Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker who is largely genre agnostic, flitting between surreal heist movies (“Inception”), sci-fi adventures (“Interstellar”), true-life war stories (“Dunkirk”) and knotty biographies (“Oppenheimer”). His latest excursion is into the world of Greek historical fantasy, with “The Odyssey,” his largest (and, indeed, one of his most impressive) movies yet.
But underneath the large-scale battle sequences and intricate swordplay, there’s something else – in a handful of sequences, Nolan tips his hat towards making a horror movie. And it is galvanizing.
We’re not going to go into too much detail on these sequences, since the movie has just opened, but there’s an encounter with a towering cyclops (played by an unrecognizable Bill Irwin) that has been teased in the movie’s marketing materials and is perhaps the best example of Nolan going full horror in “The Odyssey.” As Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his men are trapped in the cyclops’ cave, they are forced to hatch a desperate escape attempt and avoid getting eaten by the massive creature, who grabs and consumes Odysseus’ soldiers as if they were so many Sour Patch Kids being downed at your local AMC movie theater.
It’s a sequence filled with dread and actual terror, with Nolan ratcheting up the suspense and frequent collaborator Ludwig Göransson making things even more unbearable with his nerve-shredding score.
As the sequence concluded, it’s hard not to think, Now Nolan should do a whole movie that feels like that.
And he’s honestly come close. “Inception” was originally envisioned as a horror movie, before shifting to the more traditionally Nolan-y heist format.
“I was thinking along the lines of a horror movie at first, but it eventually became this project,” Nolan told The Telegraph in 2010, referring to “Inception.” “I was looking for a device whereby the dreams would become important to the story, and the thought that someone could invade your dream space and steal an idea is immensely compelling to me. The concept that dreams feel real while we’re in them underlies the whole film.”
And in the years since, he has brought up his desire to make something more outwardly spooky.
In 2024, he told Variety that he’d “love to make a horror film,” and at a British Film Institute event that same year said, “I think a really good horror film requires a really exceptional idea. And those are few and far between” but that the genre’s willingness to play with both big ideas and strange visuals appeals to him. “They have a lot of the qualities that Hollywood is generally very resistant to putting in films, but that’s a genre where it’s allowable,” Nolan told the BFI.
Even during press for “The Odyssey,” he’s brought up horror movies.
When talking to Letterboxd about the cumbersome filmmaking process behind his latest, he described that when he first started seeing IMAX movies in museums when he was a teenager (things like “To Fly” by Jim Freeman and Greg MacGillivray), he was immediately thinking of the narrative possibilities of the large-scale format. “Even as a kid I was thinking, Why can’t we do an adventure story this way? An action film? A horror movie?” That’s right – a horror movie.
Throughout his career you can see flashes of this fascination with horror – the Scarecrow’s fear gas in “Batman Begins” (a movie largely consumed with scariness), the squeamish torture sequence that starts off “Tenet,” the ghoulishness of “The Prestige’s” big reveal, and a handful of moments in “The Odyssey” – but he has also clearly been held back from going all in on the genre.
If anything, though, “The Odyssey” and the success of the movie’s scarier sequences, prove that not only is Nolan capable of making a horror movie, but that now is the time, especially, with “Oppenheimer” and now “The Odyssey,” he has comfortably returned to R-rated filmmaking for the first time since his underrated, Oscar-nominated serial killer thriller “Insomnia” back in 2002 (until now, arguably his most outwardly horrific movie).
This is a director who has conquered every technological and storytelling challenge that he’s set out for himself. A World War II movie set across three distinct time periods, with an interlocking narrative that you can somehow both follow and be completely riveted by? Check. A trilogy of some of the best, most thematically knotty comic book movies ever? Sure. A biopic of a man whose restless curiosity will likely lead to the destruction of all humankind? Here are your Academy Awards sir.
There’s another mountain for him to climb, and that’s to make the scariest, most horrifying movie that he can imagine, film it with the most up-to-date, most immersive IMAX cameras and stuff it with movie stars that otherwise wouldn’t “lower” themselves to be in a project like this. He can really try to push the visuals to places that most would be uncomfortable with, recruit Göransson for another unforgettable score, and expand his thematic concerns while also exploring those ideas that he consistently returns to in his work (the nature of storytelling, the elusiveness of time, the power of regret). And watch the box office numbers climb and the Academy Award nominations trickle in.
After all, his cinematic hero Stanley Kubrick attempted horror and made one of the great movies, regardless of genre, of all time, one that is still keeping new generations up at night, even now. Surely that must nag at him.
Clearly, making a horror movie is on Nolan’s mind. And when he finally gives into his desires, and opens up that darkened closet door, we will all be much richer for it.
