(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 31 August 2025 22:45, UK
Although Kevin Bacon has been making movies for over 40 years, including some crackers like Hollow Man and Mystic River, one of his career highlights didn’t even involve him having to do any work.
Instead, it came when Roger the Alien from American Dad spent almost an entire episode impersonating Bacon, including wearing a fake nose and doing an entire Footloose dance montage. Bacon himself liked it so much that he changed his Twitter avatar to Roger for a long time. Good man.
Bacon started off with the musical drama movie Footloose, which was a big hit in 1984, but struggled after his initial brush with fame, getting typecast in the same kind of ‘bad boy’ roles and finding himself unable to land another lead part.
After a few years in the wilderness he came back with passable creature feature Tremors in 1990 and then had another hit with Flatliners, the creepy movie about youngsters trying to experience the afterlife that also featured Kiefer Sutherland and Julia Roberts.
It was the first time Bacon had been involved in a proper horror, although he started his career off with the classic 1980 slasher Friday the 13th, and he’s returned to the genre several times over his long career, sometimes with popular results, other times not so much.
(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
The next time was in a movie from the late 1990s named Stir of Echoes, a supernatural horror adapted from a book written in the ’50s and which gained Bacon considerable praise for his performance. It suffered in terms of release timings but remains the actor’s pick of his lengthy career. He told Men’s Health:
“I think my favourite is Stir of Echoes,” the Footloose star confessed. It’s a difficult thing to pick a favourite movie from a career as deeply rich as Baocn’s, but even tougher to pick one most people won’t remember. Thankfully, Bacon can remind you all: “Stir of Echoes, written and directed by David Koepp, was a really good movie. It had an interesting, kind of sad, outcome, because it was about a little kid and a father, and the little kid could see things… And while we were making it, we all became aware of another movie called The Sixth Sense.“
Enjoying somewhat similar premises, the juggernaut Bruce Willis flick blew Bacon’s movie out of the water. “So, as a result, when it came out, people kind of said ‘This is a good movie, but you’ve already seen The Sixth Sense… so you don’t need to go see this one’”, Bacon explained. “That was kind of what happened to the movie, from a marketing standpoint. So, it was disappointing.
“To me, I think it’s definitely one worth going back and taking a look at.”
Stir of Echoes is indeed a very effective, middle-of-the-night shocker with some genuine jump scares that found decent success especially once released on home video. It is fairly ahead of its time and has motifs that can be seen in latter horrors like The Conjuring and it also features the Rolling Stones song ‘Paint it Black’ considerably, which can never be a bad thing.
The movie got a sequel in 2007, called Stir of Echoes 2: The Homecoming starring Rob Lowe, but the less said about that the better in all honesty. Bacon did team up again with Koepp however for the 2020 psychological horror You Should Have Left with Amanda Seyfried. It did ok but reviews were very mixed.
Two other dark Bacon films that didn’t perform as he might have wished were They/Them in 2022 and supernatural movie The Darkness from 2016 which boasts a whopping rating of 3 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Bacon has also spilled plenty of blood this year as an undead vigilante in Prime Video series The Bondsman which was cancelled after one season.
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