The six horror movies Pedro Pascal wants everyone to see: “It really holds up”
The 1980s were a pivotal time for horror as a movie genre, often looked back on as something of a golden age for scary cinema. It saw the rise of slasher movies, creature features, body horror and envelope-pushing directors, including The Thing‘s visionary John Carpenter, at their creative peaks.
The Last of Us star Pedro Pascal is a child of the decade, and his tastes are reflective of that when it comes to movies that will have you scrambling to get behind the sofa. So much so, in fact, that he used to act out scenes from 1982’s seminal Poltergeist when he was a kid. When asked by Sky to pick his favourite movies of all time, his selection was littered with horrors.
Although some masterpieces of the decade don’t make his shortlist of the best horror films, Wes Craven’s terrifying A Nightmare on Elm Street, for example, several others do, showing that the Chilean-American actor knows what he’s talking about.
John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London stunned cinema goers upon release in 1981, with special effects that defied belief and stand up to scrutiny even now. Something of a departure for Landis, who had previously found Hollywood fame with straight-up comedies like The Blues Brothers and National Lampoon’s Animal House, it was filmed in rural Wales on a budget of just $6million, bringing in ten times that after release.
Pascal clearly remembers seeing it as a young boy, saying, “It’s amazing. We got cable TV when I was very young. It scared me, and I thought it was hilarious. And you look at it now, and it really holds up. It has special effects that changed cinema, and has been built on since then.”
Another 1980s horror picked by Pascal is Stanley Kubrick’s frankly pant-soiling adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, a film that somehow seems to get scarier with each decade that passes. Pascal noted, “It kind of breaks your heart when you watch Shelley Duvall—she is so phenomenal in the movie. And I just remember when he [Jack Nicholson] loses his temper with her for the first time, when he’s typing, and she’s interrupting him, and the terror that she’s sort of feeling, she recognises her husband less and less.”
The Shining includes some very scary little kids, but possibly not in the same league as Damien, star of another of Pascal’s personal favourites, The Omen. Filmed in London in 1976, it stars Hollywood great Gregory Peck as an American diplomat whose wife gives birth to the literal spawn of Satan, with predictably not good results.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is, of course, incredibly influential in many ways in terms of filmmaking, but it also stands as one of the earliest examples of outright horror being seen by a mainstream audience in a movie by an established director. From the infamous shower stabbing to Norman Bates revealing the truth about his mother, it is a movie that is genuinely shocking. As Pascal notes simply, “It’s brilliant. Perfect. Classic”.
Three words are also all it takes to sum up the actor’s feelings on another all-time great horror film; this time, Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking space terror Alien, the movie that’s now 45 years old but remains just as visually astonishing and claustrophobic as ever. “Masterpiece,” says Pascal, adding, “Teeth. And Harry Dean Stanton”.
Finally, one of his other favourite fear-flicks is Candyman, the early ’90s supernatural slasher that made looking into a bathroom mirror an entirely more terrifying thing to do on a regular basis. Adapted from a book by Hellraiser director Clive Barker, it gained legendary status around the world’s school playgrounds as a film that would get you haunted in real life, something Pascal can relate to, as he adds, “Candyman, I saw in the movie theatre and it scared the s**t out of me”.
Pedro Pascal’s six must-watch horror flicks
- An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981)
- The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
- The Omen (John Moore,1976)
- Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
- Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
- Candyman (Bernard Rose,1992)
