The “unwatchable” movie Bill Hader walked out of halfway through: “This is disgusting”
Walking out of a movie before the end credits start rolling is tantamount to sacrilege for many cinephiles, and while Bill Hader fits neatly into the category of people who’ve been obsessed with film for their entire lives, even he has his limits.
He might have made his name as a rubber-faced scene-stealer and man of a thousand voices on Saturday Night Live before becoming an ancillary member of Judd Apatow’s ‘Frat Pack’ after taking his talents to the silver screen, but Hader has an impressive and immersive knowledge of the medium and its history.
Obviously, you should never judge a book by its cover, but that doesn’t make it any less surprising to know that the comic is on a Quentin Tarantino-esque plane when it comes to cinephilia. Still, that doesn’t guarantee that he’ll watch whatever’s put in front of him, and one controversial film was enough to have him abandon ship at the midway point.
Hader’s relationship with horror has always been complicated: Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead was the movie that inspired him to become a filmmaker, and he loved watching creature features when he was growing up, but the intense opening scene of 28 Weeks Later was enough to cause him a full-blown panic attack.
Ironically, Raimi was directly responsible for tipping him over the edge, with Hader in attendance when the Spider-Man and Simple Plan director was screening a restored print of Ruggero Deodato’s notorious Cannibal Holocaust. He knew he wasn’t going to like it, but it was worse than he could have imagined.
“It’s kind of an unwatchable movie,” he told Paul Giamatti. “It’s very disgusting.” That’s accurate, with the no-holds-barred horror flick introducing levels of gratuitous violence and gore that mainstream audiences had been completely unaccustomed to seeing on the big screen, with the picture banned in numerous countries and Deodato charged with obscenity in his native Italy.
“I remember I left midway,” Hader recalled. “I don’t usually walk out of movies, but I walked into the lobby of the Newark, and I got sick. I was like, ‘This is disgusting’. I wouldn’t watch Cannibal Holocaust if I were you guys. I really hated that movie.”
It’s an acquired taste, to put it lightly. You need a strong disposition and an even stronger stomach to make it through to the last of the flick’s 96 minutes, and there’s no guarantee that even the hardiest horror fan will get a kick out of the endless barbarism on display. Those are the very reasons why it gained infamy and cult status in equal measure, but it was far too much for Hader to bear.
He wasn’t the first person to be left feeling sick by Cannibal Holocaust, and if it continues to live on as an underground favourite among the most dedicated subset of blood-and-guts aficionados, he won’t be the last.
