Robert Pattinson Says He Fell Asleep Clutching Kitchen Knives After Being Scared by Horror Film

Robert Pattinson says an unnamed horror film recently scared him so profoundly that he ended up falling asleep clutching two kitchen knives, convinced someone was trying to break into his house.

This admission came about during a recent GQ-hosted conversation between the actor and Oscar-winning filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, whose Pattinson-starring Mickey 17 opens this Friday. After the director—whose previous film, Parasite, took home Best Picture in 2020—mentioned the impact of first seeing the Hitchcock classic Psycho as a nine-year-old, the duo made their way to a discussion centered on serial killer-inspired stories.

Vengeance Is Mine, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and Badlands were among the films shouted out by the two, leading to a revealing moment for 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 clarified that this feeling precedes him having become a father last year (he and Suki Waterhouse share a child together), though he conceded that new fatherhood may have “added to it.” As a recent example, Pattinson highlighted a film he watched in preparation for a meeting with a director, gleefully detailing the knife-clutching 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 relayed to his Mickey 17 collaborator. “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 theories on what he may have been hearing that particular evening that further deepened the sense of fear that compelled him to nod off with a couple of knives, Pattinson, with the benefit of hindsight, theorized that it was “probably a squirrel.”

Pattinson did not specify which film caused him to reach for the knives. Worth pointing out, however, is that among the projects in the pipeline for the Batman and Tenet actor is a new take on Possession from Smile and Smile 2 director Parker Finn.

In an interview 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 become a beloved cult classic since its initial 1981 release.