The bizarre horror movie Quentin Tarantino showed to Brad Pitt during ‘Inglourious Basterds’
As a devoted cinephile, Quentin Tarantino both pays tribute to his favourite movies within his work and actively encourages his collaborators to see the films that hadn’t been on their radar, with Brad Pitt being a beneficiary when it came to outlandish horror.
The director and star collaborated for the first time on Inglourious Basterds, which, beyond drawing its title from 1978’s The Inglorious Bastards, took its cues from several war epics that Tarantino sought to emulate. Hangmen Also Die!, O.S.S., and Operation Amsterdam were named as touchstones, although the filmmaker also incorporated elements of the Western and espionage genres into the end result.
There’s plenty of brutal on-screen violence in Inglourious Basterds, but nothing that even remotely resembles a deranged horror with zombies and sharks. And yet, Tarantino still found the need to share his love of Lucio Fulci’s Zombi, a controversial title that was banned in numerous countries.
As part of his commitment to realism – or the lack of a decent budget – Fulci decided the best way to accomplish the shot of a zombie stalking its human prey in shark-infested waters was to place all three of those elements together in the same scene for real and simply hope for the best.
Hardly required viewing for Pitt to get into the mindset of Aldo Raine, but as co-star and close friend of Tarantino Eli Roth told The Daily Beast, the fact the A-list superstar had never even heard of the film before – much less seen it – was a glaring omission from his knowledge of the medium that had to be rectified immediately.
Recalling a discussion between the two on the Inglourious Basterds set over the inherent dangers of having a stunt performer dressed as a zombie being attacked by a real shark while another actor hides behind coral and remains in character, it just so happened that Tarantino had his own copy to hand he could present to Pitt.
“The guy in the zombie makeup was the shark’s trainer, and they must have drugged the hell out of this shark because it’s actually a shark attacking a zombie,” Roth explained. “During the shooting of Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino and I described the scene to Brad Pitt and he had never seen it, and Quentin got his 35mm print of it and showed him Zombie vs. Shark“.
Even the title is confusing, with Fulci’s feature being titled Zombi 2, despite the fact there was no first instalment. Instead, George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead had been released in his native Italy as Zombi, so the numerical suffix was added to make it clear it wasn’t a direct follow-up to the genre-defining American production before Zombi/Zombi 2 was then renamed Zombie vs. Shark in international markets.
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