The 2012 Danny DeVito horror movie shown once and never again: “An 89 minute edge-of-your-seater”
In a career that dates back over 50 years, Danny DeVito has never starred in a horror movie. He’s made one, though, not that anybody noticed, since it was screened once and then swept under the rug.
The diminutive actor and filmmaker has been involved with a few horror-adjacent movies, from Tim Burton’s Batman Returns and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice to Disney’s Haunted Mansion and the dark undertones of Death to Smoochy, but never a feature-length exercise in full-blown terror.
From the outside looking in, it would appear that DeVito drew a line under his directorial career after the aforementioned Robin Williams and Edward Norton-led crime caper and the Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore-fronted picture took a pasting from critics and tanked at the box office, but that’s not the case.
Technically, the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia stalwart hasn’t helmed a film that’s been made available to anything resembling a wide audience since 2003, but almost a decade later, he was back behind the camera to make his maiden voyage into what had been completely uncharted waters.
In 2012, he quietly wrapped production on St Sebastian, a post-apocalyptic story starring William Fichtner, Constance Zimmer, and Lance Reddick, with the plot revolving around an injured police officer, a murderer, and a nurse, all of whom are trapped in an abandoned hospital as a war rages outside.
Trapped inside the labyrinthine building, the three protagonists soon discover the real reason why they’ve been brought together. What was that reason? Fuck knows, to be honest, because DeVito took the film to the Cannes Film Festival in the hopes of finding a buyer for the distribution rights, and he didn’t get one.
“I was truly excited about getting behind the camera on this one,” he said at the time, relaying that he’d “enjoyed the challenge of making an 89-minute edge-of-your-seater.” He might have had fun shooting it, but that was as far as his involvement went, with St Sebastian failing to find anyone willing to pick it up.
As a result, it simply vanished into the ether. It’s been almost a decade and a half, and at no point has DeVito’s first horror flick, and the last feature he’s directed, come anywhere close to being released. It’s out there somewhere, but nobody seems to know where, and nobody seems interested in ending its purgatory, either.
That’s enough to make you think it might be an awful piece of work, but the novelty value of a Danny DeVito-directed post-apocalyptic horror would also make you think that there should have been at least one distributor or production company willing to give it a shot. If that hasn’t happened by now, though, it probably never will.
