The “horrible” movie Bill Hader wasn’t allowed to make: “I really lost my confidence”
Creative types, even if they’re very successful, are never really immune to criticism.
There’s a very familiar cycle to making something, be it a film or a book or an album, that tracks the process from initial excitement, to a flurry of activity, to slowly creeping doubt, to acceptance that whatever you’ve made is terrible, to perhaps thinking it might not be that bad. It’s one Bill Hader knows all too well, and it’s why we haven’t seen his horror movie yet.
Hader has been a familiar face to anyone who watched TV or movie comedy over the past twenty years, and some of the best Saturday Night Live moments in fairly recent memory are down to his superb characters, timing and impressions. That’s aside from his work in movies like Pineapple Express, Hot Rod and Superbad.
For five years or so, Hader concentrated on Barry, his hitman comedy about an assassin turned actor that won him and former Fonz Henry Winkler a raft of award nominations and wins, including some 44 Emmys and a host of Golden Globes. Hader created, co-wrote and directed the show up until its finale in 2023, and immediately followed it up by writing what he hoped would be a successful horror film.
However, as he told fellow director Hereditary’s Ari Aster, things didn’t go to plan when he pitched the screenplay to a Hollywood exec, who was, to put it mildly, not a fan.
Hader explained: “I had written a horror movie right after Barry wrapped, I didn’t really take a break… I kind of went right into writing this feature. I had a meeting with a big producer – actually, a very smart, lovely guy. But his response to it was so bad.”
You might think that, given the darkly comedic nature of Barry, plus Hader’s well known love of shocking, genuinely bleak movies like David Cronenberg’s The Brood, that the producer in question, who Hader didn’t name, would have been more receptive to the project on his table, but apparently not, calling it ‘disturbing’ and ‘cynical’.
Hader added the exec’s response was: “This is so mean-spirited and horrible and everything,” adding: “I was like, yeah, it’s a horror movie, did you not see my TV show?”
A dejected Hader said that after the experience, “I really lost my confidence”, although he said he was eventually inspired to revisit the screenplay after watching Aster’s 2025 small-town Covid drama Eddington, which gained mixed reviews on release.
While no further details on Hader’s scary movie have been revealed, he is busy working on other projects, like providing a voice for an upcoming adaptation of kids classic The Cat in the Hat, plus on a completely different note, a rumoured HBO series based on the 1978 Jonestown Massacre.
That was a mass murder-suicide orchestrated by the Reverand Jim Jones that took place in Guyana, resulting in the death of some 918 people. Jones had been leading a cult known as the Peoples Temple and had moved it to South America in order to avoid outside scrutiny from both the media and the US government. The phrase ‘drinking the Kool Aid’ comes from events at the settlement, where victims were given poison-laced grape-flavoured drink to kill them, although younger members were injected against their will.
