Jessica Alba’s favourite horror movies of all time: “More like ghosts and demons and stuff”
With The Fantastic Four: First Steps currently doing the rounds in cinemas—a reboot of a reboot of a franchise that not very many people wanted in the first place—it’s worth remembering just how many times Marvel has tried to get this series going, with the original attempt in 2005 and a cast including comic book-adaptation queen Jessica Alba.
It seems impossible that Alba is still only 44, given she was already a huge hit with fans as far back as 2000, thanks to a lead role in James Cameron’s TV series Dark Angel. Now seen as something of a lost classic, it told the story of Alba’s genetically modified supersoldier character living in the real world and evading capture from government agents.
Running for two seasons, it was popular enough to spawn a video game, and it put a Golden Globe-nominated Alba firmly on the map, especially with sweating bedroom-dwelling comic obsessives who widely considered her the hottest woman on the planet. She made the most of it a couple of years later by steaming up the screen in Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, based on Frank Miller’s eponymous graphic novel.
That led to her being cast in the first iteration of Fantastic Four alongside The Shield’s Michael Chiklis and future Captain America Chris Evans. While critics didn’t like the film at all, it somehow did well enough at the box office to warrant a sequel in 2007 in which Alba revised her role as the Invisible Woman, although presumably not as invisible as she’d have preferred, given the ratings.
She then spent some years focusing on romantic comedies and the occasional thriller before teaming up with Rodriguez once more in the terrifically bloody Danny Trejo film Machete. Alba also proved she had genuine A-list power when she was named as part of an ensemble cast for the poorly-reviewed but box office success Little Fockers alongside Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller.
What followed was a fairly fallow period for the actor. She tried her best with sequels for Machete and Sin City, but neither really landed, and despite a reasonable hit alongside Jason Statham in Mechanic: Resurrection, she closed out the decade as a producer on a Disney parenting show that was never released. She more than made up for that by forming the Honest Company, a brand that sells baby goods and make-up and now has a valuation of over half a billion dollars.
Back in 2008, she dipped her toe into the world of horror with The Eye, a remake of a 2002 Asian movie of the same name. It became a decent-sized hit at the box office and told the tale of Alba’s blind character who gets eye surgery only to start seeing visions of the dead. And horror is a genre she is keen on to some extent, as long as it isn’t too gory, bless her.
She told Rotten Tomatoes, “I do like Nightmare on Elm Street, the first one. I like Psycho, Poltergeist, The Birds, It, Rosemary’s Baby…kind of more like ghosts and demons, and stuff like that, less like a psychopath coming to rip your body apart.”
The original A Nightmare on Elm Street is a true classic of the genre, the seminal 1984 slasher written and directed by horror legend Wes Craven, which spawned some eight sequels and made knife-fingered Freddy Krueger into the bedtime boogie man of choice for an entire generation. Made on a budget of just $1million, it pulled in 60 times that amount from cinemas and is now regarded as one of the finest horror films ever made.
Alba, meanwhile, will be seen this year in a movie about the Italian sports car company founders, titled Maserati: Brothers, alongside Al Pacino and Anthony Hopkins.
