Since one of his earliest roles, as one of the seminal horny teens in the originalFriday the 13thin 1980,Kevin Baconhas played a part in creating the veryhorrorclichés that we recognize today. They’re the same tropes that have been subsequently lampooned by younger, smart-ass movies likeScreamandCabin in the Woods.
Scream’s resident movie nerd Randy has a sort of ten commandments of things that youabsolutely must not do in order to survive a horror movie, and of course, Bacon broke the rule inFriday the 13th. In the world of the Voorhees family, Kevin Bacon’s “Jack” has pre-marital sex and chases it down with a well deserved doobie… Naturally, he has his throat slit just seconds later.
The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Movies
Kevin Bacon as a performer hasn’t forgotten his humble (but mostly just bloody) horror roots. Bacon’s debut role inAnimal House(1978) was brief and overshadowed as a supporting player, and still four years from universalFootloosefame (1984),Friday the 13thgave this young performer his first proper role (albeit one that would also kill him off). Throughout Bacon’s decades-long career, he is an actor who couldn’t ever be accused of complacency in his career choices.
Related:Horror Movies That Killed Off Big Stars Before They Were Famous
As a consistently strong actor prone to menacing performances wrapped up in American farm boy looks, Bacon has always been so solid in what he has done. Genre has not constricted his roles, but informed them as they should. As an actor, he can easily stroll into scenes and butt heads with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson inA Few Good Men(1992), or play a man who has discovered the scientific formula for invisibility inHollow Man(2000), and make both wildly different roles three-dimensional and entirely authentic.
Toxic Characters Causing Tremors
Bacon’s characters, horror or otherwise, have become notable for their very specific venom. At his best (which by now seems to be a standard), Bacon excels at said characters, especially when they’re, frankly, assholes (with his awful character inSuperbeing one of the best). Tricksy with acidic dialogue and fluent fork tongues, they either know more than they’re revealing — or think they do. But regardless of where he crops up in whatever effortlessly workmanlike role it is, like repeatedly going in to the attic to check out that unknown noise in the dark, Kevin can’t resist coming back to the genre that gave him his big break: horror.
Even some of the riper roles that Bacon has been a part of have veered towards horror, or at the very least horrific. Even if they’re not horror movies, films likeThe Woodsman, X-Men: First Class,andCop Carall reveal the most menacing of villains (playing a pedophile, Nazi, and dirty-as-hell cop respectively, for anyone keeping count).
Speaking to us in Julyto promoteThey/Them, he said:
It never gives me pause that a character is toxic. I’ve done a lot of terrible things in my acting game to people and animals, children and adults, you know, I’m not afraid of that at all. I mean, I’m not drawn to bad characters. Sometimes people say, “Well, you must be drawn to them,” but I play plenty of nice guys too. To me, the interesting thing is somebody who is complex and someone whose shoes I feel like I really haven’t walked in before, and that’s what this delivered.
Bacon Returns
By our count, Bacon has starred in nine horror movies. Some are more obvious than others, but they go as follows:
Based on those release dates, that means that Bacon has featured in at least one horror movie for every decade that he has been an actor, and that’s not even including the often horrific and disturbing TV series he led,The Following. In an article supportively titled “Kevin Bacon Reveals Why He Keeps Coming Back to Horror” forComing Soon, Bacon said:
I love horror because horror has very, very high stakes. It’s life and death, and that’s good stuff to act. John [Logan, director of They/Them] could have made a movie that was about gay conversion. It could have been a dark little indie sort of drama, but to his credit, he realized that horror is a genre that has the possibility of reaching a lot of people. We see that all the time when things come out of the gate and have a very widespread appeal. So to take this background, this terrible idea, this horror in itself of gay conversion, and then plug it into a very traditional structure, for us — a 70s camp slasher movie — was, I thought, a super brilliant idea.
A quote like that suggests a performer that really does mean it. He has a genuine love for the material and the space that only the cobwebby catacombs of horror brings, and vice versa a genre that repeatedly loves to have him.
Hollywood Trends & Horror
It’s no question that Bacon is a superstar, and the longevity at the very top of Hollywood for so long proves that statement, but assessing his career shows just how good horror has been to the actor. Once again citing Bacon’s savvy career choices, you could even argue that Bacon’s star vehicles have reflected the main horror trends since the 80s.
The firstFriday the 13thmoviewould properly kick off the slasher phase which would last the entirety of the 80s. By 1990,Flatlinersfelt brainier as it questioned the meaning of life and death in sci-fi mixed with psychological horror, and his villainous turn inWild Things(essentially a sexy whodunit where multiple people are murdered throughout) would be the last big name for the erotic thriller before the turn of the millennium.
Related:Kevin Bacon’s Best Horror Roles, Ranked
Hollow Manwould ring in the 21st Century, and with it a sign of things to come with the magic capabilities of CGI. And finally,You Should Have Leftfollowed byThey/Thembuddied Bacon with the biggest name in horror right now, Blumhouse Studios, with the latter film recognizing and utilizing “queer"and “elevated horror.”
And now with such an emphasis on elevated horror, Bacon’s fingerprints on the genre have spilled over. As movies likeGet OutandThe Babadookused everyday human anguish and threw monsters in with them, a uniquely horrific movie likeHollow Manleft the original footprints so Cecilia Kass' (Elizabeth Moss) abuse survivor ofThe Invisible Mancould run away.
More recently, horror royaltyRobert Englund name-dropped Bacondirectly as the man he would most want to take over the role of Freddy Krueger following his own time as the Dream Demon. Bacon is also starring in the anticipated reboot of the horror classicThe Toxic Avenger, and his daughter, Sosie Bacon, took on the horror mantle withthe excellent new filmSmile.
To cite another famous Bacon, artist Francis Bacon was famed throughout his career for paintings of the otherworldly nature of the human body in abstractly sinister motifs. Often centered on meat and blood, his paintings were violent, forming a sense of dread in whomever was viewing the work. His subjects were distinctly human, while feeling nightmarish and taboo like in his tinkering of the pope in “Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X,” which makes the image of the pope appear to be screaming and distorted, or “Paralytic Child Walking on all Fours,” which presents a disabled being as animalistic and almost predatory. Mr. Kevin Bacon’s onscreen characters aren’t at all dissimilar in their darkness — they just happen to move.
