Christopher Nolan is up for a horror film if he can find the right script

Jordan Hoffman
·3 min read
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When Christopher Nolan’s idol, Stanley Kubrick, first reached out to Arthur C. Clarke, he asked if he’d like to try and make “the proverbial ‘really good’ science fiction film” which, at that point, Kubrick did not believe existed. (Clarke was more forgiving, and tormented Kubrick with his recommendations throughout the research period of their collaboration.) The point is that Kubrick would only commit to the genre if they nailed the script first. 

While Nolan, I’m sure, finds merit in an entire catalog of horror movies, he echoed the late master a bit when he told an audience at a recent BFI event that he’s interested in giving the horror genre a try, so long as the idea is good enough.

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The writer-director of “Oppenheimer,” which is a front-runner for many of its 13 Oscar nominations this year, including Best Picture, said that the Cillian Murphy-led portrait of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer “has elements of horror in it, definitely, as I think is appropriate to the subject matter.”

He continued, “I think horror films are very interesting because they depend on very cinematic devices, it really is about a visceral response to things and so, at some point, I’d love to make a horror film. But I think a really good horror film requires a really exceptional idea. And those are few and far between. So I haven’t found a story that lends itself to that.”

While Nolan’s films, especially recently, all have a similar texture in their use of editing, musical elements, and jigsaw puzzle-like plotting, he has certainly made more than one type of movie. While “Memento,” “Inception,” “Interstellar,” and “Tenet” can all be called mind-scrambling sci-fi, “The Dark Knight” could be classified as a police thriller with a guy dressed as a bat. “The Prestige” has more gothic elements than the rest of his work and “Dunkirk” can safely be called a war drama (with a little bit of time-shifting complexity, sure).

He continued, “I think it’s a very interesting genre from a cinematic point of view. It’s also one of the few genres where the studios make a lot of these films, and they are films that have a lot of bleakness, and a lot of abstraction. They have a lot of the qualities that Hollywood is generally very resistant to putting in films, but that’s a genre where it’s allowable.”

He’s got a point there. Art house cinema is certainly free to play around with “vibes” but something for the mainstream is usually couched in “and then there is some kind of demon and a fight at the end.” Even real junk, like last year’s “Insidious: The Red Door” had a few sequences in there that got pretty creative. Funnily enough, some directors with great aspirations complain that they can only get financing if they cough up a horror script. (“Midsommar”’s Ari Aster has told this tale a few times.) Here’s Nolan, maybe the last filmmaker who can get any budget he wants with a snap of his finger, saying he’d consider going the other way.

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