Horror Actressing: Jessica Lange in "Cape Fear"

by Jason Adams

It was said that the director Ken Russell helped the actor Oliver Reed modulate his performances with a scale ranging from "Moody One" to "Moody Two." And while I am in no way insinuating that the actress Jessica Lange has in any way that sort of limited range -- step off, Lange-anistas, I love her too! -- it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility to gauge her work on a sliding scale of how much hand fluttering each role involves. And using that system Cape Fear comes out, blissfully, near the top.

Normally if I was feeling inclined to talk about the terrific actressing going on in Martin Scorsese's hot-brained 1991 remake I'd make a bee-line straight for the (rightfully) Oscar-nominated Juliette Lewis, who's the best in show over every single one of her far older and more experienced co-stars...

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Horror Actressing: The Women of "American Psycho"

by Jason Adams

I don't think there's any good faith argument to be made that Mary Harron's American Psycho, which turns 20 today, is not Christian Bale's movie. His serial killing investment banker Patrick Bateman, now an icon for the ages for better or for worse, is in very nearly every scene -- Harron cuts away from his perspective only twice (both pointed moments I'll dig into below). We are, terrifyingly, trapped inside this most beautiful madman for every dissection and Whitney Houston diatribe -- it's much like Bret Easton Ellis' book that way.

But Harron, bless her, found ways to make the experience survivable, hell even somehow giddy and a deranged sort of fun, whereas Ellis' book is an undertaking swathed in ugliness and despair I've had no desire to revisit since my one and only traumatic read-through a good 25 years back. Harron navigated a supernaturally exquisite balance between her satire and horror, a vital "looking in from the outside" set of eyes that escaped the burden of Ellis' prose. And I think the key to it, besides Bale's brilliantly sweaty bananas work of course, is the vibrant gallery of women that Harron surrounded Bateman with...

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Horror Actressing: Sadie Frost in "Bram Stoker's Dracula"

by Jason Adams

Are you wearing the dress or is the dress wearing you? That is the question, the one every fashionista asks -- it's not just comfort but confidence; the former might assist with the latter but if you've got enough of the latter you can overcome any obstacle, good taste be damned. Like how exactly does one give a performance for the ages encased inside a neck ruffle that could be captured on the cameras of satellites orbiting the Earth? Don't ask me, ask Sadie Frost, who yanked those satellites out of the skies and stared 'em down into submission with her take on the character of "Lucy" in Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 re-imagining of the classic vampire tale.

Nobody save Gary Oldman with his prosthetics parade was asked to do more inside of Eiko Ishioka's Oscar-winning kabuki-inspired outfits than Frost was...

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Horror Actressing: Shelley Duvall in "The Shining"

by Jason Adams

Why isn't the face of "Cabin Fever" that of Shelley Duvall's? Why isn't it her Wendy Torrance huddled behind that bathroom door holding a knife that we see, instead of Jack Nicholson's Jack peering through the broken slats? I mean we all know the answer -- it rhymes with "Fuctural Fisogyny" -- but maybe we should start to do something about that. All of the news stories we've seen over the past few weeks about the victims of domestic abuse being quarantined at home with their abusers feels like a good start to having that conversation. Losing your mind trapped in a single location is scary, but being trapped in one place with a person you love who has lost theirs is scary tenfold.

For all of the abuse that Shelley Duvall suffered as an actress at the hands of her director Stanley Kubrick in the making of The Shining it feels just, and way overdue, to re-situate the film as that of Wendy Torrance's story of survival...

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Horror Actressing: Catherine Deneuve in "Repulsion"

by Jason Adams

Oh, Repulsion! Prescient, precious Repulsion! How could you have known that one day we'd all every last one of us be boarding up our doors and dreaming about probing walls of man hands every night? ... Just me? Watching Repulsion for the umpteenth time what immediately struck me this week, after having lost track of the time indoors myself, was its soundtrack -- the diegetic bird song, distant people playing and chit-chatting through the windows, the incessant clanging of trolley bells that slip in and out of some sort of wailing, panting kazoo cry whenever Carol (Catherine Deneuve) turns her inner heat up...

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