The movies Bill Hader grew sick and tired of watching: “God, another one of these?”
Bill Hader may be known as one of the funniest actors on the planet, but he’s also prone to making salient points about trends within the film industry.
Although there aren’t as many stars of Saturday Night Live in the 21st century who broke out in the same way as their contemporaries from the previous century, Hader instantly became a standout. It was only shortly after making some of the best sketches in the show’s recent history that he was identified as someone who could be in movies, making the most of his screentime, even if he was only offered brief roles in Superbad or Tropic Thunder.
It was always clear that Hader had talent, but no one was fully prepared for what a dramatic reinvention his career would experience when he became the writer, creator, producer, and star of HBO’s dark comedy Barry, which was layered with references to classic films and served as both a nuanced satire of the entertainment industry and a compelling anti-hero story. A huge cinephile, the actor used the show to express his opinions on film, and while most of the commentary tends to be positive, he’s also known to incorporate some criticism about films he didn’t think were successful.
Many of his reactions are prompted by assumptions people have made about him based on the work that he’s done on screen, and although Barry is a violent, often cruel show that explores the dark side of human nature, Hader was keen to note that he was very different from the character he was portraying, flatly declaring, “I’m not a violent person”.
He explained, “I don’t like violence. People always ask, ‘What’s it like getting to work with a gun?’ I don’t like it. Don’t get me wrong, I like action movies, like Mad Max: Fury Road, and even monster movies. Those are unreal, fantasy, but I grew up in the ’80s watching slasher films, and it was like, ‘God, another one of these?’”
His comments make sense because Barry uses its gruesome content not for pure entertainment, but instead to tell the story of a complex, broken character trying to improve himself, despite the pressures of the world that always force him to sink lower, and while there’s no shortage of gunplay, sure, the violence itself is often more tragic than it is satisfying.
The same could be said of Mad Max: Fury Road, the film that Hader praised, because it uses action to create a dazzling work of art and beauty while also serving up a dystopian reality that, although looking absurd, doesn’t feel too far off from where society is or might be headed at breakneck speeds. On the other hand, his resistance to slasher films may be because of how often this genre of horror uses torment and bloodshed as its sole reason for existence, on the back of cheap thrills and jump scares.
There are certainly slasher films that transcend the genre, and Hader would probably be the first to sing the praises of John Carpenter’s Halloween or Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, but the 1980s were a time in which these genre films were made cheaply and churned out frequently, and they rarely had the same elegance as that of the aforementioned classics.
Hader, who clearly cares about the future of movies, may have been disturbed that this subgenre was eating up the attention of an audience that may have been better suited to turn it elsewhere.
