Christopher Nolan has long been fascinated with depicting fear on screen – just think back to Batman Begins and its depiction of Scarecrow, or the PTSD flashes in Oppenheimer. But The Odyssey might be the closest he’s come yet to giving us full-on horror setpieces — from Odysseus’ cave ordeal with the Cyclops, to the brutal Laestrygonians, to a terrifying encounter with Samantha Morton’s enchantress Circe. All of which has left everyone online asking the same question: when will Christopher Nolan make a horror movie?
“I’ve always been interested in doing a horror film,” Nolan tells Empire, speaking on this week’s Empire Podcast. “But horror is most successful when the conceptual framework of whatever the story is is just so undeniable. I think there are very few really great horror movies.” The only thing stopping him from going full-horror is that he simply hasn’t found the right project yet. “I’ve never clicked with a particular idea or concept that worked for me,” Nolan explains, though his passion for the form is undeniable. “I love the genre,” he says. “Of all genres, it’s the most visceral. Where the direct response to the audience is the most important. That is to say, you’re trying to make people literally feel something in their bones about what’s going on on-screen.”
It is, he says, a “genre in which experimentation is demanded,” the appeal of which is clear for a man known for changing the game. “I go to see a lot of horror films with my kids and stuff these days, and you’ll see things in the first half an hour, 45 minutes of any horror film that you’d never see in another genre,” explains Nolan. “Risks that are taken. Dangerous approaches to things and all the rest. Admittedly, a lot of movies can’t sustain that to the end. But in the horror genre, that kind of innovation is not just respected – it’s really demanded.”
When it came to crafting The Odyssey‘s scariest sequences — like Samantha Morton’s Circe scenes — Nolan and his team took cues from some true greats. “I come from that really cool era of ‘80s transformation movies, with incredible technology by geniuses like Rick Baker and Rob Bottin,” shares Nolan, nodding to effects legends from the likes of An American Werewolf In London, The Thing, and The Howling. “We wanted to get back to that era of tactility in visual effects, and try and add something to it. I challenged my team to come up with a technology that could be driven by performance, so that rather than telling [Samantha Morton] exactly where to stand, or exactly how to do things, we wanted to come up with an approach to that sequence where she could lead it. Her performance could lead it. It was really thrilling stuff to shoot, I have to say.” Here’s hoping Nolan goes full-Scarecrow soon and delivers audiences a real lungful of fear gas.
The Odyssey is out now in cinemas
