite in the 1997-set film.

“I turn to Kurt, hold out my hand and then start firing on The Duke. You see all of Maggie’s morality there.”

Beginning a career

Barbeau, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, first came to the Poconos in 1967, when she performed her second summer stock job at the now-defunct Pocono Playhouse in Mountainhome.

The next year, Barbeau made her Broadway debut in “Fiddler on the Roof,” later playing Hodel, Tevye’s daughter, with Bette Midler playing her sister Tzeitel. In 1972, Barbeau originated the role of Betty Rizzo in Broadway’s “Grease,” earning a Theatre World Award and a Tony nod.

Barbeau has lived in Los Angeles since the early 1970s, when Norman Lear cast her as Bea Arthur’s TV daughter Carol in the “All in the Family” spin-off “Maude.” Barbeau then made her theatrical-film debut as sultry radio DJ Stevie Wayne in Carpenter’s supernatural horror film “The Fog.”

Big break

In the late 1970s, “if you were on television, you couldn’t get an audition for a feature,” she said. “The producers thought nobody’s going to pay to see her in the movie house if they can see her at home.

“Had it not been for John offering me that,” she continued,” I don’t know how long it would have been or how my career would have gone.”

Shot in Northern California, “The Fog” also featured Jamie Lee Curtis and mom Janet Leigh, plus the likes of Hal Holbrook and Barbeau’s close friend Tom Atkins.

Barbeau went on to appear in further diverse early-1980s films: action-comedy “The Cannonball Run,” superhero flick “Swamp Thing” and George A. Romero’s comedy-horror anthology “Creepshow.”

At the insistence of Carpenter, with whom she was married from 1979 to 1984 and shares son John “Cody,” Barbeau did see Romero’s 1968 classic “Night of the Living Dead.” The actress reunited with Romero for his segment in horror anthology “Two Evil Eyes,” based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

Building a legacy

However, Barbeau has difficulty recalling the filming of her tale “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” in which she plays the titular character’s younger wife Jessica.

“I probably saw it once when it first came out. I didn’t have a babysitter. It was all about taking Cody, who was 4 or 5, with me, setting him up, playing games, making Legos when I wasn’t filming, working all night, putting him to sleep. Trying to get three to four hours of sleep.”

She does remember one thing, though. “I was wearing shoulder pads. It was the late ’80s.”

Barbeau gets a kick out of Mike Mendez’s demon-possession flick “The Convent.” One line in the film, in which Barbeau plays the survivor of a decades-ago massacre, stands out for the entertainer.

“The other character is talking about her brother and says he’s a virgin. I remember saying, ‘It’s always something with a virgin.’ It was great fun, blowing away nuns” who were possessed and demonic.

Other appearances

Considering her filmography, Barbeau counts Alex Horwitz’s 2009 short film “Alice Jacobs is Dead” among her favorites. She sees the short, in which she transforms into her first on-screen zombie, as an allegory for Alzheimer’s disease.

Aside from “Maude,” Barbeau’s countless TV and film appearances include voicing Selina Kyle/Catwoman in three 1990s- and 2000s-era DC animated series and portraying snake charmer Ruthie in 2003-05 HBO series “Carnivàle.”

Barbeau, who has also worked with tarantulas, rats and bees, draws the line at one icky critter.

“The only thing I wouldn’t work with, and I can’t say they scared me — to use an old Italian saying, I skeeve them — is cockroaches. I was not around for E.G. Marshall’s segment of ‘Creepshow.’ ”

In terms of potentially scary moments while filming, Barbeau mentioned an incident on the set of 1995 Showtime film “Bram Stoker’s Burial of the Rats,” filmed in Russia in the middle of nowhere.

“I was on top of a three-story brick castle, all the way up at the top, sitting on my throne, surrounded by straw, nobody around me. The set caught fire. Fortunately, I had a cup of tea.”

Barbeau’s newest projects include two with Canadian actress/filmmaker Krsy Fox. In the meantime, her enduring classics have helped fuel her status as a horror icon.

“From what people tell me, those films in the ’80s were very well done. They care about the characters. I’ve had people say they watch ‘Swamp Thing’ all the time, ‘Creepshow’ once a month. One man has ‘The Fog’ set up so that he can fall asleep to it every night.”