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Before They Were Gods: Our Halloween Edition With Ricky Whittle

For American Gods fans, it's still a very "plus/minus" time that's tough to reconcile. On the plus side, they feel great knowing that Starz renewed the series for a second season that's expected to begin filming January 2018. On the minus side, they find themselves stuck knee-deep in the long haul that is…The Wait Between Seasons!

So what's a faithful fan to do? Sure, you could re-read Neil Gaiman's award-winning novel again or get your series-rewatch count up into the teens because that's what any fan would do, right?

But you're not just any fan…

Then you've come to the right place, folks! Because like each and every one of you, I'm waiting for American Gods to come back, too: first, because I'm a fan of the show; and second, because it's a little tough to do episode recaps when there aren't any episodes. So to pass the time, I'm going to post some things during this down time that you might find interesting and help pass the time.

This edition, we're getting into the spirit of the Halloween season by putting our normal format back into traction and taking a look at what Ricky Whittle thinks about scary movies; and which films he admitted to Variety as still making it tough for him to sleep at night:

●  When it comes to horror movie cliches that everyone jokes about, Whittle makes it clear that he's not one of them:

"Everyone always runs up the stairs, or into danger, or they hide. I'm not running up the stairs, I'm not grabbing a baseball bat. I'm pretty quick, and the Olympian inside me would be out the door, sprinting down the street, onto an airplane, into a different country or city. I'd be on the beach, loving life."

●  Whittle refers to scary movies as "crazy town" films because of the crazy things that happen in them, the crazy characters in them, and the crazy people who watch them; and cites Scary Movie and Scream as two films that do a great job of pulling back the curtain on the horror film "rules" and showing some of the absurdities:

"You're never supposed to have sex. It's tough. If I'm gonna die in a horror movie, I'd probably rather die at least having had sex. It's better that than dying trying to get a cat from underneath the bed, or investigating some noise you heard in the backyard. That kind of sucks."

●  When it comes to a gore-fest film that still traumatizes him, Whittle has to look no further than Eli Roth's Hostel:

"Hostel is the movie you need to go and see if you want to traumatize your children, traumatize all your friends just for the hell of it. I have nightmares and I'm traumatized."

●  Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs scares him in a completely different way, thanks mainly to Dr. Hannibal Lecter's (Anthony Hopkins) one-man homage to Travolta/Cage's Face Off:

"He's basically a shape changer. He can put other people's faces on his face. That's terrifying, he's a superhero."

●  But Whittle's "desert island" scary movie? Steven Spielberg's Jaws, a fear that got to him recently while jet skiing:

"I probably watched it too young. It traumatized me for life. Although I'm now fascinated with great whites, that is my greatest fear in life and it is because of that movie."

"I swam as fast as I've ever swam in my life. I just thought, 'This is it, this is how I die' Who's jet skiing when there's great whites! Why would I do that? I just broke all the rules."

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