Actor Lance Henriksen is known for roles where he has to face nightmarish threats – like in Alien, The Terminator, and Pumpkinhead – but his newest film features the threat that he thinks could be the most frightening of all: wildfires.
Henriksen joins an ensemble cast that includes Peter Facinelli (The Twilight Saga), Fiona Dourif (Chucky), and Asher Angel (Shazam!) in the new film On Fire, which was directed by Nick Lyon (with Facinelli also directing when Lyon caught COVID).
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On Fire “Follows a family who lives in a trailer home in the woods and are suddenly confronted by a wildfire. Survival becomes their main objective.” Lance Henriksen plays George Laughlin, the elderly patriarch of the Laughlin family (Facinelli, Dourif, and Angel). George joins his family in the mad dash to escape and survive the wildfires; when speaking to ComicBook.com during the press junket for On Fire (which SAG-AFTRA approved through an interim agreement), Lance Henriksen explained how real-life wildfires are right up there with the monsters and killer robots he’s faced onscreen:
“It’s like a ghost – it’s like a horror ghost. It wants to burn you up,” Henriksen explained. “It wants to reach out and burn everything – and take all life away. Because it’s not really a life: it’s an energy. It doesn’t have a morality play going on in its head – it just wants to eat you up. It’s frightening. The sound of it – just the sound of it, let alone you’re surrounded by it. It’s a big deal [laughs]. Bad for anyone that’s burned.
Obviously, part of the goal for those making On Fire is for the film to bring awareness to the continuing threat of wildfires in different regions all over the world. The film’s depiction of wildfires is certainly as Henriksen describes it: almost like a slasher-killer stalking the Laughlin family in the night. Another way of looking at it is like Stephen King’s The Mist: a hellish bend to the natural world, which envelopes a set of characters from all sides, offering nothing but death to anyone it touches. Whereas a lot of fire survival films lean into the thriller aspect of survival, Loyd and company instead seem to think the horror of the experience is what needs to be conveyed.
On Fire will be in theaters on September 29th.
