EXCLUSIVEHalloween Season Thrills & Chills! 'Saw' Actor Michael Emerson Reveals What Scares Him The Most In Horror Movies
Michael Emerson has a long history of playing unique and intriguing characters from the master manipulator Leland Townsend in CBS' supernatural drama Evil to the sinister hospital orderly Zep Hindle in the first Saw film.
Despite his penchant for playing the occasional spine-chilling antagonist, the former Lost star, 68, exclusively revealed to OK! that while he's always enjoyed Halloween, he has a complicated relationship with gory horror films.
For Emerson, it's the subtler details that send a tingle down his spine. When asked which concepts scare him the most, he pauses before thoughtfully replying, "Just the unknown."
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"You know, a movie like The Others ... a place where something's going on and you can't put your finger on it, but you can't defend yourself against it," he continues. "I guess more ghosty stuff. I do like that more than slashers and chainsaws. I like a movie that makes me believe that spirits of people can somehow survive death in a way."
Continuing the discussion on spooky season flicks, he admits he prefers movies that are "slow and moody."
"I like movies like The Witch or Let The Right One In," he explains of his personal tastes, adding that he enjoys "old mythologies and tropes to be modernized" in new ways rather than rehashing "old horror movie territory" an audience has seen countless times.
"Sometimes, it's just a style and the pace of the movie and the way it's shot," he notes. "Can it get under my skin?"
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Emerson goes on to candidly confess that he's "a bit of a wimp on horror movies," revealing he had to "step out in the lobby" during a theater screening of The Blair Witch Project, adding he'd done the same decades earlier while seeing The Exorcist.
And although some may think a role in one of the goriest horror franchises of all time may be an odd fit for an actor who finds the film's torture scenes to be too "upsetting" for his own tastes, the Emmy Award winner shares he took the job because it had one of the best endings of a script that he'd ever read.
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"I thought, 'Oh my god, are you kidding me?' That body laying in the pool of blood for the whole movie is awake and listening," Emerson recalls of initially reading the script.
"All that business of the gruesome, punishing traps ... I can't watch a lot of that," he notes. "It's a little hard to sleep because some of that sticks with you."
