Kevin Bacon on Psychological Horror, the “Tremors” Pilot and That Whole Freddy Krueger Idea [Interview]
Horror never seems very far away from Kevin Bacon… in a good way. The actor has over four decades of experience in film and television – co-starring in classic films like Animal House, Footloose, Apollo 13 and A Few Good Men – but he keeps coming back to scary movies.
One of his earliest performances was in the original slasher hit Friday the 13th, and in the years that followed he’s turned up in horror movies like Tremors, Flatliners, Hollow Man and Stir of Echoes. His latest horror film, You Should Have Left, now On Demand, reunites him with writer/director David Koepp.
In a new interview with Bloody-Disgusting, the actor mused on his relationship with the genre.
“I love well-made films in all genres, horror being one of them,” Kevin Bacon says. “I’m really more drawn to horror films like You Should Have Left and films like Midsommar or The Shining or Rosemary’s Baby.”
“Don’t Look Now is one of my favorites. [Films] that are really emotional and character-driven,” Bacon explains. “That’s the stuff that I… mostly because it’s great stuff to act, you know?”
“But the reason that I found myself in these horror films is for one thing, I’m not afraid of them,” Bacon adds, before clarifying. “I’m not afraid to do them. I like them. But also because they require a lot of acting challenges. They’re intense, you’re dealing with life or death situations, and these are all great acting challenges.”
And yet, although Kevin Bacon prefers the acting challenges involved in psychological horror, one of his most popular movies is the subterranean monster horror-comedy Tremors. It’s also the only horror movie franchise that the actor ever returned to, after filming a pilot for a new Tremors television series in 2018.
“Well, Tremors is an interesting thing because as a subgenre within horror, another piece of the subgenre that I really like are scary-funny, which is a very difficult balance to make,” Bacon says. “I think Tremors was very successful in it, but movies like Shaun of the Dead for instance are able to meet that kind of balance. Even Get Out, which added a whole other level, which was social commentary, as well as the humor, as well as being scary. Which is really hard to do.”
“You know, with Tremors it wasn’t so much that I was like, ‘I want to go back to horror,’ as it was this seems like a character that… it’s the only character that I played in the course of my career that I really thought about revisiting after 25 years. I thought it would be interesting to see who he had become, because he was a really ordinary guy who had really extraordinary circumstances thrown at him,” Bacon explains.
“It was a great process, a really fun process. In my opinion we made a fantastic pilot that I think really, with writer Andrew Miller and a great director [Vincenzo Natali], I think we really nailed it. I still have no explanation for why they didn’t want to move forward,” Bacon says.
The pilot for the second Tremors television series – following a short-lived 2003 SyFy series featuring series regular Michael Gross and future Breaking Bad co-star Dean Norris – wasn’t picked up, but it was completed and lots of fans would love to see it.
Unfortunately, Bacon doesn’t have any good news about the possibility of screening it any time soon.
“We tried. We tried to show it at, I guess it was ATX, and we were not allowed to,” Bacon explains. “So we put some clips together [instead].”
While people keep hoping Bacon’s Tremors follow-up will get released someday – “Yeah, me too,” Bacon adds – there’s another idea floating around that has many horror fans excited. Robert Englund recently floated the idea that Bacon should eventually replace him in the role of Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise.
Does that idea interest Kevin Bacon?
“Sure,” the actor laughs. “It would take a lot of makeup…”
