The 1979 movie that traumatised Patrick Wilson: “I had nightmares for a long time”
Some actors seem to be so dedicated to the pursuit of giving people nightmares that you have to wonder at some point who might have hurt them, and as the star of the nail-chewing The Conjuring franchise, plus Apple’s recent Cape Fear reboot, Patrick Wilson needs to be near the top of that list.
Because it’s not like he’s left it at The Conjuring, which alone is one of the more ‘you go ahead and watch it, I need to go and do something urgent’, totally pant-soiling, ‘turn-it-off-this-is-horrible’ cinematic series of recent times, if not the most upsetting. Wilson then also decided to team up with the director James Wan for Insidious as well, which proved to be just as horrible and full of complete bad-dream fuel.
Showing that the key to his taking on a project is not money or creative expression but also ‘how sadistic can I be’, Wilson has now starred in no less than 11 different mainstream horror movies in the last 15 years, including spin-offs like the doll-gone-insane Annabelle and the Sister Act antithesis The Nun, and he doesn’t seem to be done yet by any stretch of the imagination.
At least there’s some poetic justice to the fact that Wilson grew up being given sleepless nights of his own due to his watching habits, and to listen to him, it’s probably not a surprise that he wound up making some of the most supernatural, bed-wetting films of the 2010s and 2020s.
He was asked by Dread Central to name the TV shows and movies that inspired him as a youngster and he replied, “Easy. Salem’s Lot. The TV version of Salem’s Lot in the ’70s. Saw it at a friend’s house, and it just really freaked me out, and I had nightmares for a long time.”
Based on an early Stephen King novel, Salem’s Lot was a miniseries that called upon a Hollywood legend in the form of James Mason to add some gravitas alongside Starsky and Hutch’s David Soul. Airing in 1979, it composed two feature-length episodes and told the story of a writer returning to his hometown only to find his friends and neighbours turning into vampires.
Not unusually for King, he was unhappy with anyone involved until The Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper was brought on board, who tried to bring less gore and violence and more of a spooky atmosphere to proceedings. It was eventually released in Europe as a reedited movie.
In addition to Salem’s Lot, Wilson added another horror classic to his list of things he watched then turned into a career, seemingly trying to get back at the wider world for, explaining, “And then Poltergeist, because my house was robbed the night that I saw it, I always connect those two…which may just be trauma being connected together if I really think about it. But they are connected in my mind.”
2025 was supposed to bring an end to The Conjuring series, with The Last Rites, but Wilson hates us so much that now there’s a prequel on the way, The Conjuring: First Communion, which is scheduled to be released in September next year. In the meantime, he will be appearing opposite Alicia Silverstone in a drama called Tunnels, and has signed up for a recurring role in the third and final season of HBO’s zombie video game adaptation The Last of Us.
