Editorials
Game Over, Man! 10 Genre Roles of Bill Paxton
The world received some crushing news yesterday when it was announced that veteran actor Bill Paxton had passed away due to complications from surgery. It’s an especially sad piece of news for horror fans, as Paxton holds a special place in many of our hearts for the multiple roles he has portrayed in genre films. While he was mostly well-known for films like Apollo 13, Twister, Titanic, True Lies and the exceptional HBO series Big Love, Paxton had a loyalty to the horror genre that many veteran actors lose once they become more established. We thought we would take a moment to look back on some of Paxton’s most memorable roles in genre films in order to celebrate his life and career.
Night Warning
Back in 1982, Paxton was still being billed as William Paxton, so if you stumble upon Night Warning one day be on the lookout for his name. Night Warning is a bizarre horror film that acts as a modern retelling of Oedipus. It’s got incest and murder galore. Paxton’s role as the local bully isn’t a large one, but since this is one of his earliest film roles, that’s not surprising.
Mortuary
Paxton re-entered slasher territory with his role as Paul Andrews the mentally disturbed son of a mortician. This isn’t high art here, but it’s worth seeing simply for the fact that the killer is a face-painted man whose weapon of choice is an embalming trocar. It’s super cheesy and hasn’t aged well, but it is a lot of fun.
Aliens
Paxton re-teamed with James Cameron (their first collaboration being The Terminator in which Paxton played a thug) for what is arguably his most famous genre role: Private Hudson, a cocky, foulmouthed pretty boy who, as annoying as he was, managed to capture the hearts of genre fans everywhere. He should have been a character that got on your nerves, but Paxton made him endearing enough to the point where you actually feel bad for him when he gets dragged through the floor grates by an Alien.
Near Dark
Paxton teamed up with James Cameron’s future wife Kathryn Bigelow for Near Dark, a vampire film that was a flop upon its initial release but has since garnered a massive cult following. He portrays Severen, the craziest of all the vampires in the film, and boy is he great in the role. He certainly gives Kiefer Sutherland (The Lost Boys) a run for his money when it comes to psychotic ’80s vampires.
Brain Dead
The two Bills (Pullman and Paxton) joined forces in Adam Simon’s (Carnosaur) Brain Dead, a film that sees Pullman’s character slowly going insane. In all truthfulness, Brain Dead is not a very good movie, but where else are you going to see Pullman and Paxton bantering? Nowhere, that’s where. So give this one a watch.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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