(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 17 August 2025 21:15, UK
For an actor who’s seemingly made it their mission to play every type of character under the sun in every kind of movie imaginable, Nicolas Cage hasn’t starred in a lot of horror movies.
Longlegs is the first one that comes to mind, and it’s arguably the only full-blown horror flick he’s made in his career. Sure, the idiosyncratic icon has been in plenty of films that carry certain elements associated with the genre, but his scenery-devouring turn as the titular serial killer is a nightmare from start to finish.
Technically, Face/Off could be interpreted as a body horror film. Willy’s Wonderland saw him battling against animatronic animals inhabited by spirits thanks to an occult ritual, he battled against monsters in Arcadian, channelled voodoo in Ghost Rider, Color Out of Space and Mandy were a pair of phantasmagorical mindfucks, and he played the most famous vampire of them all in Renfield.
He also played a guy who thought he was a vampire in Vampire’s Kiss, dealt with the supernatural in Season of the Witch, and headlined the remake of the classic horror flick, The Wicker Man, which everyone knows wasn’t scary when it’s a comedic masterpiece. Many horror-tinged outings, yes, but every one of them, apart from Longlegs, fits into at least one other genre.
That’s not to say he isn’t an expert on the genre, with Cage having been a studious cinephile for as long as he can remember. He’s seen enough to know when something’s scary, but as far as the Academy Award-winning eccentric is concerned, there’s only one scene that deserves to be called the most frightening ever committed to film.
When he was asked that very question by NME, the man of a thousand memes only had one answer: “There have been many, but I think that The Exorcist really took it to a whole new level,” he pondered. “I think the final exorcism scene in that movie, I would say, would be the scariest film in cinema history.”
While it wouldn’t have been surprising for Cage to plump for a lesser-known or obscure title that most people hadn’t heard of, he decided to go with a classic. The Exorcist was less of a mere motion picture and more of a cultural phenomenon when it exploded into cinemas in 1973, becoming the first horror movie to secure a ‘Best Picture’ nomination at the Academy Awards.
Is the final exorcism the scariest scene of all time? As is always the case with the genre, it’s a matter of taste and personal preference. The average cinemagoer in the 1970s would have agreed wholeheartedly, because enough of them were fainting, vomiting, and running out of the auditorium screaming to guarantee William Friedkin’s seminal chiller a spot in the horrifying hall of fame.
Many modern viewers will watch The Exorcist and wonder what all the fuss was about in an age of CGI-assisted gore and geysers of blood, but at the time, nobody had seen anything like it. The impressionable Nicky Coppola was only nine years old when it was first released, so maybe his decision was informed by lingering childhood trauma.
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