Entertainment
The Most Popular Director In The World Wants To Transform A New Genre
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Right now, Christopher Nolan is on top of the world. Despite all the concerns that it would flop (mostly from people who think Citizen Vigilante is the best movie ever made), The Odyssey has proven to be a massive success in its first weekend. Unlike Odysseus himself, it looks like the film has some smooth sailing ahead of its voyage to earning (with the blessing of the gods) at least a billion at the box office. Considering how this literary epic is so different than his previous works (which focused on everything from Batman to Oppenheimer), fans all have the same question: what will Nolan do next?
Now, it seems we have an answer…sort of. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he discussed how large portions of The Odyssey essentially function as a horror film and that each scary scene in that film “whets my appetite for more.” It seems the Dark Knight director is interested in making his own horror movie, and he went so far as to praise Curry Barker for turning Obsession into a microbudget success story. As a huge horror fan myself, I’m crossing my fingers Nolan transforms the genre with the exact opposite: a macrobudget film that stretches the boundaries of cost as much as it stretches the boundaries of imagination.
Christopher Nolan’s Newest Obsession
Have you ever wondered why there are so many new horror movies each year? It comes down to basic math. It doesn’t take much money to make a movie where young, virtually unknown actors die in gruesome ways, making these films a safe gamble for the studios. Their goal is the kind of success that happened with Obsession, a movie made for $750,000 that has earned over $443 million at the box office. When you have a chance to get that kind of insane return, you better believe studio execs are happy to roll the dice on horror.
That particular cinematic success story seriously impressed Christopher Nolan. In his interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Nolan indicated a desire to direct his own horror movie, but he doesn’t want to rush into anything. “I’ve always believed that horror as a genre has to be approached very carefully from a conceptual point of view. In other words, you have to have an amazing idea,” he said. “When you go see a film like Obsession, that’s an amazing idea. That movie works like a motherf*cker. It’s not about the technical side. It’s not about what technical itches I would have to scratch. It’s about story. So I’m always looking.”
Beer Taste On A Champagne Budget
That means all you horror fiends can mark down Nolan as being tentatively interested in crafting his own spooky movie. His praise of Curry Barker is both sweet and charming; it demonstrates that Nolan (who is reportedly a huge fan of lowbrow comedies like Talladega Nights) is no snob, and he’s impressed with what the younger director could do on such a shoestring budget. While I’m confident Nolan could deliver a similarly thrilling film on a similarly tiny budget, I’d like to see him go in another direction. That is, I’d like to see him make a horror movie with an Odyssey-sized budget!
Traditionally, horror movies have been made on the cheap for the reasons I outlined earlier. It’s one thing for a studio to gamble on a microbudget film, and it’s another for them to gamble on a blockbuster. Of course, this wouldn’t be just any blockbuster scary movie; it would be one from Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan, whose critical and commercial success rate is undefeated. As both a fan of Nolan and the spooky genre, I can’t help but wonder how cool it would be if he got to film a lavish horror movie in IMAX, replete with special effects and the most famous working actors, all of whom want to star in one of his pictures.
We Deserve Better Big Budget Horror
Beyond my fanboyism, the main reason I want to see Nolan tackle a horror movie is that big-budget spooky films are rare, and the ones we get are usually pretty bad. Like, that awful Van Helsing movie cost $160 million to make, and the deeply disappointing World War Z cost $190 million. Most genre fans can acknowledge those movies are forgettable trash. But what if Nolan, the most ambitious modern director, used that kind of money to bring the scariest story he can think of to life? It could do more than scratch his proverbial itch; it might, in fact, transform the horror genre into something else entirely.
Until he makes any official announcements, the idea of Christopher Nolan directing a horror movie remains a beautiful (or, at least, beautifully bloody) dream. But it’s a dream worth having. Like, this guy just turned a 3,000-year-old poem that 99 percent of the world hasn’t read into a blockbuster nobody can stop talking about. He’s already transformed the tired superhero genre and the bland biopic genre. Why not go for the hat trick and transform scary movies, too? At the very least, Nolan would give spooky fans something to argue about other than their favorite subject: whether “elevated horror” is the best thing ever or the stupidest marketing term ever created.