Romero behind the scenes of Night of the Living Dead
Horror has always been linked to challenging societal norms, applying commentary on the unknown, whether its topics around gender, race, sexuality and any other of society’s taboos. Unlike any other film genre, the genre is linked to the fear of the unknown, the return of the repressed, whether that’s the return of a zombie from the grave or confronting societies repressed notions of sexuality. 1985’s Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge has been analysed as metaphorically focused on gay repression, 2000’s Ginger Snaps uses the werewolf transformation as a metaphor for puberty, and 2008’s mockumentary feature Lake Mungo uses its ghost story as an exploration around grief. These are all prime examples of horror being metaphor, but no director can summarise this more through his work, then George A. Romero and his Living Dead franchise. Made up of five central features, the films would be a staple in the zombie sub-genre, creating the commonly accepted version of the monster for modern audiences. His initial feature, 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, became a metaphor for racism in complete accident, recontextualised in its time and through its central casting, when Romero had no plans to make the film metaphorically about anything at all.
The positive reaction to this aspect of his debut feature led to the original Trilogy of the Dead being heavily focused around political and social commentary, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead and 1985’s Day of the Dead being clearer with its commentary, built into the narrative rather than being analysed retrospectively. Twenty years later, the franchise would continue with 2005’s Land of the Dead, the film continuing the franchise’s lack of continuity, joined together by the similar exploration into a group of survivors trying to thrive in a zombie infested America. Land of the Dead updates the franchise to the modern day, making the use of phones, and reflected Romero’s future with the franchise, following with 2007’s Diary of the Dead and 2009’s Survival of the Dead, which would both tackle modern commentary through the lens of the zombie feature. Survival of the Dead would be the final feature of the late director, dying in 2017 at the age of 77, during pre-production on his newest feature in the franchise, but the director left behind a compelling legacy of social commentary in the zombie feature.
Duane Jones and Judith O’Dea in Night of the Living Dead
The zombie feature found prominence with the release of the 1932 feature, White Zombie, with the original concept of the zombie focusing on African voodoos, capitalising on a race angle as African characters being villains, turning white characters into mind-controlled puppets. It was rooted in America’s obsession with African mysticism, and that concept of the zombie would not change until Night of the Living Dead. Made on a miniscule budget and shot in black and white to save costs, the film never actually refers to the flesh-eaters as zombies, rather as ‘ghouls. The film set up the precedent of the creatures rising from the grave, their craving for brans, infecting others and the slow-walking nature of their movement, with the film’s implied backstory for the infection coming from radiation from a fallen satellite. The casting of African American actor Duane Jones, who had been cast by Romero because he was the best actor for the best part and not because of any racial undertones for the plot, moved the narrative into one being composed of a racial angle. Prominent black characters in mainstream Hollywood were increasingly uncommon, so the first major black protagonist in a horror feature being gunned down alongside the monsters of the film by a horde of white men seems to have major political meaning. Critics have long compared the death of Jones’ Ben to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr and compared the ending to the multiple African American causalities of the civil rights movement.
Ben is shot down in the movies’ conclusion, as the white hunters mop up the remaining zombies left after morning rises, and confuse him as a zombie. Ben represents a racial other, joined forth with the zombies as a racial threat, a victim of white America. His presence in the film comes as a threat to the white suburban home, as he finds solace in what he believes is an abandoned home, only to come face to face with a father, child and mother. The conflict of the movie comes from the butting heads between Ben and the father, as Ben takes the upper hand and the father’s insistence to not listen costs his family their lives. The white family feels threatened by a black man in their home, the film aligning him more with the zombies outside, the family seeing him as mindless threat just like the undead. Even without meaning to, the film draws incredibly clear racial messaging, confronting headlong into the black experience during the civil rights movement.
The credits roll in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead by showing the zombies walking around aimlessly the mall that the central characters of the film once called sanctuary, multiple still shots showing the zombies acting as mindless as the shoppers that once roamed those very aisles. Dawn of the Dead very much tackles the concept of consumerism head on; it’s a film where Romero realised, he could imbue his movies with specific actual messaging that would not be forced onto the film after release. In the present day, shopping malls are very uncommon, in a world where most shopping can be done on your phone, but during the time of release, shopping malls were a societal norm which represented the capital of capitalist spending. Most of the runtime of the film takes place in the very shopping malls that represent America’s interest in consumerism, as the characters find solace and happiness in meaningless items, walking around in new clothes and taking part in various montages as they move from shop to shop. The items mean nothing in an apocalypse, and once the zombies descend into the building, stacked outside like an army of shoppers waiting for the doors to open, the items become just part of their fight for survival, no different to how they were trying to survive beforehand.
Shot in colour and with a larger budget than his previous feature, Romero uses the movement in the zombie genre since the release of his previous feature to highlight the impressive zombie makeup featured here. The zombies all wear distinct outfits, matching the professions that they had when they were alive, less a horde of similar monsters and more now a group of victims that resemble the humans that kill them. Even zombie children are included, who our protagonists have a moment of hesitation for, wondering if they will kill a child. The outfits make them blend into the shopping districts, they are one in the same as the groups that have used this as their home, as brainless as the people who make shopping and commercial goods part of their need to survive. The protagonists can escape, using a helicopter on the roof, but the zombies are not so lucky, stuck wandering the halls of a dead mall, a mall which has no monetary value in a world which does not run on money and spending. The zombies are victims in Romero’s mind, forced to repeat their meaningless monetary existence in both their life and death.
Sherman Howard in Day of the Dead
Dawn of the Dead’s opening sees a group of media agents trying to downplay the current zombie crisis, showcasing the media hiding the truth from the public as a breakdown in information and communication leads to it all going array. Breakdowns in communication and distrust of governmental bodies makes up a major focus of Day of the Dead’s narrative thrust. The film is contained to a small underground bunker in Florida, where a group of survivors, made up of scientists and military personnel must decide how to continue society after the zombie virus has got even worse. Romero mentioned in an interview after the release of Dawn of the Dead, that he saw the zombies as sympathetic characters, as the real victims of the entire conflict, and that’s how this movie depicts the characters. In the final decade of the Cold War, the movie released during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, a period where the president led America to becoming more consumerist but also helped private owned businesses and struggled to respond to the threat of AIDS. It was a period which was uncertain for the American citizen, and Romero’s feature reflects that, showcasing the worst of the military personnel and the scientists that should be trying to stop this zombie threat. Zombie media frequently boils down to narratives which reveal that humanity is the real villain, even with all the zombies featured, it is the basis of every season of The Walking Dead series, and Romero seems to be where this factor began. The characters bicker at each other, turn on each other constantly and the scientists are taking part in inhuman tests on zombies, so bad that the lead scientist is nicknamed ‘Frankenstein’.
With zombies becoming more part of their regular everyday life, the zombies have moved from horrific to a part of life that the military personnel enjoy, loving the sport of dispatching the zombies one by one. They are sexist to the female lead, violent and Joseph Pilato’s performance as Henry Rhodes leads him feeling more mentally insane than trustworthy military man. A film needs a protagonist then, and the only way the film can keep up with this need is making the zombies the protagonists, and specifically a domesticated zombie, known as Bub. In a world where humanity has been taken over by flesh-eating zombies, the only actual human thing in the bunker is one of the zombies, as the deaths of the various military personnel becomes cathartic to the audience. The zombies are contained to their nature, they cant help being monstrous, while the humans decide to be cruel, it instinctively reflects the feelings of unease and distrust in America, when the monster is the hero, how does that reflect on who is meant to be the good guys.
Eugene Clark in Land of the Dead
Sympathy for the zombies becomes the backbone of Romero’s return to the zombie genre, in Land of the Dead. The zombie sub-genre was back, popular at the box office once again, after the success of 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead, and these successes allowed Romero the chance to make another zombie feature. Land of the Dead builds on various aspects of Day of the Dead and contains elements that were scrapped from that film because of budget restraints. Years removed from the initial zombie outbreak, humanity survives in city-states across North America, where the rich live in high rises and in safety, and the poor live in the outskirts of the guarded cities, forced to survive in squalor. Consumerist goods become a means to an end in this new society, used by the paramilitary personnel to barter for money, housing and favours with the leader of the city, Paul Kaufman. The poor are given worse goods when the paramilitary travel for supplies, giving the rich goods to the upper classes and the spoiled foods to the poor. The features’ plot gets into focus when one of the army men takes Kaufman’s rich army vehicle, bartering it to get the apartment that was promised to him, each character is just fighting to survive in a world where consumerism is used to subjugate them and keep them in check.
The zombies featured, led by a former gas worker, known as Big Daddy, fall in line with the poor of the city. Zombies are used as threats in the town, forcing prostitutes into cages with zombies for entertainment, its Romero continuing his view of the rich and governmental bodies being unfair and the true evil. The zombies gain sentience, as Big Daddy can learn how to use a gun, and is able to have enough mental capabilities to become a leader to the zombie horde. By the end of the film, the zombies and the paramilitary both storm the city, both using guns and taking down the rich. When it comes to face off, the zombies spare the humans and walk away, recognising each other as societies just trying to survive. The movie’s exploration into the split between the rich and poor is very clear, and reflects a movement in Romero’s film-work, where his metaphorical messaging has become less like metaphors, and is clearer and more heavy-handed. It is a continuation of the themes that appear in the previous two features, but with a modern and less polished look.
Romero’s final works for the franchise are easily his worst, and less fleshed out compared to the previous four. Diary of the Dead takes place during the initial outbreak, shot as a found footage film with Romero seeing out of his depth in exploring the zombie as a metaphor for modern media. It is a thinly veiled look at the disinterest in violence in the modern day of cameras and social media, and the commercialisation that comes from that new world, but it’s just a worse version of Romero’s previous exploration of those themes. Romero stated in an interview after the release of Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead in 2005, that the exploration into consumerism would not work in the modern day, and that was proven right by his own feature. Survival of the Dead works more as a zombie feature because of its lack of major metaphorical themes, outside of the continued narrative thread of the distrust of the military, it’s a narrative sure zombie feature. They both continue the zombie as metaphor staple of Romero, a factor that unites his Living Dead franchise, a franchise that is without any actual continuity. Zombies are seen as victims, representing themselves as both villain and protagonist, and reflecting the messaging fitting the period, from racism, to consumerism, to distrusting governmental bodies, and finally, as a mirror of the feudal system.
John Carpenter is one of the masters of the horror genre, forming the basis for the slasher sub-genre, but also dabbling in the psychological horror, the science-fiction horror and even wandering outside of the horror genre. He is characterised heavily by pessimistic and nihilistic films, and by composing his own scores for his features, becoming a soundtrack artist long after he has finished being a filmmaker in the modern day. With the upcoming Halloween season, following will be a ranking of the eighteen theatrically released films directed by the horror auteur, not including his direct to television features or his involvement in anthology features.
18) Ghosts of Mars
Pam Grier, Natasha Henstridge, Clea DuVall and Liam Waite in Ghosts of Mars
Starting the list off, comes Carpenter’s second most recent film released into cinemas, 2001’s Ghosts of Mars. Starring a central cast of Natasha Henstridge, Ice Cube, Jason Statham and Pam Grier, the film centres itself around a future where Mars has been colonized. A squadron of police officers and a convicted criminal are forced to work together to fight against the possessed residents of a mining colony, with the ghosts of the planet’s original inhabitants taking control over the peaceful residents. The film has slowly become a cult classic to many fans of the director’s work, but the film also marks a downward trend in the director’s late career, from the 1990s to the present day. The film essentially serves as a remake of one of Carpenter’s classic features, Assault on Precinct 13. Just like that film, the feature brings police officers and criminals together to stop a gang that essentially act as zombies, mindless monsters that exist as cannon fodder in various action sequences where they try to break into one building.
Where that original feature is entertaining, this film just blends itself in mediocrity, with all the central players failing at making their characters feel convincing or entertaining. The film lacks the central feel of a Carpenter feature; his nihilistic characters and plot lines are replaced with a film that feels more campy and embarrassingly unfunny compared to a genuine horror-action feature. Carpenter’s score feels generic and unimpressive, lacking a unique hook that makes it stand apart, and the direction flounders in keeping up with the set style of 2000s horror, with an oversaturated look and shaky camera use that makes it fall in line with the eventual style that Saw, in 2004, would set for the genre. Action sequences can be fun at parts, but when the film stands out so much from the general quality of Carpenter’s work, it is hard to praise anything in the feature
17) Village of the Damned
Christopher Reeve in Village of the Damned
In a 2011 interview, John Carpenter described his remake of Village of the Damned as a ‘contractual assignment’ that he was ‘really not passionate about’. Starring Christopher Reeve, Kirstie Alley, Linda Kozlowski and Mark Hamill, the film follows what happens after all women in a town are impregnated by brood parasitic aliens, with the children growing rapidly and having psychic abilities. Based on 1957’s The Midwich Cuckoos, the book has created various adaptations of the work, with 1960’s Village of the Damned and its sequel, 1964’s Children of the Damned, being the basis of Carpenter’s remake. The novel also spawned a television remake, sharing the same name as the novel rather than the film version, released in 2022. A remake of Village of the Damned had been in the works for a decade since the popularity of 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with the adaptation being aimed to tackle the subjects that the original film could never tackle.
With censorship at the time of production, the original could not even mention impregnation and could not explore the true focus of the narrative, abortion. Outside of this big change with the lack of censorship, Carpenter’s version of the narrative just falls short and ends up feeling campier than a serious outlook on abortion. Reeve’s final role before he was paralysed in 1995, both him and Hamill feel miscast in their roles and fail to convince as serious stars, and the score suffers, similarly to Ghosts of Mars, as feeling generic, and at times, out of place in such a dramatic feature. The film marks the ‘work for hire’ time in Carpenter’s career, with the 1990s serving him badly with a lack of creator-owned projects.
16) Escape from LA
Kurt Russell in Escape From L.A.
A fifteen-year late sequel to Carpenter’s classic feature, Escape from New York, 1996’s Escape from L.A, is a derivative film that feels in line with sequels to 80s classics. Similar in case to features like Ghostbusters 2, the film serves more as a remake of the original film than a direct sequel, with very little callbacks to the original and more of Carpenter just doing the same plot beats again. Set in a near-future world of 2013, where the United States is ruled by a President for life, the film sees Snake Plissken returning into action when the president’s daughter steals the remote of a new superweapon. She finds herself in L.A., which has been walled off from the rest of the States as a prison-city, and Plissken is tasked to save her and retrieve the weapon to stop his upcoming deportation. Carpenter has long declared his sequel to be his favourite of the two, stating his reasons as because of the film’s darker and more nihilistic tone and its deeper themes, but the film fails at being either of these things.
A competent film, but a lesser feature when compared to Carpenter’s original, the film feels sillier and more cartoonish than a darker feature. Scenes including a paragliding action sequence, a chase on surfboard and a showdown between heroes and villains through a basketball game come across as goofier than anything, and the turn from impressive miniatures and practical effects to poorly aged digital effects lead the film looking less impressive than ever. Originally, the film would be followed with an end of a promised trilogy, as Escape from Earth would double down on the special effects, however the poor box office performance left all plans for the franchise on the cutting room floor. The shining light of the film comes from Kurt Russell’s still impressive performance as Plissken, he is still committed to making the character cool and the character never flounders when the rest of the film does.
15) The Ward
Amber Heard in The Ward
There would be a nine-year gap between Ghosts of Mars and Carpenter’s most recent big screen venture, 2010’s The Ward. He has since directed an episode of the streaming series Suburban Screams in 2023, but until then this was his most recent directorial work, with the director falling out of love with the medium in the years since Ghosts of Mars. It was during his short stint working on two episodes for Showtime’s anthology series, Masters of Horror, that his love for the medium returned. The Ward sees that love for return, and though it is nowhere near groundbreaking, it is a chilling story that proves that Carpenter still can make a tension inducing and briefly scary feature. The film follows a young woman who is institutionalized after setting fire to a house, and once arriving at the institute, she becomes haunted by the ghost of a former inmate at the ward. Starring Amber Heard, Mamie Gummer, Danielle Panabaker and Jared Harris, the film suffers from a script that undermines everything Carpenter has done with the atmosphere and setting.
Characterisation is basically null in the film, with each inmate having one personality trait, and the late-game reveal that the narrative is all happening in one person’s head, and no one is real gives that a reason, but leaves the film feeling cheap and empty. Knowing the central twist as well, leads to the film feeling impossible to enjoy on a rewatch, when nothing that is happening on screen is real, it is hard to become invested.
14) Memoirs of an Invisible Man
Chevy Chase in Memoirs of an Invisible Man
The production of Carpenter’s take on H.F. Saint’s novel, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, would be hellish and would almost make the director want to quit, a hard start to his downward trend in filmmaking during the 90s. The film was backed by the studio because of Chevy Chase’s intense interest in using it as a star vehicle to move him from being a comedic actor to a serious star. The star was most well-known off the back of his stint on comedy series, Saturday Night Live, where he starred from 1975 to 1976, and then a comedy leading man in films like 1980’s Caddyshack and the five National Lampoon’s Vacation movies. His move to serious actor was a confusing one, and the departure of director Ivan Reitman, famous for Ghostbusters, came about because of these budding heads of tone, with Carpenter eventually hired after Superman-director Richard Donner left the project after eight months.
The film follows Chase as Nick Halloway, a man who is rendered invisible after an accident, and he soon becomes the target of a CIA operative who sees him as a potential new weapon for the American government. Chase wanted to base the film in drama, focusing on the troubles a man would have when becoming invisible and how that would drive him away from his friends and family, and wanted the film to be a central love story. This is where the film falls flat, Carpenter directing a light-hearted comedy drama, where the main star is refusing to do the comedy aspect only leads to disaster. The film is tonally confused, and there are interesting uses of the invisibility effects, and a fun performance by Sam Neill, but Chase only bewilders in his performance, and the central connection between him and love interest Daryl Hannah is nowhere to be seen. The troubled production has only led to an equally troubled feature.
13) Vampires
Thomas Ian Griffith in Vampires
When asked in an interview on his opinion of the filmic version of his novel, Vampires, author John Steakley pointed out how the adaptation retained much of his dialogue but none of his original plot, though he liked the film. Carpenter’s 1998 film Vampires has become a cult classic since its release, spawning a franchise which contains two direct-to-DVD features, 2002’s Vampires: Los Muertos and 2005’s Vampire: The Turning. Moving away from the gothic loneliness that the monsters were known for, Carpenter’s film tackles the vampires as bloodthirsty monsters which more resemble zombies than anything like the Draculas of the past. Starring James Woods as Jack Crow, who leads a team of vampire hunters, after being raised by the Catholic Church to become their master vampire slayer. The plot kicks into gear after his crew are killed, and he must pull together new members to take down the first vampire, Jan Valek, who is after a centuries-old cross. The plot is paper-thin, essentially a series of engaging action sequences that are stitched together by something resembling a plot.
The film has become a cult classic because of its reliance on action, it is a movie trying its best to be cool and kick-ass, with a central performance by James Woods that feels laughably over-the-top at times. Carpenter has always wanted to make a Western, with many of his films falling into Western-lite at times, with Ghosts of Mars and They Live being the prime examples. Vampires serve as the closest to a Western for Carpenter and showcases his tendency to make his films increasingly goofy and comedic in the 90s, but its also hard to be completely invested when Carpenter makes all his characters so increasingly unlikeable. It has gained a cult-following in the years since but outside of some great action and some maybe not on purpose-comedic moments, it is hard to see why.
12) Dark Star
Serving as Carpenter’s debut feature, the science-fiction comedy, Dark Star, is a bit rough around the edges as a student film but has enough charm and is important enough to the genre that it deserves to be high enough on the list. Set up essentially as a spoof of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film went through a journey from University of Southern California student film, to expanding with reshoots in 1973 and then having a limited theatrical release in 1975. Serving as Carpenter’s first directorial project, the film also offered Carpenter his first chance to score a feature. The film follows the crew of the deteriorating starship, named after the title of the film, twenty years into their mission to destroy unstable planets which might threaten the future of galactic colonization.
The film feels messy at times because of the clear inclusion of various random sequences to lengthen the runtime of the film, with the film’s plot essentially being a bunch of comedic sequences one after another until the central bomb plot takes place in the back half. The film does not really get going into that secondary half, but the inclusion of a beach ball alien is humorous and makes up for some of the shortcomings of the set up. Outside of making a career for horror auteur John Carpenter, the film is equally important for launching the career of Dan O’Bannon, who would take the beachball alien concept and turn it into screenplay of the hit 1979 film Alien. His animation work here would also lead him to provide the special effects animation for 1977’s Star Wars, setting himself up as a signature creator for the science-fiction genre, and marking the importance of Dark Star as a figurehead of the genre.
11) Christine
Keith Gordon in Christine
The opening sequence of John Carpenter’s Christine sets itself apart from the original novel instantly, as the film opens with the creation of the signature car, with the car instantly revealed to have a mind of its own as it injures a mechanic. The film marks a connection between Christine and femineity, the car strikes out in anger when a man touches herself in a private area, and later becomes jealous when Arnie, it’s owner, becomes entwined with another woman. It is far away from Stephen King’s original concept for the central car, where the car was possessed by its previous owner, marking it as a normal car made evil through possession, where Carpenter’s is evil from the assembly line. Like Kubrick’s take on The Shining, this had led King to disliking this version of his novel, but outside of this central origin difference, and some more cinematic depictions of the death sequences, the film is faithful to the textual events. The film was handled by Carpenter as a work-for-hire job, while he was trying to develop a filmic version of King’s other novel, Firestarter. The film follows Arnie Cunnigham, as his life takes a dramatic change when he purchases the car known as Christine, which only becomes worse when he meets a new girl at school, and the car begins to take control over him.
As a work-for-hire job, the film excels in showing the class of Carpenter’s 80s work, working hard to make a car scary and capable of gruesome kills. The film conveys an interesting personality through an inanimate object, and Keith Gordon’s central performance as Arnie holds the film together perfectly. The character is as multilayered as the novel, the film spending so much time away from the character so that by the end of the feature, he feels as evil and alien as the car, Gordon tracking a change in his performance, from innocent and kind student to a crazed murderer. Even if King does not like this version of his work, it has the spirit contained in it for sure.
10) Prince of Darkness
Donald Pleasence in Prince of Darkness
The second instalment in what Carpenter names as his ‘Apocalypse trilogy’, alongside The Thing and In The Mouth for Madness, Prince of Darkness is a mix between Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2. Starring Donald Pleasence, in a welcome return to the world of Carpenter after last being in Halloween, and a larger cast, the film follows a group of quantum physics students who are assigned to assist a Catholic priest. The priest has found a liquid at a local monastery, which they soon come to find is a sentient, liquid embodiment of Satan himself. At heart, the movie is a possession film, a possession takes on The Thing, as the characters fall one by one to the possession in a similar way to that previously mentioned feature. Like Raimi’s Evil Dead movies, the charm comes in the possessed creature effects, and the compelling ways that each character plays their possessed self-compared to the original character, mixing the serious nature of Evil Dead with enough goofy and comedic performances that makes it stand toe-to-toe with Evil Dead 2. The central romance of the film feels underwritten, but each other aspect of the film more than makes up for it. An early found footage scene is included, well before the concept boomed with the release of The Blair Witch Project, and the film works to convey a film brimming with doom and despair.
The liquid possession angles the film explores seems to be a clear comparison to the AIDS epidemic that was still raging during the release of the film. The possession is transmutable, passing via fluid transferred between person to person. Similarly, the film also transmutes many references to homosexuality across its runtime, namely through a sequence where Walter, an implied gay man, is only able to escape from a group of possessed women, by coming out of a closet. Homosexuality, at the time, was believed to be the only sexuality to be infected by AIDS, marking a deeper meaning in a tonally comedic film, balancing both comedy and heavier themes perfectly.
9) Assault on Precinct 13
Austin Stoker and Darwin Joston in Assault on Precinct 13
Carpenter’s second feature as a director is essentially a remake of George A. Romero’s classic 1968 feature, Night of the Living Dead, only swap out the mindless undead instead for an army of mindless gangsters. The film even retains Romero’s accidental social commentary by focusing the film on a black lead during a time where that was a phenomenon in mainstream cinema. Originally developed as a straightforward Western, a film that Carpenter has always wanted to create, the film explored a similar plot to Rio Bravo, where a sheriff’s office is attacked by the local rancher’s gang when the sheriff arrests the corrupt rancher. When the film lacked the budget required, the film was downsized to taking place in the present day instead, following a police officer who must band together with a death row-bound convict to defend a defunct precinct against a criminal gang. The film opened to mixed reviews, and a dwindling box office performance, but would soon become a cult classic, allowing it to even garner a remake in 2005, starring Laurence Fishburne and Ethan Hawke.
Even if no longer a Western, the film still retains Western components and features a running gag of the line ‘Got a smoke?’, a reference to the various cigarette gags that came from Howard Hawks classical Westerns. The film features a poppy score from Carpenter, a synthy electric score that breaths strong life into the action, as the station gets swarmed by army after army of faceless goons. The film’s most shocking moment, however, comes from the execution of a little girl in bloody fashion, an event that kicks off the central plot of the film after a slow start of plot build-up. The MPAA threatened that the film would receive a X rating if the scene was not cut from the film, and Carpenter relented, removing the scene from the copy he gave to the MPAA, but distributing the film with the scene still present to play coy with them. It was for the best that the film retained this harrowing sequence, it marked it for what it truly was, one of the very best exploitation features.
8) In The Mouth of Madness
Sam Neill in The Mouth of Madness
The one movie that still proved that Carpenter had the ability to make a tremendous film during his ‘work-for-hire’ period of the 90s, In The Mouth of Madness is a great outlier in Carpenter’s filmography, a supernatural film that feels smart and surreal in its narrative, that many critics considered it pretentious during its initial theatrical run. Starring Sam Neill, in his return to the world of Carpenter after a villainous turn in Memoirs of an Invisible Man, as an insurance investigator, visiting a small town when looking into the disappearance of a successful horror author. Once reaching the town, the lines between reality and fiction begin to blur as Neill’s character begins to question his sanity, as this famous horror author seems to be able to bend reality to his own whim. The horror from this feature comes from the sense of the loss of free will, questioning how much free we will really have when something dictating our every move can be written. It is a clearly multilayered feature, questioning even what insanity really means, when one can be labelled as such when they are just acting outside of the regular order of nature put forward by society.
The texts written by the central author also make people insane, essentially showcasing Carpenter questioning the true meaning between crime and media, does what people view through film, television and fiction truly make them violent, or is it the people themselves that is to fault. There is a grand scale to the narrative that is so unlike Carpenter, with excellent creature designs and a genuine foreboding tone. Inspired by the works of H.P Lovecraft, and clearly with the author being designed to be like Stephen King, the film matches the scale of those two authors perfectly. The film even opens in media res, as Neill’s character tells the film’s narrative in a similar way to Lovecraft’s work, it’s a love letter to Lovecraftian horror that truly works.
7) The Fog
Jamie Lee Curtis in The Fog
Started in 2020, and occurring annually on April 21st is Fog Day, a day where fans will watch Carpenter’s classic supernatural feature, The Fog. The fact that there is an entire day named after the film is a shocking one, especially after it received incredibly middling reviews during its initial theatrical run in 1980. In the years since, the film has garnered a cult following and an impressive re-assessment as one of Carpenter’s finest works, a drive which brought upon a critically panned remake in 2005. The film follows the day-to-day lives of the residents of a small coastal town in Northern California, whose lives are mixed up when a strange fog arrives in town. The fog brings ghosts linked to the past of the town, as the ghosts seek revenge on the children of the men that wronged them many years in the past. Dean Cudney’s cinematography is the star of the show of this feature, as Cudney shoots an incredible number of scenic shots of the coastal town, as it becomes encased in eerie fog, with the one brimmer of light coming from the tall lighthouse poking out in the distance. Carpenter makes the use of shadows to shoot the ghosts in complete murky light, more silhouettes than fully formed designs that add to the creepiness of the sequences, the fog hides them, and the lightning follows suit, but the little you see, of the zombie-like pirates makes for memorable creature design.
Carpenter’s strength here is the build-up, bringing together an incredibly well-cast set of characters that make the town feel alive, the tension palpable and makes you question the validity of the ghosts when both sides are almost human. Tom Atkins, Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh and Carpenter’s at-the-time wife, Adrienne Barbeau, all deliver strong performances. At heart, the movie is about the pain and sin that causes a town, a nation to be built, for each beautiful thing created, someone else is either stolen from or hurt for it to be made. 100 years on, the townsfolk celebrate their town with no idea what was done to create that very town, a topical message that could be conveyed to various aspects of American life, with a clear analogue to the pain and suffering brought to the Native Americans.
6) They Live
Roddy Piper in They Live
Carpenter’s career was characterized heavily by a series of films that were pessimistic in nature, even before he got to a feature focusing around Lovecraftian monsters controlling free will, and no film is more pessimistic than 1988’s They Live. A precursor to that before mentioned Lovecraftian feature, They Live follows a drifter who finds a special pair of sunglasses that reveal the secret truth of humanity. Putting on the sunglasses, they reveal to Nada, played by Roddy Piper, that the ruling class are aliens concealing their identities and rule the world through manipulating people to follow the status quo through subliminal messages across various forms of media. Based on the 1963 short story known as ‘Eight O’clock in the Morning ‘by Ray Nelson, the short story’s film rights were bought by Carpenter as he used it as a basis of his more developed script. His take came from how dissatisfied the director was with then-president Ronald Reagan’s economic policies, also known as Reaganomics, which was focused around increasing defence spending, slowed growth of government spending, reducing government regulation and tightening the money supply to reduce possible inflation. These economic policies were mixed in value, on one hand causing an entrepreneurial revolution, and on the other, the national debt tripling in eight years. The biggest outcome was the rise in consumerism in the country, another factor that Carpenter was spoofing in this feature, connecting mass consumerism as one of the major causes of drone-like personalities and American patriotism.
The film’s signature sunglasses sequences were shot with black-and-white photography, a filmic style which brings the sequences closer in line with war propaganda films during the second World War. The film has all the action movie quirks that makes films like Assault on Precinct 13 and Big Trouble in Little China work but mixed with an excellent amount of social commentary that makes every punch and gunshot come with a thematic purpose. It is a complete shame that the movie has essentially become the opposite of its thematic theming in popular culture, becoming a pop culture juggernaut in one of its central macho lines, and the film’s alien designs becoming synonymous with street art.
5) Escape from New York
Kurt Russell in Escape from New York
Written originally in 1976 as a response to the Watergate scandal, the political turmoil of the time where American society did not trust their own president caused Carpenter to pen Escape from New York. The project would not be released until 1981, after the director had enough pull to begin production on such a risky movie after the smash hit of Halloween, and after Michael Myers actor Nick Castle was able to touch up the script with some humorous additions. The film mirrored a common trope for the time, concerning a grim and gritty look at New York City that perpetuated through the 80s with films like Ghostbusters and then into the 90s with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and a level of humanity drawn through humorous New Yorkers. Dealing with a near-future, a future which is ruled over by a forever president, and one where Manhattan Island in New York City has been caged off as a maximum-security prison. When Air Force One is hijacked and the President is kidnapped into the streets of New York, federal prisoner Snake Plissken is given twenty-four hours to find and rescue the President to be able to be pardoned for his crimes. Plissken is easily where this film shines, he seems like your typical action hero, but he is incredibly stubborn, angry and resentful across the film, speaking in low octave with almost growls rather than the typical one liner you would expect from an 80s action hero. Kurt Russell really shines here, playing against type as a gritty and serious action star after years of being a comedic actor.
He is known by every character in the film, building a mystique around him and the eventual excellent action sequences he will be able to pull off, and he has morals. The film twists the script on the typical hero-villain dynamic, Plissken is a shady individual but he’s a hero, while the people he is helping are clearly the villains. The President is the true antagonist, and the people who are keeping him hostage are just victims of a system that had put them down and refuses to give them the rehabilitation they deserve, a pure criticism of the American prison complex. It is a film which gives its viewers all the gritty action you would want out of your Hollywood blockbuster, but also enough to chew on under the surface, a bridge of both best worlds of cinema.
4) Big Trouble in Little China
Kurt Russell, Dennis Dunn, Victor Wong and James Lew in Big Troubles in Little China
20th Century Fox hired Carpenter to helm Big Trouble in Little China because of his reputation of being able to work incredibly fast, with the film facing a limited preproduction schedule of only ten to twelve weeks and rushed into production to beat a similar releasing film. The Eddie Murphy starring feature, The Golden Child, was seen as big competition for the studio, a film Carpenter was even offered to direct, sharing similar narrative threads, and having such a big star attached. Big Trouble in Little China was originally put into production as a separate film, mixing the action of the Western with the new popular sensibilities of the martial arts feature, but would be rewritten into being more modernised. This version of the script would be what enticed Carpenter to the feature, fulfilling his desire to one day direct a martial arts feature. The film, which continued Carpenter’s lack of success at the box office during theatrical runs, followed drifter truck-driver Jack Burton, who must help his friend Wang Chi rescue his green-eyed fiancée from criminals in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The green-eyed woman is important to the plot of an ancient sorcerer, who requires a woman with green eyes to marry him to be released from a centuries-old curse. An interesting genre blend of various tones and genres, from the American action movie, the comedy, mystical and supernatural elements and the martial arts feature, Carpenter’s high-flying feature has everything and has become a deserved cult classic in the years since release.
Kurt Russell returns to the world of the Carpenter feature, his role of Jack Burton inspired by the machismo of actors like John Wayne, but with an entertaining satirical edge. The film flips the American movie on its head, where once the American lead would have a foreign sidekick, Russell’s Burton is macho and cool, but he is a goof, and out of his element next to such strong leaders like Wang Chi. He is along for the ride in a narrative that spins around him, never through him, to the point that he is knocked out and misses the entire final battle. The failure at the box office of Big Trouble in Little China is what led John Carpenter back into the world of independent filmmaking, disillusioning him with mainstream Hollywood, where he would only come back for work-for-hire jobs. It is a shame as well that the movie put a pin in his big-budget career, because the film is one of the perfect summer blockbusters, feeling like a genre-blender at its best.
3) Halloween
Nick Castle wears the mask of The Shape in Halloween
1978’s Halloween is an important release in the Hollywood zeitgeist for various reasons, from it being Carpenter’s first box office success, to launching the career of Jamie Lee Curtis, or being a big factor in the boom of the slasher movie sub-genre into the 80s and 90s. The slasher film existed beforehand, with 1960’s Psycho, or the double release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Black Christmas in 1974, but the story of babysitter killer Michael Myers, who returns to Haddonfield after escaping a mental asylum to kill everyone who stands in his way, lit up the zeitgeist and proved the sub-genre could be a box office success. The final girl, the use of point-of-view shots of the killer, the chase sequence and the defining of sex as the cause of death in the feature would become staples of the genre and would define the entire Halloween franchise. To date, there are thirteen movies released in the franchise, with varied levels of involvement from series creator Carpenter, who essentially handed over the franchise after releasing the first feature.
The sequel’s script would be penned by the director, the third feature would move away from Michael to go through an anthology lens because of Carpenter’s insistence, and the director would return as producer and composer for Blumhouse’s requel trilogy, 2018’s Halloween, 2021’s Halloween Kills and 2022’s Halloween Ends. The slasher genre would follow the Halloween genre across the decades, with the initial boom coming from 1980’s Friday the 13th, which was a remake without the name of Halloween, to the genre being revived in the wake of 2018’s Halloween. This importance comes with a major reason; Carpenter’s initial Halloween feature is one of his very best. It is his very best score, with his most memorable motifs, and has two winning central performances by Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence. The film’s central villain is incredibly intimidating and eerie, a feeling that many slasher villains cannot convey, with the eerie sound of his breathing being felt across various sequences. The film’s final shots linger on empty spaces, leaving the film on a menacing note, retracing each location from the film and proving that nowhere is safe, the boogeyman could be anywhere.
2) Starman
Karen Allen and Jeff Bridges in Starman
What starts as a science-fiction adventure with a creepy alien morphing sequence, soon becomes an emotional drama that stands as the biggest outlier in Carpenter’s filmography. The film, starring Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen, follows an alien arriving to Earth in response to the invitation found on the Voyager 2 space probe. The alien takes the form of a cloned body of a grieving widow’s husband, as the widow and the clone must take on a cross-county road-trip to send him home and escape the government who is after him. The film has been theorised to have been put into production as a response to the success of Spielberg’s ET: The Extraterrestrial and picked up Carpenter after The Thing failed at the box office because of audience’s being more familiar with positive alien features off the back of that previously mentioned Spielberg venture. The film, which went through at least six different script drafts, one where the signature alien flew during sequences, feels like an outlier in a career which is characterized heavily by films which feel pessimistic in nature. The film is hopeful and warm, a love story which uses its central science-fiction narrative to wow and surprise rather than to make the audience uneasy, a scene where Bridges’ alien revives a deer that has been killed by a hunter is one such powerful moment.
It is a road movie, with each character the central leads meet across their journey feeling warm and sincere, and even the central governmental forces allow the characters to go at the end. Karen Allen’s character feels like Carpenter willing himself into the narrative, a nihilistic character who feels only pain from the death of her husband, whose nihilistic tendencies are proven wrong by the film’s genuine pleasantness. Bridges received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for the film, in a performance that feels so inhuman but never in a terrifying way, a perfect encapsulation of the fish out of water trope, he is charming in his eccentricities, and the central love story is moving and powerful. The movie ends on a terrific note, a loving final embrace leads Allen’s widow pregnant with a child who is both the child of her late husband and the alien she loved soon after, a moving final beat that encapsulates the tenderness of this film compared to each other Carpenter feature.
1) The Thing
Kurt Russell in The Thing
No other film could be placed first on a John Carpenter ranking, The Thing is just his magnum opus. Based on the 1938 novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr, which had already been adapted into the 1951 feature film, The Thing from Another World, the film is another Lovecraftian horror from the director. The film tells the story of a group of American researchers in Antarctica, who encounter an alien life-form that assimilates, then imitates organisms. The group is brought against each other, believing any one of them could be the signature ‘Thing’. The film is a perfect encapsulation of the feeling of paranoia and isolation, the viewer is along for the ride in trying to decide who is the Thing, the film leaving it up to the audience to catch up on the mystery as the characters figure it out together.
The setting of Antarctica also brings the isolation to the forefront, it is open plains of nothingness, encased in darkness which makes the characters cold and isolated, it is an eerie location which is used to its best effect. As mentioned previously, the film was a box office bomb when released in 1982 and was even slated by critics. It has since become a staple of the science-fiction genre, a creature feature with excellent creature effects by Rob Bottin, a film which is both disturbing and impressive in its use of practical effects. The eventual 2011 prequel, with the same name as its title, would try to compete with its CGI effects, but nothing can compare to the practical effects shown here, The Thing looks inhuman in each body modification it causes, but there’s always human elements to it, an eeriness to each form it takes. The film was initially given to director Tobe Hooper, and various other directors were considered after Carpenter briefly decided to leave the project to direct a passion project, which then fell through, but it is hard to see any other director helming the film. It’s Carpenter’s first big-budget feature, and cinematographer Dean Cudney’s as well. Only Carpenter could direct such a bleak film as this, playing the best to his nihilistic tendencies, as the situation feels hopeless and impossible, but balancing that with such well-realised characters.
Kurt Russell takes the lead once again, but with a character who is forced to lead, bouncing off such a wonderful supporting cast that is led by a wonderful performance by Keith David. When asked in an interview, Carpenter stated that the film is pro-human, in comparison to the original text’s pro-science exploration, or the initial film adaptation’s anti-science exploration. The film’s humanist approach to its storytelling has led to a series of discussions about the film’s thematic meaning, namely because of its creation during post-Cold War tendencies. The paranoia can be seen as a metaphor for the red scare at the time, with people not knowing who to trust in the wake of Communists being found across the country. The film is also exploring nuclear annihilation through mutually assured destruction in the wake of the Cold War, with the death of The Thing only being possible if both our lead characters die alongside it. However, the film’s end leads the film on a forever sinister note, a cliffhanger ending that only Carpenter knows the answer to, as both characters sit opposite each other not knowing if either or both are The Thing, a perfectly mysterious ending that leaves the audience thinking long after the film is finished.
Stephen King has made a long career as one of the most successful American horror authors of all time, crafting horrific stories from Carrie to Salem’s Lot, or from IT to Christine. However, the author has also stepped outside of that box with various novels of various other genres, from the crime thriller of Mr Mercedes, the fantasy story of Eyes of the Dragon, or the science-fiction narrative of 11/22/63. Dystopian narratives have an equal importance to the career of King, mostly published under the authors’ pseudonym, Richard Bachman. King wrote five novels under this pseudonym, with his 1981 novel, Roadwork, and 1982’s The Running Man, which will soon hit the big screen directed by Edgar Wright, falling under this category, but the most famous would be 1979’s The Long Walk.
The Long Walk serves as King’s first written novel, written during his freshman year at the University of Maine, but would not be released until well after King’s first published novel, Carrie in 1974. A film adaptation of the novel would be in development for years, with Night of the Living Dead-director George A. Romero being considered as director in 1988, and Frank Darabont, who was on a strong run of King adaptations after the release of 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption, 1999’s The Green Mile and 2007’s The Mist, was able to secure the rights to the novel in 2007. The project was finally put into active development under Lionsgate, with Francis Lawrence directing, announced in November 2023, and the film adaptation has finally been hit the screen.
Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson in The Long Walk
The Long Walk is set in a dystopian future ruled by the mysterious Major’s regime, where an annual event takes place where a group of youths must walk for miles until there is only one left. The event promises a wish and a large cash prize, as each contestant walks to win, and aims to not fall behind their pack or they will earn their ticket, or in other words, their death.
Dystopias and post-apocalyptic settings are the backbone of Francis Lawrence’s career, with only his second feature being the Will Smith-starring zombie feature, I am Legend. Though not directing the original, Lawrence would be the helmer of the Hunger Games franchise, directing 2013’s Catching Fire, 2014’s Mockingjay Part 1, 2015’s Mockingjay Part 2 and then 2023’s prequel film, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. His next feature will even be 2026’s The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. This long connection with the dystopian genre has made him the perfect choice to helm this adaptation, and Lawrence proves himself as the right choice throughout this feature. A relatively straightforward story, its essentially just one hundred minutes of walking and conversations between people, but Lawrence can breathe enough life and style into every shot that keeps the contained narrative continuously entertaining and intense. Frequent uses of beautiful long shots and tracking shots that showcase the scenery and landscapes, reminding the audience of the beauty of nature and the hope that comes from it in such a depressing narrative.
Charlie Plummer in The Long Walk
There’s a thrilling uphill sequence, as the camera tilts with the characters and the audience feel the pain and suffering. The film does not shy away from the violence, it is bloody and disgusting at times, with each kill bleak and depressing. Disorienting editing, shaky camera and a loss of audio are all used frequently to get a view into the character’s heads as they lose consciousness during the long walk, as a visual graphic showcases how miles they have walked. Jeremiah Fraites’ score also sells the terror at the centre of the plot, booming synths showcasing the meaningless of this event as the central characters face a threat that was made by their own society to cause them pain.
The tension of the film really comes from how much the film excels in making each contestant feel like a three-dimensional character, making the audience terrified for when each member falls. There are main characters clearly, but even the lesser characters, who go out early or are more in the background, have a scene or two to make them memorable, and make their deaths feel less like creating a kill count. Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson serve as the central relationship of the film, the uniting characters that bring all the themes into play and surround every other character becoming developed and nuanced. They represent two separate sides of the coin in responding to a dystopian future, Hoffman’s Ray is pessimistic and easily succumbing to the violent nature of life, and Jonsson’s Peter is gentler and kinder, believing in humanity, nature and the possibilities that come with freedom. It is an interesting dichotomy that the film plays with, as they both argue their points but come closer together because of their shared pain but differing worldviews. Jonsson proved himself as a powerful actor with Alien: Romulus and he continues to wow here, coming out with the most heartfelt and human performance of the entire cast.
Mark Hamill in The Long Walk
That is not to say, however, that the rest of the cast are anything to scoff at, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Joshua Odjick and Karate Kid-star Ben Wang all deliver memorable performances, with enough backstory and characterisation that their secondary roles do not ever feel secondary. Mark Hamill also slides perfectly into the role of the Major, he is in so little of the film that every scene feels completely memorable, as the film talks about him more than shows him, and everything that talk about makes him even more vile for when Hamill makes his presence known.
For fans of the novel, the film is an incredibly faithful rendition of the novel’s events, essentially just making changes to character’s backstories to make others hit more and remove the repetition of each character’s homelife. The source texts’ narrative is straightforward, so small changes are needed to make it more cinematic, but the series of events are the same, and the biggest changes do not come until the conclusion, which fits into the films various themes that are more present here than in the source.
The text features crowds following the walkers around the Long Walk, but this adaptation completely removes this, really hitting home the normalisation of violence and the commercialisation of violence when people can just sit at home and view. Pain comes as a necessity to the structure of this dystopia; the entire thing would fall apart without it and its that fact that drives the characters. The film is increasingly sombre, violent and depressing, but there is always a touch of humanity and hope through the characters’ humour and connection to one another, questioning what will succeed to the end, humanity or the governmental bodies that seek to crush that humanity.
Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson and Joshua Odjick in The Long Walk
In 2013, famed modern horror director, James Wan, released a film based on the cases of Ed and Lorraine Warren, famous paranormal investigators and authors focusing around the supernatural. Based on the case files of the Warrens, the same case films that inspired by the events of the Amityville franchise, The Conjuring was a massive success and would soon join the likes of Saw and Insidious as famous franchises that James Wan helped launch. Followed by a Wan-directed sequel in 2016, the franchise would blossom into a cultural juggernaut, with three Annabelle spinoff features, released in 2014, 2017 and 2019 respectively, two Nun spinoff features, released in 2018 and 2023, and a standalone film focused on Mexican folk lore character La Llorona, with The Curse of La Llorona releasing in 2019. The franchise has become immensely successful across the years, grossing a combined gross of $2.8 billion against a budget of $263 million, becoming the most influential horror franchise of the modern day after the end of Saw and Paranormal Activities’ tenure as box office king.
The expansion of the franchise has slowed down once entering the 2020s however, and the critical reaction to most of the films, namely the spinoffs, would become mixed and poor. Wan would leave the director’s chair for the third core entry in The Conjuring series, with director Michael Chaves, who helmed The Curse of La Llorona, taking the reins of the entire franchise, following up 2021’s The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It with 2023’s The Nun II. Both films did not fair as well critically as Wan’s time with the franchise, but Warner Bros seems to still be confident with Chaves being in the director’s chair. The final chapter is what is being advertised as Chaves’ next film, The Conjuring: Last Rites, even if it has also been stated as the potential end of the first era of The Conjuring Universe, with a supposed second phase in production.
Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson in The Conjuring: Last Rites
Based on the Smurl haunting case, where the family of Jack and Janet Smurl alleged a demon was inhabiting their home between 1974 and 1989 and was then published as a novel known as The Haunting, penned by the Smurl family, Ed and Lorraine Warren and Scranton newspaper writer Robert Curran. The film works as the supposed final case of Ed and Lorraine Warren, as things become personal when daughter, Judy Warren, and her fiancée become involved in a case that will potentially cost everything
As a finale to the series, Chaves plays the film safe, as essentially a greatest hit of both original Wan features. The previous entry, subtitled The Devil Made Me Do It, went in a different direction, subverting the haunted house formula to play out a narrative focused on possession and a central courtroom drama plot. It only makes sense to return the franchise back to its roots for the final entry, but it only works in returning to the roots if there are still enough fresh angles on the material to be mined. Here, Chaves is playing out the greatest hits of the franchise and giving out very little new, and it is hard not to compare the effectiveness of the scares between Chaves’ work and Wan’s. Wan is one of the most effective horror filmmakers of the modern era because of his distinctive style, his moody colour palettes, his ability to blend genres between horror and drama, and his fast-paced editing gives the movie rhythm and speed.
Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson in The Conjuring: Last Rites
Chaves is a capable director, but he just cannot deliver a direction as distinct and compelling as Wan’s, his work looks too clean for trying to match the vision of Wan, and his scares just rely on jumps. The narrative even just acts as a remake of the events of Wan’s second Conjuring feature, mixing a storyline focused on the Warrens with a family in terror by a demon, a demon which is personally invested in drawing the Warrens out, as the narratives converge. Last Rites has the exact same narrative and then borrows nearly every scare from the first feature to a lesser effect, proving maybe that it was right to end here, when there is so little originality left.
Wan’s signature genre blend is not handled the same here either, the film jumps back and forth between the signature haunted house events, as the family is plagued by a demon, while switching back over to following the Warrens and their daughter, as the film attempts to wrap up character arcs. The focus is clearly on the Warren’s storyline, so the hauntings suffer from a lack of attention, with so little time given to it that the audience will never care for the family in danger or feel genuinely scared when the events are fast-tracked heavily to get to the conclusion. The Warrens’ narrative is easily the best part of the family, and they continue to be the height of this franchise, no matter what someone may think of their real-world personas. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga are both wonderful here, one of the most perfect casting duos in horror history, as they bounce off each other so perfectly. It is great to see them get so much focus, but when it takes an hour and ten minutes of a two-hour film for them to get involved in the central haunting, it’s clear that your film has some severe pacing problems.
The film instead has a clear focus on potentially backdooring a continuation by propping up the Warren’s daughter as the new central character. Mia Tomlinson portrays an older version of Judy Warren, who was portrayed previously by Sterling Jerins in the other three Conjuring features and McKenna Grace in Annabelle Comes Home, who acts as the film’s protagonist, as she comes to terms with her abilities and having the mantle passed down to her. Ben Hardy also stars as Judy’s fiancée, Tony, who feels a lot less developed compared to Judy, but is clearly set up as a new protagonist moving forward. It’s a passing of the torch, and the future does not look as promising without Farmiga and Wilson.
Madison Lawlor and Orion Smith in The Conjuring: Last Rites
As a finale as well, the film just fails to wrap everything up. It feels more like a middle chapter of an ongoing franchise, where much of the film is still left open-ended enough to warrant a continuation, like the studio was unsure whether to commit to the finale lens if the film is successful enough. The marketing has teased a loss or sacrifice that caused this to be the final case for the Warrens, but that seems to be more of a marketing ploy rather than to be relevant to the text’s content.
With all this, the film plays out its events incredibly safe, with a predictable narrative that does not offend, shock or even leave an audience in awe, only leaving an audience whelmed. It reads as a film that exists to keep a franchise alive that makes an alarming amount of money for the studio, with very little passion behind the camera. Michael Chaves is a perfectly okay director, but it fails at being scary or balancing the elements that have made the previous films in the franchise so successful. The central performances are strong but are lost in a film which is attempting to conclude a saga, set up new instalments and play out the greatest hits all at the same time. It is the last breath of a franchise that really should have ended when Wan departed from the saga, and the film fails to explain its existence at large.
Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson in The Conjuring: Last Rites
Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger in the pages of Detective Comics #27 in 1939, Batman has become a pop-culture phenomenon that has transcended the comic book page. The story of Bruce Wayne, a man shaped by the death of his parents in his pursuit of costumed crimefighting on the streets of Gotham, has become an iconic narrative that has lit up the cinema screen repeatedly. Initially making his live action debut in a pair of serial features in 1943 and 1949 respectively, played by Lewis Wilson in Batman and then Robert Lowery in Batman and Robin, the character would return to the big screen and the small screen at the same time in 1966. Adam West played the titular character in Batman: The Movie, and the three season show that ran between 1966 and 1968.
In the years since, the character has been played by Val Kilmer in 1995’s Batman Forever, George Clooney in 1997’s Batman and Robin, Christian Bale in The Dark Knight Trilogy, Ben Affleck across the DC Extended Universe series of films and Robert Pattinson in 2022’s The Batman. The character has also lit up the cinema screen in the animation field, appearing in the Lego Movie, Lego Batman Movie and Lego Movie 2, voiced by Will Arnett, and iconic voice actor Kevin Conroy in 1993’s Mask of the Phantasm, based on Batman: The Animated Series, and 2016’s The Killing Joke, based on the graphic novel of the same name.
Adam West as Batman
Wide varieties of the character have appeared on the big screen across the years, based on differing takes on the character, from the comedic takes in West’s, Kilmer’s and Clooney’s take on the character, to the more grounded and serious takes on the character from Bale, Affleck and Pattinson. This latter takes on the iconic comic book character would not exist however without the release of easily the most influential take on the character, Tim Burton’s Batman, released in 1989. Starring Michael Keaton in the titular role, the film moved the needle in the public perception of the Dark Knight and launched the career of one of the most influential directors of the modern day. 1989’s Batman follows the early days of the caped crusader, inspired by the comics, The Dark Knight Returns and Year One by Frank Miller, and Alan Moore and Brian Bollard’s The Killing Joke, as the hero comes into conflict with his archnemesis, The Joker, played by Jack Nicholson.
Going into the release of Burton’s take on the Batman, the public perception of the character was shaped heavily by the television series that predated it in the 60s. The Adam West-starring show was based on the current era of the hero who had moved away from his darker routes and became more involved in sci-fi adventures, with his adventures becoming pulpier and more comedic. West’s show followed suit by focusing on the goofier side of the character, emphasising the costumed criminals, the gadgets, the relationship between Batman and his sidekick, Robin, played by Burt Ward, and going full forth with dance numbers, silly action and action balloons, The comics would soon jump back into serious adventures, with the release of graphic novels like The Dark Knight Returns and Year One, but the wider media stayed with the goofier side of the character, public perception continuing to be shaped by animated series like The New Adventures of Batman and Super Friends. The promise with Burton’s take on the character would be to return the character to his roots, the darker stories that Bob Kane and Bill Finger focused on when the character was first published would be focused upon again.
Tim Burton behind the scenes with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson
Tim Burton got the job directing the feature after the success of Beetlejuice in 1988 and was most well-known for Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, a 1985 big budget comedy which served as the director’s directorial debut. Fan expectation was at a all time low when both director and star were announced for the film, with Keaton, at the time, being most well-known for his comedy roles, with fans clearly having flashbacks to the goofier take on the character that had predominated the culture zeitgeist in the last decade. The superhero genre had also recently returned to the world of camp and unpopularity, with Christopher Reeves’ tenure as Superman coming to an end, with the release of the critically panned Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Various versions of the Batman script were penned after the release of the initial Superman feature, with Warner Bros Pictures taking on the role of producers for the project.
Directors like Ivan Reitman, Joe Dante and Wes Craven were approached and thought of to helm the project, with a script being used by writer Tom Mankiewicz, which was rewritten at least 9 times during early production. Once Burton came on board the project, he hired comic book fan, Sam Hamm, to rewrite the script, believing the film to be too campy, and to trim the excessive amount of characters included in the various drafts, with characters like Silver St. Cloud, Dick Grayson, who would become Robin, and Rupert Thorne being removed from the script.
A dark route is what the film went for, initiating a new look and feel for Gotham City, one that emphasised the cities Gothic look, and formed a connection to the look of German Expressionist features. Famous for films like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the movement was formed after the first World War, after the German government banned the release of foreign films in their film markets. The movement emphasised artist’s inner emotions and feelings over trying to match any sort of reality, rejecting cinematic realism with the movement highly influencing the future of gothic cinema. Sets were hyper expressive, made to look unnatural and not realistic, and that matches Gotham City in Burton’s feature, a city marked by gothic backdrops, contained in overwhelming darkness, but still home to skyscrapers and architecturally absurd buildings that create a contrast between the streets and the skyline. The German Expressionist movement would continue to be an influence on Burton throughout his career, notably in films like Sleepy Hollow in 1999, Edward Scissorhands in 1990, and Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in 2007.
Michael Keaton’s casting was controversial, but it is hard to argue against how wrong initial reactions to that casting would be. Keaton plays the version of Batman that the fans needed at the time, a dark and brooding hero, who creates an interesting dichotomy when compared to playboy Bruce Wayne. Like Reeve in his Superman outings, Keaton plays both characters differently but still emphasises a connection between the two whenever the perfectly formed mask of Bruce comes falling off. A controversial aspect of the character comes from his willingness to kill, he almost seems to love it in various sequences, with the character being famous to comic book fans as a willing unable to kill. However, if the film is wanting to strike back to the early days of the hero, basing itself off returning to the roots of Bob Kane and Bill Finger, then it is still accurate. The hero did indeed kill in his first appearances, brandishing a gun as a weapon of use. This killing nature of the character seems to be one that has stuck with most cinematic versions of the character, with only Clooney and Pattinson seeming to be the only ones unwilling to take a life.
Jack Nicholson and Michael Keaton behind the scenes of Batman
The Joker debuted in the comics in 1940, initially designed as a one-off villain who would be killed in his debut in Batman #1. The character would soon become the most iconic villain in the rogue’s gallery of The Batman, known as his archnemesis. The character was initially depicted as a prankster character, one who was in line with the comedic side of the brand and soon turned into one more aligned with Nicholson’s depiction of the character, as a gangster costumed criminal. Years after the release of the 1989 film, the character would revert to a serial killer and frequently moves between each depiction of the character. Nicholson plays the character with a level of tension, he is scary but also funny, blending the world of the prankster and the gangster together perfectly. Nicholson accepted the role under strict guidelines, which gave him top billing, a portion of the film’s earnings and his own shooting schedule. The film would be controversial for some variations from the established Joker lore, with the film giving the character a new origin and identity.
Based on the Killing Joke graphic novel, the film depicts his vat of acid transformation, but removes his connection to the Red Hood Gang, in favour of making him the murderer of the Waynes, a role which was given to character Joe Chill in the comics. This change was controversial but adds a close connection to villain and hero for the film, exploring the trauma of Bruce Wayne in a way no other outside media had been able to yet. The inclusion of his name, Jack Napier, was an original idea for the film, and would be a name that would be reused across various other adaptations. Various other characters would appear across the film’s runtime from the comics, notably Vicki Vale, who debuted in the comics for Batman #49 during 1948, as the character’s love interest, who shared a lot in common with Lois Lane. Bruce’s butler, Alfred would also play a large role, played by Michael Gough, who would play the character four times consecutively until Batman and Robin, with the character debuting in the 1940 Batman serial. Billy Dee Williams also appears as Harvey Dent, seeding the promise of sequels with him becoming costumed criminal Two Face, which would eventually happen, but without Williams. The character debuted in the comics in Detective Comics #66 in 1942.
Michael Gough and Michael Keaton in Batman
The success of the feature cannot be understated, with the year being marked by a ‘Batmania’, where over $750 million dollars of merchandise being sold about the character in response to the feature. The film grossed $411.6 million against a $48 million budget, marking a new franchise and the return of the superhero feature. A sequel was guaranteed, with Batman Returns debuting in cinemas in 1992. The film doubled down on the dark gothic atmosphere, a choice that alienated child-friendly audiences, with the film reflecting the character’s new mature focus. The film featured the debut of two classic Batman villains, with The Penguin, first appearing in Detective Comics #58 in 1941 and played by Danny DeVito here, and Catwoman, first appearing in Batman #1 in 1940, being the newest villains that Batman would have to face. The film was made with a higher level of control from Burton, with the film gaining a notable pushback from audiences after being marketed similarly to the previous film, falsely marketing a more sexual and violent feature as a child-friendly feature. The film was still a success at the box office, breaking various records, but fell short of the previous feature’s gross, only making $266.8 million.
Though, not as successful, the film would be equally as important to the character, with the series, Batman: The Animated Series being made off the back of the success of both features. The series, which would be followed by various other animated shows in the same universe featuring DC Comics characters, would become the posterchild for the popularity of the character, and the blueprint for how to adapt a comic character into animation. Danny Elfman’s fantastic score for Batman and Batman Returns would also live long past these two features, becoming known as essentially the score for the character, returning in use in Batman: The Animated Series, the Lego Batman games and 2017’s Justice League.
Michelle Pfeiffer and Danny DeVito as Catwoman and Penguin in Batman Returns
Batman’s cinematic history has forever relied upon reacting to the previous iteration of the character, as come the 2000s, Batman was once again a joke in the public consciousness after Batman Forever and Batman and Robin returned to the campy nature of the character. The negative perception to Batman Returns led to Joel Schumacher taking the director’s chair, with two films that acted as sequels, just without the main star returning, with the appearances of new Batman villains to the big screen, notably Two Face, The Riddler, Poison Ivy, Mr Freeze and Bane. Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy would return the character back to his gritty and dark roots, and Matt Reeves’ The Batman would act as a reaction to the negative perception of Ben Affleck’s tenure as The Dark Knight in 2016’s Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice League and 2017’s Justice League.
Batman commonly moves between perceptions, from goofy to serious, but that former version is always going to be rooted in Keaton and Burton’s take on the character. Forever the character is going to be connected to his gothic depictions, and the character proves his popularity in this form, with Keaton returning as the character in 2023’s The Flash.
Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson face off in Batman
Director Darren Aronofsky is presumably most well-known for his use of psychological realism, most of his films falling under the psychological drama category, creating various features that feel both disturbing and unpleasant to watch at the same time. He never falls into creating films that are unwatchable, but his films are meant to be dark and psychologically complex, with films like 2000’s Requiem for a Dream, a film about four drug addicts who fall into a world of delusion. 2010’s Black Swan falls into the psychological horror category, following the pursuit of a woman into insanity as she attempts everything possible to become cast in a role that will change her life when trying to pursue. 2017’s Mother! continued the director’s pursuit of the psychological horror, as he produces a film which mixed audiences when first released, crafting a confusing feature following a woman’s life being thrown into disarray when a new couple arrive at her door, a narrative that quickly becomes convoluted and requires multiple viewings to completely grasp.
His most recent feature, 2022’s The Whale, based on Samuel D. Hunter’s play of the same name, begins as a drama of a man trying to reconnect with his daughter, but the final days of his life begin to turn it into something more surreal and shocking. Saying then, that the director’s newest release, 2025’s Caught Stealing, sticks out from his filmography is an understatement. In a film which plays out with so much energy as a hybrid between a dark comedy and a thriller, the film subverts the director’s typical work in favour of resembling something between a Martin Scorsese film or a film by the Coen brothers.
Based on the film’s screenwriter’s novel of the same name, which is the first of a trilogy focused on protagonist Henry Thompson, followed by Six Bad Things and A Dangerous Man, Caught Stealing follows a former baseball player who unwittingly becomes involved in the seedy underbelly of New York. After looking after his next-door neighbour’s cat, Austin Butler’s Henry Thompson must fend for his life when being hunted by various gangs and escape from his own trauma.
Austin Butler and Zoe Kravitz in Caught Stealing
The Coen Brothers are most well-known for their crime-comedy features, which bring together many characters with eccentric personalities, with films like 1996’s Fargo or 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou, falling into this category. These features seem to be a big point of inspiration for Caught Stealing, alongside Scorsese’s dark comedy After Hours. The 1985 cult classic stood apart from Scorsese’s filmography as a hilarious film featuring one man’s pursuit of trying to get home across New York after a date goes array, his night only getting worse as he meets various peculiar characters. You could also even say that Caught Stealing is inspired by the works of Quentin Tarantino, who makes the use of lengthy dialogue exchanges between characters, whose personalities are usually routed in what popular culture they consume, namely in features like 1994’s Pulp Fiction, 2003 and 2004’s Kill Bill: Volume I and Volume II and 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. That is not that Caught Stealing is derivative however, its clearly Aronofsky trying something different, and it completely works. There is enough personality behind the camera that gives the film a feel that resembles these other director’s features, but also still feels like an Aronofsky feature.
Austin Butler has been having a wonderful couple of years after his breakthrough performance in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis in 2022, the former Nickelodeon and Disney Channel star has been working frequently, appearing in features like Dune: Part Two and this year’s Eddington. Caught Stealing is the first time since Elvis that the actor has led a cast of this size, and he handles that perfectly, he shines on screen as close to the perfect leading man as possible. Paired with flashbacks that show the darker moments of the film’s narrative and the personal pain that protagonist Henry Thompson must go through, Butler breathes a sense of life into a pained character who is designed to be the ultimate underdog. He is designed to be relatable, the entire narrative taking place across a couple of days, clearly inspired by the small period of events from After Hours, and Butler matches that velocity of events with a high-energy performance.
Austin Butler, Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber in Caught Stealing
His performance holds tight a ship of various other fun performances that populate the film, with different amounts of importance and screen-time. Zoe Kravitz plays the romantic lead, and shares undeniable chemistry with Butler, and a central twist in the narrative leaves her one of the most memorable characters. Matt Smith, who plays Russ Binder, Thompsons’ next-door neighbour, is in very little of the film but is easily one of the highlights for the comedic side of the film. The actor, who is mostly known for being one of the various Doctors on BBC series Doctor Who, is easily playing against type here as a punk-rock criminal who’s the true driver of the plot. Regina King is memorable as Detective Elise Roman, and Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber deliver two of the most chilling performances of the 2025 film season. Both can be funny and terrifying at the same time, the movie humanising and dehumanising them at the same time, matching the unpredictability that the movie is striving for in its narrative.
The film works best when it is keeping true to its crime thriller routes, delivering a central narrative with so many twists and turns that it is hard to see coming, and a narrative that feels completely full-circle and earned in the end. Aronofsky’s direction would not make you feel that he is out of his comfort zone, he’s directing this film with so much energy and passion that sets it apart from his more contained drama directions. It still has that grim and gritty dark colour palette but paired with a fast-cutting edit by Andrew Weisblum, gives the film a fast-paced rhythm that you don’t see much anymore in mainstream Hollywood features. The film’s score, written by Rob Simonsen and recorded by British post-punk band Idles, gives the film a rebel feels, a rocky pulp to it that keeps it moving and keeps the excellent chase sequences fun and riveting. If director Darren Aronofsky was attempting to make his own take on a Coen Brothers film, he has exceeded in making it seem very much his own feature, and certainly on par with some of their works
Martin Scorsese is one of the most important filmmakers to come out of Hollywood, a pioneer who came out of the New Hollywood movement in the 1960s, releasing 26 different films which has ranged a career spanning between 1967 to the modern day. The director has also created various documentaries, and here we will be ranking his core 26 features, which are ranked as follows:
26) Boxcar Bertha
Barbara Hershey in Boxcar Bertha
Scorsese’s second feature film, Boxcar Bertha feels like a proof of concept of the future of the director’s career in the crime genre. The film was offered to Scorsese after producer Roger Corman had seen his previous feature and requested him to make a sequel his exploitation feature, Bloody Mama. This would soon be reworked into an adaptation of Ben Lewis Reitman’s 1937 novel, Sister of the Road, which follows the titular character as she begins a career in bank and train robberies after becoming orphaned after the death of her father. A low budget feature, there feels like a lack of creative freedom from Scorsese, as the lower budget and the overwhelming sense of exploitation takes over an incredibly simple narrative. Corman was well-known for his cheap to make and produce low-budget features, commonly making the use of sex and violence as a pull for both filmgoers and VHS pullers. Scorsese would have more successful attempts at both the crime genre and the western genre, which knock this movie down his filmography
25) Kundun
Gyurme Tethong in Kundun
The first of three religious features that will appear on this list, Kundun differs from the two other focus features because of its focus on a religious figure outside of Christianity. The film tells the life of the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, an exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, being based on the writings of the famous figure. The film was a massive political concern for distributor Disney, when being released, as the Chinese government threatened to block Disney from accessing the Chinese film market, leading to the distributor to limit the distribution of the film. The director would become banned from ever entering China, a ban which would eventually be lifted by 2015, when the director attended the premiere of his short film, The Audition, in Macau.
Kundun is a grand feature for director Martin Scorsese, ambitious in its storytelling as a film epic, and though breathtaking in its visuals by cinematographer Roger Deakins, the film’s narrative core falls flat. There is very little attention to helping the audience become closer to the person at the heart of the narrative, walking out of the feature, an audience member will still know very little about how the Dalai Lama was as a person. A two hour plus film epic can only be held together if the central performances are strong, and the Chinese actors clearly struggle acting out of their native language, rendering a lot of the film tonally dull, with wooden performances hampering a technically superb feature
24) Gangs of New York
Daniel Dey Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio in Gangs of New York
One of Scorsese’s features that was in the pipeline the longest, the director originally becoming interested in directing the feature in his early career, before the release of either Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. The director would then acquire the screen rights to Herbert Asbury’s novel, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld, in 1979, but it would take twenty years for his film adaptation to finally come to life. Starring a broad ensemble cast which includes the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cameron Diaz, Brendan Gleeson and Liam Neeson, the film follows the Catholic-Protestant feud between 1862 and 1863, just as an Irish immigrant group is protesting forced conscription during the Civil War. The film’s glaring problem comes from the lacking Irish accents from most of the cast, failing to feel authentic and true to the time when the film’s set dressing and script holds up such an authentic look at the period. Diaz sees herself being vastly miscast, with her storyline holding the film down from being at all possible to being one of Scorsese’s greatest films. The film tackles may variously themes and characters, but in such an ambitious way that leaves many of its feeling empty, with the film deciding to tackle everything to a minimal effect, compared to a minute amount to a wider effect. Daniel Day-Lewis holds the film together, holding as one of his strongest performances in a vast and creative career
23) Who’s That Knocking at My Door
Harvey Keitel and Zina Bethune in Who’s That Knocking At My Door
A nominee at the 1967 Chicago Film Festival, Scorsese got his start as a director with the release of Who’s That Knocking at My Door. Starring Harvey Keitel, in one of his first collaborations with the director, the film follows the pull between sex and a free-spirited life and the connection to religion. This narrative comes forth from the character of JR, as he struggles to accept the fact that his romantic interest, played by Zina Bethune, has been raped. Based heavily in location on Scorsese and Keitel’s youth as Italian Americans, the film holds a level of authenticity to its locations, and its black-and-white photography gives it a very down-to-earth and documentary feel. The film roots a connection in Scorsese’s films through his exploration into religion, with the film capturing the void between the free-spirited life of sex and violence and how frowned upon that is in a world of faith and religion. Like Boxcar Bertha, a lot of the themes lack the punch that would come of Scorsese’s career, with a lot of the themes becoming even more prevalent in films like Mean Streets, which essentially acts as an improved version of this very film
22) New York, New York
Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli in New York, New York
In the DVD introduction to the film New York, New York, Martin Scorsese states that his intentions for the film were to make it into a homage to the musicals of Classic Hollywood that he grew up with, and to finally break away from the gritty realism that he was well known for. This break away from the norm has led to the film being mixed in reception, becoming a box office bomb when it was released against the competition of Rocky in 1977. It stands out as an outlier in Scorsese’s filmography, the artificial sets, bright colours and the music numbers stand out when compared to the realistic depictions of religious turmoil and the exploration into the mafia that the director is known for. However, that is where the film also fails at points, as Scorsese seems to still want both sides of the coin. Tonal incongruities exist across the film, as the film seems to almost spoof or critique the musical rather than pay homage to it. Every scene with powerful musical numbers is matched with a tonally different scene of tension-inducing fights between stars Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli. It is a tonally confused film, which delivers on the promise of a Martin Scorsese musical, at least the film’s main single, titled the same as the movie, would become a worldwide hit
21) Mean Streets
Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro in Mean Streets
The first collaboration between Scorsese and Robert De Niro, who was introduced to the director through mutual friend Harvey Keitel, Mean Streets is the blueprint for the director’s most famous films to come, crime-mafia features. Being Scorsese’s first critical and commercial success, the film follows Keitel’s Charlie Cappa, who works as a gangster in Little Italy, Manhattan, as he attempts to keep the peace between his fellow gangsters and his psychotic childhood best friend, De Niro’s ‘Johnny Boy’ Civello. As a follow-up to Boxcar Bertha, the film sees Scorsese returning to his roots featuring characters and settings that he recognised from his childhood, making a movie personal to him rather than a movie designed by Roger Corman.
Corman originally wanted involvement in the feature but only requested for the film to be a blaxploitation feature if he would back the film with funding, but the director would soon find other ways to fund the feature when being introduced to the road manager for The Band, Jonathan T. Taplin. As mentioned previously, the film almost acts as an improved version of Who’s That Knocking at My Door, as Charlie seeks to stay true to his religious beliefs as a low-level gangster, as he wishes to cause harm to no one, but also continues in his sexual relationship with Civello’s cousin, Teresa. It acts as a more developed version of the director’s first feature, with a more compelling side to it as a gangster feature, and shows the continued development of the director’s filmmaking skills
20) The Age of Innocence
Daniel Dey Lewis and Winona Ryder in The Age of Innocence
Adapted twice already, as a silent film in 1924 and once again in 1934, Scorsese would direct his own film adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel The Age of Innocence in 1993. Both film and novel follow the life of Newland Archer, played by Daniel Dey Lewis, who finds himself caught in a love triangle between two women, the conformist and safe May Welland, played by Winona Ryder, and the striking and unconventional Countess Ellen Olenska, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. Unlike New York, New York, which stands out from Scorsese’s filmography as a tonally confused collaboration between the Hollywood musical and Scorsese’s original drama features, The Age of Innocence acts as straight-up romantic-historical drama, with Scorsese allowing the narrative to form itself away from his sensibilities. The film stands apart because of its authenticity to the genre, which gave the film the Academy Award for Best Costume Design, as Dey Lewis gives an incredible performance among a talented cast, as the film delivers on the novel’s sad look at love, and the powerful nature of need and the romanticism of wanting more. The film’s exploration into class, and the forbidden nature of love in such a high society, marks a connection to Scorsese’s earliest works around sex and the society you are birthed in
19) Cape Fear
Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte in Cape Fear
Cape Fear, a 1991 remake of the 1962 film of the same name, proved that Scorsese could make an easily accessible and commercial thriller, which combined his filmic characteristics with the crowd-pleasing fun you would expect from the genre. Originally conceived as a film through Amblin Entertainment, and to be directed by Steven Spielberg, Spielberg and Scorsese swapped projects once Scorsese realised, he had little drive to tell the story of what would become Schindler’s List. Starring Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte in the main roles, the film, which is also based on the 1957 novel, The Executioners by John D. MacDonald, follows a convicted rapist, played by De Niro, who seeks revenge on a former public defender who he blames for his imprisonment. Using his new knowledge of the legal system, De Niro’s Max Cady tracks down the man who caused his downfall, played by Nick Nolte, and attempts to terrorise the man and his family.
Through this pursuit of the man’s family, the film draws upon the continued narrative thread of sexual development and sexual violence in a world with laws and rules, with Cady first being shown as an evil man when he rapes Nick Nolte’s Samuel Bowden’s flirtatious friend, who seems to be close to becoming an affair. Cady also impersonates Bowden’s daughter’s teacher and attempts to seduce her, going as far as to kiss her, marking a connection between violence and sex in the film, with various of the sexual acts in the film coming from the villain. Robert De Niro plays the character with so much charisma but also with clear venom, levelling up to a pure camp-filled performance in the closure, as the film goes for a clear Hollywood ending, unlike Scorsese’s usual efforts. A faithful remake of a Hollywood classic, which feels unlike Scorsese outside of his trademark topics thrown into the script, the film would go on to be marked as Scorsese’s first 100-million-dollar grosser at the box office, showcasing Scorsese’s talents for commercial hits.
18) The Aviator
Leonardo DiCaprio in The Aviator
A film project focusing on the life of Howard Hughes had been in the works across various Hollywood studios through the years before The Aviator’s release in 2004. Famous directors like Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, Christopher Nolan and Michael Mann were involved in film adaptations at various times, with stars like Johnny Depp, John Travolta and Nicholas Cage attached as well, but it was with Mann’s exit that Scorsese jumped onto the project. Based on the 1993 novel Howard Hughes: The Secret Life by Charles Higham, the film follows the life of aviation pioneer and director of the 1930’s war epic, Hell’s Angels, Howard Hughes. The film follows his life in the period between 1927 to 1947, during which the director had to juggle his aviation career, film career and his battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder. One of Scorsese’s most ambitious features, releasing with a 100-million-dollar budget, the film is highly entertaining, if not a little disjointed in the amount of content it needs to explore in Hughes’ life. It falls into the traps of many biopics, focusing on too much in such a large period, that at times elements feel very undercooked, but the film looks excellent. Cinematographer Robert Richardson breathes life into breathtaking flight sequences, as Leonardo DiCaprio gives a soul-crushing performance in various intimate moments, even if co-star Cate Blanchett clearly steals the show. Proved even more, by the fact, that she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for the role
17) Shutter Island
Mark Ruffalo and Leonardo DiCaprio in Shutter Island
Shutter Island is a simple story told in an engaging way with various stylistic quirks that make up for its narrative simplicity. It could easily be seen as another Cape Fear, Scorsese taking on a commercial thriller but involving enough of his own creative intent to make it something worth seeing. The film blends so many genres that matches the confusing nature of its narrative, making the use of unreliable narrators to it’s very best to make the movie incredibly rewatchable once you know the central twist. The film’s a neo-noir feature, with a detective narrative mixed in with supernatural and fantasy elements in the mystery, while the characters go through a psychological thriller, blending a film that both resembles the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Se7en.
Based on the 2003 novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane, the film follows a Deputy Marshall, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who comes to the titled Shutter Island to investigate a psychiatric facility after one of the patients goes missing. DiCaprio stars alongside other Hollywood giants like Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams and Max Von Sydow, as they deliver thrilling performances that give the film its aura of mystery and horror, forever unknowing who to trust as the film thrusts you into DiCaprio’s character’s shoes. Similar in a sense to Alfred Hitchcock films like Vertigo, it’s a mystery where the audience’s involvement in figuring out the mystery and feeling the mood of the location is the most important, and the film delivers exceptionally as so, and was successful enough commercially to become Scorsese’s second highest grossing film at the box office
16) Hugo
Chloe Grace Moretz and Asa Butterfield in Hugo
1902’s A Trip to The Moon and 1904’s The Impossible Voyage may be two of the most important films ever made, films created by legendary French silent film director George Melies. Melies is an important director in his ground-breaking use of special effects in his fantasy and science-fiction features that would soon inspire the rest of the filmmaking world to follow, with the director pioneering the use of such important film techniques such as dissolves and time-lapse photography. Come 2011, Scorsese would release a rare film for the director, a feature aimed at the younger generation with connection to the filmmaking past, a film designed as a family picture. Though Hugo would disappoint at the box office, grossing only $185 million on an estimated $150 million dollar budget, it remains an interesting outlier in Scorsese’s filmography.
Based on Brian Selznick’s 2007 book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the film tells the story of a boy who lives alone in a railway station in Paris, growing up in the 1930s. Soon, the boy becomes pulled into an adventure focused on his late father’s automaton and the filmmaker George Melies. This film is Scorsese’s film about the magic of cinema, in a similar way that The Fabelmans is for Spielberg, it’s a movie that connects itself to the passion Scorsese has for the medium and the medium’s history, and that passion shines through, Wonderful sets fill the screen, recreated in an attempt to be historically accurate to the director’s life, and the film is brimming with a sense of wonder and excitement that is needed for a family feature. Sacha Baron Cohen delivers a memorable comedic performance, and the 3D work gives the film a wonderful sense of child-like mystery
15) The Color of Money
Tom Cruise and Paul Newman in The Colour of Money
Scorsese’s only sequel across his filmography, The Color of Money serves as a sequel to the beloved Hollywood classic, The Hustler, released in 1961. Both films are based on novels of the same name by writer Walter Tevis, with The Color of Money released as the author’s final novel, dying in 1984. Both film and novel follow the return of ‘Fast Eddie’ Felson, portrayed by Paul Newman, as he trains a protégé in Vincent Lauria, portrayed by Tom Cruise, as the two, and Lauria’s girlfriend, attempt to hustle various pool halls until they eventually make their way to a nine-ball tournament in Atlantic City. The film stands strong as proof of Scorsese’s brilliant ability to breathe life into what could be generic genre cinema, as he makes the sports-drama so entertaining and thrilling.
It is hard to match up to the original feature that this film follows, with one of the major criticisms that this film faced in the press being that is not as good as The Hustler, but it can easily stand on its own. Newman delivers an engaging performance, that earned him the Oscar for Best Leading Actor at that years’ ceremony, and the actor bounces off Cruise well. The brewing respect and rivalry that builds between the two is delivered perfectly by both actors and through the undeniability powerful script by Richard Price, as the film hinges on this central dynamic. Scorsese manages to also breathe new life into pool on film that hadn’t been seen since the original film, with the dynamic camera work leaving the drama-based moments and the sports focused movies feeling as dramatic as one another
14) Killers of the Flower Moon
Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of The Flower Moon
The newest film released by the titanic director, Killers of the Flower Moon, was an Apple TV+ collaboration for the director, releasing both on the streamer and for a short while in cinemas. Based on the non-fiction novel of the same name, subtitled The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, the film can be described as an anti-Western, or a revisionist Western. The typical Western believed in the traditional battle between good and evil, simplistically boiling down the cowboy into a traditional hero, and rooting itself in the American Dream. By 1968, once the Hays Code restrictions were relaxed, the genre became more open to less traditional depictions of the cowboy, subverting the romantic outlook of the West and the American Dream. Killers of the Flower Moon continues this look into the American West, following a series of murders of Osage Native members, after oil was discovered on their land.
The 206-minute-long epic showcase the evil of the American hero, as they attempt to marry the Osage members for their wealth, led by Robert De Niro’s William King Hale. Unlike the novel, which displays a weighted series of events, focusing on both the Osage members and the FBI investigation, Scorsese’s film adaptation displays the troubles of the Osage members specifically, and the horrors that leads Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro deal on those members. The film is rooted in the corruption of greed, as Scorsese does for the Western which he had already done for the neo-noir, the musical and the thriller, depicting a typical genre through his own revisionist tendencies, a realistic outlook on Hollywood’s romanticised version of events. A powerful feature, the film was nominated for ten Academy Awards, but sadly did not receive any wins, though the Award season was marked by frequent wins for breakout star Lily Gladstone, who won the Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actress. The film showcased the ability for Scorsese to still be relevant in the modern day, crafting a superb feature which shone light on an important story
13) The Wolf of Wall Street
Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street
Scorsese’s biggest commercial success, The Wolf of Wall Street drew in a $407 million dollar gross during its theatrical run. The film was based on Jordan Belfort’s 2007 memoir, as it recounts his career as a stockbroker and how his firm, Stratton Oakmont, engaged in fraud on Wall Street, eventually leading to his downfall. The film was met on release with both widespread successes critically and commercially, but a level of criticism that was never displayed at a Scorsese feature before. Its depiction of its lead character seems to display a level of moral ambiguity, being seen as almost glorifying these horrendous actions, and its depiction of graphic sexual content, extreme profanity, hard drug use and the use of animals in production, lead to various criticism.
What seems to be lacking in initial professional criticism of the film is its satirical nature, DiCaprio’s Belfort seems cool and collected, the film depicting the fun and games that came with the job, but the film ends with him being caught and losing everything. His relationship with Margot Robbie’s Naomi seems to infantilize the character, as he is stripped of all identity at both his job and at home, as she takes everything and even takes control of the relationship sexually. Like films like American Psycho, the film builds to a reveal that its character is ridiculous and not meant to be pitied, the film just needs to get though the glorification of the character’s actions to get to the actual reveal. The Wolf of Wall Street is a brilliant depiction of greed and corruption, brought together by one of Leonardo DiCaprio’s strongest performances
12) The King of Comedy
Robert De Niro in The King of Comedy
The King of Comedy continues to showcase Scorsese’s knack for crafting features around both unreliable narratives and morally confused individuals. One of Scorsese’s most uncomfortable films, and it is not even part of the horror genre, the film follows an aspiring stand-up comedian who is willing to do anything to make it big, as he becomes obsessed with a successful comedian who he met once by chance. Robert De Niro plays the central character, Rubert Pupkin, in one of his finest performances with Scorsese’ direction, portraying a character who is both sympathetic and terrifying at the same time. The film makes you feel uneasy with being the shoes of its lead, unwilling to trust his turn of events, as the film relies on its satirical black comedy tone to make its narrative both hilarious and harrowing all at once. It’s satirical depiction of celebrity culture and American media matches the tone perfectly, showcasing how far people can truly go when seeking fame and when following a celebrity that must not be treated as a martyr. The film was a flop at the box office, even if being released to strong critical reviews, grossing only $2.5 million dollars against a $19 million dollar budget. This marks the film truly as one of Scorsese’s lesser appreciated features
11)The Last Temptation of Christ
Willem Dafoe in The Last Temptation of Christ
A film depiction of the life of Jesus Christ had been in the works through Scorsese for decades, from the production of Boxcar Bertha to The King of Comedy, only eventually receiving funding for the film from Universal Pictures after agreeing to make a commercial feature for them in the future, which would become Cape Fear. Scorsese received $7 million for a 58-day shoot. With a screenplay by Paul Schrader, the film was based on Nikos Kazantzakis’ controversial 1955 novel of the same name, which followed the life of Jesus Christ and the temptations that displayed themselves to him across his life, from fear, depression, lust and reluctance. The film was incredibly controversial, namely from various Christian groups who claimed the work was blasphemous for its depictions of Christ imagining himself engaging in sexual acts. The film was banned and censored in various countries, namely Greece, South Africa, Turkey, Mexico, Chile and Argentina, and remains banned to this day, in the Philippines and Singapore.
Both novel and film depict Jesus Christ as a fully formed man, who must come to terms with the fact he will have to sacrifice himself, with Willem Dafoe delivering a moving performance as Christ. The film’s gravitas comes from its depiction of sexual need and lust in balance with the power of religion, a continued theme for Scorsese’s filmography, but made even more powerful when being depicted through Christ himself. Christ is besieged by promises of the Devil, as he balances his life with the need of his fate, as the film’s most powerful moment comes from Christ’s imaginations of the life he could have had if he did not die on the cross. Blasmephous to some, but it’s a moving portrayal of a figure you could never get outside of a Scorsese picture
10) The Irishman
Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci in The Irishman
The Irishman is one of Scorsese’s most important works of the modern day, or even of his whole career, a film that feels like a send-off note to his time with the gangster feature. Based on the 2004 book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt, the film follows Robert De Niro’s Frank Sheeran, a truck driver who soon becomes a hitman for mobster Russell Bufalino, played by Joe Pesci, who came out of retirement for the role. Later, he begins work for Teamster Jimmy Hoffa, played by Al Pacino, as the film chronicles his life from first hits to old age. Released with a limited theatrical run on 1st November 2019 and then followed by a streaming release on Netflix on 27th November of the same year, the streaming nature of the film allowed it to become the longest Scorsese feature yet, running for 209 minutes. The film seeks to squash the dream of the American gangster, telling its narrative from the perspective of the aging Sheeran, who begins the film recounting his story while in a nursing home.
Marketed around its de-aging digital effects that made Pacino, De Niro and Pesci look younger based on the period, the film brings together gangster giants for a film that feels like a classic gangster narrative. Uniting three actors who have long been the faces of the genre, the film acts as almost an anti-gangster film, revealing the meaningless of the gangster’s actions, the years of work put into their personas and the secrets kept meaning nothing when they just age like the rest of us, and die all the same. The film can be easily seen a Scorsese coming to terms with his own age, exploring his most famous genre again but through the lens of a man who is aging and doesn’t know how much time he has left, seeking out what he hopes he will be remembered for. It only makes sense that the National Board of Review called The Irishman the Best Film of 2019
9) Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
Star Ellen Burstyn was offered another leading role by Warner Bros Pictures during the production of The Exorcist, and after a recommendation by Francis Ford Coppola and a screening of Mean Streets, Scorsese would be hired for his first major studio feature. Scorsese’s films have been heavily criticised for their lack of female representation, with outside of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Boxcar Bertha there is very little leading roles for females in his features, mainly reserved for roles like daughter, mother and wife. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore place the narrative completely around the female character, a woman’s film in genre, but with enough grit and realness that only Scorsese could bring to the feature. The film follows a widow who travels with her preteen son across the Southwestern United States in search for happiness and a better life, finding work in a local diner.
The film is unlike any Scorsese feature, its sweet and warm, hopeful and pleasant, wrapped in a Scorsese bow with his signature level of darkness that balances out the pleasant nature of the feature. It avoids the tropes of the melodrama, with one of the goals of Burstyn and Scorsese being that it would not feel like a soap opera, those elements only come into play when needed, when Alice finally gets the life she wanted, after all the turmoil she must go through. The film would inspire a soap opera adaptation, just known as Alice, which ran on CBS between 1976 and 1985, and the film would garner Burstyn a well-deserved Oscar for Best Actress
8) After Hours
Griffin Dunne and Rosanna Arquette in After Hours
Director Tim Burton originally had his eyes on directing After Hours, a at-the-time upcoming director who had just come off the release of his short film Vincent but pulled away from the project when Scorsese shown interest. After Hours currently stands as the director’s latest feature to not be an adaptation or a biopic. The neo-noir comedy follows Griffin Dunne’s Paul Hackett, a regular day office worker who becomes interested in a woman he meets one night and soon experiences a series of misadventures while attempting to make his way back home after initially going to meet her.
The film can be summed as part of a growing subgenre of films at the time, known as the ‘yuppie nightmare cycle’, a genre which follows a young professional who is thrown under threat through events resembling both the film noir and a screwball comedy. The film containing itself to one night and one series of events gives it a serious sense of fast pacing and an energy that is unlike any other film from the director, its darkly comedic and in a way that Scorsese has never been able to pull off before. Themes focused on sex is still prevalent as always however, with Paul consistently emasculated by the various women that make their appearance known across the film, from Kiki with her sexual aggressiveness, Marcy’s neglect of his sexual want for her, Julie and Gail causing a mob to chase him, and then June trapping him in a phallic shaped plaster. The film seems to be about a search for masculinization, Paul going across the night attempting to both go home but also find himself as a man in a city full of women who are attempting to castrate him. The film portrays itself as a living nightmare, one that is both darkly humorous and narratively driven
7) The Departed
Jack Nicholson and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed
An American remake of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Hong Kong feature, Internal Affairs, had been bought by Warner Bros Pictures in 2003, with Brad Pitt among the proceedings to get the film made. Pitt would eventually walk away from the project, once Scorsese joined the project, and the central cast was formed as Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, who replaced Pitt when the actor left believing someone younger should be cast in the role, and Jack Nicholson. The remake, partially also based on the real-life Boston Winter Hill Gang, follows the Irish Mob Boss Frank Costello, played by Nicholson, who plants Colin Sullivan, played by Damon, as a spy within the local police force. At the same time, DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan is assigned to go undercover for the police in Costello’s mob. The film pits the two spies against each other as they both attempt to find the identity of the other.
Scorsese wears his film influences on his sleeve in this crime feature, combining his inspiration from the original feature with films like 1932’s Scarface, 1931’s Little Caesar and 1949’s White Heat. Original film directors saw the film as a remake of all three Internal Affairs movies, with two sequels released in 2003, and the film is as ambitious as that sounds. It delivers an exceptionally crafted film focusing on identity, the sacrifices one must make to keep up appearances in society, and what people can do when pushed to conform to family and work’s expectations. The exploration into distrust could also be clearly read as reflecting the current state of the American population post-9/11, and the distrust that came after those events. The Departed held a true level of importance at the time of release, proving Scorsese’s increasing relevance in the 21st century
6) Casino
Robert De Niro in Casino
Based on Nicholas Pileggi’s nonfiction book, Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas, Casino plays out as greatest hits of Scorsese’s mafia features and could even be called a follow-up in a sense to Goodfellas. Starring Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone and Joe Pesci, the film follows Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein, a gambling expert who is asked to oversee the day-to-day casino and hotel operations at the Tangiers Casino in La Vegas. The film tracks his operations in the casino, the sudden appearance of the Mafia in the Casino business, and the breakdown of his relationships with wife Ginger McKenna and best friend Nicky Santoro. All primary characters are based on real people, with Sam being inspired by Frank Rosenthal, who ran four separate casinos in Las Vegas, while Nicky and Ginger are based on mob enforcer Anthony Spilotro and former dancer and socialite Geri McGee respectively.
Released a mere five years after Goodfellas, the film almost seems inferior, but it is hard to match up to one of Scorsese’s very best, and Casino still stands strong alone by hitting the same beats incredibly well. It was called a safe narrative for Scorsese, off the back of such a thematically similar feature, but the longer runtime and the glossy direction in the Casino backdrop allows a more in-depth exploration into the setting and characters. What sets it apart is how much it strives to be like a film epic, it does not just rely on the characters and their dynamics, but the history and setting that the audience feels like they are peering on, collecting moments that feel like a well-developed and realised world
5) Silence
Liam Neeson in Silence
The final piece of Scorsese’s central trilogy focused on spirituality, following The Passion of the Christ and Kundun, Silence went through almost two decades of production hell before finally being released in 2016. Based on Shusaku Endo’s novel of the same name, the film follows two 17th century Jesuit priests who travel from Portugal to Edo period Japan via Macau to locate their missing mentor and to spread Catholic Christianity. A cast led by the trio of Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver and Liam Neeson, this is one of Scorsese’s most thematically complex features, dealing with the comparisons between colonialism and the spreading of religion. The film introduces its ‘villains’, a group of disillusioned Japanese men and women who seek to force Garfield and Driver into joining them in their disillusionment, and the film then curves to reveal the balance between villain and hero here.
The Japanese men and women see Garfield and Driver as a threat, Jesuit priests who are here to only cause them more pain in forcing them to believe in a God who they already believe has failed them, and they are pushing the same pain by torturing them into denouncing their God. It is a brutal, tragic and dark film, probably one of Scorsese’s most depressing and violent features, but its exploration into hope and compassion shines through thematically, feeling almost like a religious take on a future entry on this list, Bringing out the Dead. Silence comes in the acceptance that God is watching and helping even if he doesn’t make his presence known, that pain and suffering does not mean that God is not there, his Silence means just as much
4) Taxi Driver
Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver
One of Scorsese’s most important features, Taxi Driver could be argued to be his most well-known feature along his long career. The first collaboration between Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader, the film follows Robert De Niro as Taxi Driver Travis Bickle, a mental unstable man who only gets worse when working nights across the city, as he becomes enrolled in a plot with a young prostitute. Considered now as one of the most important American features, the film released to various different controversies, namely the casting of twelve year old Jodie Foster as a child prostitute, the film inspiring John Hinckley Jr to attempt to assassinate US president Ronald Reagan and the threat of the film being given a X rating when initially released, moved down to a R once Scorsese desaturated the colours in a climatic battle with much bloodshed.
The frightening thing about Taxi Driver, which many films inspired by the project, such as films like Joker, would forget about, is how straight De Niro plays Bickle. Bickle is the original Scorsese protagonist, the original character that would inspire, in parts, characters from films like The King of Comedy to The Wolf of Wall Street, a character who is intentionally a terrible person but is still the film’s protagonist. He is an outcast of society, but De Niro plays him as socially aware, socially conscious of how people are meant to act in society, but there are small subtleties about him that don’t work with societies’ norms.
He takes a date to a porn film is one of the biggest giveaways, and Scorsese amounts him to a religious saint who is attempting to purge himself away from weakness, no matter if he goes to far in that quest. The direction is gritty and dark, with a view of New York that matches the grimy nature of its character, ending on an interesting note. After a bloody battle to save the life of Foster’s prostitute character, the film ends on a confusing note, as the social outcast becomes social hero, welcomed into society for his heroism, where if he was a moment earlier, it could have been seen as vigilante justice. The scene questions whether the scene is a dream, the dying thoughts of Bickle, or the cycle of delusion just repeating again, a compelling end to a compelling feature
3) Raging Bull
Robert De Niro in Raging Bull
Raging Bull awarded Robert De Niro his second Oscar for Best Actor, an award perfectly deserved for the best performance in any Scorsese feature. The project was offered to Scorsese by De Niro, who had become enamoured by the story of Jake LaMotta while on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, but Scorsese turned it down for having a lack of familiarity or passion around a boxing feature. After nearly dying from a drug overdose, Scorsese took on the project to save his career, seeing a new passion in the battle in the ring. A battle in the ring could mean anything in Scorsese’s mind, a relatable battle to save his career, to become sober, or even to just get the movie made. The film, based on former middleweight boxing champion Jake LaMotta’s 1970 memoir Raging Bull: My Story, follows the career of the boxing champion, his rise and fall in the world of professional boxing and his personal life that was beguiled by his rage and jealousy. Shot in black and white, the film gives off the idea that it is a personal documentary about a man who is losing everything, giving the audience a fly on the wall-type perspective on the life of a man who lost everything because of his anger.
That is the central narrative thrust of the movie, exploring the all-consuming nature of rage, outside and inside the boxing ring. De Niro plays LaMotta with such venom, making the boxing champion feel as sympathetic as he does look terrifying and scary, a boxing champion who is ready to burst into fists at any minute. The film’s balanced focus at both the boxing side of his life and his personal life allows the over-two hour film feel developed and deeply layered, with Joe Pesci, who works for Scorsese for the first time here, delivering a heartbreaking performance as a showcase of the horror that anger can cause, the destruction of their friendship is one of the many lynchpins of an amazing script by Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin
2) Goodfellas
Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta in Goodfellas
Alongside Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Goodfellas is the staple movie for the gangster genre, three films which essentially created the blueprint for a genre that is still kicking to this day. These films inspired television series such as The Sopranos, and it is clear to see why, many would argue that Goodfellas is Scorsese’s magnum opus. Based on the film’s screenwriter’s 1985 nonfiction novel Wiseguy, Nicholas Pileggi’s script follows the rise and fall of Mafia associate Henry Hill and his friends and family from the years of 1955 to 1980.
The biggest takeaway from this film is the performances, with Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta walking away from the film with some of the most memorable performances of any film ever. The script would be composed of improvisation and ad-libbing that the stars would input into the project during rehearsals, which gives the dialogue a great feel of authenticity and naturality, Pesci specifically gets to showcase his darker side as one of the evilest characters in a Scorsese picture yet. The performance even awarded him with the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
What separates the novel and the film away from regular mob-land films is its fly on the wall approach that would become synonymous with the director at this point in his career, both novel and film would tackle the day-to-day operations of the Mafia, foregoing any major Hollywood narrative in favour of a Mafia-at-home feature. The episodic nature of the script is given fresh life however with a Scorsese penned voice-over and a narrative that thrusts the audience between the present, past and future in various orders. Scorsese also layers the films with incredibly compelling directorial touches, making the use of freeze frames, fast cutting and various uses of the long tracking shot, giving the mob-home feature a incredible energy
1) Bringing out The Dead
Nicholas Cage in Bringing out The Dead
Bringing out The Dead, one of Scorsese’s lesser appreciated features takes the top spot on this ranked list. Starring Nicholas Cage, the film follows a traumatic 48 hours in the life of a depressed and tired New York City paramedic. The film grossed only $16 million at the box office against a £32 million dollar budget, and when retrospectively talking about the project, Scorsese revealed the personal nature of the film.
The film serves as a love letter to the brave men and women that work as paramedics and showcases the mental turmoil that they must suffer, showing Scorsese’s level of empathy for the people he saw working day and night during his youth. Paired with a wonderful script by screenwriter Paul Schrader, who had worked on the scripts for Scorsese classics like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, the film plays out like a horror feature, or a neo-noir, with dark and grainy photography and editing which gives it this haunting feeling, recognising the audience with the horrors at display. Nicholas Cage leads a terrific cast who drop into the narrative at specific points to show the different perspectives of this night, and the different ways the workers will deal with this trauma. John Goodman, Ving Rhames, Patricia Arquette and Tom Sizemore are all incredible, but Cage easily takes the reins of the film.
Haunted by the multiple people he could not save while on duty, and especially when he failed in resuscitating a homeless teen known as Rose, Cage plays the character with such subtle sadness. Cage has become well-known for his over-the-top performances, whether its in the critically panned The Wicker Man remake or his two Marvel outings as The Ghost Rider, but this character allows him to hone his sensibilities back. However, when he begins to boil over into his typical over-acting, it comes out as less humorous or impressive, and more on the sad side
The effects of COVID-19 on the film industry are still being felt to this day, a virus which shut down the entire world for an entire year and pushed back every studio’s film schedules for the year. Based on the box office of the decade, regular film-going numbers have increasingly gone down, with the once guaranteed success of films like superhero movies and animated movies being long-gone. Streaming services became the new hot commodity in Hollywood, and it will be a long time until the cinema rises back to its 2010s era of popularity, where 1 billion dollar grossing feature films were so common. Films about the period of COVID-19 lockdown has become an interesting film trend in response to the real-world events, with the release of films like Host, a horror film which captured the isolation felt during the time when the world revolved around Zoom videochats. The James McAvoy-starring film, Together, captured the breakdown of a marriage during the lockdown, as the lockdown brings apart a loving relationship rather than holding them close together. The newest film to capture his specific topic comes as the film, Eddington, from director Ari Aster. The director got his start in the horror genre, releasing Hereditary and Midsommar through the production company A24, with the former being A24’s highest grossing film at time of release. The director moved away from the genre that made him famous with the release of Beau is Afraid in 2023, a surrealist comedy epic that was a box office bomb but featured the first collaboration between the director and future Eddington star Joaquin Phoenix.
The director has reported that he had a pitch for a contemporary Western film but pushed the project back to work on his horror features, and now he has circled back to it. Joined by Joaquin Phoenix as star, Eddington tackles more than just the COVID-19 pandemic, as it acts as a grab bag of many societal issues that happened during 2020, with the film acting as black comedy take on every side of the political spectrum. The film’s plot focuses around the political and social turmoil that happens in Eddington, New Mexico, as Sherrif Joe Cross and Mayor Ted Garcia come to blows during the years’ mayoral election.
Joaquin Phoenix in Eddington
Capturing such an impactful year as 2020 is going to be hard for any filmmaker, but Ari Aster seems the closest at being able to pull it off. What begins as a story about the divide between a town amongst the COVID-19 mask protocols, with a clear divide between the republican and democratic responses to life wearing masks and protected from the virus, becomes a narrative that reinvents itself frequently. This is certainly not going to be a film for everyone, it changes tones and its narrative throughline constantly, acting as a checklist of topics to cover from the 2020 period, but it manages to pull this off perfectly. It evolves into a narrative that is perfect for one focused around a police department in a year which brought the morality of the American police department into question. George Perry Floyd Jr, an innocent African American man, was murdered on 25th May 2020, after a white police officer, known as Derek Chauvin, knelt on Floyd’s back and neck for over nine minutes. Floyd’s final words ‘I can’t breathe’ would become a rallying slogan during the Black Lives Matter protest across the year of his death, a year which marked a remembrance of the various past cases of police brutality, especially towards black people, and called for a systematic revaluation of the police force and the people employed to protect the peace. Eddington seeks to spoof the police officers that caused the systematic violence during the period, the governmental bodies that attempted to make profit at the time, and the bad faith actors that turned a peaceful protest into a period of looting and rioting.
Aster does not pull his punches in the film, and does not play sides, in a way that may offend some audiences but plays true to the dark comedy genre. Both sides of the political angle are criticised heavily, with the film continuing Aster’s motifs focusing on the loss of individual identity in the face of communal or inherited forces, and cult-like behaviour. Hereditary and Midsommar feature actual cults, as the characters lose themselves to firstly possession, and then, in Midsommar’s case, the pull to a better life in the cult. Beau is Afraid explores the loss of identity through childhood trauma, as a child becomes one with the cult-like impression of its mother and family. In comparison, Eddington explores the cult-like nature of joining a noble cause for selfish reasons, as one loses their identity to a cause they do not believe in and betrays their own morals. This is also shown through the police department, with the one major African American character, played by Michael Ward, being a cop. He is judged for being a member of the police department during this time, and the film truly questions is it morally safe and morally sound to be a part of the department as an African American.
Emma Stone in Eddington
What keeps the film afloat in its social commentary is that its central character, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is centralised as the most despicable character in the film. No matter what jabs the film pulls at either political side, or contemporary moment during the 2020 season, it is still all morally above water by comparing it to the struggle of Phoenix’s protagonist. Phoenix’s character will be contentious but is brought to life by a very controlled performance from the star, who keeps the character from feeling too silly, but also keeps just likeable and despicable enough at the same time. He serves to bridge the film into its final section, where it essentially becomes an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridan, or Ethan and Joel Coen’s adaptation of McCarthy’s other text, No Country For Old Men. The film captures the fear of being hunted perfectly, capturing a sense of paranoia and terror that hasn’t been seen in the director’s work since his departure from the horror genre. Composers Bobby Krlic, who previously worked with Aster on Beau is Afraid, and Daniel Pemberton, known for the scores for films like Spider-Man: Into The Spider Verse, work wonders to deliver a score that feels at home in a horror film rather than this social drama, delivering a sense of unease that muddles the tone on purpose.
Aster never forgets to also focus heavily on the family drama aspect of his narratives, family trauma is always at heart of his narratives, whether its Toni Colette’s grief over her daughter’s death in Hereditary, Beau’s trauma around his childhood with his mother, or the suicide of Florence Pugh’s sister that forms the narrative of Midsommar, its always present. Here, Phoenix’s Joe Cross, must deal with the disfunction at home with his wife, played by Emma Stone. Stone’s role is minimal but crucial and easily could be analysed as Aster taking a shot at cancel culture and the commercialisation of the Me-Too movement in the modern day, and potentially how it has been angled away from true cases. Austin Butler portrays essentially a cult leader, an internet personality that takes advantage of the dissolution between husband and wife, and he delivers his performance exceptionally. He seems a mix between Andrew Tate and former actor Russel Brand, an internet personality that has become increasingly more famous because of everyone’s affinity for their phones in a time when they are locked at home. The rest of the cast serve their roles well enough, with Pedro Pascal playing a charming but multi-layered mayor who seems to have sold his soul to mega corporations, and Luke Grimes delivering an evil but humorous police officer character.
Austin Butler and Joaquin Phoenix in Eddington
Aster has proven himself an actor who has a firm eye for contemporary commentary, whether it was around toxic relationships in Midsommar, or sexually focused family abuse in his initial short film debut, The Strange Thing About the Johnsons in 2011. He has only continued to impress with Eddington, a film that is not going to be for everyone. Its dark comedy is hard hitting while also being hilarious and does not choose sides, it is bound to offend some, but it works more as a commentary than it does not. The performances are strong and entertaining, Joaquin Phoenix leads an ensemble cast as such a despicable character, and his character matches the changing tones and genres that the film tackles across its runtime, turning from a socially conscious drama to an intense action film. The film seems to have one goal, to be a film which combines essentially ever major 2020 conspiracy theory into one exceptional film, and it works incredibly well.
Joaquin Phoenix, Luke Grimes and Michael Ward in Eddington
Kyle MacLachlan and Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
Famous director David Lynch died this year, on the 15th January 2025 at the age of 78. He was well-known for his avant-garde filmmaking, which focused on surrealist and experimental features, becoming one of the most famous and well-respected directors of the modern day. Releasing 10 films across this career, his most iconic features would include his directorial debut Eraserhead, the drama adaptation The Elephant Man, the neo-noir mysteries Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, and the space opera adaptation Dune. However, what could be argued as his most well-known and well-regarded project would be the ABC series, Twin Peaks. Premiering on April 8th, 1990, and running for two initial seasons until 1991, the series followed the residents of the town Twin Peaks, as the town’s golden daughter, Laura Palmer, mysteriously dies. FBI special agent Dale Cooper arrives to the town to help the investigation but is soon drawn into a darker story which mixes the melodrama of a soap opera, eccentric comedy that was common to Lynch’s work and horror and surrealist elements. Created with co-showrunner Mark Frost, the show was pitched to the network around the mystery of Laura Palmer’s death, but Lynch and Frost made the promise that the mystery would eventually become a background element of the show as the audience becomes more comfortable with the residents of Twin Peaks.
Opening title sequence of ‘Twin Peaks’
After an incredibly successful first season, which Lynch directed multiple episodes across the 8 initial episodes while multitasking with his feature film Wild at Heart, ABC demanded season 2 to put an answer to the question of who killed Laura Palmer. Being forced to reveal such a crucial plot reveal prematurely led to a lot of knock-on effects for the famous show, namely Lynch and Frost both stepping back from the show until returning for the finale, and a ratings decline. Once being one of the most watched shows in 1990, the 15th episode of the show’s second season would be placed 85th out of 89 for ABC’s ratings numbers. The return of Frost and Lynch to the writer’s room could not save the show, and after multiple timeslot changes that only hindered the show more, the show would be placed on indefinite hiatus and eventually cancelled on a cliffhanger. Though the show would eventually return for a third season in 2017, that would finally address the long-simmering cliffhanger, fans’ original hope for answers would come in Lynch’s feature film follow-up, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
Released in 1992, the film serves as a prequel, a fact that turned off many viewers who were hoping to finally receive the answers to Twin Peaks’ cliffhanger ending, where series protagonist, Dale Cooper, was replaced with an evil doppelganger. The film was booed during its screening at the Cannes Film Festival, and was panned by the American press, eventually ending up as a box office bomb. Foregoing the show’s large cast of eccentric characters and its upbeat and humorous tone, the film goes for a darker tone and a surrealist directorial style that was more in line with Lynch’s work. A set of deleted scenes would be recut into a separate film, Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces in 2014, which featured the various characters from the show that were cut from the film for time. Instead of the larger cast, the film focuses on the murder of Laura Palmer, stepping the audience into the toes of the character that was only known to her audience because of her death. She is plagued by the malevolent spirit known as Bob, as the film tracks her final seven days, where she soon finds out that her own father is Bob.
The move between television and film comes with the movie literally beginning with the smashing of a television by a man as he murders Teresa Banks, the original victim of Bob. This opening marks the idea that Lynch seems to be putting across the film, that nostalgia and fan service is not what the film exists for, it is pulling its audience into unfamiliar settings and setting itself apart. This would be a decision that would be followed in the show’s third season, known as The Return. This can be seen even more by the film’s opening act, where FBI agents Chester Desmond and Sam Stanley are assigned to investigate the death of Teresa Banks in Deer Meadow, Washington. With the appearance of Gordon Cole, a character played by Lynch himself in the series, and the appearance of a death girl for the FBI, the film begins with a false sense of security. The plot sounds eerily familiar to Twin Peaks’ original storyline, with the opening act even initially planned to feature Cooper instead of Chester Desmond, but actor Kyle MacLachlan requested for his role to be lessened compared to the series.
David Lynch, Chris Isaak Kiefer Sutherland in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
The plot may seem familiar, but the setting of Deer Meadow welcomes the film to breaking that familiarity, as the settings that would be central to comedy for the series would instead be conveyed as combative and tension-building. The residents of Deer Meadow do not welcome the FBI with open arms, shown through the diner sequence, a place that was routed into the television series as a place of comfort and joy. The police department welcome Cooper into Twin Peaks with open arms, as Sherrif Truman essentially becomes Cooper’s best friend straight away, but the police department of Deer Meadows are violent towards Desmond and Stanley. These differences open the film for an audience familiar with the brand that things are not going to be the same here, you cannot go home, and everything will feel the same.
This difference in tone translates over when the film transitions over to the familiar town of Twin Peaks. The series’ iconic theme, composed by Angelo Badalamenti, pulls the viewer into feeling comfortable, but rather than pulling into one of the various characters that make up the show, the first character we see is Laura Palmer. Actress Sheryl Lee finally gets to play Laura Palmer in all her various shades of grey, a fully realised character that only existed as a dead body and a ghost that haunted the Black Lodge in the series. The feeling of unfamiliarity is mirrored by the appearance of Donna Hayward, Laura’s best friend, who is recast and played by actress Moira Kelly here. Donna may be Laura’s best friend, but Laura refuses to allow Donna to become like her, to follow her into her sexual liberation or her sexually driven sadness, and the recasting almost adds a sense of isolation to the proceedings.
The pieces fall into place across the film, as the film retraces the steps of the investigation into her death from the film, as Laura places those clues down that Cooper, Truman and the rest of the cast would soon discover. The investigation in the series brought unexpected reveals to Laura’s character, the golden girl who brought food to the less fortunate and helped with English lessons, was revealed to be moonlighting as a prostitute, and cheating on her drug dealing boyfriend. Laura Palmer haunts the narrative of Twin Peaks, and it is until the reveal that her own father was sexually assaulting her that you get a full understanding of Laura. The events surrounding Laura’s death are choreographed to feel true and real, the comedic overtones of the show are replaced by scenes that are shocking and disturbing, from the explicit rape of Laura, to seeing her death played out through her own point of view.
Ray Wise, Grace Zabriskie and Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
Ray Wise plays Laura’s father, Leland, and he is easily one of the most complex performances and characters across the film. Leland’s reveal as Bob came as the final straw in Lynch and Frost’s relationship with the studio, a reveal that would have been saved for many seasons in the future. The reveal and execution of that storyline however is incredibly powerful, as Ray Wise gives a fantastic performance with his last scene, crying in his final moments as he realises what he has done to Laura throughout the years. There’s a clear intention to blur the lines of what really Leland is, and how much control does Leland have in his own body when Bob is in the mix. Fire Walk With Me continues this distinction, Wise plays the character as both terrifying and sympathetic, he is ruthless, demanding his daughter to clean her hands before dinner or verbally assaulting her once he catches wind of her relationship with James Hurley. However, he also has scenes of genuine kindness and remorse, as he apologises for his dinnertime outburst and hugs Laura. It is clear from the series that Leland was sexually abused in his youth as well, potentially by Bob, and he is just passing that trauma down to his own daughter.
The home is portrayed as something frightening for Laura, as the fan spins above, and her own mother seems to be ignoring the sexual abuse her daughter is facing. Grace Zabriskie’s Sarah Palmer smokes and cries at what is happening to her daughter, and screams for Leland to stop his verbal attack, but never protects her daughter, she knows what is going on but is powerless to do anything about it. The entire proceedings are just played incredibly straight and sad, there is so little comedy after the opening act, and it just hits home harder how real this movie feels. Stripping out all the supernatural aspects, the film is boiled down to a domestic drama about the sexual abuse faced by a young daughter, a father who is inflicting that sexual abuse while questioning why he is doing so, and a mother who just wants to look the other way.
David Bowie in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
Mark Frost declined to be involved in this film, as Lynch and Frost were mixed on what to write the story around; Lynch wanting a prequel, and Frost wanting a continuation of the events of the series. Frost would continue to be involved in the franchise for years after, penning various supplemental material, such as The Secret History of Twin Peaks in 2016 and Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier in 2017, before having an equal role in the show’s revival. However, Lynch’s signature surrealist nature comes about across the runtime of Fire Walk With Me, leaving the show as much as a prequel as it is a sequel. Various characters make their appearance known across the runtime, and some creative visuals open the door for their return in the show’s third season, name in point being the namedrop of Judy, and the appearance of David Bowie’s Phillip Jeffries. There is even a brief appearance of a character from the future, as Annie Blackburn appears from the Black Lodge, a character who was added to the original in the tail end of the second season as an attempt to raise ratings by giving Cooper a love interest. She appears in an unsettling sequence, where the bloodied body of Annie appears after being trapped in the Black Lodge at the end of the series, and warns Laura that the good Cooper is trapped in the Black Lodge. This would be written in Laura’s diary and become one of the most important plot points moving forward.
These sequel moments highlight the dream-like nature that would soon come in Twin Peaks: The Return, as the film bridges the gap between soap opera-drama and Lynch’s signature filmic tendencies. The signature red drapes, eerie editing with quick cuts and over-lit blinding horror scares, a strong control over sound and the use of silence and blaring music, are all signatures to how Lynch creates that dream-like reality for his films, and it is incredibly present here. But, at heart, the movie is the story of Laura Palmer, a character who the audience never actually meets. This film allows that audience to become familiar with the character, and her struggles, and when they will return to the show’s pilot episode again, and Andy and Truman find her body, the audience will grieve alongside them.
On release in 1973, audiences waited out in long lines for Warner Bros biggest film since The Godfather, a film which was reported to have some of the strongest audience reactions to this date. Various viewers reportedly fainted during sequences, a New York citizen was reported to have miscarried, and one man was carried out in a stretcher after only 20 minutes. Nausea was frequent, and Catholic viewers, including both people who had lapsed in their faith and current faith practisers, stated that they experienced spiritual crises before and after watching the film. In the UK, the film drew protests from the Nationwide Festival of Light, a Christian public action group, and once released on home video, the film was withdrawn from being available after the passing of the Video Recordings Act in 1984, which sought to ban so called ‘video nasties’. This film, which gained so much outrage and paranoia, is The Exorcist, director William Friedkin’s supernatural-drama based on screenwriter William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel of the same name. The Exorcist has become an iconic horror feature in the time since, spawning a franchise and influencing the future of the horror genre in subsequent years, after grossing $193 million worldwide, and a lifetime gross of $441 million after re-releases. The film spent decades as the highest grossing R-rated film (adjusted for inflation), until being de-throned by Stephen King adaptation IT in 2017, and became the first horror film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, with Blatty winning the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and the production crew taking home the Academy Award for Best Sound.
William Peter Blatty’s original novel was inspired by the one of the very first cases of demonic possession known to the public, a phenomenon that would being more widespread in the years after the release of the Exorcist. Exorcisms, performed by the Catholic Church, were a low commodity in the years before Friedkin’s film, but cases reported to the Church became more frequent after the film’s release. It would even get to the point that demonic possession would come to the courts in 1981, with the trial of Arne Cheyenne Johnson, who claimed that he was possessed by the devil when committing murders. The trial would go on to be the basis of the third Conjuring film, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It in 2021.
Behind the scenes of the Head Twist sequence in The Exorcist
Blatty’s basis would be a lot less mainstream than Johnson’s case, with the novel being based on a series of exorcisms performed on an anonymous boy by the attending priest, Raymond J. Bishop, and under the pseudonym ‘Roland Doe’ or ‘Robbie Mannheim’. It was claimed that the boy became possessed after coming into possession of a Ouija Board, which would become a small plot point in Blatty’s screenplay. So little was known about the case during Blatty’s discovery of the events, that it took until December 2021 for the American magazine, The Sceptical Inquirer, to report the purported identity of the boy as Ronald Edwin Hunkeler. Blatty’s signature drive to craft the novel came from seeing Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Rosemary’s Baby in 1968, being drawn to the film’s ability to keep the audience unsure whether Rosemary’s concerns for the supernatural nature of her baby were genuine or unfounded. He was, however, unhappy in the ending, believing the reveals to be shlocky in nature, and was determined to craft a novel that bridged the world between realism and the supernatural convincingly.
The appearance of Pazuzu in The Exorcist
This becomes the route of the narrative thrust of both the novel and the film adaptation. The Exorcist follows the mysterious demonic possession of eleven-year-old Regan MacNeill, the daughter of a famous Hollywood actress. Her mother, Chris, pursues every angle to try and explain what is wrong with her daughter, and after scientific means fail her daughter, she recruits two priests to try and exorcise the demon. Those priests come in the form of Father Damian Karras, a priest who has lost his way after the death of his mother, and Father Lankester Merrin, who has done battle with the demon before. The novel and film retain the same basic plot developments, but Blatty’s screenplay narrows the focus down to the key plot points and characters that make up the narrative crux. The time frame of the events is shortened, and characters like Chris’ staff, Dennings and Regan’s father are removed entirely. A lot of the most horrifying content of the novel was also toned down in scripting, mainly the sexual aspects, once it was clear an age-accurate actress would play the eleven-year-old character. Blatty’s screenplay also foregoes the ambiguous nature of the novel’s perception of the supernatural events, with each occurrence of Regan’s supernatural abilities being paired with a reference to a real-world case where the root of the problem was revealed to be scientific in nature. Outside of Karras’ initial concerns over the validity of the claims, the film version removes the sceptical perspective entirely.
This lack of scepticism leads the emotional throughline of the film’s narrative, a mother’s pursuit to do anything possible to save her daughter. Chris is a famous actress and moves herself and her daughter to a new home for an upcoming role, and this movement leads to an isolation for her character instantly, and Blatty’s screenplay pairs the small-town drama aspect with horror perfectly. The film never gives the viewer a perfect answer for how Regan becomes possessed, it could be the Ouija board, but its never told for sure, and this mystery thrusts Chris into action. She takes Regan to every scientific expert she could think of, with the film displaying these scientific machines as cold and terrifying, with many audience members finding the angiography sequence to be the film’s most unsettling moment. When all the natural means fail her, the film crosses over into the supernatural with her, placing her complete faith in the unknown and to the two priests that could save her daughter. Ellen Burstyn delivers a moving performance across the film, capturing a vulnerability and an openness to a mother who will do anything for her daughter, and the slow-moving nature of the opening allows the audience to gain a connection to the bond between Chris and Regan, and even more so Burstyn and Linda Blair.
Jason Miller in The Exorcist
The balance between realism and faith also comes in the character of Karras, played by Jason Miller. Karras is a complex character, he is railroaded by his grief, losing faith in God after he seen his mother go through so much pain before death. It’s this pursuit of meaning to regain his faith which holds together his arc. He falls under the pull of his grief when Regan’s possessed self makes fun of his mother, but he ends the film allowing good to prevail. His fall from the window allows him to remove the demon from the mortal plane, and he knows that in his death, God will accept him once again. Miller’s performance matches Burstyn’s, he is calm and collected, the pain coming from his eyes and his facial expressions, but he conveys a sense of warmth and kindness. These two central performances convey why The Exorcist is such a compelling film, it bridges the world between horror and drama so perfectly, it’s a movie about a woman trying to save her child and a man trying to regain his faith, with supernatural undertones to compliment those narrative elements.
That is not to say, however, that The Exorcist is without its frightening scares. What once was known as ‘one of the scariest films ever made’, may feel less frightening to a modern audience who are used to supernatural clowns and nuns, but the film’s horror still works frequently. Scenes like the crucifix masturbation scene also works as a scene to both frighten and make the audience uncomfortable, shooting the sequence head on to make the audience feel like they are also in the room. Friedkin’s direction, who was hot off the success of 1971’s The French Connection, which he won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director for, makes the film feel like a pseudo-documentary. The audience feels like a fly-on-the-wall of the events taking place, as the natural lightning and authentic set design gives the film the air of realism. The supernatural aspects are aesthetically toned down compared to the novel, so when they do occur, they hit harder than if the scares were frequent and expected. The head twist sequence is a pure example of this, its terrifying because it is the only attempt at doing something so incredibly outlandish in the film’s runtime.
Spider-Walk sequence performed by stuntwoman Ann Miles
A similar experience was exercised from the film, a spider-walk sequence where Regan comes down the stairs in a creepy crawl, ending with a shot of Regan with a blood-soaked mouth. Blatty and Friedkin disagreed on various aspects of the film, namely the crucifixion masturbation sequence, and this was one sequence which Friedkin removed because of Blatty’s insistence. The scene stayed hidden for years, with many people arguing whether it even existed in the first place but was soon found by film critic Mark Kermode in the Warner Bros. archives when researching his book analysing the film, and the scene was reinstated in the 2000s director’s cut. The director’s cut was also used to re-emphasise one of the creepiest sequences of the film, the brief flash of the true face of the demon. The demon would not be named properly until the sequel, but his form would appear as both a face flashed on screen during Karras’ dream, and as a statue found by Merrin in the film’s prologue. The directors cut made use of this subliminal flash and placed it more commonly across the film, placed in frightening moments to give a more dream-like feel to the film.
Ellen Burstyn and subliminal appearances of Pazuzu in The Exorcist
The legacy of The Exorcist is a hard thing to describe completely, it was a wildfire of a film which proved that horror films can be taken seriously, making more A-list actors interested in starring in horror features. A massive trend followed the release of the feature, with studios allocating larger budgets to films that fit into a similar niche for the genre, namely 1976’s The Omen and 1979’s The Amityville Horror. Exorcism features would also become a trend in the coming years, a sub-genre in horror that still dominates the box office today, with The Conjuring franchise focused on similar genre tropes started by The Exorcist.
The film also spawned a franchise, followed by The Exorcist II: The Heretic in 1977, a film made without the involvement of either Friedkin or Blatty, and would stall the franchise for another 13 years after failing critically. In response to the negative response to the sequel, Friedkin and Blatty began work on their own sequel, which Blatty turned into his sequel novel Legion, once Friedkin departed from the project. Legion follows side characters, Detective Kinderman and Father Dyer, from the original novel, who become involved in a criminal case with a revived serial killer. The novel became the basis of Blatty’s screenplay for The Exorcist III, which he would also direct. Two attempts at a prequel following Father Merrin’s first encounter with Pazuzu would follow next, with Paul Schrader hired first and then replaced by Renny Harlin to replace him as director. Warner Bros would release Harlin’s Exorcist: The Beginning in 2004, and after becoming a critical and commercial failure, Schrader’s Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist would be released in 2005. The latest attempt to keep this franchise alive, after a two season TV adaptation on Fox, would come from Blumhouse, after acquiring the rights to the franchise for $300 million dollars, with the release of The Exorcist: Believer in 2023. The two sequels would be scrapped after its failure, and a Mike Flanagan-directed reboot is currently in the works for the studio. As a franchise, it seems that The Exorcist floundered, but it only proves how monumental the original is, it was a lightning in a bottle film, and that is hard to capture afterwards.
Ellen Burstyn returns in The Exorcist: Believer
Willaim Friedkin and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist is a tremendous undertaking of a horror feature, an important film that legitimised the horror genre for the mainstream public. It is a completely accurate adaptation of Blatty’s original novel, with a more streamlined approach that could be argued to make the story even better. What makes the movie work so well, and what the franchise since could not recapture, is the balance between the horror and the drama. The movie, at heart, is about the distinction between science and faith, and the human drama of a man losing his faith and a woman trying to save her daughter, wrapped in a horror story focused on a demon.
William Friedkin and Linda Blair behind the scenes of The Exorcist
Rhys Reviews 