“A little too intense for me”: Ron Howard’s unofficial spiritual trilogy and why he’s too scared to finish it
When is a movie trilogy not a movie trilogy? When it’s a spiritual trilogy, technically, with Ron Howard one film away from completing his, and he might never, since he admitted he’s too frightened.
Of course, the two-time Academy Award winner has already helmed a triptych, with Tom Hanks, his pristine suits, and floppy hair cavorting around the globe to monotonous effect in The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, and Inferno, so it’s an itch that he’s already scratched in more conventional terms.
The Coen brothers anointed George Clooney as the fulcrum of their ‘Trilogy of Cowardly Idiots’ after his roles in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Burn After Reading, and Hail, Caesar!, while Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End formed Edgar Wright’s ‘Three Flavours Cornetto’ trio.
John Carpenter’s The Thing, Prince of Darkness, and In the Mouth of Madness are often known as the genre legend’s ‘Apocalypse Trilogy’, Terry Gilliam’s ‘Imagination Trilogy’ is comprised of Time Bandits, Brazil, and, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, not to mention Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours.
There’s plenty of history for it, but Howard is wary of making the third time the charm, and not only because of its ironic adherence to the unluckiest number of them all. The first instalment is the best film of his entire career, Apollo 13, and it took decades for the Happy Days alum to edge one step closer to completing his spiritual arc.
27 years later, and after pissing Viggo Mortensen off by foregoing a theatrical release in favour of a streaming-only rollout, Howard added the second with his dramatization of the Tham Luang cave rescue, Thirteen Lives. Two down, one to go, and there’s an obvious candidate to complete the spiritual trilogy most likely to upset those who suffer from triskaidekaphobia, but he’s not sold on the prospect.
There hasn’t been a new Friday the 13th flick since 2009, with legal red tape holding up Jason Voorhees’ comeback, so why not kill two birds with one stone, have an Oscar-winner bring the hockey mask-wearing mass murderer back to the screen, and let him wrap up his trilogy of 13s?
“Well, you know, there’s a certain kind of horror movie that I have not done that I would enjoy doing,” he pondered. “Probably not Friday the 13th, the stalker thing is a little too intense for me.” That rules Jason out, but if it were something “paranormal, supernatural, you know, monsters, things that we kind of know aren’t real,” then maybe he’d be interested.
Howard has always talked about removing horror from the list of genres he hasn’t tackled yet, and as much as Friday the 13th would kill two birds with one stone by letting him do that and concluding his spiritual trilogy, it doesn’t look as though it’ll happen.
