Robert Pattinson reveals an unnamed horror film recently terrified him so badly that he ended up sleeping while holding onto two kitchen knives, believing someone was trying to break into his house.
This confession came during a recent GQ-hosted conversation between the actor and Oscar-winning director Bong Joon Ho, whose Pattinson-starring Mickey 17 hits theaters this Friday. After the filmmaker—whose previous movie, Parasite, won Best Picture in 2020—mentioned the impact of first seeing Hitchcock’s classic Psycho as a nine-year-old, the two drifted into a chat about serial killer-inspired stories.
Vengeance Is Mine, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and Badlands were among the films mentioned by the pair, leading to a candid moment from Pattinson.
“It’s funny because I remember I used to watch a lot of really dark stuff when I was younger and just think, like, ‘Yeah, this is cool,'” Pattinson said, as seen in the video below. “And now I’m too sensitive. I watched Henry again the other day. It really frightened me. It’s strange how you would think it would go the other way around and as you get older you become less frightened of this. I can’t watch horror movies anymore.”
Pattinson noted that this feeling came before he became a dad last year (he and Suki Waterhouse have a child together), though he admitted new fatherhood might have “added to it.” As a recent example, Pattinson described a film he watched before meeting with a director, enthusiastically sharing the knife-grabbing effect it had on him.
“I had to do a meeting with a director and he’d done this horror movie and I watched it and I kept thinking that someone was breaking into my house,” Pattinson told his Mickey 17 director. “So I was sitting on my sofa with two kitchen knives, like, waiting for the person to come in. And then I fell asleep with them basically, like, in my neck on the couch. My girlfriend came in and she’s like, ‘What is happening? Why do you have two knives in your face?'”
As for what he might have been hearing that night that intensified his fear enough to fall asleep with a couple of knives, Pattinson, looking back, guessed it was “probably a squirrel.”
Pattinson didn’t reveal which movie drove him to grab those knives. It’s worth mentioning, though, that among the upcoming projects for the Batman and Tenet star is a new version of Possession from Smile and Smile 2 director Parker Finn.
In a chat with Entertainment Weekly last October, Finn promised a “viciously sharp” and “insane” film that’s “in dialogue” with Andrzej Żuławski’s original Possession, which has grown into a beloved cult classic since it first hit theaters in 1981.
