Quentin Tarantino’s insane original idea for his worst movie: “That was the devil’s punishment”
In 2007, Quentin Tarantino experienced something he was completely unfamiliar with in his 15-year film career: failure.
After a streak of critically acclaimed and commercially successful films like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Kill Bill, Tarantino ventured into unfamiliar territory with a movie that was largely dismissed by critics and flopped at the box office. It was an uncharacteristic misstep for the director, who later admitted it was the worst film he’d ever made. Surprisingly, though, the original concept for the movie might have been even worse than what ultimately made it to the screen.
In the wake of the gruelling productions of Kill Bill Volume One and Two, Tarantino needed to recharge his batteries before, as he put it, climbing Mount Everest again. As a palate cleanser, he signed up to direct a two-part CSI: Crime Scene Investigation episode entitled ‘Grave Danger’, which was much harder work than anticipated. In fact, he told Sight and Sound, “It almost counted to me like I had made another movie”.
Soon after, Tarantino’s pal Robert Rodriguez came over to his exhausted friend’s house one evening and quickly zeroed in on a double feature poster Tarantino had on his wall. The poster proudly advertised the grindhouse double bill of Roger Corman’s Rock All Night and Dragstrip Girl, a common tactic for exhibiting exploitation and horror films in the 1970s. “I always wanted to do a double feature movie,” Rodriguez mused, which sparked Tarantino’s imagination. Before he knew it, they’d each agreed to make a throwback exploitation-style horror movie they’d release as a double feature branded Grindhouse.
To both directors’ dismay, though, Grindhouse underperformed in the US in its intended incarnation as a double feature, so the films—Tarantino’s Death Proof and Rodriguez’s Planet Terror—were released separately in other markets. Once again, though, they drastically disappointed at the box office, and the reviews were middling. At this stage in his career, Tarantino had never experienced poor reviews for a directorial effort. Sure, he’d been torn apart for a misguided attempt to become a Broadway actor in the ’90s, but the movies he directed had all been rapturously received. It left him in an unsure position for the first time, as he admitted, “I was depressed when Grindhouse didn’t do well. I felt rejected.”
Interestingly, though, Tarantino’s newfound vulnerability in this period was perhaps what led to him revealing his original idea for Grindhouse. It’s relatively unusual for any director to be so honest about a story they’d considered but then abandoned, especially when the idea was clearly unfinished. It was also potentially highly controversial, yet not the least bit surprising given Tarantino’s well-known storytelling predilections.
“The first idea was a bunch of young college history students that were going through a tour of the plantations of the old South,” revealed Tarantino. “And there’s a ghost of an old slave that is part of negro folklore”. In Tarantino’s tale, this spirit is known as Jody the Grinder, and he actually found himself in Hell, where he bested the Devil by – ahem – “fucking him”. Lucifer subsequently exacted vengeance on Jody by cursing him to eternal life on earth where his sole purpose is “to fuck white women”.
A mischievous Tarantino grinned, “That was the devil’s punishment”.
As insane as this sounds, Tarantino revealed that he planned on opening the movie with a professor—played by Samuel L Jackson, of course—recounting the tale of Jody the Grinder to his class. The movie would then have played out as the tale of “a killer slave with supermacho powers, done in the style of a slasher film”.
Mercifully, Tarantino soon realised that the story, as he was envisioning it, didn’t have legs. He admitted, “I didn’t have anywhere to go with it,” and ultimately decided that it would have subverted the tropes of the slasher film so much that it wouldn’t have wound up a slasher film at all. So, he changed tack and wrote a script about a serial killer stuntman who murders women with his juiced-up ‘death proof’ muscle car – which, to be fair, only sounds marginally less insane than Jody the Grinder.
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