Five of Quentin Tarantino’s favourite grindhouse movies
It’s well known that Quentin Tarantino is a big fan of grindhouse cinema, and several works within the genre have informed his movies. As a young man, Tarantino regularly frequented the American grindhouse cinemas, where you could watch a double bill of the goriest cinematic offerings for just a few dollars.
Grindhouse cinemas were conceived as low-budget theatres – on the shabby side in terms of their interior aesthetics – which screened equally low-budget pictures that showcased over-gratuitous violence, horror and sex.
Discussing his early experience with grindhouse, Tarantino explained, “You hoped for the best, and you bought your ticket, and then in five minutes you’re like, ‘Oh, yuck, Jesus fucking Christ!’ Stephen King had a line about this, right on the money. He said, ‘You gotta drink a lot of milk before you can appreciate cream.’ And in the genre we’re talking about, you gotta drink a lot of bad milk before you can appreciate milk.”
But how about some of the iconic director’s favourite grindhouse movies? Tarantino is certainly an admirer of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a film which proves that low-budget films can still generate a healthy profit. The film’s antagonist, Leatherface, has undoubtedly inspired some of Tarantino’s more effed-up villains, as has the film’s generous violence.
Gore and violence, after all, is often the name of the game when it comes to Tarantino’s action scene aesthetics, and when it comes to copious amounts of the sticky red stuff, then it’s hard to look beyond George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. The film goes heavy on blood, which will undoubtedly inspire the gallons upon gallons of it used in the likes of Kill Bill.
In Kill Bill, Tarantino placed one of the most substantial female leads at the forefront of one of his movies. In that light, John Carpenter’s Halloween must have been in the back of his mind. Although where Laurie Strode (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) is feeble in her attempts to hold off the serial killer Michael Myers, Uma Thurman’s The Bride exemplifies the strength that we have come to expect from Tarantino’s female leads.
But the strongest of all Tarantino’s female leads undoubtedly comes from Pam Grier in Jackie Brown. The inspiration for the film came from several blaxploitation films of the 1970s, which had generated healthy profits from small budgets. Among those is Coffy, which Grier performed in, and Tarantino loved the movie so much that he also nicked part of Roy Ayer’s soundtrack for his film.
Another common feature of Tarantino’s film, certainly in Kill Bill, are their use of martial arts. Several martial arts films were shown back in the day in grindhouses across America. Tarantino likely admired Five Fingers of Death, which is often attributed to starting the martial arts craze in the United States. Tarantino uses several features of the film Kill Bill, including the camera work and the swooshing cuts.
Five of Quentin Tarantino’s favourite grindhouse movies:
- The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
- Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978)
- Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)
- Coffy (Jack Hill, 1973)
- Five Fingers of Death (Jeong Chang-hwa, 1972)
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