It’s hard not to love superhero movies. One regular, everyday human being is suddenly plucked from the millions of other ordinary citizens in the universe to rise above, and answer a call greater than themselves – to save the world. A diamond in the rough struggles to overcome inexperience, physical inferiority, and self-doubt, in order to evolve into the person he or is she is meant to be: a hero.
Seeing them on the big screen, it’s difficult not to relate to their journey. In truth, the trials and tribulations that these masked icons face and inevitably conquer are no more than a metaphor for the daily struggles of our lives, and our fight to exist in a better world. Although the battles we endure in our own personal existence don’t always go the way we’d hoped, it’s nice to have a fantasy film to put on every now and then, and live vicariously through its victories.
Likewise, the same type of catharsis can be found in watching horror movies. After all, the go-to formula for a slasher flick is to put a final girl through test after test until she is reborn from a naïve young girl, into a vicious warrior woman capable of taking down her predator. In truth, horror movie characters are always tormented and challenged, because the whole point of a thriller is to witness people confronting their demons and ascending their arc. From that perspective, it’s easy to see why so many actors who appear in the X-Men universe have also, at some point, played a role in a scary movie.
Check out the full list below, and see which horror movies have featured the cast of X-Men: Apocalypse, which is set to hit theaters on May 27, 2016.
Horror Movies Featuring the Cast of X-Men: Apocalypse
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ParaNorman - Kodi Smit-McPhee
Nightcrawler may be able to teleport from one spot to another in the X-Men universe, but long before Kodi Smit-McPhee donned the blue epidermis, he voiced a character in the charming little animated horror comedy ParaNorman, who possessed the power to see the dead. Although it is miraculous, it wasn’t necessarily a gift that Norman enjoyed. Labeled as a freak by his peers and pitied by his frustrated parents, Norman feels more like he’s been cursed with a hex than bestowed with an honor as of late. However, when he is suddenly shouldered with the responsibility of being the only one who can save his town, Norman finds that what makes him different is also his greatest asset. In a similar manner, a consistent theme in the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby universe is that although they are sometimes rejected by the humans in their world, being mutants is what makes these kids so special.
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Stoker - Lucas Till
To comic book fans, he’s Havok, a.k.a. Alex Summers, a marvel character with the ability to incinerate his enemies, but who chooses to fight for peace, making an appearance in both Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse and Matthew Vaughn’s 2011 gem X-Men: First Class. However, to Oldboy-obsessed Park Chan-wook fans, he’s Pitts, the school bully from Park’s only English-language film Stoker, who seems to have an affinity for picking on infamous outsider India (Mia Wasikowska). A versatile actor, Till has been working since he was eleven years old, dabbling in many various horror projects, such as Dance of the Dead, Fear Clinic, and Laid to Rest.
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Victor Frankenstein - James McAvoy
Whereas many Hollywood starlets who start out in horror grow to scoff at the same genre that gave them fame once they land more mainstream roles, James McAvoy has taken a much more exciting approach to his acting career. For the first time since his spooky 2001 German B-movie The Pool, McAvoy decided to swim in old waters with his 2015 light-hearted horror flick Victor Frankenstein. A revamp of Mary Shelley’s classic 1822 novel, McAvoy takes on the legendary role of the man who brought the monster to life: the slightly deranged scientist Victor Frankenstein. The film itself may not be much in the way of new material, but the chemistry between Daniel Radcliffe’s Igor and James McAvoy’s Victor makes for an entertaining if not insightful commentary on the slightly homoerotic undertones in the relationship between the iconic head scientist and his hunchbacked helper.
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The Lazarus Effect - Evan Peters
In the X-Men ‘verse, he’s a cocky, self-serving jokester whose endearing attitude makes him just tolerable enough to excuse the fact that he’s constantly complaining about how slowly everyone moves. However, in Blumhouse’s unofficial Flatliners remake The Lazarus Effect, it’s everyone else who’s asking Peters to snap to reality, as he portrays the dopey stoner lab worker Clay. Although he’s usually the one performing experiments while he helps out his coworkers Frank and Zoe attempt to reanimate dead tissue, Clay becomes a part of an unholy experiment himself when he unwillingly gets involved with the recharging of a friend. Whether he’s moving at the speed of sound or slowing down to stare at his hands, Evan Peters has proven himself to be a talented actor capable of a variety of performances, and his version of Quicksilver is thought to be one of the best new additions to the cinematic mutant family.
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Warm Bodies - Nicholas Hoult
Nicholas Hoult is quickly gaining a large fandom for his portrayal of Beast, the mutant who morphs into a super strong ape-like character covered in dark blue fur, but Hoult is no stranger to taking on the viewpoint of fantastical creatures. A few years back, Hoult played a man who is brought back from the dead in Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies. A zombie who can only remember the first letter of his name, “R,” as he calls himself, wanders what’s left of a post apocalyptic world, moaning and shuffling, and searching for brains. Thanks to a unique screenplay and a surprisingly endearing performance from Hoult, this sweet little genre comedy managed to revisit a very well worn subject matter, and breathe some fresh life into its stiff body.
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Insidious - Rose Byrne
Long before she became one of the leading authorities on human genetic modification in her role as Dr. Moira MacTaggert, Rose Byrne just wanted to learn as much as she could about what exactly it was that was haunting her home. In Insidious, James Wan’s eerie supernatural franchise, Byrne’s character Renai Lambert is a mother desperately seeking to protect her family from the shadowy creatures who roam her hallways at night. What she discovers is, it’s not the house that’s haunted, but actually, it’s her son. Like a parasite, this entity has attached itself to her son Dalton, which temporarily gives him powers that allow him staggering strength as it controls his movements, but ultimately pulls him further away from the human world. In a side-by-side comparison, Byrne’s work in X-Men: Apocalypse as the doctor helping youngsters who don’t understand the newfound power inside of them which is controlling how they interact with the world, is just a hop, skip and a jump away from her previous role in Wan’s creepy ghost story.
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Another Me - Sophie Turner
From a princess caught in a territorial medieval war between competing kingdoms, to an undercover secret agent trying to fit in at a regular high school, to a mutant capable of mind control, Sophie Turner has been around the block when it comes to diverse acting roles. However, her performance as Fay in the 2013 thriller Another Me is possibly the only time she has ever stepped into the shoes of a person whose identity is being stolen by someone who may be dead. In the film, Fay finds that strange things start happening to her immediately following her involvement with the school play, and her mother’s illicit affair. Fay swears she’s been seeing a girl that looks just like her, but also realizes how crazy that sounds. Could it be that the stress wrangled in her stomach over her mother’s adultery has caused her to conjure up full-on hallucinations? Or, is this creepy doppelganger actually real? And if it is, does it mean her harm? Learning how to control her own powers as a mutant is one thing, but when it comes to controlling the actions of a frightening spirit, will Turner’s character be able to survive, given that she won’t have a school of mutant friends to guide her through her grievances? Only time will tell in this case of stolen identity, and ugly hidden secrets.
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House at the End of the Street - Jennifer Lawrence
Let’s be honest: by this point, everyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the past five years knows who Jennifer Lawrence is. Whether it be from her recurring role in The Hunger Games series as Katniss Everdeen, or as David O’Russell’s go-to muse in Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, and Joy, or as Mystique in X-Men, the second franchise this impressive young lady nabbed in her short but very fulfilling career, most movie-goers have at least heard of her, or one of her films. However, one entry that might have slipped past some fans’ radars is the A-lister’s appearance in House at the End of the Street, a smaller horror movie starring Jennifer Lawrence as the girl next door, and Max Theriot as the mentally disturbed love interest. Although it features one of the most popular actresses working today, House at the End of the Street didn’t quite have the same massive budget as some of Lawrence’s other movies, which explains why it isn’t one of her more well-known endeavors. Originally conceived in 2003 with Jonathan Mostow set to direct, the film tumbled around in development hell for nearly a decade before Mark Tonderai picked up the project in 2010 and released it in 2012. As if her other insane accomplishments weren’t already enough, Lawrence can now add “final girl” to the list of iconic movie character roles she has played in her life.
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Deliver Us From Evil - Olivia Munn
Taking over for Meiling Melancon as Psylocke in the upcoming X-Men: Apocalypse is Olivia Munn, an ex army brat who speaks Japanese as well as she does English thanks to her time growing up in Tokyo with her mother and military man Stepfather. After moving out to Los Angeles, Munn got her big break as a host for G4’s Attack of the Show, a television program that was huge amongst gamers, anime fans, internet trolls, and other self-professed “geeks.” In an ironic turn of events, the woman who spent several specially-themed episodes dressing up as Wonder Woman, Sailor Moon, and Princess Leia has now earned herself a spot on the X-Men mutant squad, complete with telepathic powers and all. Still, before she made the jump from on air personality to comic book character, Munn broke in her horror acting chops in Scott Derrickson’s follow up to his sleeper hit Sinister, Deliver Us From Evil. In the film, Olivia Munn plays Jen, the wife of a Sergeant who is experiencing increasingly strange paranormal activity on the job. As her husband’s sanity slowly spins out of control, Jen just tries to keep her family afloat, in this creepy, atmospheric thriller.
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Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse - Tye Sheridan
Although he’s only nineteen years old, Tye Sheridan has already proven himself to be a talented actor who takes on very interesting roles, including The Tree of Life, Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s The Stanford Prison Experiment, and the vastly-underrated Mud. Coming up, Sheridan will be Scott Summers, a.k.a. Cyclops, in X-Men: Apocalypse. Funny enough, it was just last year when Sheridan was involved in a different end-of-days scenario, when he played the boy-next-door type Ben Goudy in Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse. A coming-of-age tale about a group of childhood friends who are finally growing up and growing out of their boy scout uniforms, Sheridan’s character Ben feels just as confused about his identity as any teenager, as he’s caught between his cautious, vanilla buddy Augie, and his rebellious, hormone-fueled bro Carter. It’s bad enough he’s not sure if he’s closer to being a kid or a grown up, but unlike most angsty teens who like to claim it as such, it really is the end of the world for Ben, who has suddenly found himself faced with a zombie apocalypse. Similarly, in the X-Men universe, Sheridan will portray a character dealing with the pressures of young adulthood, while he also attempts to save the world from total annihilation.
