Horror Actressing: Mia Wasikowska in "Stoker"

Out this Friday the cast of Antonio Campos' new Netflix film The Devil All the Time is so ridiculously stacked with young actors of note -- Tom Holland! Robert Pattinson! Riley Keough! -- that it was inevitable one of them would be left under-served by the material, and I'm sad to report the worst off in this respect is by my estimation the best actor in the whole cast, one Mia Wasikowska. She gets less than five minutes of screen-time, none of which save her final moments give her much of anything to do, all while we know good and well dagnabit that Miss Mia can do anything!

So for today's edition of our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series let's look back at Mia doing something. Something plenty worthy of her talents. In Park Chan-wook's deliriously under-appreciated 2013 coming-of-age thriller Stoker, specifically.

Mia plays India, who's celebrating her 18th birthday as the film opens...

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Horror Actressing: Jena Malone in "The Ruins"

by Jason Adams

I've talked a lot in my "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series about the ritualized magic that can be summoned on-screen when an actor can get across genuine fear to an audience, but I've talked less about that emotion's trickier parasitic twin -- when an actress is called upon to display weakness. Fear in the context of a horror movie is acceptable -- we show up to these films to live through our fears vicariously; to ride on the Final Girl's coattails through the thorny weeds of nighttime terrors and to triumph over them, standing tall in the dawn.

But weakness, weakness is a slap in the face. A character that makes the wrong decisions over and over again, one who doesn't seem capable in the moment of learning from them, well who wants to watch that? These characters make us angry, sometimes viscerally so -- think of the long standing sneers that've met Shelley Duvall's Wendy Torrance in The Shining or Judith O'Dea's Barbra in Night of the Living Dead. Queens the both, and yet their trembling lips and wet noses inspire such vitriol from so many. Well you can and should definitely add to the whimpering, simpering heap of queens Jena Malone's Amy in Carter Smith's 2008 "When Plants Attack!" film The Ruins.

Amy just can't seem to catch a break...

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Horror Actressing: Barbara Crampton in "Re-Animator"

by Jason Adams

Why's it so hard to put the work of H.P. Lovecraft on the screen? Over 80 years since the writer died it's real weird (an appropriate word in this context) to me that there's never been a truly grand-scale adaptation of his begging-for-just-that work, especially given how timely they do feel here in the 21st century as reality seems to morph into madness. Guillermo Del Toro notoriously tried for a decade to get At the Mountains of Madness off the ground to no avail, but that's the closest Hollywood has as yet come. Before theaters shut down in early 2020 we did get an unofficial HPL turn with Kristen Stewart in Underwater (which I truly dug) and we're now right this minute three episodes into the HBO series Lovecraft Country, which... well I'm waiting to see how that goes. Situating Lovecraft's profound racism against American race relations is hella smart, so I keep hope alive it will find its footing. (This latest episode felt like a tentacle squish in the right direction.)

In my talk there of notable Lovecraft adaptations I purposefully skipped over the hilariously disgusting 80s works of writer-director-madman Stuart Gordon though, in order to bring us to the subject of this week's edition of our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series, which is Scream Queen and Horror Icon Barbara Crampton's turn as the "bubble-headed co-ed" Megan in 1985's Re-Animator...

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Horror Actressing: Anya Taylor-Joy in "The Witch"

by Jason Adams

There is model beauty, and then there is movie star beauty, and they overlap less than you'd imagine. The thing about movie stars is they've got faces that are interesting more than they are perfect, and once our interest has found them their so-called "imperfect" curiosities -- Michelle Pfeiffer's mouth, Daniel Day-Lewis' nose, to be all Age of Innocence example about it -- become in turn cache. Nobody was walking into a plastic surgeon's office asking for Michelle Pfeiffer's lips before 1982 but you can be sure there was a spike in such utterances once "Cool Rider" had come and gone.  

I begin with this to say I knew the second I saw Anya Taylor-Joy's eyes that a star was being born right in front of me. I might have actually missed several important details plot-wise watching Robert Egger's The Witch that first time in 2015, so lost was I in trying, and failing, to find footing astride those eyes' ginormous bedevilry. The film opens on them... perched as they're wont on the the two separate sides of her face, anime teardrops wandering in opposite directions. You wanna live deliciously you stare into those eyeballs for an hour and a half, that's my recipe.

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Horror Actressing: Anna Massey in "Peeping Tom" (1960)

by Jason Adams

The adage goes that curiosity kills the cat, but in Michael Powell's 1960 shocker Peeping Tom it's only half true -- curiosity kills one while saving the other. Mark, the deranged killer camera-man at the film's heart (played with shy finesse by Karlheinz Böhm), finds Helen (Anna Massey) by perching on her windowsill and peering in at her birthday party -- she's his downstairs neighbor and full of life as irrepressible as her vast array of bright monochromatic dresses. They seem an odd match from the start but Helen can't seem to get Mark off her mind -- there's something curious about that upstairs man, and she's going to find out if it... well you know.

Is Helen film's very first Final Girl? 

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