Panos Cosmatos reveals his inspirations behind ‘Mandy’
For someone who’s only directed two movies and a solitary episode of television since making their filmmaking debut with 2010’s bonkers sci-fi horror Beyond the Black Rainbow, Panos Cosmatos has done a sterling job of carving out an identity as a purveyor of phantasmagorical heavy metal nightmares.
His career path of choice makes perfect sense given his background, with the filmmaking side hailing from father George P. Cosmatos, who helmed Sylvester Stallone vehicles Rambo: First Blood Part II and Cobra, as well as the classic revisionist Western Tombstone.
Meanwhile, his mother was an artist, who, in Cosmatos’ words, “made these very disturbing, strange sculptures that were about identity and people’s souls,” which helps explain some of his stylistic sensibilities. Combine the two – which extended to DVD residuals from Tombstone helping to fund Beyond the Black Rainbow – and it all starts to make a little more sense.
For his sophomore feature, Cosmatos recruited Nicolas Cage and sent him for a walk on the wild side – even by the Academy Award winner’s own deranged standards – in 2018’s action-packed and blood-soaked psychological horror Mandy. It’s a hard film to reasonably quantify, but it’s unmistakably a singular piece of work that couldn’t have come from anywhere but the mind of its creator.
Set in 1983, Cage’s Red Miller and Andrea Riseborough’s Mandy Bloom enjoy a peaceful and idyllic existence in isolated rural America. However, when Linus Roach’s enigmatic cult leader Jeremiah Sand shows up on the scene to ruin their picture-perfect notion of domestic bliss, Red is left with no choice but to tool up and embark on a psychedelic spree of retribution and vengeance.
An instant cult classic, Mandy was carried along by waves of critical acclaim and praise for its distinctive aesthetic, pulse-pounding set pieces, and unabashed weirdness. A transgressive rock opera by way of David Lynch and H.P. Lovecraft, there’s nothing else quite like it.
That’s a testament to both Cosmatos’ unfiltered creativity and a leading man who was more than willing to embrace the outlandishness of both the story and his character to deliver one of the best performances in a career stuffed to the brim with oddities, but the filmmaker still had to draw his influences from somewhere.
“I was really inspired by the ’80s fantasy and barbarian films, I thought merging those in a more contemporary ’80s setting would be an interesting thing to balance,” Cosmatos said to Film 4. “You aren’t quite sure if these things, these artifacts and beings that they encounter are in fact supernatural or are believed to be real.”
The 1980s was indeed a hotbed for off-kilter fantasies that took huge creative swings, while the decade also marked the heyday of the barbarian subgenre, if there even was such a thing, with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s two outings as Conan being joined by other sword-and-sorcery favourites as Beastmaster, Ladyhawke, and Krull. Cage’s Red does wield a sword during Mandy, but his actions are more barbaric than barbarian by the strictest definition of the latter.
