“I would be screaming like a bitch”: Quentin Tarantino reveals his one debilitating fear
Even though he’s always carried himself with supreme confidence, Quentin Tarantino isn’t above admitting there’s one thing above all others that could instantly reduce him to a shrieking bag of nerves.
The filmmaker has gained fame and notoriety in equal measure for the way his movies constantly depict graphic violence and colourful language that can ruffle the odd feather or two on occasion, and thanks to his well-known love of exploitation horror, it’s clear that he isn’t the squeamish type.
He most definitely doesn’t suffer from podophobia, either, with his unabashed love of the foot becoming a hallmark of his work. Is it really a Tarantino flick if there isn’t at least one uncomfortably long shot designed explicitly to gaze at a set of toes? History quite clearly suggests the answer is no.
Ironically, the thing Tarantino is frightened of the most is pivotal to his debut feature, with one of the several intertwined subplots of Reservoir Dogs focusing on the surviving members of the heist crew trying to figure out which one of them is an undercover member of law enforcement tasked to bring them down from the inside.
He’s got no issues with death, despair, violence, brutality, profanity, the sexualisation of feet, or racial epithets that raise eyebrows, but as Tarantino admitted to The Talks, he’d quite happily run a mile if he ever found himself in close proximity to a specific sort of rodent.
“My number one fear hands down – it’s probably the only super-fear that I have, one of those irrational things – I am afraid of rats,” he explained. “It’s the only thing I would call debilitating. If a rat were on this table, I would be in some girl’s lap. I would probably be standing on her shoulders and screaming like a bitch.”
Despite his intense and debilitating fear, though, he’d never make a point of carrying out an extinction event against them on-screen. He’s happy to maim, mutilate, and murder human beings without a care in the world, but the two-time Academy Award winner draws the line at inflicting even fictional animal cruelty.
“Some animal, some dog, some llama, some fly, some rat, doesn’t give a fuck about your movie,” he explained. “I’d kill a million rats, but I don’t necessarily want to kill one in a movie or see one killed in a movie, because I’m not paying to see real death.”
If he’s being taken literally, then it does come across as somewhat bizarre that Tarantino would quite happily take up arms against the rodent population and inflict a vengeful genocide upon them, but he wouldn’t even consider having so much as one bumped off within the context of a fictional film.
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