It’s always fun to find one of your favorite actors in a horror movie. It’s especially fun to notice an actor in an upcoming horror movie, move to check their IMDb and notice a litany of other horror movies you’d maybe forgotten they starred in. But to go and watch all of said actors horror movies in sequential order? I know, I know. Somebody better stop me because I’m a wild person with no regard for danger. C’mon, let’s get nuts.
Justin Long is the subject of this completist exercise in honor of his not one but two recently released horror movies: Barbarian (In theaters) and House of Darkness (Currently available for rent on VOD). I’ve always considered him an underrated and charismatic actor with the ability to walk the line between “cool guy” and “total dork” as they are so often the same in real life. Or to turn that off and be a total asshole with the wit to get away with it as he is so often asked to do in his horror roles.
Justin Long first appeared on the horror scene in his third and maybe most popular film with Jeepers Creepers. When it released twenty one years ago in 2001 (Holy Hell, I just felt my back crack and soul die), I think all of us old folks watching this for the first time can remember screaming at Darry’s dumb ass for going back to look inside that huge tunnel. You know, the one he’d just seen the monster-esque figure dumping bloody dead bodies into before climbing back into its rusty truck with the “Hi, I’m a cannibal” license plate on it? We also remember sympathizing with what in flying Satan’s satchel must have been going through his mind when he looked up to see hundreds of bodies Gorilla Glued to the goddamn walls. Or watching the Creeper tongue the mouth of a severed head before sniffing the shit out of it. “Looked like he was liking it, too.” There was a lot to unpack here. Had he not had his eyes gouged out like finger fucked Reese Cups, he definitely would have needed therapy.
Point is, Long served as the perfect deer in the headlights of a completely batshit storyline and it wouldn’t be the last time. Foreshadowing! DUN DUN DUN!
‘Drag Me to Hell’
Fast forward all the way to 2009 after the main comedic run of his career which included Dodgeball, Accepted, Waiting and The Sasquatch Gang- Justin Long would return to horror with Drag Me to Hell. Which, coincidentally was Sam Raimi’s first all-out horror film (Depending on how you feel about The Gift) since Army of Darkness; a whopping seventeen years earlier.
In Drag Me To Hell, Long backed up an also underappreciated Alison Lohman as her super understanding but also slightly dick-ish boyfriend, Clay Dalton. This would mark the beginning of a character archetype he would play several more times in his horror filmography. A guy who is charismatic and malleable right up until the point anything uncomfortable happens. Like your girlfriend being cursed by an old lady, hallucinating eyeballs inside of her cake and murdering her own kitten in demonic sacrifice.
In this particular instance, although Clay seems like a jerk at times, he ends up making the noble choice in the end. Sticking by his lady’s side and even paying for her exorcism. Which of course ended with him being forced to watch the ground open up and literally drag his girlfriend into the fiery pits of hell right in front of him. But hey, life is about the journey, not the destination.
Later that same year in one of the fifteen feature films Long was a part of in 2009, he joined Liam Neeson and Christina Ricci in the ridiculously titled After.Life (That period is somehow supposed to be there). Once again, Long plays the caring but flawed boyfriend about to propose when his life becomes engulfed in horror.
In After.Life we see this character post-tragedy and grieving after his girlfriend (Ricci) is supposedly killed in a car accident. She then somehow wakes up and is talking to the funeral home director (Neeson) who swears that she’s really dead; it’s just that he can talk to dead people. When Long’s character finally cracks the case at the end of After.Life he’s subsequently impaled to death with the guy from Taken’s embalming trocar, making him 0–3 in the happy endings department of horror flicks.
‘Tusk’
After another six year horror break, Justin Long returned to horror with Kevin Smith’s Tusk. Here, Long chews the living hell out of both the scenery and uncooked fish as an asshole podcaster who’s imprisoned and turned into a goddamn Walrus. I am really hoping I got to be the person who told you about that plot for the first time. Yes, a goddamn Walrus. Long is a blast to watch as an obnoxious yet entertaining asshole opposite a legendary performance from the late Michael Parks as Walrus maker Howard Howe.
Much like his performance in Jeepers Creepers years earlier, his over the top yet also understandable reactions to the complete bat shit scenario help make Tusk work. In one of the most “fuck it, let’s go for it” performances of his career, Long is the perfect compliment to a hilarious and scary, forever underrated performance by Parks. All of this of course, ending with him surgically turned into an actual fucking walrus whose girlfriend is now sleeping with his best friend. I’ll tell ya, if Sean Bean is the guy who dies early in every movie? Justin Long is the guy who gets royally screwed at the end of them.
2016 brought one of the few dull roles in Long’s career as a psychologist in thriller Lavender. He also brushed shoulders with horror in the paranormal comedy Ghost Team and again teamed with Kevin Smith for a small role in Yoga Hosers. In 2021, Long was directed by horror staple Greg Nicotero in an episode of the second season of Shudder’s Creepshow series. In the episode, titled Night of the Living Late Show (Spoilers ahead) Long’s character invented a full bodied version of virtual reality that looked a lot like a tanning bed but had the ability to put you inside of any movie on its hard drive. This led to infidelity with one of the characters from 1972’s Horror Express which, in turn led to his wife tricking him inside of Night of the Living Dead which, in turn once again led to a Justin Long character screaming bloody murder as the credits rolled.
Which brings us to the current year of our dark lord 2022 and Justin Long starring in not one but two recently released horror films; Barbarian and House of Darkness. Both of which I must warn you will contain *SPOILERS*.
Long is great in both films; His characters once again hitting every checkpoint on the long road between “great dude” and horrible asshole of a human being.
‘Barbarian’
Barbarian asks a lot of Justin Long and his character. As soon as the horror of the film’s opening act kicks in, BAM! we’re out of the basement and on the coast with this guy (Long) singing like a douchebag in his car and having a whole other rabbit hole to go down before getting any answers. The casting here could have made or broken Barbarian and thankfully, we get another entertaining round of “what an over the top prick” to play with Long.
Though you likely find his characters morals disgusting, watching him toil through this house trying to figure out what in the unholy fuck is happening is a treat. The utter disrespect of his surroundings (trying to figure out a stranger’s password on one try before tossing her laptop into the wall) or total lack of awareness (measuring the square footage of a murder dungeon) was just the entertaining thing we needed to get us through the exposition of Barbarian without it losing a bit of steam. It’s probably my favorite overall performance of his horror career.
Oh and if you’re still keeping score of just how badly his characters get it in horror movies, he was forced to drink from an inbred monster’s breast before being beaten to death on the street. In Detroit.
In House of Darkness, Long and his co-star Kate Bosworth carry a dialogue heavy horror comedy that’s a self professed new take on Bram Stoker. He plays a dude trying to get lucky with the strange woman (Bosworth) he picked up at a bar who spends the night toying with him in her gothic castle. The film is always heading towards the same inevitable conclusion and we all know it; yet, it’s able to barely pull the job off thanks to a cool setting, intriguing dialogue and two great leads. Long is once again playing essentially two roles as both an extremely polite gentleman with no ill will and a guy who’s just saying what he has to say to get in this girl’s pants. His character gets what he probably doesn’t deserve (tough audience) when her and her sisters reveal themselves as vampires and rip his body apart limb by limb while dining on his flesh as the credits once again roll with….you guessed it….Justin Long screaming.
In his illustrious and underrated horror career, Justin Long has been force fed an inbred’s breast, beaten to death on a street in Detroit, ripped apart by vampires, ripped apart by zombies, had his eyes ripped out and God knows what else by the Creeper, been impaled by Liam Neeson, turned into a goddamn Walrus, and that’s just the start of it.
My point? I think he’s earned his own little moment in the horror sun.
‘House of Darkness’