The horror movie that inspired Quentin Tarantino’s most villainous line
With the release of Reservoir Dogs in 1992, Quentin Tarantino made his first mark on the film industry, debuting a unique style comprised of witty dialogue spoken by memorable characters, stylised graphic violence and elaborate use of music. His landmark independent movie was the first of many successful films the director would come to release over the following three decades. From Pulp Fiction to Django: Unchained, Tarantino is one of America’s defining cinematic voices.
The filmmaker has an eclectic oeuvre, spanning 19th-century westerns like The Hateful Eight to the samurai-inspired Kill Bill, which also incorporated influences like grindhouse and blaxploitation. Elsewhere, Tarantino has taken his viewers back to the late-1960s for Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and World War Two for Inglorious Basterds. Through his vast array of influences, Tarantino has mastered the ability to set his movies in virtually any period he pleases while retaining his signature style.
However, despite this, Tarantino has never directly ventured into horror. With the announcement of his final film, The Movie Critic, coming next year, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever see the director produce a scary movie. Still, many of Tarantino’s films contain references to the horror genre, which has been a massive source of inspiration for his work, particularly B-movies and low-budget slashers. Thus, although he has never made an outright horror flick, his films contain enough moments designed to scare audiences, mainly in the form of graphic violence.
During an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Tarantino revealed his favourite horror movies, even claiming he was interested in making a slasher one day. He said: “The genre I wanted to tackle was slasher films because I’m a big fan of late-70s, early-80s slasher films. The only thing was, what makes them so good is the genre is so rigid.”
Tarantino continued: “I love Halloween and all those. But as time’s gone on, I think My Bloody Valentine may be my favourite.”
Tarantino is also a big fan of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a seminal slasher from 1974. However, he cites one of Hooper’s other, less acclaimed films, Eaten Alive, as providing him with valuable inspiration, so much so that he even used a line from it in Kill Bill. The movie was released two years after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and follows a Texan hotel proprietor named Judd, who owns a crocodile, feeding those who upset him to his unusual pet.
The movie includes a funny line which Tarantino loved so much that he used it in Kill Bill: “My name’s Buck, and I’m here to fuck”. In Tarantino’s effort, the line is uttered by a hospital worker named Buck, played by Michael Bowen. While Uma Thurman’s The Bride is unconscious, Buck sells her body to various paying customers so they can sleep with her. In one scene, Buck walks into The Bride’s room after she has awoken and murdered a man, leading the protagonist to slam his head into a door. The darkly comic line is shown in a flashback as The Bride identifies Buck as the man responsible for her vile mistreatment in the hospital.
On Jimmy Kimmel Live, Tarantino said, “We laughed about that Buck/fuck line for the first whole 20 minutes of [Eaten Alive]. Consequently, we didn’t love the movie, but we loved watching the movie. On the drive home, we laughed ourselves silly about the Buck/fuck line all over again.”
Watch the clip from Kill Bill below.
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