The terrible movie that became Melissa Barrera’s first obsession: “The best thing I’d ever seen”
There are two genres that don’t typically go together that Melissa Barrera absolutely loves: horror and musical theatre. It’s rare that the two mix – how scared could you really be if a serial killer came at you doing jazz hands? – but there are certainly some beloved horror musicals out there, like Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street or Little Shop of Horrors.
Barrera has yet to appear in a musical horror film, though, preferring to do one or the other, finding success when she emerged in Hollywood in the early 2020s with the musical In The Heights and the horror movie Scream, the fifth instalment in the popular franchise.
She has since appeared in the horror films Bed Rest, Scream VI, Abigail, and Your Monster, becoming somewhat of a modern-day scream queen, although she’s got her Scream co-star Jenna Ortega to compete with for the title. When she’s not appearing in blood-soaked scary films, she can be found singing and dancing, with a role in 2022’s Carmen alongside Paul Mescal, very loosely inspired by the classic opera, allowing her to further demonstrate her multifaceted talents.
When it came to picking her favourite movies for the Oscars, she naturally selected a mixture of films that ticked both her musical theatre and horror-loving sides, with Chicago sitting alongside Black Swan. However, one of her choices is a film that critics widely panned upon its release in 2004, but it’s one that Barrera loves for several reasons, finding that it blends several of her interests in one.
Van Helsing, directed by Stephen Sommers, isn’t exactly an enduring horror film, although for fans of classic monster stories like Frankenstein and Dracula, the appeal is certainly there. Hugh Jackman played Gabriel Van Helsing, a monster hunter who interacts with various classic figures from horror history, like Jekyll and Hyde and Frankenstein’s monster. It’s pretty bad, but to a teenage Barrera, it was amazing.
“I’ve said it before when people ask me, ‘What’s one of your favorite movies?’ and people are always like, ‘Really?!’ But I was obsessed with this movie. I forget that I was so into fantasy and sci-fi, but I was really into that when I was younger,” she explained.
“There was a point in my life where I would get home after school and press play on Van Helsing and watch it every day. I love vampires and monsters and werewolves and all of that, and there was such a cool combination of all of them in one movie. I’m also a huge Hugh Jackman fan because, again, he’s a musical theatre guy. He’s so talented, and also beautiful. I just loved the scope of it.”
The actor emphasised just how obsessed with the movie she really was when she was younger, adding, “I thought it was so grand and exciting, and I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I thought the visual effects were great. My 14-year-old self thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen. It was very transformational for me, and I realized that I wanted to do some big action-adventure sci-fi movie at some point in my life.”
We all have those films that we loved when we were younger that are actually rather awful, but it’s hard to let them go from that special place in our heart. Whether it’s a cringey comedy or a schlocky horror film, sometimes they just resonate with us in a strange way when we’re coming of age, and watching them back years later can provide us with an odd sense of comfort. For Barrera, it’s evidently this critically derided action horror movie, which was actually a box office hit, grossing over $300 million upon its release over 20 years ago.
