Horror Actoring: Max von Sydow in "The Exorcist"

by Jason Adams

"I think the point is to make us despair. To see ourselves as animal and ugly. To make us reject the possibility that God could love us."

Re-watching The Exorcist this weekend for the gazillionth time -- but for the first while under the Coronavirus quarantine here in New York -- was an interesting experiment. Like a lot of you I've been locked up in my apartment now for three days, just watching movies and binging TV shows and doing whatever I can to avoid looking at the news (or god forbid Twitter). But still it's proven impossible not to see each successive thing through the lens of now -- the characters in whatever I'm watching will go to a bar or hug and I will wince, thinking "Socially distance yourselves dammit!" before I can even catch myself.

One week ago (a lifetime in itself, at this point) Max von Sydow died and Nathaniel wrote up a lovely memorial and asked me if I'd like to switch up our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series for an actor who we loved like an actress, and one who did his fair share of time mucking about in the horror genre. Max had a face for dallying with Death, be it over a chess board or a little girl's bedside; as gaunt and serious as the grave, as a medieval plague etching, but also capable and strong enough to smile, knowingly, back at it. Max Von Sydow always looked like he knew things he wasn't telling us...

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Horror Actressing: Sonoya Mizuno in "Ex Machina"

by Jason Adams

Is Alex Garland's Ex Machina a horror film? For all of its Frankensteinian elements I could be swayed towards a yes or a no, but when it comes to viewing the film via Sonoya Mizuno's character of "Kyoko" -- Mizuno can currently be seen co-starring on Garland's Hulu show Devs -- the "yes" argument feels substantive and then some...

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Horror Actressing: Haley Bennett in "Swallow"

by Jason Adams

Modern living breeds its own special brand of anxieties. It's a warm culture for bacteria. Walk around any big city these recent weeks and you'll see -- the face masks and the empty shelves where hand sanitizers once sat. We're internet ghosts, part people part machine, searching for apocalyptic keywords and wiping our screens down to curves where our fingers just fit. We're both exposed and isolated -- personal sized soap bubbles floating down every street; don't get too close lest you pop.

The ways this schism situates itself into our daily living, the way it expresses itself, varies-- personally I start to pluck hairs out of my beard if I stay still for too long. I know only too well the satisfactory sense of build and release, a manic arc unto itself, that such compulsions afford. There is a beginning and an end and then a beginning and an end -- a rollercoaster we control; a narrative of our making, our choosing, in days that feel anything but. 

In Swallow, out in theaters and on VOD today, Hunter (Haley Bennett) doesn't feel in control of her life, and so she does something about it...

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Horror Actressing: Una O'Connor in "The Invisible Man" (1933)

by Jason Adams

What better time than now, what with the latest iteration of The Invisible Man hitting movie theaters this week, to celebrate one of the cinema's greatest character actresses -- I speak of ye Irish spitfire Una O'Connor, who was once described as having "the body of a scarecrow, the contemptuous stare of a house detective, and the voice of an air-raid siren." Said with affection, no doubt.

She certainly brought all of those awesome qualities to bear on James Whale's 1933 adaptation of The Invisible Man, which had her playing the mistress of the pub that the villain-scientist Claude Rains rents an upstairs room from...

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Horror Actressing: Barbara Hershey in "Insidious"

by Jason Adams

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On Wednesday the great Barbara Hershey will be celebrating her 72nd birthday, and per usual once an actress hits a certain age what's the genre that picks up the slack? The "disreputable" Horror genre,  that's who, always there to welcome these great talents into its warm, slimy embrace. I simply don't know how one could call one's self an "actressexual" and not be appreciative of all the meaty roles this genre's afforded actresses that nobody else is throwing their way. Yeah yeah maybe they're not always Chekov, but the work is there and the focus is often on women's stories and relationships, and great actresses can make anything sing.

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Ten years ago Hershey hit hard with two prime examples of this -- I'm not going to fall down the rabbit hole of whether Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is a horror film (it is) though, because I want to focus on the other one, one which gifted Hershey with one of the decade's greatest scares...

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