What would a Christopher Nolan-directed horror movie look like? Cinephiles may want to start speculating in a category that fits neatly beside “what would a Christopher Nolan James Bond film be like?” in the realm of films that don’t yet exist, but might at some point.
Citing comments Nolan made at a recent British Film Institute event, The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Nolan is both a fan of the genre and someone eager to make his own mark with it.
“[A]t some point, I’d love to make a horror film. But I think a really good horror film requires a really exceptional idea — and those are few and far between,” Nolan told the BFI audience. “So I haven’t found the story that lends itself to that. But I think it’s a very interesting genre from a cinematic point of view.”
It doesn’t seem hard to imagine a Nolan-helmed horror movie, in part because plenty of his films have already made inroads into the genre. The twists and turns of The Prestige arrive at a place that, while not overtly horror, is still pretty horror-adjacent. Inception abounds with dream logic, which can sometimes double as nightmare logic — especially considering Marion Cotillard is playing, effectively, a vengeful ghost.
Robert Oppenheimer’s visions of nuclear devastation in Oppenheimer are nothing if not horrific, and another Cillian Murphy character in a Nolan film — Dr. Jonathan Crane in Batman Begins — turns pretty much every scene he’s in into something from a horror film.
Christopher Nolan Hasn’t Ruled Out Directing a James Bond Movie
The director is keeping his options openNolan’s filmography abounds with characters realizing awful truths about themselves and pushing themselves to do unspeakable things — all qualities that would translate well into outright horror. At the BFI event, Nolan pointed to the tone of horror films as another reason for his attraction to them. “[T]hey’re films that have a lot of bleakness, a lot of abstraction,” he said. “They have a lot qualities that Hollywood is generally very resistant to putting into films, but that’s a genre where it’s allowable.” What Nolan might do with the genre definitely feels like cause for anticipation.
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