Stephen King’s favourite “horrible” horror movie: “I actually saw it three times”
One of the best things about cinema is that beauty is often in the eye of the beholder, and there is no scientific definition of a good or bad film. Naturally, we all think we know a masterpiece or a stinker when we see them, but what about the movies that defy conventional categorisation? The horror genre, in particular, is full of objectively terrible films that audiences still love. In fact, Stephen King‘s favourite “horrible” horror movie is the platonic ideal of a “so bad, it’s good” fright flick.
In the late 1970s, director John Frankenheimer was in a strange place in his career. The no-nonsense filmmaker, often cited as one of the best pure craftsmen in Hollywood, had spent the first half of the decade cranking out a film every single year, with none of them reaching the cultural significance of previous pictures like The Manchurian Candidate and Birdman of Alcatraz.
Frankenheimer realised his career was in danger of being frittered away on box office disasters, so when he got the chance to direct the sequel to William Friedkin’s Oscar-winner The French Connection, he grabbed it with both arms. “I want to make pictures that one sees,” he honestly admitted. “There’s a great public out there, and you have to reach them; otherwise, you’re not in the movie business.” He followed French Connection II with Black Sunday, an action thriller about a terrorist attack at the Super Bowl, and suddenly his career was back on track.
The director’s next choice, though, was to attempt something he’d never tried before: a horror movie. He signed up to make Prophecy, based on a script by The Omen’s David Seltzer, and Paramount Pictures sunk a sizeable budget into the project. It told the bizarre tale of a paper mill polluting the waters of a nearby river, which causes a local bear to mutate into a grotesque beast that begins savagely killing anyone it comes across.
The film was an obvious parable about the dangers of environmental pollution, and Frankenheimer effectively conveyed that message. Crucially, though, the film wasn’t scary in the least, and its monster looked utterly laughable. In fact, Seltzer concluded that the production was doomed when he took his children to the set and saw “nothing but some big ballet dancer wearing huge shoes and a bear costume.” After seeing the finished film, his worst fears were realised, and he admitted, “It’s a terrible movie. No, it really sucks”.
Frankenheimer himself confessed that the movie had the potential to be much better than what he managed to get up on screen, but he stopped short of dismissing it as brutally as Seltzer. He admitted that he was in the throes of alcohol addiction when he made the film, and that may have affected his work. The regretful director also revealed that it was his decision to make the monster more “bear-like” instead of how it was depicted in Seltzer’s script, as a misshapen collection of every step of evolution, including fish, bird, and mammal.
However, there was one horror expert who begged to differ with both Seltzer and Frankenheimer. “Since any affectionate discussion of really horrible movies (as opposed to horror movies) is in the nature of a breast baring,” King wrote in his non-fiction book Danse Macabre, “I must admit here that I not only liked John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy, I actually saw it three times.”
Perhaps King saw something in Prophecy that its own writer and director didn’t. Maybe they were too close to the project to see the forest for the trees, and didn’t realise they’d actually made something that worked on multiple levels. Or, as is potentially more likely, King simply gets a kick out of watching a bad horror flick now and again, and to his delight, this one was so entertainingly woeful that he had to witness it not once, not twice, but thrice.
