A tart romantic comedy set in California wine country, "Sideways" earned Virginia Madsen a Best Actress Oscar nomination and reinforced her status as a mature thinking person's sex symbol — a vintage that improves with age.
Madsen's new film, "The Haunting in Connecticut," which opens Friday, returns the actress to the less-refined subject matter of her early career, when films like "Candyman" and "The Prophecy" pitted her against supernatural menaces that, typically, didn't stand a ghost of a chance against a strong-willed blonde with smarts as well as curves.
"I don't play victim very well," said Madsen, 47, in a recent telephone interview. "I think that women are subjugated and victimized onscreen too much for my taste, and I'm not attracted to playing a role like that."
Producers "seem to want to hire me for women who are stronger."
A Chicago native whose credits include Robert Altman's "A Prairie Home Companion" (in which she played a sort of supernatural presence herself) and Francis Ford Coppola's John Grisham adaptation, "The Rainmaker," Madsen said "The Haunting in Connecticut" lured her back to the horror genre with its intelligent script.
"I like the film very much," said Madsen, the sister of actor Michael Madsen. "I get a particular kick out of scaring the hell out of people; I don't know why. So I want people to go out and see it.
"I've been looking for a good horror script since 'Candyman,' and I've been reading them for years, and I just could never find one. They were all either a gorefest or a good idea but a stupid ending. None of them were really character-driven," until "Haunting."
Inspired by an allegedly true story, "The Haunting in Connecticut" casts Madsen as Sara Campbell, a mother who moves her family to a rambling old house so her cancer-stricken son can be close to the hospital where he receives treatment. Unfortunately for the Campbells, the house needs an exorcist more than an exterminator, and all hell breaks loose — literally, more or less.
Madsen said she's never had "my own paranormal experience," but it would be "naive or arrogant" to think such things don't happen.
"I think it's plausible," she said. "There has to be an explanation to experiences that millions of people are having. You cannot just write it all off as hysteria or imagination ...
"Our perception as human beings is very limited. We know as we look at the known universe, the physical world around us, there is more than meets the eye. The more that science looks into the atom, it becomes more and more vast. We know that when we place our hand on a table, it is not 'solid,' it's merely a gathering of (particles), bouncing off each other."
Even so, Madsen said, she's not sure that ghosts, in the classic sense, exist.
"Once you die, I don't think that anyone wants to stick around here, if heaven is what heaven is supposed to be. But I don't know; there are some things that can't be explained — just like in our movie."
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service