Editorials
From H-to-A: Movie Stars Who Got Their Start in Horror
A lot of movie stars make derogatory remarks about the horror genre, all while failing to mention that before they were raking in the dough and starring in period dramas they might’ve actually acted in one or two of them. Which is why B-D reporter Chris Eggertsen headed over to IMDB to uncover some of the more notable examples of this phenomenon. Read on for his list of ten celebs who made their screen debuts in horror films (and no, Jamie Lee Curtis isn’t one of them).
Role: Jennifer Corvino
Long before she won an Oscar for her role in the overrated melodrama A Beautiful Mind, Connelly made her starring debut in Dario Argento’s 1985 horror/mystery Phenomena, playing a teenage girl able to communicate with insects. When she goes to live at a Swiss boarding school, she becomes caught up in the search for a vicious serial killer. Interesting bit of IMDB trivia: after going on to star in studio films like Labyrinth, Career Opportunities, and The Rocketeer, she would next return to horror in her role as…an extra in Witchcraft V? I guess everybody suffers from low points in their career.
Related Quote: [talking about the films she did in the beginning of her career]: “You don’t want to get rid of your experiences, because they’re your experiences – good or bad – and you need them, but it would be great if they weren’t on the video shelf!”
Role: Glen Lantz
He commands $20 million a picture and is one of the biggest movie stars in the world, but horror fans will always remember Depp for playing Heather Langenkamp’s boyfriend in Wes Craven’s ’84 classic A Nightmare on Elm Street. Interestingly, the friend he rode to the audition with was none other than Jackie Earle Haley, the new Freddy in Warner Bros.’ upcoming remake. Hey, I don’t know if it’s true, but it makes for a damn good story.
Related Quote: [about a scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)] “I love this stuff. The kid falls asleep and it’s all over, he’s sucked right into the bed and spit out as blood. His bloody body rises straight out and then topples over, too. I heard somebody talk about having a dummy shot out of the bed, but I said, `Hey, I want to do this! It’ll be fun! Lemme do it!'”
Role: Claudia
Ok, so this adaptation of the 1976 Anne Rice novel isn’t exactly a small little horror movie, but nevertheless it was Dunst’s first major role, in a pretty great performance as Claudia, a 30-something-year-old vampire stuck in the body of a child. Arguably it’s still her best performance in a career that’s seen her transform from eerily mature child actor to object of fanboy ridicule, but regardless she’s gone on to have an illustrious career – and Interview served as a pretty colossal launching pad.
Related Quote: (On kissing Brad Pitt in Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994) ): “It was horrible, I hated it. Brad and Tom were like my big brothers on the set, so it was like kissing your big brother – totally gross.”
Role: Elliot
Hanks’ role in this Halloween-influenced slasher directed by Armando Mastroianni is relatively small, but large enough for the purposes of this article. The double Oscar winner here appears as Elliot, a college student who goes all meta, Jamie Kennedy in Scream style, when he explains to his costars the reasons why people are afraid of horror movies. As for the plot, it’s about a bride-murdering psychopath stalking a soon-to-be-married young woman and her two friends. Apparently, Hanks proved so charismatic on-screen that the director rewrote the script to keep his character alive. Far from the astronomical salaries he would later command, according to IMDB he was paid $800 for his work on the movie.
Related Quote: [from earlier in his career] “I’ve made over 20 movies, and 5 of them are good.” (Let’s just assume He Knows You’re Alone wasn’t one of the five he was talking about.)
Role: Kir
She may be a glamorous sexpot and leading lady now, but in 1998 Eva Mendes was “Kir”, a beautiful teenager who falls in with the titular deranged kiddie cult in Children of the Corn V after getting stranded with her friends. Later on in the film, her character sacrifices herself by jumping off a silo into a raging fire lit by the little delinquents. (No, crybaby, that did not merit a “spoiler alert”. It’s fucking Children of the Corn V.)
Related Quote: “I love horror movies. The Shining is my favorite.”
Role: Lana Marcus
She had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it part in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories the previous year, but Stone didn’t enjoy her first starring role until Wes Craven’s little-seen 1981 horror flick Deadly Blessing, about three women caught up in a series of murders perpetrated by an Amish cult known as the Hittites. Stone plays Lana, one of the three women forced to fight off the religious fanatics in a battle to the death that includes a dream sequence where Stone’s character has a spider dropped into her mouth. Unfortunately for the actress it was one of Craven’s lesser efforts, and after toiling in relative obscurity for years, she finally broke through 11 years later as the femme fatale in Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct.
Related Quote: [from a 1990 interview]”I was this cute young girl with a nice ass who was a terrible actress. But I’ve worked real hard to become a good actress and now I think I’m starting to reap the benefits of that hard work.”
Role: Kimberly
Nearly ten years prior to winning her first Oscar, golden girl Swank appeared in the film that was supposed to make Kristy Swanson a big star (whatever happened with that, anyway?) as Kimberly, one of Buffy’s one-liner spouting high school friends (“Get out of my facial!”). Unlike its later incarnation as a TV show, the film underperformed both critically and commercially, but after a few false starts (remember The Next Karate Kid?) Swank’s career later took off and she ended up winning Oscars for both Boys Don’t Cry and Million Dollar Baby.
Related Quote: [on walking around nude in front of her boyfriend’s six-year-old son] “You wonder at what age you should stop walking around nude. But he doesn’t look twice. He doesn’t think about it yet.” (Ok, I’ll admit this has nothing to do with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)
Role: Billy Nolan
Although in his early career he’s most closely associated with his role as Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, Travolta made his big debut (after a bit part in another horror film, The Devil’s Rain) in director Brian de Palma’s Carrie at age 22. In the film he plays Billy Nolan, the dumbshit boyfriend of teen-queen Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen) who helps orchestrate the climactic prank on telekinetic loner Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), leading to famously disastrous results. It’s merely a footnote in his megastar career, but a memorable one.
Related Quote: “I wanted to work with Brian De Palma. I knew the film would be interesting and attract a lot of attention.”
Role: `Professor’ Bennett
Some things never change: Paul Walker was making crap movies then, and he’s making crap movies now. Although to be fair, Monster in the Closet is a low-budget Troma production that at least has a sense of humor about itself, which instantly raises it a notch or two above those retarded Fast and the Furious movies. In the film Walker has a small role as `Professor’ Bennett, a nerdy kid tormented by – what else? – the monster in the closet. Oh yeah, Fergie is in it too – before she got all that face work and joined some stupid hip-hop group.
Related Quote: “It’s not about working anymore, its about doing work I can be proud of.” (You mean like Snow Dogs?)
In this made-for-TV movie starring Tom Skerritt and JoBeth Williams, Wood plays Luke, a young boy who holds the key to solving a series of grisly murders perpetrated by a rain slicker-wearing killer wielding a hook (sound familiar?). The only problem is, he’s blocked out the details of the murder he witnessed – that of his own father – and now a child psychologist (Williams) must force him to remember before the killer claims his next victim – her! Following this little gem there’d be no looking back for Mr. Wood, and eleven years later he’d go on to score his biggest career coup to date by winning the role of Frodo the Gay Hobbit in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.
Related Quote: “I think God gave me a talent to use for the positive and to do a horror movie would be, like, overstepping my bounds. If I was to do a horror film, I wouldn’t want to be paid. It would be like a vacation, because you don’t really have to use your acting skills.”
The problem with filming sequels back-to-back is that, unless you can afford expensive reshoots, there’s no easy way to adjust course in between movies if fans react badly to where the story is headed. That’s why it’s important to have a complete narrative thought out well in advance lest you accidentally kill a budding franchise.
However, this isn’t always the case. Every once in a while, it seems like the cinema gods smile upon certain chaotic productions and gift moviegoers with complete franchises that feel like more than the sum of their hastily produced parts. Ted Nicolaou’s Bloodlust: Subspecies III is precisely one of these miraculous pictures, with the raw talents of the artists involved (as well as the continued support from Romania) turning the feature into an effective conclusion for a series that kind of made things up as the filmmakers went along.
That’s why I’d like to invite my fellow readers to join me on this third part of our journey through the Subspecies franchise as we look into Bloodlust and talk about how it remains a surprisingly satisfying finale to the original trilogy.
A Trilogy Planned on the Fly
Released only a year after Bloodstone found plenty of success in rental stores and mail-in VHS catalogues worldwide, 1994’s Bloodlust was produced at the same time as its predecessor in (mostly) the same locations and with the same team. This means that the movie benefited from all the same upgrades as Bloodstone, with the crew now being more experienced with the ins and outs of surviving a low-budget Romanian production and the cast really settling into their characters.
At this point, everything from location scouting to the makeup process had been streamlined, with Wayne Toth and Norman Cabrera, the main duo behind special effects, even switching out time-consuming prosthetics for latex gloves in order to speed up Anders Hove’s monstrous transformation. The titular “subspecies” demons were also once again relegated to a mere cameo appearance due to the laborious puppetry required to bring them to life.
The only real hiccup came from the fact that actress Denice Duff had replaced the first film’s Michelle (Laura Mae Tate) and was immediately expected to portray the character as both an innocent victim in part II and as a secondary villain in part III. According to behind-the-scenes interviews, the hectic production schedule that blended two different movies meant that Duff would often find herself having to alternate between two incredibly different versions of Michelle during the same shooting day – though it’s obvious that she’s having more fun with Bloodlust’s more traditionally vampiric version of her character.
In the finished film, we pick things up immediately where the previous entry left off as Rebecca (Melanie Shatner) is forced to leave her vampire sister Michelle (Duff) behind in the dungeons of Castle Vladislav due to the rising sun. This allows Mummy (Pamela Gordon) to use Michelle’s blood to revive the vicious Radu (Hove) so that he may continue his quest for the coveted Bloodstone – a magical artifact that perpetually drips the Blood of Saints.
Meanwhile, the dreamy US embassy agent Mel (Kevin Blair) agrees to help Rebecca plan a rescue mission, though they’re unaware that Radu has become infatuated with Michelle during his attempts to guide her growing bloodlust. This all culminates in a climactic confrontation meant to tie up all of the series’ loose ends in one of Full Moon Pictures’ most ambitious productions.
The Evolution of Radu
Like its predecessor, Bloodlust: Subspecies III was also warmly received by fans who argued that the series was an even bigger success than Full Moon’s other major horror franchise, Puppet Master. This praise wasn’t unanimous, however, as 1994 had seen the rise of a more modern breed of sexy vampire popularized by Anne Rice, with old-school Nosferatu like Radu being viewed as obsolete when compared to the likes of Lestat and Gary Oldman’s take on Dracula.
In a way, one might argue that Nicolaou’s film is something of a swan song for the classic vampire story, as Bloodlust combines all of the traditional elements we tend to associate with these tales into a single tragic yarn that ties a neat little bow on Radu’s story as well as the old-fashioned monster movies that he represents. The finale remains shocking despite the fact that this is the third time we see Radu get brutally killed onscreen, with the brief tease that he may one day return feeling more like a nod towards the nature of evil rather than sequel bait.
The film dabbles a bit in gothic romance and even explores the inherent power fantasy behind transforming into an immortal creature of the night, but the filmmakers never lose sight of Radu as a demonic force even when he’s willing to betray his beloved Mummy for Michelle’s sake. In fact, his twisted “love” for his fledgling makes him even creepier as we get the feeling that his passion comes from a dark and disturbing place.
Anders Hove is at his absolute best in this film, with the effects department boosting his moments of what the younger generation would call “aura farming” whenever Radu emerges from shadows like a 90s version of Count Orlok. There are even a couple of surprisingly effective jump-scares here, which is why I’d argue that Bloodlust cements Radu as one of the most memorable cinematic vampires of all time despite his humble origins.
Subspecies Saves Its Best For Last
Nicolaou and Vlad Panescu also saved the best for “last” (more on that in a bit) regarding the film’s visuals, with the cinematography and overall atmosphere of Bloodlust absolutely surpassing what we saw in the previous films. Everything feels appropriately climactic this time around (including the wonderful soundtrack that was co-composed alongside an authentic Romanian orchestra), and I appreciate how this is the fastest-paced entry in the trilogy since the film doesn’t need to waste time setting anything up.
Bloodlust still suffers from some of the same low-budget blemishes as its predecessors, but there’s so much creative passion here that no amount of wonky effects work or stilted dialogue can get in the way of appreciating the flick’s gothic grandeur. That’s why it’s not surprising that the movie’s definitive(-ish) ending would later be retconned as fans begged for more Radu.
Of course, the next entry in this series would be a different kind of vampiric endeavor altogether, with the filmmakers attempting to engage with the same trends that ultimately killed Radu and his antiquated kin. That, however, is a story for another time. For now, I’ll merely insist that Bloodlust: Subspecies III remains a highlight of Full Moon’s expansive catalogue and is definitely worth seeking out today.
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