Jack O’Connell names the most terrifying movie he’s ever seen: “I was too young”
Jack O’Connell’s appreciation for classic horror films has made him one of the genre’s most exciting young actors, and while it was always clear that he was destined for success, his career hasn’t quite taken the route that some of his early admirers may have expected.
It was right after his breakthrough performances as a British soldier in ‘71, a young prison inmate in Starred Up, and a World War II hero in Unbroken that O’Connell was expected to be the next major leading man, similar to his heroes Christian Bale and Michael Fassbender.
However, he instead chose to take on darker and more exciting supporting roles, proving that his movie star good looks didn’t mean he couldn’t be a dynamic character actor. Horror has been where the actor has succeeded in the most; after Sinners gave him the opportunity to play one of the most memorable screen vampires in recent memory, he delivered a terrifying performance as the cult leader Jimmy Crystal in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.
As is the case with many artists who find themselves working in the horror genre, O’Connell’s affinity for scary stories was inspired by a memorable experience when he was young, as he told Hero that he grew to have more appreciation for the genre’s films as his tastes matured.
“I used to have a very low tolerance for cheese, but now I seem to appreciate cheese,” O’Connell said, “I don’t know why that’s relevant to the horror genre, but it is. A good horror film has got to shit you up one way or another. The scariest film I grew up watching was The Blair Witch Project, when that came out I was too young to be watching it.”
The Blair Witch Project was a popular culture event unlike anything that the horror genre had experienced since the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and due to a clever marketing campaign that played up the notion that it was ‘found footage’, it managed to convince many audiences that what they were watching was real.
While these assumptions could obviously be disproven today, the film was released in an era before internet speculation about movies had peaked, meaning that audiences generally had less awareness about what they were seeing before they bought tickets. Moreover, since it had a cast composed of unknowns and was not manipulated by obvious visual effects or music choices, the narrative that it was beyond fiction could be a convincing one.
The effectiveness of The Blair Witch Project may have waned in recent years because of how significantly the found footage concept has evolved, and it didn’t take long for other studios to start making similar films, as the Paranormal Activity franchise in particular became a phenomenon. While there aren’t many found footage films that had the same cultural impact as The Blair Witch Project, there have been a few, such as Cloverfield and Chronicle, that used the medium in a creative way.
As easy as it can be to mock the film and the fake news surrounding its release, it unquestionably opened the eyes of many young moviegoers as to what horror could do. Had a young O’Connell not seen this iconic project and taken an interest in making horror films, then the world would have lost some truly amazing performances.
