‘From Dusk till Dawn’: Quentin Tarantino’s overlooked third universe
Cinematic universes have been all the rage since Marvel Studios first arrived on the scene in the summer of 2008, but Quentin Tarantino has been at it since the early 1990s. During his tenure as one of cinema’s most exciting auteurs, the filmmaker can be credited with crafting not just one, but two distinct realities that encompass his entire filmography.
The writer and director has broken it down into the ‘Realer Than Real World’ universe – which is where the likes of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood unfold – and the ‘Movie Universe’ of fictional films that his characters would go and see at their local multiplex. It may have been lumped into the latter, but From Dusk till Dawn ended up becoming a universe of its own, that’s even been folded into another filmmaker’s sprawling labyrinth of interconnectivity.
By Tarantino’s logic, his protagonists and antagonists alike would sit in a darkened auditorium to watch Seth and Richard Gecko get caught up in a showdown against hordes of the undead after a fateful stop at the Titty Twister on the road to Mexico following a heist. However, dig a little deeper, and it’s easy to see how it gradually evolved into its very own entity.
Danny Trejo is the only actor to appear in the original, sequel Texas Blood Money, and period-set prequel The Hangman’s Daughter, but despite his name changing from ‘Razor’ Charlie to ‘Razor’ Eddie and back again, the immortal nature of vampirism means it stands to reason he’s playing the same guy in all three.
Michael Parks plays Earl McGraw in From Dusk till Dawn, with the ranger going on to appear in both Kill Bill and Death Proof. This is where things start to get a little unwieldy, though, with the extended family of law enforcement officers weaving in and out of multiple timelines and universes at will.
Parks’ real-life son James joins him in Uma Thurman’s rampage of revenge and Kurt Russell’s chase thriller as Edgar, but he also swings by Robert Rodriguez’s Machete, which is seemingly unconnected to Tarantino’s oeuvre but is technically tethered to it by his mere involvement. The younger McGraw is also present and accounted for in Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, where Marley Shelton plays Dr Dakota Block.
The physician is the daughter of Earl and sister of Edgar, who reappears in the third season of From Dusk till Dawn: The Series as played by Nicky Whelan, in which Don Johnson replaces the late Parks patriarch as the grizzled McGraw. James Parks had originated his role in 1999’s Texas Blood Money long before that to make his first appearance in a Tarantino-connected flick, which served as the catalyst to embed the McGraw clan deeper into this particular corner of the multiple Tarantino-verses than any other.
Having spawned two direct-to-video successors where he was credited as an executive producer before going on to become absorbed into the continuity of not only Kill Bill and Death Proof but also Machete and Planet Terror by extension, when the TV series gets factored into the equation, it stands to reason that not only does From Dusk till Dawn exist as a universe unto itself in the Tarantino tapestry, but it might well be the most wide-ranging and all-encompassing of them all.
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