The “weird, dark” movie that scarred Anthony Hopkins for life: “That really scared me”
Anthony Hopkins is no stranger to dark and disturbing roles.
We all know him as Hannibal Lecter, the performance that earned him his first Oscar and cemented the cannibalistic killer as one of the scariest, most cunningly clever villains in cinema history.
His portrayal of Hannibal in The Silence of the Lambs wasn’t the first horror role Hopkins had taken on, but he played it with such gravitas – such terrifying subtlety – that it came to define the actor’s propensity for truly unnerving characters. Of course, he can do so much more than that, but whenever Hopkins has had the chance to do a horror movie, like The Rite or The Wolfman, he has fully committed to it, embracing the darker facets of life with scarily impressive realism.
Still, Hopkins isn’t immune to getting scared by a good horror movie – even if the ones he grew up watching were hardly that frightening. Cinema was limited by censorship and screen violence was much less acceptable when the Welsh actor was young, so nothing he watched would even make a five-year-old bat an eye these days. They’d probably not have the attention span for a full film, anyway.
One film in particular left Hopkins scarred for life, although if you check the age rating with the Motion Picture Association, it’s only labelled a PG. Still, back in 1947, you can imagine how scary a dark noir – featuring several murders and plenty of mystery – might have been. If Hopkins saw the movie when it came out, he would’ve been just 10 years old, which is a very formative time in your cinematic education, so it’s no wonder that the fear he felt from watching the film has always stuck with him.
“It was this weird dark movie with Victor Mature and Peggy Cummins about these girls who were killed because they were in love with this woman’s son,” he once revealed in an interview with Lawrence Grobel. “This one scene when Peggy Cummins comes downstairs looking for her sister in-law and she goes into this large room and there’s this fire burning grate and you see this dead woman, eyes open and all…that really scared me.”
The movie also featured horror legend Vincent Price as a police inspector, although it didn’t turn out to be one of his most successful films. Unfortunately, it didn’t score at the box office as well as the studio had hoped, even if critics were slightly more forgiving. Still, the movie managed to terrify a young Hopkins, who would eventually prove that he wasn’t easily scared anymore – he would become one of the most iconic villains in all of cinema history.
Perhaps the fear that was instilled in the budding actor as a child after watching Moss Rose unlocked something inside of him that made him want to appear in dark movies himself. It’s these early, formative movie-watching experiences that truly stick with you as a child. You carry the feelings you experienced – the fear and the excitement – into adulthood, and for Hopkins, this proved to be a vital part of shaping his career.
