“Some things have to die”: the four Matthew Lillard movies would save for the apocalypse
For most moviegoers, their knowledge of Matthew Lillard encompasses two or three films.
I’m not even going to tell you which ones those are; you probably already know. It’s easy to look at this statistic and write his career off as a failure, but that would be criminally unfair. His life’s work amounts to far more than faking murders and battling dudes in monster costumes.
Lillard has given a lot to the horror genre. This was referenced in his recent appearances in the Five Nights at Freddy’s films, which very much felt like a nod to his oeuvre. As well as his most famous outings, he’s appeared in a number of scary films; some are serious, some are definitely not. Speaking of, he’s a very talented comedy actor too. His role in 1998’s SLC Punk! is a bona fide cult classic and the actor’s personal favourite from across his career.
In an interview with The Skinny, Lillard was asked a few questions about the apocalypse for some reason. One question was which movies he would recreate on stage in a world where cinemas were wiped out. In his words, if he were “king of a post-apocalyptic world”, he would rule with an iron fist.
“I’m pretty sure I’d make everyone watch every movie I’ve ever been in on stage,” he admitted, “I would convince everyone living in post-apocalyptic Matt-world that every one of my movies was considered a classic, and I would forbid the right to anyone producing any art that wasn’t Summer Catch, Scream or Scooby-Doo.”
The interviewer noticed he didn’t mention his 1999 movie Wing Commander, to which Lillard replied, “Some things sadly don’t survive the apocalypse. Some things have to die”.
Allowing himself one more pick, though, Supreme Leader Lillard announced that he would give his subjects a treat at Christmas, with a musical reproduction of the 1994 film Serial Mom. In the non-apocalyptic timeline, Serial Mom is a black comedy directed by the king of poor taste, John Waters, in which Kathleen Turner plays a seemingly tame housewife with a dark secret. If somebody wrongs her even slightly, they get murdered, and Lillard plays one of Turner’s children in a film that Waters said brought him his “worst experience”.
As ridiculous as this question is, Lillard has answered it very sensibly. Serial Mom is a dark mixture of fun and gore that would appeal to everyone’s collective sense of macabre camp, and is genuinely for the sickos. On the other hand, Scream offers a truly scary adventure that still holds up even if you know the twist, plus, Lillard can say the movie invented all of those horror tropes instead of just parodying them. Summer Catch is a romcom that, despite receiving poor reviews, would do much better if it was the only story of its kind left in existence, and as for Scooby-Doo, that speaks for itself, for it would be immaculate in any timeline.
With the end of the world getting scarily closer every day, at least we know that Matthew Lillard has us covered.
