Christopher Nolan Would “Love” To Tackle The Horror Genre, But Hasn’t Found A Compelling Angle: “It’s All About The Idea”

We keep hearing from Oscar-winning filmmaker Christopher Nolan every other year when he’s on the promotional rounds that he’s itching to tackle a straight-up horror film. However, there is one caveat he has, and that is finding the right compelling idea to spark that story, which doesn’t sound like he’s been able to capture just yet. Speaking with Fred Asquith during his press junket for “The Odyssey,” Nolan has mused again about playing in that sandbox, and when pressed about Stanley Kubrick‘s “The Shining” making one of the greatest horror films, the director was pressed about his own desires to tackle a full-on horror film.

“I’d love to do a horror movie, but it’s all about the idea. It’s all about is there a story that really compels you and I’ve never found that for me. Other than in other ways, I mean, there’s a sense of in which ‘Oppenheimer’ is a horror movie. It’s very dark material to engage with for that long. And there are very significant elements of horror baked into ‘The Odyssey,’ in the original text. And I’ve tried to fully embrace those. I think it’s a genre that is really essentially cinematic. It’s a visceral genre, you know, it’s one where you’re really trying to give the audience a feeling of what the characters are experiencing,” Nolan told Asquith.

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Nolan doing a hororr movie isn’t all that shocking given that efforts like “The Prestige” and his “Insomnia” remake (featuring Robin Williams as a tricksy killer being pursued by Al Pacino‘s disoriented homicide detective) certainly have those kinds of genre beats, even if they were never marketed as such. The former had Hugh Jackman’s magician character developing a machine (SPOILER ALERT) created by Nikola Tesla (played by the late David Bowie) that is essentially a cloning machine and kills his duplicates by drowning them on a nightly basis in an attempt to one-up a rival, making him a mass murderer even with a supernatural angle.

As pointed out by Nolan himself, “The Odyssey” will also explore supernatural elements and could very well have a somewhat horror-like tone, given the R-rating, which allows for more violent sequences than we had originally imagined. Such as Samantha Morton‘s Circe, an antagonist sorceress who turns sailors into animals and they’ll get eaten/killed along the journey, one of the many threats being a giant cyclops.

Given his lucrative working relationship with Universal Pictures on “Oppehehimer” (an R-rated atomic bomb drama that ended up earning an impressive $976 million at the global box office, even after opening alongside the billion-dollar hit “Barbie“) and the upcoming Greek epic “The Odyssey” (projected to have a big domestic debut in the range of $100-120 million) it seems odd that he hasn’t just tried pitching a horror film to them. Hard to imagine Nolan at this point in his career having studio executives telling him now (even Warner Bros. and a delusional Netflix had been hopeful about wooing the theatrical-focused director).

Horror has seemed to be one of the few studio genres that tends to well with audiences of all generations, as seen with recent original breakout hits like Curry Barker‘s “Obsession” and Kane Parsons‘ “Backrooms” that have further established that horror is having more of an impact with audiences on consistent basis than with other ones (superhero movies overstaturating the cinematic space may have overstayed its welcome as seen with wishy-washy reception of “Supergirl“). Our minds are going to race for ages, considering the possibilities are endless of where that hypothetical Christopher Nolan horror story could go (slasher, creature feature, or even something more in the sci-fi horror arena), maybe he goes for another adaptation rather than a straight-up original.

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That all said, “The Odyssey” is heading to theaters on July 17, so get your tickets soon before they get gobbled up for the opening weekend.