Nicolas Cage is one of his generation’s busiest actors, graduating from bit parts and goofball roles in the early ‘80s, to romantic leads (Moonstruck) and dramatic heroes (Raising Arizona). He racked up Oscar nods for Leaving Las Vegas and Adaptation, and when he wasn’t making prestige dramas, he spent much of the 1990s and early aughts on the run from various bad guys or chasing the good ones in movies like Face/Off, National Treasure, and Gone In 60 Seconds. Lately, the actor has made a shift into a genre he hasn’t spent much time in: horror. He’s embraced his dark side with a nefarious glee, letting his freak flag fly, cutting loose any inhibitions about how he looks onscreen, and pushing his expressive eyes to their limits.
The actor known for his exaggerated performances and intense reactions found the perfect sandbox to play in, one that encourages and potentially benefits from his style of outsized reactions and panache for over-the-top theatrics. Vampires are one of the more consistent horror elements in Cage’s work (he also produced a movie about the making of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, Shadow Of The Vampire), and one of his earliest breakout roles still lives on in infamy and memes. The horror-comedy Vampire’s Kiss was one of the first showcases for Cage’s full potential—his physicality, his voice, his entire body changes within seconds, like a man possessed, as his character turns into a vampire. He yells at almost operatic heights, he spits dialogue faster than the speed of a screwball comedy as he jumps on desks, eats a cockroach, and contorts his face in menacing ways. It was the kind of uninhibited performance that would feed into his maniacal villain role in Face/Off, but the movie was a flop only later reclaimed by Cage’s untethered performance. The actor moved away from horror movies for a time.
Busy as ever in the early aughts, Cage once again drifted to the dark side with the 2006 remake of The Wicker Man. With a change in setting from England to an island off Puget Sound, Cage plays a serious cop dedicated to finding his ex-fiancee’s missing child. It’s nowhere near as campy as his role in Vampire’s Kiss, but it’s more in tune with the kinds of dedicated dramatic roles he was taking on at the time (including Ghost Rider right before the big Marvel boom of the late 2000s). His performance is quite serious. As the movie’s hero, he’s haunted by a loss he couldn’t prevent, but his dedication to the bit holds through even when faced with some goofy scenarios like the inexplicable bee scene that is perhaps what most audiences remember from the movie. Like Vampire’s Kiss, this horror entry also flopped at the box office.
After a fallow period of flops, Cage moved to independent films (The Croods aside), and with it, started taking greater acting risks, including a return to horror-comedy with Mom And Dad in 2017. Once again leaning into an over-the-top performance, Cage plays a father, who, like other parents in town, is driven to attack his kids. He meets the challenge with a feral snarl and threatening presence. The following year, Mandy broke out of the Sundance Film Festival, boasting yet another unhinged performance from Cage. Mandy, a colorful fever dream of a movie about a man seeking vengeance for the murder of his girlfriend, officially marked yet another turn in his career: embracing his gonzo style of acting in all its intensity. Cage’s wild-eyed stare under coats of fake blood became one of the film’s oft-shared images, the beginning of many strange sights soon to come.
After Mandy cemented Cage as a horror star, he starred in Lovecraftian adaptation Color Out Of Space, playing a father who loses his mind as a strange force warps his family into monsters. Once again, he had the chance to scream, endanger his kids, run for his life as the evil drew closer and closer. Revisiting the vampire life for the horror comedy Renfield was less well-received, but by 2024’s Longlegs, all was forgiven. Although he appeared in less than a quarter of the movie, Cage is one of the most shocking sights in it, wearing gobs of white makeup with messy white hair as the film’s serial killer. By this point, just about all of Cage’s forays into horror movies were box office disappointments, but what may be his most unbelievably creepy performance in Longlegs has so far become his most successful horror role to date, grossing over $120 million at the box office.
Now that the king of reaction shots has found his horror niche, Cage is due for another outing in the Longlegs sequel, just as he’s keeping up with his busy action (Parish) and drama (Madden) schedules. Cage may have blazed a trail for other performers to embrace their weird, inner darkness, but it took some time to fine tune how to scare audiences with his intensity, not make them laugh.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.