Editorials
[Special Feature] 10 Widely Seen And Wildly Underrated Horror Performances!
While many of our favorite horror performances enjoy their richly deserved iconic status, there are plenty of great turns out their that don’t get nearly enough credit. And it can happen for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the movie tanked or wasn’t well regarded. But sometimes the films were hugely successful (or found cult popularity later) and their roles were simply outshined by the other stars, or elements, in the picture.
In this list I take a look at 10 performances that I feel haven’t gotten their due. I wanted the focus to be on films that you’ve likely seen (and love), so there’s a chance you may already feel the same way about many of these performances. In some cases these are roles that already get a fair amount of credit in the horror community – but are ignored in popular discussion of the performer’s overall career.
Disagree? Did I miss someone? Make sure your voice is heard in the comments!
Hit the jump to check out the list!
Platinum Dunes’ Friday The 13th entry has a lot going for it. Sure the kills aren’t creative as they could be and I’m not sure what’s up with that tunnel system, but it gets almost everything else right. It’s brutal and has a high body count along with plenty of misbehaving teens and 20-somethings. And it also has one of the biggest d*cks of the franchise in Travis Van Winkle’s Trent. He’s insanely stand-offish, a huge prick to his girlfriend and generally hilarious. You can’t wait for him to die. Bonus? He’s get the best pillow talk in history. Fact. “You’ve got perfect nipple placement, baby!”
Second bonus? I’m pretty sure he plays the same character in Transformers. Both are named Trent and both are total *ssholes. And both are produced by Michael Bay, so there could be a connection.
For Drag Me To Hell it was kind of a tossup between David Paymer’s smarmy bank manager Mr. Jacks (“Did I get any in my mouth?”) and Reggie Lee’s conniving Stu. I wound up going with Stu. He’s the perfect workplace adversary to Alison Lohman’s Christine, sniveling enough to warrant our desire to see his comeuppance and effectively manipulative enough to pose a genuine threat to the corporate ascendence she so badly wants. His character actually has to hit quite a few beats and reversals (like in the diner scene near the end) and Lee pulls it all off with aplomb.
It’s a shame that Nancy Kyes (aka Nancy Loomis) has disappeared from the film world. She was an intelligent, strong and funny screen presence whose combined attributes made her sexy. And her Annie Brackett might just be my favorite character in John Carpenter’s Halloween. Where Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode was stridently virginal and demure and P.J. Soles’ Lynda was stridently sexual and rebellious – Annie struck a good middle ground between those two extremes.
Even though she has less screen time than Curtis (and possibly less screen time than Soles) she feels like a much more fleshed-out character than either. Not boring (Laurie) and not annoying (Lynda), Annie was the one I was the saddest to see go.
The Final Chapter is perhaps the best entry in the pre-zombie Jason canon (though I oddly prefer Part 2) and it certainly has one of the franchise’s most memorable characters in Crispin Glover’s Jimmy Mortimer. The cast is full of stand-outs (relative statement to the franchise, I wouldn’t stack it against Ocean’s 11 or anything) But I’d put Glover at the tippy top. He’s vulnerable, he can dance, and we feel genuinely bad for his demise. Plus, he’s got an arc! He goes from being worried that he’s a “dead f*ck” at the beginning of the film to proving he’s not!
Gremlins 2: The New Batch is one of the weirder major sequels to ever be released. It’s so completely different from the original it boggles my mind and it makes me nostalgic for a time when pulling something like this off was even remotely possible. Today’s Hollywood is so protective of its franchises that the creative life is often snuffed out of them the moment a sequel is greenlit. One of the great touches of Joe Dante’s gonzo sequel is John Glover’s mega-mogul Daniel Clamp, the Donald Trump inspired owner of the glitchy tower in which the film is set. The bold choice here? He’s a nice guy. Misguided, unaware and out of touch, but genuinely nice. His enthusiasm is admirable, as is his intention of preventing any further Gremlin-related harm.
Before “Modern Family”, Ty Burrell made a splash as Steve In Zak Snyder’s James Gunn scripted Dawn Of The Dead remake. It’s a much quicker moving film than the original, one that drops a good deal of the subtext, but it’s full of nice (if not perfunctory) character moments. It’s one of the better remakes out there because it does what remakes should do, take the central premise of the original and explore different territory. Burrell’s Steve is the comic relief of the piece, but he’s also one of the two primary audience access points (Sarah Polley’s Ana being the other). In a movie full of Ving Rhames’ typical bluster and bravado, it’s saying something that I remember Burrell’s snarky quips as vividly as I do. This is what they mean when they say, “stealing the show.”
Kurtwood Smith’s Clarence Boddicker is such an amazingly chilling (and entertaining) villain I don’t even know where to start. He’s completely aware of how evil and cruel he is. He also shows a surprising modicum of social/political savvy for someone who’s ostensibly just a thug. The way he toys with Peter Weller’s Alex Murphy before he and his gang commence his protracted murder (which, obviously they don’t technically complete) still makes me squirm. It’s such a strong performance that “That 70’s Show” was arguably able to exploit its menace for years to come.
First of all, if you haven’t seen Lamberto Bava’s Demons you need to fix that sh*t real quick. I know a lot of people write off foreign horror as “boring” or “arty”, but Bava’s film is a crass, fun, fast-paced and gory ride. It feels almost as American as a Golan Globus production. Bobby Rhodes’ Tony is a man whose proverbial pimp hand is strong as steel. While his misogynistic attitude might initially be offensive, it’s clear that the film is completely in on the joke and doesn’t endorse his sentiments. Demons has great fun toying with and exploiting this particular male archetype and I can’t imagine anyone but Rhodes pulling it off. Bonus? I saw him do a Q&A for this film at the New Beverly and he was as sweet as can be. The complete opposite of his character.
While the rightful stars of Attack The Block are John Boyega’s Moses and his gang of charismatic wayward thugs, I don’t think Jodie Whittaker’s performance as Sam gets nearly enough attention. She doesn’t have quite the hero’s journey of Moses, but she imbues her character with a grounded pragmatism (and frustration) that’s easy to relate to. She’s able to fend off “gorilla wolf motherf*ckers” and Pest’s advances with equal amounts of grace and intelligence.
Oh boy. Look, I love A Nightmare On Elm Street, okay? But let’s face facts, Heather Langenkamp’s performance as Nancy isn’t really all that great. I often find myself wishing that Tina didn’t get killed off so early. If she had been the main protagonist and had been forced to find the same internal strength that Nancy does, the film would have been all the better because of it. I can actually see Wyss pulling off the last act of the film with the convincing and steely reserve that Langenkamp lacks. NOES is a home-run either way, but killing Nancy and keeping Tina would have knocked it out of the park.
Editorials
Five Serial Killer Horror Movies to Watch Before ‘Longlegs’
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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