The childhood movie that made Quentin Tarantino fall in love with cinema: “This is the best movie ever”
Can you remember the first movie you were ever obsessed with? For me, a child of the early 2000s, I remember constantly rewatching The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, falling in love with the magical world presented in front of me that subsequently led me to get in my parent’s wardrobe and hope I’d be transported to a world of endless Turkish Delight and frosty eyelashes. I’d never even had Turkish Delight. Still, the atmosphere of the film, which made me want siblings, as well as a faun as a guide, enveloped me, and perhaps sparked my love of cinema.
For Quentin Tarantino, a child of the 1960s, he had some rather different cinematic references, but ones that equally shaped his love of the medium. In some cases, the first film you fall in love with comes to shape your future tastes, but for Tarantino, his first obsession was a far cry from the movies he’d come to make – apart from its use of humour and blending of genres.
It wouldn’t be until the 1990s that Tarantino would find luck as a filmmaker, releasing his debut film, Reservoir Dogs, in 1992 to critical acclaim. It reshaped the landscape of ‘90s American cinema, helping to usher in a new era of successful indie filmmaking, alongside the likes of Steven Soderbergh and Richard Linklater, that would lead to the dubbing of the term ‘Indie Wood’.
Until then, he was a film-obsessive who worked at Video Archives in California, spending his days recommending movies to customers and taking tapes home to educate himself about the endless and exciting world of cinema. His first cinematic obsession, however, was a horror comedy from 1948, which he would watch over and over as he geared up to become one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of his generation.
“My favourite movie when I was a little, little, little, little boy was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” he revealed in an interview. “I loved monster movies and I loved comedies, and in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, yeah it’s very funny when Abbott and Costello are around. But when they’re gone, it’s actually played very straight.”
Tarantino even recalled just how obsessed he was with the film and how he felt himself learning the beginnings of his cinematic knowledge from rewatching it endless times. “I actually remember having the thought, ‘These are the best movies ever, when it’s supposed to be funny it’s really funny and when it’s supposed to be scary it’s really scary. I can’t believe they make movies like this – this is the best movie ever’. So even as a real young child, I was making genre distinctions. I was noticing that there were genres and I liked the genre and I liked that genre, and actually blending them was like a really sexy thing to me.”
This has clearly stuck with Tarantino throughout his career, which has seen him blend everything from crime, exploitation and blaxploitation, martial arts, western, and comedy cinema to create completely unique worlds of his own. Perhaps this would’ve never happened if he hadn’t had become so obsessed with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein when he was small.
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