This week we awoke to the sad news of the passing of Donald Sutherland. An iconic character actor whose electric performances see him transform from charming through to terrifying. Sutherland also clearly had an affinity for genre movie making and so we thought what better way to celebrate a man with over 200 movie credits than to highlight some of his standout performances in genre classics…
Mr Sutherland, you will be missed.
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1978)
A remake of the 1956 classic, Donald Sutherland plays a health inspector who discovers that humans are being replaced with alien duplicates. Suspensful and eerie and frankly an outright classic.
The Hunger Games (2012-2015)
Plenty of younger audiences now associate Donald Sutherland as the iconic villain, President Snow in The Hunger Games movies. Snow is responsible for the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death in a dystopian future and Sutherland’s subtly creepy performance made him perfect for the role.
Don’t Look Now (1973)
After the tragic death of his daughter, bereaved father (Sutherland) travels to Venice with his wife only to encounter a psychic who claims to be in contact with their daughter, from the other side. An absolute classic and standout in Seventies horror. Tortuously psychological, Sutherlands performance is truly chilling
Outbreak (1995)
Who doesn’t love a pandemic thriller?! Donald Sutherland stars alongside Dustin Hoffman as an Army General, responsible for finding a cure for the deadly African Motaba virus that is infecting a sleepy Californian town.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1992)
No, not the TV series, Donald Sutherland starred in the Nineties movie which started the whole thing, where he played Merrick (Giles by another name) who ushers Kristy Swanson’s Buffy into the world of vampire slaying. While never as popoular as the series, the movie still has its fans and it gave the world a chance to see a lighter side of Sutherland’s prowess.
Honorable mentions
- Mr Harrigan’s Phone (2022): Based on a short story by Stephen King about a boy who can communicate with the dead via iPhone
- Mooonfall (2022): Roland Emmerich’s frankly bonkers scifi distaster movie that theorises that the moon is actually hollow!
- The Lifeforce Experiment (1994): When eccentric scientist Dr. “MAC” MacLean wants to determine if the afterlife exists, his morbid experiments take a psychic turn.
