The one movie Sarah Paulson said “there’s no fucking way” she’d ever watch
Imagine you’re a nurse who can’t stand the sight of blood, or a plumber with a phobia of getting wet, or even a pilot with a fear of heights, which is pretty much the case for Sarah Paulson, who has worked extensively in horror, and yet she will not, in any circumstances, watch a horror film.
Paulson even began her career in a horror series, the mid-1990s, the Sam Raimi-produced American Gothic, and has spent a huge amount of time working on Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story, nine seasons of it in fact up to 2021, winning five Emmy award nominations in the process, so the idea that she might be a bit freaked out by the occasional jumpscare is a surprising one to say the least.
That’s aside from the movies she’s made, like 2024’s Hold Your Breath, which was a psychological horror along the lines of the frankly nerve-shredding The Babadook, plus Netflix’s Bird Box, which rather than a nice sunday afternoon speny feeding ornithological feathered chums was in fact a John Malkovich film about entities who can make people kill themselves if they look at them, which is…fun.
Add to that Paulson’s uber-creepy Nurse Ratched in the pre-One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest series Ratched, also developed by Ryan Murphy, and you’ve got a career spent scaring people, which adds some poetic irony to the fact that she’s an absolute wuss when it comes to watching anything remotely scary herself.
When she had just made Hold Your Breath, she spoke to People magazine about the fact her close friend Pedro Pascal was “always trying to get me to go see scary movies” and that, without trying to upset him, she was not going to countenance that idea at all. She said, “I remember Pascal talking about Hereditary and being like, ‘You have to see this movie’. And I was like, ‘There’s no fucking way I am going to see that movie’. Everyone I know wants me to go see all the Conjuring movies ’cause I love Vera Farmiga, and it’s like… I just can’t do it.”
Evidently, the people around Paulson either hate her or have very good taste, because Hereditary is probably the best horror movie made this century, and the Conjuring series is indeed particularly unsettling, especially the first two movies, which came out in 2013 and 2016, respectively, and made almost a billion dollars at the box office.
James Wan directed the films starring Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, which are made all the more ‘nope’-ish by the fact that they’re based on the real-life stories of a pair of paranormal investigators in the 1970s.
Luckily for Paulson, she’s giving herself a break from the scary stuff for the foreseeable future, instead making a film called Mother Courage about an actress discovering her long-lost sister, and a TV mini-series called The Way Down about a cult-like Church scandal.
Meanwhile, fans of The Conjuring will be excited to know that although the movies technically finished with last year’s The Conjuring: Last Rights, which became the highest-grossing in the franchise’s history, a prequel is on the way titled The First Communion, due to hit cinemas in September 2027. Also, Ari Aster says he has an idea for Hereditary 2, but disappointingly said earlier this year, “Who knows if I’ll ever do it”, the big tease.
