The surprising horror movie that influenced Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Reservoir Dogs’
Back in 1992, Quentin Tarantino proved that he was more than just a brilliant scriptwriter; he was also a talented film director. When his directorial debut Reservoir Dogs arrived on the scene, it was clear that American cinema had a new, young hero on their hands, a reputation that Tarantino has continued to grow upon.
Starring the likes of Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen and even Tarantino himself, Reservoir Dogs told of a gang of diamond thieves who experience all manner of chaos when a huge job goes wrong and featured many of the kind of facets that would become Tarantino hallmarks, including overt violence and nonlinear storytelling.
There’s certainly a unique quality to Reservoir Dogs that could only ever come from Tarantino himself, but looking deeper into the film, as well as Tarantino’s comments about it, there seems to be a classic horror movie that influenced the legendary director when it came time for him to make his first steps as a filmmaker.
“The film that influenced this movie the most is John Carpenter’s The Thing,” Tarantino once told Time Out, admitting that Carpenter’s 1982 classic also influenced Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. He added, “And in its own way, The Hateful Eight is also influenced by Reservoir Dogs. So you could say everything is already starting to come full circle, and that umbilical cord is there, linking my eighth film back to my first.”
Carpenter’s The Thing, starring Kurt Russell in the lead role of helicopter pilot R.J. MacReady, tells of a group of scientific researchers in Antarctica who encounter an extra-terrestrial lifeform that imitates other people. Slowly, the group lose their trust in one another as the lifeform is suspected of being any single one of them.
Speaking with Collider, Tarantino once noted the real reason that The Thing is so damn scary. “These men are trapped in this situation in this arctic research centre, and one or more of them are possibly this Thing that’s going to devour all of them,” the director explained. “And no one knows if you are the guy I’ve known forever or you are a Thing.“
He added, “The movie makes the paranoia of that so palpable, so real, it’s almost like another character in the movie, the sheer paranoia of it.”
Concerning that paranoia, it’s easy to see how Tarantino had been inspired when making Reservoir Dogs, particularly in the way that put several highly-strung criminals in a difficult situation and made them worry about which one of them could not be trusted as a police officer (Tim Roth’s Mr Orange).
After watching The Thing, Tarantino knew that he needed to tap into the air of paranoia that Carpenter managed to detail if he was ever to have the movie succeed as he wished. He had once told Stephen Colbert, “I need to trap these bastards in this warehouse, and no one can trust anybody else, and I want the paranoia of what’s going on in that warehouse to bounce across the walls and, hopefully, like in The Thing, it will go out into the audience”.
Indeed, Tarantino absolutely succeeded in bringing the same kind of tension as Carpenter’s The Thing in his directorial debut; only he did it with an air of cool filmmaking that could only ever be his own.
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