Video Scripts: Children of the Corn (1984), Bone Tomahawk, Fight Club
Cody shares three more videos he wrote for JoBlo YouTube channels.
I have been writing news articles and film reviews for ArrowintheHead.com for several years, and for the last couple years I have also been writing scripts for videos that are released through the site's YouTube channel JoBlo Horror Originals. Recently I started writing video scripts for the JoBlo Originals YouTube channel as well. I have previously shared the videos I wrote that covered
Three more videos that I have written the scripts for can be seen below; two for the JoBlo Horror Originals channel and one for the JoBlo Originals channel.
For the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series, I wrote about the 1984 Stephen King adaptation Children of the Corn, directed by Fritz Kiersch:
Children of the Corn script:
INTRO: Sure, kids can be funny and adorable. But they can also be incredibly creepy. Imagine this: a town that’s completely overrun by children who are murderous, blade-wielding little maniacs. Children that want to sacrifice all adults to an evil god so they can have healthy corn crops. Unnerving, isn’t it? Well, that’s exactly the vision director Fritz Kiersch brought to the screen with his 1984 Stephen King adaptation Children of the Corn. It’s a film that has spawned many poorly received sequels and reboots that have tarnished its reputation. But if you’ve been avoiding it because of that, we have to let you know: Children of the Corn may be the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: Children of the Corn was marketed as being “an adult nightmare”. So maybe it’s fitting that the short story Stephen King wrote was first published in the pages of the adult magazine Penthouse. It was then included in King’s 1978 short story collection Night Shift – and it wasn’t long before studios started inquiring about the film rights to the stories in that book. Children of the Corn sold to an unexpected company: Hal Roach Studios. Best known for their comedic output, they had been called “The Laugh Factory to the World”. They had even been behind the Our Gang franchise, also known as The Little Rascals. Now apparently they were interested in making a movie that would ask the question, “What if the Little Rascals were homicidal?”
Children of the Corn follows a couple named Burt and Vicky, who are passing through Nebraska on a road trip to the West Coast. When they hit a child that comes stumbling out of a cornfield and into the road, they seek help in the nearest town. A little place called Gatlin. There they find that all of the adults have been killed off, sacrificed by the children to a monstrous god that lives in the corn. A god they call He Who Walks Behind the Rows. This god demands the blood of anyone older than their teens. And in return, the corn grows tall and healthy. Burt and Vicky, being adults themselves, are targeted by the little maniacs that have been in control of Gatlin for years at this point.
King wrote the first draft of the screenplay himself, but studio executives weren’t entirely satisfied with what he turned in. Burt and Vicky are a very unhappy couple on the verge of divorce in his story. So he dedicated the first thirty-five pages of the script to this couple bickering and having intense arguments with each other. Since that script didn’t work for them, the studio turned to a writer named George Goldsmith, whose rewrite took the screenplay further from the source material. In his version of the story, Burt and Vicky aren’t married. The tension in their relationship comes from the fact that Vicky is anxiously waiting for Burt to propose to her. Goldsmith also gave the couple some allies to interact with. In King’s story, all of the children in Gatlin are in on the deaths of the adults. In the film, there are two children who don’t agree with what the others have done. They’re not into all this He Who Walks Behind the Rows crap. And when they cross paths with Burt and Vicky, they try to help them survive the terrible situation they’ve stumbled into. King wasn’t pleased with Goldsmith’s revisions, leading to an uncomfortable phone call between the two. King claimed that Goldsmith didn’t understand horror, and Goldsmith replied that King didn’t understand cinema. His script hadn’t been cinematic enough, and the studio must have thought Goldsmith’s script was, because that’s the one they went with.
Several other companies stepped in to help Hal Roach Studios get Children of the Corn into production, including distributor New World Pictures. New World’s Donald P. Borchers became a producer on the film, and he’s the one who thought of offering the directing job to Fritz Kiersch. Even though Kiersch had never directed a feature film before. His success had come from making commercials, and Borchers was very impressed by his work. And while Kiersch would have been happy to stick with commercials, he couldn’t turn down the chance to direct a Stephen King movie. This was a huge opportunity.
From the time he was hired, Kiersch had roughly two months to prepare before filming was expected to begin. First he went on a location scout to multiple states across the U.S. He found the cornfields and small towns he was looking for in Sioux City, Iowa and the surrounding areas. With the location chosen, and his commercial crew ready to follow him into the feature world, Kiersch began assembling the cast. The role of Burt went to Peter Horton, who was a few years away from landing a major role on the TV series Thirtysomething. For Vicky, Kiersch cast Linda Hamilton, who would go right from working on this movie to starring in The Terminator, which started filming the same month Children of the Corn reached theatres. Robby Kiger and AnneMarie McEvoy were cast as the helpful kids, Job and Sarah. Many of the He Who Walks Behind the Rows kids would be played by Iowa locals, but John Philbin was cast as one named Amos, who is ready to be sacrificed now that he’s turning eighteen. Julie Maddalena was cast as pregnant teen Rachel. Jonas Marlowe plays Joseph, an unlucky kid who gets his throat slit for trying to flee from Gatlin. Then he stumbles out into the road and gets hit by Burt and Vicky’s car. One of the few adult roles other than Burt and Vicky went to the great character actor R.G. Armstrong. He plays an old man named Diehl, who can be found at a rundown auto shop just outside of Gatlin.
The cult in Gatlin is headed up by a young preacher named Isaac. He gives the orders and his followers do the dirty work. The main enforcer of the group is Malachai, the creepiest of the bunch. He’s even more strict and dangerous than Isaac. Both of these roles went to actors who were making their film debuts. John Franklin was cast as Isaac. Even though he was in his mid-twenties, he could pass for younger because of a growth hormone deficiency. Franklin had just finished working on a commercial where he had been playing a Vulcan, and it was decided that he would keep his Vulcan haircut for Children of the Corn. They figured it would add an extra bit of strangeness to the character. Malachai was played by teenager Courtney Gains. He proved to be so effective at playing an evil little bastard, even his parents were disturbed by his performance in the movie. Gains started bringing the intensity as soon as he stepped into the audition room, where he pulled a prop knife on a casting assistant.
BACKGROUND: Kiersch and the producers didn’t take into consideration that cornfields can change a lot in a period of two months. When they returned to Iowa to start filming, they were shocked. Some of the corn wasn’t there anymore. It had been harvested. Other fields of corn had changed color; they lost their vibrant green. The crew had to scramble to find corn that was suitable to appear in the movie. One farmer was convinced not to harvest his crop so they could use it as the main cornfield in the film. Cornstalks made of polyurethane were used for some moments. And sometimes crew members had to paint the green back onto real cornstalks.
The changing cornfields weren’t the only things making this a difficult shoot. Since many of the cast members were children, the production had to take frequent breaks. The kids needed recreation and schooling. Kiersch was also working with a budget that was lower than it seemed. Technically, the budget was one-point-three million. But the director only had access to two-thirds of that amount. The rest of it went to studio executives and to Stephen King. Due to the budget being lower than expected, some scenes had to go unfilmed and Kiersch wasn’t able to include nearly as many special effects as he had envisioned. There were supposed to be more confrontations between Burt and the killer kids, but those were pared down. In the sequence where the kids attack Diehl at his auto shop, he discovers that they have killed his dog. He was originally supposed to find the dog’s severed head. But that effect would have been costly, so he finds the dog’s bloody bandana instead. Which is actually better for the movie, and still effective.
When evil is defeated in the climactic moments, Kiersch wanted to show the cornfield rotting away. They couldn’t afford that. But at least they were able to show the field burning. In King’s story, the corn god He Who Walks Behind the Rows actually shows up to attack Burt. King described this thing as a huge green creature with red eyes the size of footballs. That thing definitely couldn’t be put into the movie, so Kiersch had to find a work-around. In some shots, He Who Walks Behind the Rows is represented by a strange, colorful substance appearing in the air. This was achieved by filming ink being injected into water. That’s not very impressive, and even Kiersch refers to that effect as the cauliflower monster. The better work-around comes in shots where we see He Who Walks Behind the Rows burrowing through the ground. And this effect was simple to achieve. All they had to do was dig a ditch, put an upside down wheelbarrow in there, cover it with dirt. Then pull it through the dirt with a tractor. When He Who Walks Behind the Rows is moving underground like a Graboid, it’s just a wheelbarrow under there.
While some scenes couldn’t be shot, Children of the Corn also had – like most movies – its share of deleted scenes. The opening sequence of the film shows the children of Gatlin rising up and slaughtering the adults. But the massacre is only shown through the eyes of Job, who witnesses his father and other grown-ups being killed in a cafe. Kiersch planned to show attacks in other locations, and even filmed a sequence that focused on the town’s sheriff. That sequence didn’t turn out well for the sheriff. He’s the Blue Man, the corpse wearing a police uniform that we see crucified in the cornfield. Kiersch had to do some very careful editing in other scenes, as the Burt character was a smoker. Peter Horton wasn’t, and it wasn’t believable when he tried to act like he was. So several instances of his unconvincing smoking had to be removed.
The ratings board was cracking down on violence in horror movies around this time, but Kiersch never intended his film to be a bloodbath. He didn’t want to show blades slicing or penetrating flesh. He wanted to be more suggestive. And yet, the financial group Angeles Entertainment wanted to withdraw from the film at one point because they felt it was too gory. Thankfully, they were convinced to stay involved. And according to Kiersch’s audio commentary, they ended up taking New World Pictures to court because they didn’t receive profits they were owed.
Children of the Corn wasn’t quite on the level of the Stephen King adaptations that had come before. Several of those had been rather prestigious, and made by legends. Brian De Palma directed Carrie. Stanley Kubrick directed The Shining. George A. Romero directed Creepshow. John Carpenter directed Christine. Salem’s Lot was a TV mini-series from Tobe Hooper. David Cronenberg directed The Dead Zone. With Cujo, Lewis Teague directed Dee Wallace through a performance that King felt was Oscar worthy. And then you have this movie. A low budget flick from a first-time director who said he saw his film as a tribute to the B-movies of past decades. It wasn’t very well received by critics. But it was successful at the box office, pulling in just over fourteen-point-five million dollars.
And just because it was a tribute to B-movies doesn’t mean the filmmakers didn’t take the subject matter seriously. Goldsmith said that when he was writing the script, he saw it as a metaphor for situations in the Middle East. Speaking with Fangoria magazine, Borchers said he wanted to make this movie because “It provided the chance to make a statement that I really believed in. … The idea that an entire group of individuals at a certain location believe in a religion. Why? Because everyone else does. I was real interested in examining the idea of dogma, the idea of blind faith without questioning, and the consequences of all this.”
For his part, Stephen King wasn’t impressed with how the film turned out. When asked what he thought of it during a TV interview, he said, “I think it’s the work of people who are going to do better.” Speaking on the Netflix and Kill podcast, Kiersch revealed that he has still to this day never met King. But he was able to read a letter that King sent to the studio after he watched the movie, and he made it clear “he didn’t believe it was any good. He didn’t like the portrayal of his characters, his protagonists. Because it didn’t deal with the same messages he had written about. Adults and their problems with relationships. The stress of post-war Vietnam issues. Our film dealt a lot with dogma and following a particular voice. And should the audience believe what they hear? Should they not learn to question and challenge authority? That’s what the film’s really all about. So different points of view from the very beginning caused him to not like things.”
Maybe if King knew what was ahead, he would have gone easier on the first Children of the Corn. If he knew the movie was going to be the most sequelized and rebooted adaptation of his work. As of right now, there are eleven Children of the Corn feature films in existence, and King believes most of them have been awful. He stopped paying attention to the franchise eventually, but was always hoping there would be a Leprechaun crossover. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been. Children of the Corn does have a solid fanbase, which seems to be growing in the age of ‘80s video store nostalgia. Even the overall franchise has its fans. But negative reactions to many of the sequels appear to have tarnished the reputation of the original film as well. Since some of the follow-ups were bad, the first is sometimes written off as a bad film. But it’s worth checking out and judging on its own merits.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: The basic concept of Children of the Corn is already creepy as hell. The idea of a town’s children murdering their parents in cold blood, just because they’ve been brainwashed into it by a leader who is also a child. The film Kiersch made out of that idea has a very effectively unnerving atmosphere that’s enhanced by the musical score composed by Jonathan Elias. The young actors that were hired to play the cult members are also incredibly disturbing. These kids are completely convincing in their roles as brainwashed murderers… and Franklin and Gains are unforgettable as Isaac and Malachai. If handled wrong and poorly cast, the sight of a bunch of kids trying to look dangerous could be unintentionally funny. It didn’t work in some of the sequels, but Kiersch and his cast got it just right in this one.
Burt and Vicky are kind of bland characters, but at least they’re an improvement over the characters in the source material. King wrote them as very unpleasant people – and the 2009 version of Children of the Corn brought them to the screen the way he had written them. Viewers didn’t react well to that, proving that bland was better in this case. Vicky is soon reduced to little more than a damsel in distress, but it does give Burt the opportunity to become a better character. He is clearly not putting as much thought or effort in their relationship as Vicky is. He has commitment issues. But when Vicky is captured by the cult, he’s willing to take on an army of killer kids to save her.
The best characters in the movie are Job and Sarah, who aid Burt in his effort to get Vicky back and take down the cult. They bring an appreciated lightness to some scenes, and they’re good sidekicks for Burt to have. And while they’re not in the short story, Sarah does seem like a King character. She has psychic ability and shares the visions she has through crayon drawings. Definitely something you would find in a King story. As maligned as it is, this movie actually improves on the source material in multiple ways. Kiersch and Goldsmith made the characters more interesting and tolerable, while doing a great expansion of the concepts and scenes in the short story. Of course, King would disagree.
BEST SCENE(S): Children of the Corn gets started with one of the most memorable and chilling scenes to come out of ‘80s horror. Job is just hanging out with his dad in the local cafe. Enjoying a Sunday morning milkshake. Then a group of teenagers, including Malachai, pull out weapons and kill every adult in the place. Including Job’s father. While all of this is going on, Isaac is watching the action through the front window. Approving.
That opening scene may be the highlight of the whole movie, but there are more deeply troubling scenes to come. Like when Diehl realizes the kids are coming to attack him at his auto shop and have already killed his dog. One of the most often quoted scenes comes when Malachai tries to draw Burt out by walking down the street while holding Vicky captive. His cries of “Outlander!” have been echoed by fans of the movie many times over the decades. Another line that gets quoted by fans is “He wants you too, Malachai” – spoken by Isaac after his right hand man has betrayed him and offered him up to He Who Walks Behind the Rows.
At the encouragement of Linda Hamilton, Courtney Gains got quite rough with her during the “Outlander” scene. According to Gains, she was left with broken capillaries in her cheeks because he grabbed her face so hard. That wasn’t the only time things got real in a scene involving Vicky. One of the best jump scares is at the end of a sequence where Vicky is dreaming about Joseph’s corpse, which is lying on the road, covered with a blanket. She approaches the body, kneels down beside it. Then the dead, bloody kid tosses the blanket back and reaches out like he’s going to strangle her. Part of why this works so well is because not even Hamilton was expecting it to happen. She didn’t know the actor was beneath the blanket, she thought she was kneeling beside a mannequin.
PARTING SHOT: Rolling Stone magazine may have given Children of the Corn the best review it ever received. In 2019, they ranked the film at number seven on their list of the top thirty Stephen King movies, sandwiched between The Shawshank Redemption and Christine. The write-up called it “a lean, brutally tense slasher film” that features “deft weaponizing of American cultural tensions”. That’s giving the film more credit than most critics had before, and it deserves more credit.
It’s not as prestigious as the earlier King adaptations. It’s a low budget B-movie about killer kids. But it’s good, it’s creepy, and it sticks with you. Other filmmakers have tried to replicate what Kiersch and his cast and crew did with this movie, and they haven’t quite managed to reach the same level. Although some of the Children of the Corn sequels are worth checking out, too. But if it’s possible to make a better Children of the Corn movie than this one, we haven’t seen it yet.
Also for the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series, I recommended S. Craig Zahler's horror western Bone Tomahawk:
Bone Tomahawk script:
INTRO: The horror western Bone Tomahawk feels like it’s the nightmare of someone who watched Tombstone and Cannibal Holocaust back-to-back while running a fever. Four doomed men, including the always amazing Kurt Russell, ride out on a rescue mission in the Old West. In a forbidden desert valley, they find that the villains they’re facing are a vicious tribe of cannibals. Guts are spilled. Flesh is consumed. It’s a jarring combination of genres. And also one that works incredibly well… which is why Bone Tomahawk happens to be the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: This movie marks the feature directorial debut of S. Craig Zahler, a writer who had sold over twenty screenplays before he decided to bring one of his scripts to the screen himself. He got into directing out of frustration: while he was paying his bills by selling scripts, only one of them had been turned into a movie. The 2011 horror film Asylum Blackout. He had written an adaptation of the anime series Robotech for Warner Brothers and Tobey Maguire. It didn’t go into production. Steven Spielberg and Park Chan-wook had both been interested in his western script The Brigands of Rattleborge. Neither of them actually made the movie. All of this writing with no movies to show for it wasn’t artistically satisfying. At least when Zahler wrote a novel he could get it published. He’s also a musician, and when he made music he could get an album released. He wanted that sort of payoff for his screenwriting endeavors. So he had to make it happen himself.
Zahler’s manager Dallas Sonnier suggested that he should make an adaptation of his novel Wraiths of the Broken Land. A shocking, violent western story about an outlaw gang seeking to rescue two sisters that have been forced into prostitution. Zahler wanted to make his movie on a lower budget, so Wraiths of the Broken Land wasn’t an option. The scope of the story was too big. But if Sonnier wanted a shocking, violent rescue mission western, he would deliver one. Just on a smaller scale. That’s when he started writing Bone Tomahawk.
Set in the 1890s, the story begins with a pair of criminals killing a group of sleeping men and stealing their belongings. But that’s not what gets these two in trouble. Problems arise for Buddy and Purvis when they decide to cut through a strange burial ground decorated with skeletal remains. While Buddy is attacked and eviscerated, Purvis runs for his life… and ends up in the small desert town of Bright Hope. It’s clear to Sheriff Franklin Hunt and Deputy Chicory that Purvis is bad news. He becomes violent when they try to talk to him, so Hunt shoots him in the leg. They take him to the jail, and since the local doctor is drunk they have to call on the doctor’s assistant Samantha O’Dwyer to get the bullet out of Purvis’s leg. Unfortunately, Purvis has been followed to Bright Hope by a tribe of brutal cannibals that still want to get revenge for him desecrating their burial ground. These cannibals kill a stable boy and abduct Purvis, Samantha, and Deputy Nick from the jail.
Hunt forms a rescue party that includes the somewhat dimwitted Chicory. Samantha’s husband Arthur, who is determined to trek through the desert to save his wife even though he’s nursing a broken leg. And the exceptionally arrogant John Brooder, a man who has killed over one hundred Native Americans in his life. Before these men set out to save Samantha and Deputy Nick – and sure, Purvis too, if they can – a Native American Professor warns them about who they’ll be up against. The Professor tells them the abductors are a cave-dwelling tribe of Indigenous people with no name and no language. He describes them as Troglodytes. A spoiled bloodline of inbred barbarians that live on forbidden territory, in a place called the Valley of the Starving Men.
The Professor considers this rescue mission to be a suicide mission, and has no intention of taking part in it. So Hunt, Chicory, Brooder, and Arthur O’Dwyer ride out on their own. Aiming to make the five day journey to the Valley of the Starving Men in three days. This journey does not go smoothly. Arthur’s injured leg is a serious issue. There are morally ambiguous encounters with other travelers. And they lose their horses, forcing them to finish the journey on foot. Which makes things even tougher for Arthur. But they do reach the valley. And find that the cave dwelling tribe is just as terrible and vicious as the Professor described. They attack with stunning speed and ferocity… and even commit one murder in a way that would have fit right in if it were shown in Cannibal Holocaust.
Things get quite gruesome and violent in Bone Tomahawk. Zahler was able to assemble an amazing cast to play the characters who witness and experience the violence. The movie appeals to genre fans right away by casting Sid Haig and David Arquette as Buddy and Purvis. When Sid Haig is the first person to be violenty killed off, you know this is serious business. The four men on the rescue mission are played by Kurt Russell, Richard Jenkins, Patrick Wilson, and Matthew Fox. Samantha is played by Lili Simmons, a relative newcomer who proved quite capable of holding her own on screen with her more established co-stars. Evan Jonigkeit’s Deputy Nick is at the center of one of the most shocking and memorable moments in the movie. And along the way we get quick appearances by the likes of Zahn McClarnon, Kathryn Morris, Sean Young, Fred Melamed, Maestro Harrell, James Tolken, Michael Paré, and The Lost Boys’ own Jamison Newlander.
BACKGROUND: Bone Tomahawk was always destined to have an impressive cast. When Zahler and Sonnier first sent the script out, it ended up in the hands of Peter Sarsgaard – who became the first actor to sign on. He was going to play Arthur O’Dwyer. Sarsgaard and Kurt Russell have the same agent, so the script was passed over to Russell next. And he signed on. Zahler had written the Chicory character specifically for Richard Jenkins, with his voice in mind. Jenkins actually changed his voice for the movie, speaking Chicory’s lines in a way Zahler hadn’t imagined… but it was a welcome change. And Zahler was glad to have Jenkins playing the character that was always intended for him. Timothy Olyphant was cast as John Brooder early in the process, and Jennifer Carpenter was cast as Samantha.
Sarsgaard, Olyphant, and Carpenter ended up having to drop out of the project due to scheduling issues because it took two years to get the movie funded. Sonnier was dedicated to helping Zahler bring the script to the screen in exactly the way it had been written, and told potential financiers that creative notes wouldn’t be accepted. But they received notes anyway. They were told that it wouldn’t be possible to shoot the script without a sixty day filming schedule and a ten million dollar budget. Some companies said they would contribute to the budget if Zahler committed to a ninety minute running time and gave them creative control. He wasn’t interested in compromising his vision for anybody. So Sonnier was eventually able to make a deal with a company called The Fyzz Facility: if Sonnier provided half of the budget out of his own pocket, Fyzz would provide the other half. And that’s how Bone Tomahawk ended up having a budget of one-point-eight million dollars.
With Sarsgaard, Olyphant, and Carpenter no longer available, but Russell and Jenkins still in firmly in place, Zahler brought in Wilson, Fox, and Simmons. Various filming locations had been considered over the years it took to find funding. New Mexico, Utah, Romania. But the movie ended up being shot in the Santa Monica Mountains – with a filming schedule of just twenty-one days. Zahler had to prove a lot of people wrong along the way. Financiers had warned him that even if he cut down the script, he wouldn’t be able to make the movie without a budget three or four times larger than the one he had. Crew members were telling him it wouldn’t be possible to shoot the entire script in twenty-one days. He was advised to cut pages before they started filming. But he decided he wasn’t going to cut pages until it was clear they were falling behind schedule. And they didn’t fall behind. The entire script was filmed, and he didn’t have to follow anyone’s guidelines when cutting the footage together. He didn’t have to make a ninety minute movie. The final cut of Bone Tomahawk reflects his vision for the film. All one hundred and thirty-two minutes of it.
It’s a good thing Bone Tomahawk didn’t go over schedule, because Kurt Russell had a very small window of opportunity to work on it. Filming on this movie wrapped on a Saturday, and the following Monday he started rehearsals for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. That’s why his characters in Bone Tomahawk and The Hateful Eight have a similar look: Russell was already growing out his Hateful Eight hair and mustache when he was working on this movie. If he didn’t need the hair for Tarantino’s movie, he said he would have cut it to play Sheriff Hunt.
It would have been understandable if someone of Russell’s standing had given up on this project and walked away from it during the struggle to find funding. But he stuck with it. He had faith in Zahler’s ability to direct a film because he had worked as a cinematographer before. He knew he was going to have a strong cast around him. And he was drawn to Zahler’s writing. He liked the script and the structure of it. The unique blending of genres… although neither he nor Zahler consider Bone Tomahawk to be a horror movie. Zahler considers the film to be a western through and through, with a dash of lost world fiction. A subgenre that deals with the discovery of unknown civilizations. He compared the story to the H. Rider Haggard novel King Solomon’s Mines. Which is about adventurer Allan Quatermain discovering a hidden civilization while leading a search and rescue party across Africa. He wanted to take a set-up like that and build his own western mythology within it. Speaking with Collider, Russell said that he stuck with Bone Tomahawk because, “I thought that it was an opportunity to do a movie that was in a new category. It’s its own category, I wouldn’t know what to call it. It’s not just a straight western. I’ve heard it referred to as a horror western, it’s not that. That’s kind of a bad call on it, I think. I think it’s a graphic western, I think that’s fair. But we were kidding about it, the fact that if you went to a video store back in the day they had all these different movies and all these different sections. There’d be a section with a question mark and an exclamation point and under that would be one movie, Bone Tomahawk.”
Well, for the purposes of this video we’ll continue to call Bone Tomahawk a horror western instead of a question mark and exclamation point movie. And there are certain moments in this film that are so intense, viewers might not be able to endure them if they’re not already an established horror fan.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Aside from the quick attacks on Sid Haig’s character and the stable boy early on, this movie does take its time getting to the horror. It might take too much time for some viewers. And the one hundred and thirty-two minute running time does feel a bit self-indulgent on Zahler’s part. He is not a filmmaker who believes that every scene needs to drive the plot forward. He’ll spend scenes on establishing the world the film takes place in. Learning more about characters. Or he’ll just include a scene to give the audience a laugh. There are plenty of scenes in Bone Tomahawk that don’t feel strictly necessary. But if you connect with the characters in the way Zahler is hoping you will, you wouldn’t want to lose any of the extra moments. You’ll want to spend as much time with these guys as possible.
Zahler did an excellent job writing the characters who go on the rescue mission and making them a likeable bunch. And each of the actors delivered a great performance while bringing them to life. We’re following a group of men on a dangerous mission as they spend days traveling through the desert, so things are not fun or comfortable for them. And yet Zahler and his cast still find ways to bring a lot of humor into the film. Whether it’s through scenes of Hunt and Chicory discussing things like how to read in the bathtub without getting your book wet. Or the vain and arrogant Brooder claiming to be the most intelligent person in their group because “Smart men don’t get married.”
After we’ve followed the characters on a long, difficult journey, they reach the Valley of the Starving Men. That’s when the horror kicks in. And it’s worth the wait. The troglodytes are terrifying, and do awful things to people we have come to care about. If you get restless during the traveling stretch of the film, just hold on. The movie is still able to dedicate nearly forty minutes to the characters dealing with the troglodytes. Trying to survive. And trying to wipe out the tribe so no one else will ever fall victim to them again.
BEST SCENE(S): Bone Tomahawk has moments of action and humor that are likely to stick with viewers after they watch it. But there’s one scene that’s more likely to get lodged in your brain than any other. The death of Deputy Nick, which Samantha, Hunt, and Chicory are forced to witness while being held captive by the troglodytes. This is the moment that’s reminiscent of Cannibal Holocaust. A movie that was brought up to Zahler multiple times when he was doing press interviews for his film. While he wishes Cannibal Holocaust didn’t have its moments of real animal deaths, he does think it’s an effective film overall. And admitted that it was an influence on Bone Tomahawk, particularly in the way it showed the violence. Speaking with DailyDead.com, Zahler said his movie has “a very dry presentation of the violence in the same way as Cannibal Holocaust. The long shots of the horrible stuff happening to people, you just see it unfold. When you go in close, those aren’t perspectives anybody ever has on violence unless it’s happening to them firsthand. In which case they haven’t survived to watch the movie. So I kept the style consistent with the hideous violence as with Chicory and Sheriff Hunt talking about corn chowder.”
The death of Deputy Nick is supposed to be shocking and appalling – but Zahler also uses this moment to show how strong Sheriff Hunt is. Instead of freaking out, Hunt talks Nick through this horrendous moment. Assures him he will be avenged. So even while the viewer is cringing at the gore, Zahler is still taking the opportunity to do character work.
PARTING SHOT: Kurt Russell has starred in some awesome cult films and genre movies: Used Cars, Escape from New York, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, Death Proof. Bone Tomahawk is a movie that’s worthy of being listed up there alongside the greats. Like several of those movies, it wasn’t a box office success. It didn’t even make five hundred thousand dollars during its small theatrical run. But it found its audience on home video, where it earned over four million dollars from DVD and Blu-ray sales. Now it stands as another cult classic on Russell’s filmography – and like its predecessors, it deserves to have a following that will grow with each passing year.
If you like westerns, Bone Tomahawk is a great one. If you like horror, Zahler welcomes you to the Valley of the Starving Men. And if you like the idea of the horror and western genres being blended together, sitting through Bone Tomahawk is a blissful way to spend two hours.
And for the non-horror Revisited series, I took a look back at David Fincher's 1999 film Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk:
Fight Club script:
INTRO: In 1999, there were two major film releases that spoke to the disillusioned. Those who dreamed of breaking free of their soul-crushing jobs and unfulfilling personal lives. One was the movie that won Best Picture that year, American Beauty. Another was a darker, more violent take on the concept. A movie that just kind of came and went at the domestic box office. But it quickly found its audience. It has gone on to earn such a prominent place in pop culture, it’s surprising to look back and realize it wasn’t a huge deal when it first came out. The movie is Fight Club, and it’s time for it to be Revisited.
SET-UP: Fight Club came from the mind of Chuck Palahniuk, who worked as a diesel mechanic during the day and wrote in his spare time. He couldn’t get anyone to publish the first novel he had written, Invisible Monsters, but he didn’t let that deter him from his writing. While on a camping trip, he asked some other campers to turn their music down. A request that escalated into a fist fight. When he returned to work with his face busted up, he was amused to find that his co-workers did not address his injuries at all. He realized that if you looked bad enough, people wouldn’t want to know about your private life. They don’t want to know the bad things about you. That realization inspired Fight Club, which started as a short story. The short story ended up being one chapter in the novel Palahniuk then built around it.
As he wrote, he practiced a technique called dangerous writing, which encourages the writer to work their own personal experiences into their stories. Many of the things he wrote into Fight Club came from his own life or from the people around him. One character was named after a co-worker who had been fired for sexual harassment. Another was named after a girl who bullied his sister in school. The ideas of projectionists splicing porn into family films, people erasing VHS tapes rented out by local video stores, and faking illnesses to attend support groups – those were all things he heard about from friends. Palahniuk also drew inspiration from interviews he conducted with young men who worked white collar jobs. He found that many of them had father abandonment issues and resented the way advertising dictated their lifestyles. This all went into the book.
The story of Fight Club centers on an unnamed Narrator. He makes his way through a hollow existence, working as a recall coordinator for a major car company so he can afford the latest lifestyle trends and build his life the way advertising tells him he should. He also suffers from insomnia… which he finds he can treat by attending support groups for people with serious diseases he doesn’t have. He can cry his eyes out with these sick people, then sleep like a baby. One day, he meets a soap salesman named Tyler Durden. Tyler works as a projectionist and splices frames of porn into family films. He also works as a waiter and taints the food he feeds to wealthy patrons. And in his free time, he makes soap out of human fat removed from bodies in liposuction procedures. When the Narrator’s apartment is wiped out in a mysterious explosion, he needs a place to stay. So he calls Tyler and asks to move in with him in his crumbling, isolated home. Tyler wants a favor in exchange: he wants his new friend to hit him as hard as he can. That one hit leads to fist fights Tyler and the Narrator find more exhilarating than anything else in their lives. And when others witness these fights, they want to join in. The fight club of the title is born. The club grows bigger and bigger as the story goes on – and along the way, Tyler comes up with something called Project Mayhem. He basically builds his own army that wreaks havoc around the city. Vandalizing property. Picking fights with strangers. Erasing VHS tapes. Tyler will eventually take things so far with Project Mayhem, the Narrator begins to see this as something dangerous that needs to be stopped. During his attempt to bring this chaos to an end, he makes some shocking discoveries about himself.
In the midst of all this, there’s also a love story. While faking illnesses to attend support group meetings, the Narrator meets another faker. A woman named Marla Singer. He doesn’t like her at all at first. Her presence disrupts the meetings as far as he’s concerned. With another liar around, he can’t cry. And if he can’t cry, he can’t sleep. He’s appalled when Tyler strikes up a sexual relationship with Marla. But she’s around so much, he does start to grow somewhat fond of her. And when he realizes how dangerous Project Mayhem is, he steps up and tries to protect her from Tyler and his mindless followers. The soldiers he calls Space Monkeys.
Palahniuk saw Fight Club as a satire of the idea of the all-American tough guy, and of books like The Joy Luck Club and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Books that, as he put it, “presented a social model for women to be together.” Fight Club “presented a new social model for men to share their lives.” But he didn’t expect any publishers to go for it. To his surprise, VW Norton did decide to pick up Fight Club and offered him an advance of seven thousand dollars for it. Palahniuk’s manuscript then started making its way around Hollywood. Most executives who read it didn’t think it would work as a movie. It was too dark and strange, with a twist that would be difficult to pull off on screen. A reader at 20th Century Fox felt a movie based on the novel would be “exceedingly disturbing”, “volatile and dangerous”, and would “make audiences squirm”. But Fox 2000 Pictures executive Raymond Bongiovanni passionately believed that a Fight Club adaptation would work. He got President of Production Laura Ziskin interested in the property as well, and she attached producers Joshua Donen and Ross Grayson Bell, who felt the reasons the reader gave for why Fight Club shouldn’t be a movie were exactly why it should be made. Donen and Bell assembled some actors for a six hour read-through of the novel, and after listening to the recording Ziskin was thoroughly convinced that Fight Club could work on film. She purchased the rights to the novel for ten thousand dollars and gave the adaptation a green light.
Sadly, Bongiovanni passed away from a blood infection before he could see the Fight Club movie go into production. In his obituary, it was said his last wish was that Palahniuk’s novel would be brought to the screen. So Ziskin, Donen, and Bell made sure his last wish would come true. The finished film is dedicated to him.
The adaptation of Fight Club had Palahniuk’s full support, but he did not want to write the script himself. He felt that if he was too involved with the movie he would mess it up somehow. Seeing similarities between Palahniuk’s story and the 1960s classic The Graduate, Ziskin considered having The Graduate screenwriter Buck Henry write Fight Club – he had written about aimless, alienated modern young men before, so he could do it again thirty years later. But then a different scribe was found, one closer in age to Tyler and the Narrator: first-time screenwriter Jim Uhls, who had already read Palahniuk’s novel and fallen in love with it. With the script in progress, the search for a director began. The book was sent to Bryan Singer, but he never got around to reading it. David O. Russell received a draft of the script, but didn’t understand the story. Danny Boyle met with the producers and read the book, but chose to work on a different project. Peter Jackson was considered the top contender to direct, but he was too busy. So the focus turned to David Fincher. He was enthusiastic about the story, but hesitant to work with Fox again after his bad experience making Alien 3 for the studio a few years earlier. After meeting with Ziskin and studio head Bill Mechanic, he was convinced that this production would go more smoothly than the Alien movie had. He turned down the offer to direct 8MM so he could make Fight Club.
Fincher and Uhls spent a year working on the script together, with Fincher helping the writer guide the Narrator on a path to enlightenment that involves eliminating his parents, his god, and his teacher from his life. Interestingly, Fincher had given David S. Goyer that same path to enlightenment note when he was briefly attached to direct the first Blade movie. Blade and the Narrator take the same journey, in their own ways. Fincher received some valuable advice from Cameron Crowe on how to handle the Tyler character. Initially, Tyler had the answer for every question. Crowe suggested that he should be less direct. Instead of giving answers, he advises based on his own views and experiences. Once Uhls had done the heavy lifting on the adaptation, Fincher brought in his Seven collaborator Andrew Kevin Walker – who had also written 8mm – to polish the script. Walker didn’t do enough work to earn a screen credit, so Fincher found a different way to give him credit: three detectives in the film are named Andrew, Kevin, and Walker. The lead actors would also help shape the script with their input.
Russell Crowe was considered for the role of Tyler Durden, but Fox preferred Fincher’s Seven star Brad Pitt. The studio was also hoping the Narrator part would be played by a more popular star; Sean Penn and Matt Damon were mentioned as candidates. But Fincher wanted Edward Norton because he was impressed by his acting skills. And also thought he was the plainest actor in Hollywood. A supporting cast was then built around Pitt and Norton, with prominent Space Monkey roles going to Holt McCallany, Eion Bailey, Jared Leto, and – wearing a one hundred pound body suit with large breasts on it – singer Meat Loaf. The most difficult role to cast was Marla Singer. Fincher knew he had to find an actress with a specific screen presence, someone who could get across that Marla is hanging around Tyler and the Narrator by choice, not because she didn’t know any better. Winona Ryder, Renée Zellweger, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Anna Friel, Vanessa Angel, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Norton’s then-girlfriend Courtney Love were all potential Marlas. Fox offered the role to Reese Witherspoon and she turned it down, to Fincher’s relief. He felt she was too young. At one point, Fincher wanted to cast Janeane Garofalo, and there are conflicting reports as to why she didn’t end up in the movie. He said she objected to the sexual content, which includes a sex scene with Tyler and Marla that was shot with the same bullet time technique used on THE MATRIX. Garofalo says it was Norton who vetoed her because he didn’t think she could act well enough. Whatever the case, Fincher did end up casting an actress who has received many awards and nominations over the course of her career. Casting against type, he chose Helena Bonham Carter, who was known for her work in period films. Carter’s mother was appalled by the script and Carter herself felt the film could be abominable if it was in the wrong hands. But it seemed to be in the right hands, so she joined in.
Fincher was given an impressive one hundred and thirty-eight days to shoot the film, and managed to secure a budget of sixty-seven million. Getting some of that money was a struggle, though. Fox was initially hoping Fight Club would only cost twenty-three million to make. Fincher’s vision caused the budget to balloon, first to fifty million. New Regency came on board to handle half of the costs – and when the budget blew up to sixty-seven million, the company asked Fincher to bring that number down by five million. When Fincher refused, New Regency threatened to withdraw their financing completely. They were only convinced to stick with Fight Club once Bill Mechanic showed New Regency head Arnon Milchan three weeks of the footage Fincher had shot. Many of the people involved with the making of the film were shocked that they were being given so much money to make a movie that wouldn’t go over well with a large portion of the audience – but they believed in it, they knew there would be a receptive audience out there, and they had a blast making it. Even though some of them suffered painful injuries filming the fight and stunt scenes. And Carter got bronchitis from all the smoking she had to do.
REVIEW: There was worry among studio executives that Fight Club was going to turn out to be something sinister and seditious. The film does have a dark, oppressive atmosphere that’s enhanced by Fincher’s stylistic choices, as he and Jeff Cronenweth wanted this to look shadowy, dirty, and ugly. And it does have critical things to say about modern culture. Advertising, materialism, the fact that people can come to feel there’s no value in their everyday life. A viewer can relate to a lot of things that are said by the characters. There are certainly viewers who have taken the wrong lessons from the film. But you’re not supposed to follow Tyler Durden’s example. This was not meant to be a call to action. It’s not intended to inspire people to start their own fight clubs or come up with their own Project Mayhem plots. In the end, the Narrator realizes Tyler is out of control and needs to be stopped. The Narrator is not being empowered by his association with Tyler, he’s falling apart. Tyler is pushing him to self-destruct. The film rejects what he’s doing, points out that it’s wrong and dangerous. The further over the edge Tyler goes, the more the film shifts from being a character study to being an exciting thriller.
If you dig beneath the darkness and filth, the anger expressed by these characters who feel lost in life, you’ll also find that Fight Club is a very humorous movie. A lot of the humor might go over the heads of some viewers due to how dark it is, but Fincher did intend for this film to be funny. Given that the lead character is referred to as the Narrator, you might assume that the extensive narration was always part of the plan. But the first draft of Uhls’ script didn’t have narration, since that’s generally frowned upon in screenwriting circles. Fincher felt that the movie would come off as sad and pathetic without narration. With this material, maybe it could have even come off as sinister and seditious after all. So the director and writer worked to enhance the film’s level of humor through the narration and dialogue.
Uhls would go on to describe the film as a romantic comedy, and that element is definitely there. The trajectory of the relationship between the Narrator and Marla follows a traditional romantic comedy structure. At first they can’t stand each other, but they gradually start to warm up to each other. The Narrator accidentally messes things up with her, then he comes to realize how much she truly means to him. Their relationship really becomes the heart of the movie as it goes along, building up to a great final line and a final shot of the Narrator and Marla holding hands as the world crumbles around them. This is what ultimately matters the most. The answer isn’t violence and destruction. It’s love and finding a way to connect with other people. Without beating them to a pulp.
Fincher wouldn’t call the movie a love story, but he does consider it to be an apology. An apology for bad behavior.
Fight Club is one of the rare instances where an author feels that a film adaptation improved upon their initial work. Palahniuk has gone so far as to say that watching the movie made him feel sort of embarrassed of his book, because the filmmakers “streamlined the plot and made it so much more effective”. He shouldn’t be embarrassed, because his book is great in its own right and provided a strong foundation for the film to be built upon. Fincher brought his story to the screen with amazing style, and assembled the perfect cast to bring his characters to life. Pitt was so dedicated to his character, he even went to a dentist to have his front teeth chipped so they would look like they were broken in a fight. Fox paid for the dentistry work under the condition that Fincher would be sure to have Pitt take his shirt off in the movie.
LEGACY/NOW: Fight Club had an A-list cast and an excellent script. Fincher did an incredible job directing it. The Dust Brothers provided a great score. Looking at the film now, you might expect that it was an Oscar contender when it was released. But that’s not the case. The movie did make it to the Academy Awards ceremony, but it was nominated in just one category: Best Sound Effects Editing. And it lost to The Matrix. But at the time, the movie wasn’t seen as being very Oscars-friendly anyway. Some audience members stormed out of the premiere screening, shouting on the way out that the filmmakers were fascists. There were plenty of positive reviews, but also an onslaught of negative ones that called the film an assault on personal decency, grotesquely explicit, irresponsible, appalling, dumb and brutal. Roger Ebert called it cheerfully facist macho porn.
Executives at Fox weren’t too fond of the movie, either. It has been said that the studio’s then-owner Rupert Murdoch despised the project and wasn’t happy with Bill Mechanic for allowing it to go into production in the first place. They had to release the film, but didn’t know how to market it. Fincher hoped the film would have a clever, anti-commercial marketing campaign, but Fox ended up dropping twenty million dollars into a campaign that focused on the fights instead. They aired ads during UFC and WWE matches. Viewers were not drawn in by the promise of getting to see Brad Pitt beat people up. Fight Club only made thirty-seven million at the domestic box office. Thankfully, it pulled it almost sixty-four million internationally… but a total haul of one hundred million was not what Fox was looking for. The disappointing box office of this film led to Mechanic resigning a few months after its release.
In the UK, some of the violence had to be trimmed before Fight Club could earn an 18 certificate – meaning no one under the age of 18 could go see it. The cut moments were added back in for a later home video release. Some demanded even harsher treatment of the film, saying it contained dangerous information and would encourage anti-social behavior. The ratings board wisely defended it, saying the film was clearly critical of its characters’ behavior and a parody of the amateur fascism on display in it. The said the “central theme of male machismo and the anti-social behavior that flows from it is emphatically rejected” in the end.
Norton could understand why some viewers, especially older ones, had such a negative reaction to the film. He could see why they wouldn’t be able to understand what was wrong with the characters. He told Total Film, “I don’t think they related to the ambivalence of our generation. We have grown up with so much broader a sense of global dynamics, of the impending catastrophes of the environment and the economy and world politics and nuclear war – all mainlined into us at a speed that they can’t comprehend. That feeling of being overwhelmed at a very young age, being overwhelmed at the prospect of trying to engage in adult life, just didn’t resonate for them the way it does for us. At its core, Fight Club springs out of a feeling of being overwhelmed and alienated, cut off from anything that feels like an authentic sense of being alive. If you choose to fully explore what are the roots of those negative feelings, on the way to maybe suggesting that there’s a way out of that, you’re going to lose a lot of people.”
Fight Club found some of its appreciative audience while it was in theatres, but really gained popularity once it reached home video. It helped that Fincher was able to oversee the DVD release, which was packed with special features. His marketing suggestions had been disregarded when the movie was released, but the DVD packaging was all his. Years later, Fincher oversaw the Blu-ray release as well. The DVD won awards for Best DVD release of the year, best commentary, and best special features. Entertainment Weekly listed it among the fifty essential DVDs that should be in a cinephile’s collection. Within the first ten years of Fight Club being on home video, over six million copies were sold, making it one of the best-selling films in Fox history. VHS and DVD rentals added more than fifty-five million dollars to the film’s haul and finally made it profitable for the studio.
As its cult following grew, negative responses in the press were drowned out by the amount of praise the movie was receiving. The Online Film Critics Society named it as one of the ten best films of 1999. The New York Times called Fight Club “the defining cult movie of our time.” Empire magazine has listed it in the top ten of the greatest movies ever made on multiple occasions, and its readers chose Tyler Durden as one of the best movie characters. IMDb also ranked the film in their top ten list of the greatest movies ever made. Men’s Journal called Fight Club one of the fifty Best Guy Movies, while Total Film called it The Greatest Film of Our Lifetime. Premiere ranked Tyler’s line “The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club” as one of the greatest lines of all time. There’s no doubt that it’s one of the most popular and most often quoted. Martin Scorsese passed on the word that Leonardo DiCaprio told him the younger actors in Hollywood considered Fight Club to be the Citizen Kane of their generation.
Fight Club became so popular, there was even a video game based on the movie, released five years after the film. That didn’t go over very well. And yes, there have been sequels, but not on film or even in novel form. Chuck Palahniuk wrote Fight Club 2 and Fight Club 3 as comic books.
The world has changed a lot since 1999, so there are elements of the film that haven’t aged particularly well. Things were already shifting when the movie was being made. It has been said that Fox delayed the release a few months after the shootings at Columbine High School. There’s a scene in which the Narrator threatens his boss with the idea that someone could walk into the office with a rifle. This scene got laughs in a test screening before the massacre at Columbine. At a screening after the massacre, it didn’t get laughs anymore. And now incidents like the one the Narrator talks about happen with shocking frequency. The final shot of the film, with skyscrapers crumbling, was also played with humor at the time. It wouldn’t be now. It’s also difficult to watch the scene where Tyler talks about his generation having no great war and no great depression to endure without thinking, “Just wait a few more years.” War and recession were right around the corner.
But even though some things about the film are dated, Fight Club is still relevant to this day. People are still feeling overwhelmed by modern life and adulthood. Still feeling like their jobs are destroying their souls. Still being abandoned by parents and struggling to connect with each other. We’ve been through rough times since this movie was released, but the frustration and anger felt by the characters remains relatable.
And Fight Club is still in the news decades later. The movie didn’t receive a streaming release in China until 2022, and when it did there were several minutes missing. And it had a whole different ending. Instead of showing the Narrator and Marla holding hands while the buildings fall, it fades to black before Marla enters the room and finishes the story with text on the screen. This new ending made the police the heroes of the story, saying they were able to thwart Project Mayhem before the explosions go off. And it says Tyler was sent to a mental institution, where he stayed for thirteen years. This brought the ending of the film closer to how Palahniuk’s novel wraps up, but fans were not pleased to see the movie altered in this way. Complaints led to the missing minutes and original ending being restored for the streaming version of the film in China.
So after all this time, people are still breaking the rules and talking about fight club.
More video scripts have been written, so another batch of videos will be shared here on Life Between Frames eventually. In the meantime, keep an eye on JoBlo Horror Originals and JoBlo Originals!
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar