Everyone knows about typecast actors, like how Sean Bean dies in almost every movie. While some actors just are coincidentally placed in roles that seem to be too similar to each other, there’s a point when coincidences become a verifiable pattern. That’s what happened to Justin Long. While most people would immediately think of comedy flicks when they see him, the actor has a close relation to horror cinema. However, as much as it seems like Justin Long loves horror movies, it might seem as if the feeling isn’t mutual. For some reason, every time Long appears in a horror flick, he has the worst luck imaginable.
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One of Justin Long’s earliest roles was in the 2001 horror film Jeepers Creepers. In this movie, he’s one of the characters that suffer the most at the hands of the titular Creeper, to the point where the film’s closing shot is of Long’s skin (minus the eyes) hanging after the monster is done torturing him.
It’s an eerie closing shot and quite a tragic one as well. However, the actor would then go on to star in a multitude of comedies throughout most of the 2000s, somewhat erasing part of the shock of seeing him killed so brutally in a horror flick. However, that wouldn’t be the last time Justin Long would be abducted and tortured in a film, as he would go back to his horror roots a few years down the line, in 2009’s Drag Me To Hell.
For most of the film, it seems as if Long’s luck is starting to improve. For what it’s worth, his character is not directly affected by the events of this movie, but he still suffers a bit of shock when his girlfriend is dragged straight to hell in front of his very eyes. Drag Me To Hell is a long, painful, and completely undeserved torture trip and the fact that it all happens to Long’s character’s girlfriend is just too macabre to be a coincidence.
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Speaking of undeserved tortures, a few years later Justin Long would work together with Kevin Smith in the strange and oddly fascinating horror flick Tusk. As if torture and mutilation weren’t enough, in this film, Long’s character is subjected to a traumatic surgical transformation into a human walrus. It is perhaps the most over-the-top and diabolical situation the actor has had to portray, but it wasn’t the last time that he had to come face to face with horror – and end up with the short end of the stick.
As recently as this year, the actor has starred in two horror flicks, namely House of Darkness and Barbarian. In both films, Long’s character finds an untimely demise, but one of them takes the cake when it comes to brutality.
In Barbarian, he goes through the usual affair for Justin Long’s characters in horror movies: he gets abducted, tortured, and… well…
House of Darkness makes things a bit more visceral. In this vampire flick, Long’s character is psychologically tortured for the entire affair, only to meet a gory demise right at the end. If one thing should be clear by now, is that Justin Long is the Sean Bean of horror cinema.
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