Editorials
We Pay Tribute to the Genre Career of Michael Parks
While the loss of beloved actor Michael Parks was a blow to all of filmmaking, the world of genre film is especially devastated at his absence. Though his career began in television with appearances on Gunsmoke and Perry Mason, he was already dipping his feet in the waters of suspense and horror early on with The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Police Story.
Park was a TV mainstay in the 1970s, playing handsome cops and criminals in Get Christie Love! and The Streets of San Francisco. His genre work began in earnest in the late 1970s, with a role as a doctor trying to stop a deadly outbreak of African bees in 1976’s TV thriller The Savage Bees.
He followed that up with another TV movie in 1978, Night Cries.
It was the end of the decade, in 1979, when Parks teamed with cult horror director Charles B. Pierce for The Evictors. The filmmaker, famous for his pseudo-documentary The Legend of Boggy Creek and the early slasher The Town That Dreaded Sundown, followed those films up with this lesser known but equally compelling piece of Southern horror. Parks played the devoted but often absent husband to Suspiria’s Jessica Harper (both pictured above), who spends the film terrorized by stalkers in her isolated home.
While he continued to work through the 1980s, genre material was in short supply; 1981 brought a TV remake of the Hitchcock classic Dial M for Murder, but much of Parks’ time was occupied in recurring roles on TV dramas like The Colbys and The Equalizer.
For a short time, it looked like Parks’ skills were going to be wasted in a series of quickie exploitation films like Caged Fury and the biker horror film Nightmare Beach. But that all changed when Parks landed the recurring role of Jean Renault in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Parks’ unique acting style, combining the realism of method acting with punctuations of wide-eyed creepiness that threatened to spin into a fever pitch, was perfectly matched for the material.
Unfortunately, it was back to the exploitation thriller arena after Twin Peaks ended its run, where filmmakers who didn’t recognize Parks’ nuance and skill cast him in films like Sorceress and Death Wish V: The Face of Death.
Thankfully, Quentin Tarantino then came along. As he had done with Laurence Tierney in Reservoir Dogs and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, Tarantino gave Michael Parks a role that reminded film fans how great he could be. Small but memorable, Parks’ role as Texas Ranger Earl McGraw in From Dusk Till Dawn provided us with an instant classic monologue.
In fact, the character of McGraw would return in the Kill Bill films and both parts of the Grindhouse double feature, and Parks himself would eventually return in the From Dusk Till Dawn franchise as a new character: historical figure Ambrose Bierce in From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter.
The increased interest in Parks, thanks to his Tarantino film roles, led to a series of fun appearances as another sheriff wrapped up in supernatural trouble in 2007’s The Dead One, cameos in Argo and Django Unchained, and roles as a disturbed father in Maidenhead and the truly over-the-top Fritz Tremor in Smokin’ Aces 2: Assassins’ Ball.
However, it was a trilogy of horror films early in the 2010s that truly made Michael Parks a household name for horror fans, with performances so wild, honest, and painful that they cannot be forgotten. In 2011, director Kevin Smith veered away from his standard raunchy comedy roots to write and direct a disturbing horror film based loosely on the hateful rhetoric and violence of Pastor Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist Church. The film was Red State, and Michael Parks played minister Abin Cooper. He delivered the impossible: portraying a religious zealot and cold-blooded murderer who somehow drew in viewers with his disarming folksy charm. The sermon he delivers is a pitch-perfect matching of performer and dialogue.
Three years after Red State, Kevin Smith had an idea for another horror film about a lonely old man who captures a podcast host and begins the disturbing process of transforming him into a human walrus that he will keep as a companion. The premise of Tusk is absurd, and many of the performances tilt over into broad comedy, but Parks’ central obsessed figure is always just as emotionally real as he is unbelievable in his actions. The scene with Parks explaining what will be done to his captor is disturbing in large part due to Parks’ performance.
One of the most affecting performances of Parks’ entire career soon came in a remake of a Mexican cannibal film called We Are What We Are. Relocated to the Appalachian Mountains in America, the film was written by Jim Mickle and Nick Damici, co-writers of Stakeland and Mulberry Street and co-creators of the excellent Sundance Channel series Hap & Leonard. Parks’ open wound of a performance is a wonder to behold; as a coroner whose newest case may finally reveal the truth about his daughter’s disappearance years earlier, Parks’ Doc Barrow is quiet, driven, and deeply desperate for closure. The scene in which Barrow confronts Bill Sage’s Parker to learn the truth about his daughter’s disappearance is a masterclass in subtlety and heartbreak.
Michael Parks had a career that spanned over fifty-five years. He moved back and forth between film and television, he worked with industry luminaries like Alfred Hitchcock, Larry Cohen, Quentin Tarantino, and David Lynch, and he even played Adam in John Huston’s The Bible: In the Beginning.
There was no role he couldn’t play, and the genre community is heartbroken that we won’t get any more. Rest in peace, Michael Parks. And thanks for all those immortal monologues.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
You must be logged in to post a comment.