Editorials
Fear File #4: The Real Tony Todd
I can’t begin to tell you how obsessed my mother was with Candyman. Aside from my early exposure to The Exorcist and Halloween, these were some of my first horror flicks. Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have been watching them THAT early in my lifespan, but I fell in love. The imagery, the urban legend, the way it was delivered to the audience- Candyman was a rush, an exquisite example of how horror should be. After all, there isn’t much that Clive Barker touches that doesn’t fall into the ‘awesome’ category. But it was Candyman himself that drew me to the series- the mystery of a man who had been murdered for his love of a woman and has since come back to take his revenge; gory revenge, sure, but revenge just the same. In short, it was an urban legend, and one that has stuck with me since.
Actor Tony Todd is Candyman. But he was also a villain on “24.” A CIA Director on “Chuck.” The voice of Fallen in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. And, as horror fans, he entertained as Reverend Zombie in both Hatchet flicks, and as Mr. Bludworth in Final Destination. His IMDB page reads like a journey- the path of a talented actor who has done every role imaginable and nailed each one with such grace that he’s always coming back for more. When I sat down for this interview, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. By the time I hung up the phone, I was awe struck. I walked into this assuming that I would be interviewing a horror icon; instead, I walked away knowing a skilled craftsman who has an undeniable love for Shakespeare and cats.
Yes, cats.
Uncoordinated Yet Distinguished
Tony Todd doesn’t have a Twitter. He doesn’t have a Facebook page, either (except for the one the system miraculously bestowed upon him). But people know him- they know who he is. Whether it’s for a character he played on television, or a role in a familiar movie, Tony Todd is everywhere- and that’s not something that’s going to change. Even if it were, why would we want it to?
Todd was hit by the acting bug early on in life. A sports fan who wanted to fall into varsity greatness, a growth spurt of nearly six inches between his sophomore and junior year forced him to reevaluate his direction due to a lack of coordination. That was when his English teacher handed him a copy of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and the theater bug hit hard. “You know those moments where you go, ‘wow, I want to be as close to this as possible’? That was it.” He spent high school immersed in one play after the next, but eventually went on to study the craft at not only the University of Connecticut, but also in several well-known conservatories. “I take it very seriously, but at the same time it gives me such joy to not only create but just to know that, occasionally, people are moved by what I do.” Todd completed seven years of in-depth studies, but would still love to go back and do even more. Being able to study in Moscow is a thought that crosses his mind often; being able to go into a controlled environment knowing what he knows now. “I love education. I love learning.” Those who act know that there is a distinct difference between film/television and theater. Hell, even those who aren’t actors know that the disciplines are unique. It’s like night and day- some may succeed in one area, yet struggle in another. Todd, who tries to do a play every few years or so, is fortunate enough to be able to do both. “Not everybody can do both. It’s two different disciplines, two different focuses. I’m very fortunate that A) I make a living doing film and television and B) theater is still deep in my blood.”
Todd’s nickname should be ‘reality check’. He’s a realist; a breath of fresh air- after spending nearly an hour talking about life and business, I’ve learned a few things; even more so, I’ve learned that Todd is grateful for everything that he has done and will do in the future. “There is no guarantee of success. The sad reality is that maybe one out of ten are even going to get one job. When you’re young you think you’ll live forever and you’re gonna do what you say you’re going to do.” He’ll be the first person to tell you that Hollywood isn’t kind, either. “You better have a thick skin like a reptile without becoming a snake.”
What can I say? The man has a good head on his shoulders. “You gotta keep your ego in check. You gotta keep it real, man. That’s why I was raised by the right woman and I have the right friends in my life and I have two beautiful children and I love life- and that comes first.”
Tony the Gangster
“I love good movies,” said Todd. “Anything that has a good beginning, middle and end is great.” He doesn’t just like horror movies, but he has his favorites. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. The great Universal horror films “have always resonated with me.” Rosemary’s Baby. The original Hitchhiker. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead made Todd think “Wow, not only is that so creepy it could happen, but I saw Dwayne Jones and said ‘I can do this and not be Sydney Poitier.’”
Todd’s love of film started early. Raised by a single mother, his aunt, she introduced him to a different movie every night, using it to build character. “What she was also building was my deep and fascinating love of movies.” In fact, Todd repaid her the best way he knew how in 1994 while filming the western, Black Fox. He invited her to the set and she was treated like a queen as she got to watch what she had loved so much come to life before her eyes. “The beam on her face just sort of validated everything that I was doing.”
Looking over Todd’s vast career, he really has done it all. Westerns. Horror. Action. Thriller; everything has come together to showcase how much he loves what he does. He’s not a one-genre kind guy, and that’s what makes him a treasure; the fact that he can take on such different roles and do it incredibly well. “It builds character. The beautiful thing is that whatever role is meant for you to do, you’re going to do it.” Todd even admits to hating his flops; something many actors would deny, even going so far as to cite wanting a do-over on his 2006 take on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “You just don’t know at the time. You’re only as good as your weakest link in the cast.”
Every actor, filmmaker, producer and even writer has their influences. I know for me, it’s Diablo Cody and the ever-changing writing style of Kevin Williamson. But Todd has several, including Robert Deniro and Martin Scorcese. Personally, I’d love to see Todd take on a gangster flick with the best of them. The biggest surprise to me was when Todd mentioned the likes of Humphrey Bogart, but cracked me up when he added “… he had a face only a mother could love.”
The Future
With Final Destination 5 in theaters, Todd is once again in the spotlight; but he’s constantly working. Video games, cartoons, whatever peaks his interest can easily find a place on his resume. Even the type of projects that churn out toys. “I counted one day when I was bored. I have 7 action figures. That’s pretty awesome.”
Aside from FD5, Todd’s role in Jack the Reaper has been in headlines as well. The film recently earned top horror/sci-fi honors at the Cannes Film Festival. But it’s the upcoming film Sushi Girl that has Todd beaming with pride. “[It’s] one of the best roles I’ve ever filmed.” The movie is about a group of robbers who throw a welcome home dinner party for the member of their gang that spent six years silently in prison for a crime they all committed. The dinner is an array of sushi lined up on the body of a ‘sushi girl,’ a beautiful, naked young woman who is trained to remain in a cationic state. But as the four former partners in crime open up old wounds, will the sushi girl be able to keep her cool? It’s a question that I’m willing to ask, and a film that I’m more than excited to see.
The group of filmmakers behind Sushi Girl ‘script stalked’ Todd for awhile before he finally committed to the role. Initially, they dropped a script in his shopping basket at a local supermarket. “I ignored it. I gave it to the cashier.” They pushed and pushed until Todd fell for the content and agreed to play the role. “I gotta give them points for tenacity.”
Todd doesn’t want to stick to just acting, though. Eventually he’d love to take the reigns as director at the helm of his own original project. In fact, he said he’ll keep going “… until I’m done and then I’ll travel and probably end up somewhere in Tahiti. I’ll be there, laying on the beach, having a coconut, maybe with a little rum, a woman on a boat arriving with my weekly groceries… and there in my bag will be a script sticking out of the top. Then I’ll know it’s time to move.”
Todd is a gem. He’s a rare breed; an iconic figure who is actually down to Earth and hates leaving his three cats when he has work to do (they hate it too, I’m sure). He loves fishing, gardening, traveling; but most importantly, he loves what he does. He loves entertaining; frightening people, bringing them to tears, making them smile. He is a master and the fact that he’s good at what he does makes him all the more prestigious. I can’t say enough good things about this man. Actor Kane Hodder agrees: “Tony is a very talented actor… and he happens to be the only guy I met in my life that intimidates me.” I guess that whole ‘be my victim’ mess is the equivalent of ‘you had me at hello.’
For more from ANDREA ALBIN, visit her rad blog THE ALBIN WAY
For more on SUSHI GIRL, visit the film’s official website.
And don’t forget, Todd returns as Mr. Bludworth in Final Destination 5, currently in theaters.
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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