The first time Quentin Tarantino was truly scared: “It terrified me, actually”
He may have dabbled in action, western, war movies and crime dramas, but director Quentin Tarantino is yet to make an outright horror film, much to the disappointment of cinephiles across the world. There can be little doubt that the man who brought us the rich and deeply stylistic filmography that he boasts surely has a scarier adventure into cinemaland up his sleeve. However, thus far, he has yet to sit down behind the camera and yell “action” on something grotesque, gruesome or ghost-ridden.
Sure, he’s incorporated aspects from the filmmaking of horror masters such as William Friedkin, Sam Raimi and Takashi Miike in gory thrillers From Dusk Till Dawn and Death Proof, but he’s never fully committed to a balls-to-the-wall horror spectacular.
Though he may be influenced by it, the director is yet to fully submerge himself into the horror genre but remains a vocal advocate, often voicing his favourites of the genre, with picks including Miike’s spectacular Audition, Mario Bava’s legendary Black Sabbath (which, yes, did inspire the band’s name) and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s magnificent Santa Sangre. Though his own films may be laden with blood and violence, Tarantino holds several fears that originated way back in his childhood in the 1960s.
Surprisingly, it was a horror-comedy movie which sparked fear too, with Tarantino being particularly scared of one moment in the 1948 Charles Barton film Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein in which Frankenstein’s monster bursts in on a comedic sketch to kill a nurse by throwing her out the window. The sudden moment of violence surprised and baffled the young filmmaker, with the scene making him aware of the “genre distinction in films,” as stated in his book Quentin Tarantino: The Man, The Myths and The Movies.
The first moment we are purposely scared by watching or experiencing culture is a unique experience. Firstly, there is wild and unadulterated terror, then as the realisation of reality lands, the comforting knowing that monsters on the screen can’t hurt you, which, then, turns to the slow-creeping dread that maybe we’re wrong. It’s a near-universal experience that is special for most people, but for a filmmaker, it is perhaps even more intrinsic. However, for Tarantino, his first true fear emanated from something altogether different.
This movie joined a second, very real, fear of Tarantino’s: the nightly news. “I remember exactly the first thing that frightened me,” Tarantino explained, “It terrified me, actually. Whenever it would come on, I would turn the TV off because I didn’t want to watch it. It wasn’t some horror movie. It wasn’t some dramatic thing,” as he told a Paleyfest NY panel during Eli Roth’s History of Horror.
Growing up in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and ’70s, Tarantino recalled watching the ‘Police News Watch’ that made locals aware of criminals who were ‘wanted’ in the city. “And then it would show some criminal. And then they would describe his horrible crimes [and say,] ‘He is out and about, so if you see him, do not try to apprehend him. Do not go by him. Call your local authorities,’” the filmmaker recalled.
Continuing, Tarantino explained: “For the rest of the night, that guy was bursting into my house and killing my entire family…Just before the Manson Family started happening, there was a serial killer running around Los Angeles killing people with a hammer…That guy was terrifying me”.
The filmmaker tapped into this fear with the release of his 2019 masterpiece Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Pacino, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, which looked into how LA changed during the time of the Manson murders. While some might have assumed that work was based more on his doe-eyed appreciate for the cultural touchstone, in fact it was his personal experiences that really brought the movie to life.
The dusty, romantic fairytale Once Upon a Time in Hollywood stands out in Quentin Tarantino’s filmography as his most complete feature film. It is a culmination of his directorial efforts that crafts a methodical analysis of contemporary America at the turn of the 1970s. Ditching the crutch of provocative violence and pulpy genre stories, the director digs into the archives of his obsessive mind to tell a definitive story of personal and cultural change.
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