Movies
Adrienne Barbeau Reveals She Turned Down Role in ‘The Devil’s Rejects’
Rob Zombie has a knack for giving great roles to iconic actors in the horror space, and The Devil’s Rejects is loaded with them. To name just a few, Ken Foree, Michael Berryman and of course, Bill Moseley, are all prominently featured in Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses sequel, but one horror legend turned down an offer to appear alongside them.
Speaking with Tom Holland’s Terror Time recently, The Fog and Creepshow star Adrienne Barbeau revealed that Zombie originally offered her a role in Rejects.
“I’ve turned down myriad roles. Sometimes after reading 20 pages of the script. And especially if the author hasn’t bothered to learn how to spell, learn correct grammar, and had someone else check for typos,” she told the site. “And then sometimes, in the horror genre, because they’re just too violent or gruesome or offensive for my taste. Listen, I turned down The Devil’s Rejects. Not sure I even read it all the way through, I just knew no matter how good it was and how fine a director Rob Zombie is (I later did one scene for him in his Halloween and loved working with him), it was not something I could do.”
Barbeau added, “I almost turned down Creepshow because I thought it was too bloody and gruesome. Until Tom Atkins clued me in on the comic book style George intended to use, and John Carpenter told me I’d be nuts to turn down the opportunity to work with George. I didn’t know. I don’t watch horror films. I’d never seen Night of the Living Dead.“
Two things that have proven to be pretty dependable at the box office in recent years are horror movies and Christopher Nolan movies. With Nolan’s The Odyssey absolutely dominating the box office this past weekend, many fans of Nolan’s work have been left hungry for a Nolan-directed horror movie. After all, The Odyssey does whet the appetite for Nolan nightmare fuel.
Christopher Nolan has brushed up against the horror genre in the past with 2002 thriller Insomnia, but does he have any interest in someday making a full-on horror movie?
Nolan tells the Empire Podcast in a new chat, “I’ve always been interested in doing a horror film.”
“But horror is most successful when the conceptual framework of whatever the story is is just so undeniable. I think there are very few really great horror movies,” Nolan continues.
So why hasn’t Christopher Nolan directed a horror movie yet?
He explains to Empire, “I’ve never clicked with a particular idea or concept that worked for me. I love the genre. Of all genres, it’s the most visceral. Where the direct response to the audience is the most important. That is to say, you’re trying to make people literally feel something in their bones about what’s going on on-screen.”
Nolan calls horror “a genre in which experimentation is demanded.” He explains, “I go to see a lot of horror films with my kids these days, and you’ll see things in the first half an hour, 45 minutes of any horror film that you’d never see in another genre. Risks that are taken. Dangerous approaches to things. Admittedly, a lot of movies can’t sustain that to the end. But in the horror genre, that kind of innovation is not just respected – it’s really demanded.”
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is now playing in theaters.
Cillian Murphy as Scarecrow in Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight’ (2008)
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