Cillian Murphy’s favourite horror movie of all time: “I can’t watch it”
Like so many future stars, Cillian Murphy made one of his very first film appearances in a horror movie, although it would be fair to say he fared significantly better than many of the other future A-listers who walked the same path.
Whereas George Clooney has Grizzly II: Revenge and Return of the Killer Tomatoes, Leonardo DiCaprio debuted in Critters 3, Jennifer Aniston appeared in Leprechaun, Tom Hanks announced himself to the world in slasher flick He Knows You’re Alone, and Paul Rudd helped open his account with Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers, Murphy was cut more from the Johnny Depp and Kevin Bacon cloth.
The latter pair caught early breaks in classic horrors A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th respectively, with Murphy following suit by playing the lead role in Danny Boyle’s frantic and ferocious 28 Days Later, just three years after his first prominent feature-length outing in 1999 drama Sunburn.
As well as helping popularise the fast-paced and sprinting evolution of the undead that would swiftly become a staple of cinema, 28 Days Later quickly became known as one of the most influential horrors of the 21st century, not to mention one of the best to emerge from British cinema.
The franchise is still going strong today with Boyle and writer Alex Garland putting together a sequel trilogy that picks up after the initial follow-up 28 Weeks Later, but Murphy’s personal favourite tale of filmic terror is a much more classical, ominously-paced, and altogether unsettling classic.
He’s hardly the first actor to celebrate the majesty of Stanley Kubrick’s career, but The Shining had such an effect on Murphy that he can’t even bring himself to revisit the timeless chiller. “That film still freaks me out,” he admitted to the BBC after naming it at the top of his preferred pile, with some of its most iconic moments continuing to terrify the Academy Award winner long after the fact.
“The lift and the girls, I can’t watch it,” he continued, with both the blood-spurting elevator and the Grady twins comfortably among the most recognisable iconography in all of horror. It hasn’t been a form of filmmaking Murphy has returned to all that often in the two decades-and-change since 28 Days Later, although he did recently switch up his inadvertent fascination with crimson.
Wes Craven’s Red Eye and Rodrigo Cortés’s Red Lights were the closest things to horror he’d starred in up until he lent support in John Krasinski’s hit sequel A Quiet Place Part II, although it can’t be ruled out that Boyle may extend him an invitation to return in some capacity as Jim to provide further connective tissue to the original 28 Days Later.