Tom Atkins is the tired lawman of 1980s horror: a stage-trained everyman who looks as if he has done the job for twenty years and would rather have done anything else. Horror needed a grown-up, and for a decade he was the one it rang.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Tom Atkins does when a scene turns silly, which in the films he made his living from was most evenings. He does not wink at it. He drops his voice, slows down, and treats whatever has just come through the door as one more piece of paperwork, and the scene is steadier for having him in it. It is a stage actor's habit, and he came up on the stage: Broadway and off-Broadway from the late 1960s, before Los Angeles and a run of policemen, among them Lt. Alex Diehl in The Rockford Files (1974 to 1977).
The policemen never really stopped. What changed, at the end of the 1970s, was what they were up against. John Carpenter cast him as Nick Castle in The Fog (1980), then as Rehme in Escape from New York (1981), and produced Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982), which gave him a lead, Dr Daniel Challis, in a film that was shouted at on release for abandoning the series formula and has been slowly forgiven since. George A. Romero used him three times, starting with the uncredited prologue and epilogue of Creepshow (1982). He was, by then, the man horror directors called when they needed somebody the audience would believe had a mortgage.
The two of his films we rate most are not the ones that show him best. In Escape from New York he is a supporting part in a picture carried by Kurt Russell's whisper and the dark; in Lethal Weapon (1987) he is Michael Hunsaker, another supporting part in a film that belongs to Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. Neither film is about him and neither needs to be. His leads came in smaller pictures: Det. Ray Cameron in Night of the Creeps (1986), which had only a limited release, and Lt. Frank McCrae in Maniac Cop (1988). That is the shape of a character actor's career, and he seems to have made his peace with it. Of Night of the Creeps he said: "It was the most fun film I've ever worked on. It was a pure giggle from beginning to end."
We will own that it got to us. The film is a joke, and we laughed at it, and somewhere in the middle we noticed we had stopped laughing at Cameron and were simply worried about him. Atkins plays a burnt-out detective as if burnout were a medical condition rather than a pose, and the film around him does not always deserve the care. That is the whole of what he does: he is better than the material and declines to let you see him notice.
He has kept at it, with Patrick Lussier for three films, with Adrienne Barbeau for four, and on the Pittsburgh stage, where his one-man show The Chief has had a long run and where he was still working in 2023. If you want to see what the 1980s horror film looked like once an adult walked into it, start with The Fog and Halloween III, and keep an eye on the man at the back who is not frightened yet.
Biography
Tom Atkins is an American actor born on 13 November 1935 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied at Duquesne University and began his career in stage productions on and off Broadway before moving to Los Angeles for film and television work.
Atkins is known for roles in horror and thriller films, including Nick Castle in The Fog (1980), Rehme in Escape from New York (1981), Daniel Challis in Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982), and Michael Hunsaker in Lethal Weapon (1987). He has also appeared in Creepshow (1982), Night of the Creeps (1986), Maniac Cop (1988), Striking Distance (1993), My Bloody Valentine (2009) and Drive Angry (2011). He had a recurring television role as Lt. Alex Diehl in The Rockford Files (1974–1977).
