Universal Pictures
Tom Cruise has long been one of Hollywood’s preeminent movie stars, but not in the way you might expect. A newer generation may know him for his long series of action spectaculars like “Mission: Impossible” or the “Jack Reacher” movies, but throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Cruise tended to skew away from genre films and traditional blockbuster entertainments. He was in charming sex comedies like “Risky Business” and “All the Right Moves,” before moving into the hands of notable auteurs with films like “Legend,” the thought to be doomed “The Color of Money,” “Rain Man,” and “Born on the Fourth of July.” Cruise seemed to long for career diversity, and his movies were successful enough to permit him. Action flicks like “Top Gun,” “Days of Thunder,” and “Mission: Impossible” were the outliers in his career, not the baseline reading.
As such, Cruise hasn’t starred in a lot of horror movies. He wasn’t one of those actors (and they are legion) who began their career in low-budget slasher movies, or who spent a decade paying his dues getting splattered with stage blood. Indeed, he doesn’t seem much interested in horror in general. Looking over his filmography, one can only find three films that count as horror movies. Four, if you want to be really generous and count “Legend,” but I don’t think anyone reading this would conceivably describe “Legend” as a horror movie. And indeed, one of the films below could conceivably be described only as sci-fi, and not necessarily a horror movie.
We’ll include it here for completion’s sake, and we have listed them below. In two of them, Cruise played the monster. In the third, he was attacked by them.
3. The Mummy (2017)
Universal Pictures
Alex Kurtzman’s 2017 film “The Mummy” wasn’t just bad; it was notorious. Universal Pictures, seeing the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, figured they could launch their own far-reaching interconnected film project with the Dark Universe, a series of films that would reboot all the studio’s most famous monster movies from the 1930s and 1940s. Each of the new movies was to star a widely known actor, and each monster would eventually star in their own movie, followed by a giant “Avengers”-like Monster Mash where they all team up. Tom Cruise was in “The Mummy,” and it also starred Russel Crowe as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Javier Bardem was to play Frankenstein’s Monster, Angelina Jolie was to play the Bride, and Johnny Depp was to play the Invisible Man.
As we all know, though, “The Mummy” was so poorly received that the entire Dark Universe was scrapped entirely. In the film, Cruise plays an irascible former soldier who now makes a living plundering graves and illegally selling artifacts. One of his graverobbing endeavors, however, awakens an ancient mummy (Sofia Boutella) with magical powers. By the end of the film, Cruise’s character will find that the spirit of the mummy has infected him, turning him into a superpowered monster. The idea was that Cruise would play a superpowered mummy monster in any additional sequels.
The best thing about “The Mummy” is Boutella, who exudes the appropriate levels of menace. But the script is terrible, and the plot is dull. This was baffling, given that Hollywood veterans like Christopher McQuarrie and David Koepp had a hand in it. “The Mummy” is not just the worst of Cruise’s horror movies, but may be one of the worst of his films in general.
2. War of the Worlds (2005)
Paramount
Based on the 1898 novel by H.G. Wells, but just as much derived from the 1953 George Pal movie, Steven Spielberg’s 2005 redux of “War of the Worlds” was more of a sci-fi reaction to 9/11 than a straight-up horror movie. In the film, Tom Cruise plays Ray, a divorced dad who is increasingly alienated from his teenage son (Justin Chatwin) and young daughter (Dakota Fanning). In the middle of a bad weekend with his kids, a fleet of Martian warships arrives on Earth and proceeds to vaporize the populace with death rays. The bulk of “War of the Worlds” is scenes of Ray pushing his way through panicked crowds, no real plan in mind, trying his best to protect his children from the mayhem. Back in 2005, critic Andy Klein, writing for the now-defunct and unfortunately un-archived L.A. CityBeat, posited that “War of the Worlds” took place entirely in Ray’s head, a fantasy of a pathetic divorced dad who needed a crisis to prove that he could be a hero.
“War of the Worlds” is … okay. Spielberg was an expert in creating striking and horrifying images of mayhem and destruction. When people are vaporized, their clothes remain while their bodies are instantly reduced to ash. Soon, Ray is coated in the ashes of dead humans, looking like a 9/11 survivor. Those parts of the movie make “War of the Worlds” into a proper horror movie. That, and the scenes wherein people are scooped up into a Martian vessel en masse, mashed together in a grim basket. No one knows their fate. The film is full of fear and terror.
And Cruise, playing against type, is a sad, incapable figure. He’s not the hero this time. He’s just swept up in the chaos. It’s a good turn.
1. Interview with the Vampire (1994)
Warner Bros.
Back in 1994, Anne Rice was already a celebrity in the world of pop literature, but she became utterly enormous with the release of Neil Jordan’s “Interview with the Vampire,” based on the first novel in her Vampire Chronicles. In the film, Brad Pitt played a modern vampire named Louis who agreed to give an interview to a journalist, played by Christian Slater. He recalled first becoming a vampire in Louisiana in the 1790s. He was bitten by a very ancient vampire named Lestat, played by Tom Cruise, and Lestat teaches him the ins and outs of being a vampire and the way his bloody appetite is going to work. Moreso, though, Lestat points out that conventional morality doesn’t really apply to blood-drinking immortals, and that hedonism is the way to go.
“Interview with the Vampire” is smoky and atmospheric, and the near-erotic relationship between Lestat and Louis is titillating to no end. Indeed, a big reason why “Interview” was such a hit was because of all the pretty boys in it. Slater, Pitt, and Cruise were also joined by Antonio Banderas, who plays the vampire Armand. The film also starred a young Kirsten Dunst, only 12 at the time, as a girl who also becomes a vampire.
“Interview with the Interview” was a massive success, making over $223 million at the 1994 box office, and ensuring that Anne Rice would be, at least for a decade, spoken in the same tones as one mentions Stephen King. It’s a Gothic romance of the highest order, and a slumber party movie par excellence. It’s certainly Tom Cruise’s best horror movie.
