The movies that forced Val Kilmer to confront his fears: “Masters make masterpieces”
Val Kilmer had the looks and talent of a movie star, but even when he played classic Hollywood leading roles like the Caped Crusader in Batman Forever or Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors, it didn’t seem to turn him into a mainstream star. He was a Marlon Brando-type when the industry was moving toward the Tom Cruise-mould and he ended up playing second fiddle to mainstream stars for most of his career.
Kilmer set out to be a serious actor from the beginning, becoming one of the youngest students to be accepted to the prestigious drama school Julliard when he was 17. He worked in the theatre first and even turned down the opportunity to work with Francis Ford Coppola on the film The Outsiders due to his desire to continue working on the stage.
He was the star of the very first movie he ever appeared in, but it was a decidedly unconventional debut, to say the least. Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker, the trio behind Airplane! and The Naked Gun, cast him as a hapless rockstar in their 1984 spoof Top Secret!, and although it didn’t exactly herald him as the next Paul Newman, it did get him the attention he needed to continue rising through the ranks.
His career underwent a series of steep peaks and craterous valleys, largely due to struggles in his personal life and his reputation for being a challenging collaborator. But every so often, he’d return with a bang and remind audiences what a talent he possessed. He starred in science fiction, neo-noir, comedy, and historical epics. Towards the end of his life, his credits were few and far between, and he became more of a character actor than a reliably excellent supporting star.
In 2017, shortly after revealing his throat cancer diagnosis, Kilmer starred in the horror movie The Super, in which he played a sinister maintenance man at a highrise apartment building in New York. In an interview with Deadline, the star revealed that he detested horror movies, but that there were some that even he couldn’t deny transcended the genre. “I dislike scary films intensely,” he said, “But when it’s a classic that you know will live forever like The Exorcist or The Shining, you have to show up. Even The Birds, which is the first scary movie I ever saw, still works. Masters make masterpieces.”
Friedkin, Kubrick, and Hitchcock were undeniably masters, and those films were emblematic of their prowess. Interestingly, none of those directors specialised in horror, which probably contributed to why, when they did branch out into the genre, they made sure to bring more than the predictable tropes of terror to the screen. All three films have gone down in history as some of the greatest of all time, genre aside, and The Exorcist even became the first horror movie to earn an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Picture.’
Hitchcock’s The Birds is perhaps the least revered of the three, and has been overshadowed by his previous horror film Psycho. However, it is notable for taking a completely different approach to the genre by eschewing the usual human villain for an avian foe. As flocks of murderous birds menace the characters in a small coastal town, it gives the audience an entirely new type of trauma to carry with them into the world.
