Kevin Bacon on why new haunted house film 'You Should Have Left' could qualify as 'quarantine horror'

Kevin Polowy
·3 min read

Kevin Bacon has done horror before — lots of horror — starting with one of the earliest films on his resume, the seminal 1980 slasher flick Friday the 13th. In the years since he’s appeared in other scarefests like Flatliners (1990), Tremors (1990), Stir of Echoes (1999) and Hollow Man (2000).

But there’s something that feels particularly timely about Bacon’s latest foray into horror. In You Should Have Left, he plays a wealthy banker who escapes Los Angeles with his younger wife (Amanda Seyfried) and daughter (Avery Tiiu Essex) to vacation in a sleek and lavish rental home on the Welsh countryside. Only the house is severely haunted, and part of its supernatural trap is that it makes it very, very hard for its already-social distanced inhabitants to leave.

So at a time when many Americans are still homebound due to coronavirus, it almost feels like a new subgenre has been hatched: quarantine horror.

“I hope that the quarantine doesn’t last so long that there’s gonna be a whole subgenre, but you never know,” Bacon tells Yahoo Entertainment during a recent video chat interview about the film (watch above).

At least the Jason Blum-produced film is giving those of us still quarantined something new to consume. You Should Have Left follows Troll World Tour and The King of Staten Island as yet another major release from Universal Pictures to forgo a future theatrical release and premiere directly on digital platforms while most of the country is stuck at home.

“We did think of the film as something that would work well on video on demand,” Bacon says. “And it just seemed like it made sense to put it out now.”

You Should Have Left marks a reunion between Bacon and writer-director David Koepp, who previously worked together on the critically acclaimed 1999 ghost story Stir of Echoes.

“I was trying to get him to collaborate with me on another one,” says the actor. “We stayed friends, which doesn’t happen all that often. I just kept chipping away at him and wore him down after 20 years.

“I loved working with him on Stir of Echoes, a movie I thought was a fantastic movie. And finally I could see the wheels turning in his head, and in a fairly quick succession, he wrote an outline and then a screenplay [based on the book of the same name by Daniel Kehlmann] and we took it to Blumhouse and [then] we were in Wales.”

You Should Have Left is now streaming on all major digital platforms.

For the latest coronavirus news and updates, follow along at https://news.yahoo.com/coronavirus. According to experts, people over 60 and those who are immunocompromised continue to be the most at risk. If you have questions, please reference the CDC’s and WHO’s resource guides.

— Video produced by Gisselle Bances

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