Editorials

The ‘Indiana Jones’ Supernatural Horror Movie That Almost Was

Published

7 years ago

September 7, 2017

Considering the face-melting, heart-ripping, accelerated aging and giant man-eating ants, the Indiana Jones franchise has always flirted with horror. Some of his adventures dabbled a little more than others; there’s a reason Temple of Doom outraged the PG-13 rating into existence. With the exception of spin-off novels and comics, in which the good Doctor has fought vampires, discovered dinosaurs, defeated an army of gorilla slaves and survived a place literally named Horror Island, Indiana Jones hasn’t tackled an out-and-out horror story on the big screen.

That’s not to say he didn’t come close.

In the summer of 1977, on a beach somewhere in Hawaii, two directors were hiding from the world. Steven Spielberg had barely survived the grueling production of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and George Lucas didn’t want to know how badly his sci-fi gamble Star Wars was bombing. They were musing about other projects when Lucas brought up an idea he’d been toying with for a while, a Saturday matinee James Bond. He told Spielberg he had an entire trilogy planned for his old-fashioned hero and they shook hands on the spot.

That character turned out to be Indiana Jones, and George Lucas turned out to be a liar.

Lucas only had loose concepts for adventures beyond Raiders of the Lost Ark and certainly no plans for a connected trilogy. When success all but demanded a sequel, Lucas pitched two very different, very persistent ideas – a story about the Chinese legend of the Monkey King and another set entirely in a haunted castle. Spielberg vetoed both. The Monkey King idea was too far-fetched and he’d had his fill of ghosts producing 1982’s Poltergeist.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom opened in the summer of 1984 to an eager, confused public. It was darker, grosser and altogether less family-friendly than its predecessor. It had its fans (and more over time), but plenty of critics and baffled parents considered it an ugly insult to taste. Many compared it unfavorably to another 1984 adventure movie, Romancing the Stone. Despite being written before Raiders, everybody and their extended families called it a rip-off, but that still counted as a compliment considering the gloom of Doom. Regardless of the reception, Indiana Jones’s second adventure became the third-highest grossing movie of 1984. But the real damage, the damage behind-the-scenes, was already done.

Spielberg was hurt. Backlash over the film’s juvenile gags and careless depiction of Indian culture took on a personal sting. He needed to step away from big-budget B-movies, to prove his maturity as a filmmaker. But that didn’t stop George Lucas from working his old sequel ideas with a writer who almost made too much sense.

Diane Thomas was waiting tables in a roadside diner when she sold her script, Romancing the Stone, to Michael Douglas for $250,000. It was the eighth highest-grossing movie of 1984 on a third of Temple of Doom’s budget. The press deemed her a screenwriting “Cinderella.” Lucas took note.

Thomas’s script followed Indiana Jones on a Universal Horror-style adventure into a sprawling, haunted castle as per Lucas’s long-simmering concept. Unfortunately, she only finished the first draft before her untimely death in 1985. Not long after, Spielberg passed with the Poltergeist defense for a second time. But George Lucas wouldn’t abandon his Indiana Van Helsing idea that easily, so he found another writer from a familiar neighborhood.

Chris Columbus, fresh off of Gremlins, the fourth highest-grossing movie of 1984, took Lucas’s other direction and turned out several drafts for “Indiana Jones and the Monkey King.” At least one of these drafts, with the alternate title “Indiana Jones and the Garden of Life,” has since found its way online and provides a startling reminder of how many franchise “rules” were only cemented by Last Crusade. Columbus’s “Monkey King” includes, among other assorted strangeness, adorable pygmy sidekicks, steampunk Nazis with machine gun arms and a scene where Indiana Jones outruns a three-story-tall, one-hundred-foot long tank on the back of a rhino.

The oddest part, however, might be the opening gambit, which manages to squeeze Lucas’s entire haunted castle concept into about ten pages.

The year is 1937. Indiana Jones is on vacation in Scotland and struggling to catch trout when torch-wielding villagers interrupt him. They’re crippled with fear over the latest in series of grisly murders. How grisly, you ask?

Jones, along with Inspector Scotsman MacStereotype, are enlisted to solve the case once and for all. The villagers can barely even offer ambiguous warnings about the killer not being human before a mysterious light draws the heroes to:

From there, it becomes Indiana Jones and the House of Dracula. Jones follows disembodied laughter down the castle’s labyrinthine halls, through ornate bedrooms covered in cobwebs and macabre detail. The local police get picked off one-by-one, disappearing in a split-second of darkness or, well:

Eventually, after falling through a subterranean crypt and fighting hellhounds, Indiana Jones confronts the allegedly immortal master of the house, Baron Seagrave, only for a pair of seven-foot-tall suits of armors to animate and attack. After he drops a chandelier on them, Jones holds a sword to Seagrave’s cackling throat until the authorities arrive.

Then the script casually confirms the existence of non-divine ghosts in the Indiana Jones universe:

“Indiana Jones and the Monkey King” didn’t pass Steven Spielberg’s muster either. He found it too far-fetched for an Indy adventure and it’s easy to see why. Not long after, Lucas would dig up another old sequel conceit, which Spielberg once dismissed as too spiritual. But this time he’d change his mind on the Holy Grail.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was the second biggest box office smash of 1989. And even if it’s not exactly haunted, Lucas finally got his castle…

Jeremy Herbert

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Editorials

Finding Faith and Violence in ‘The Book of Eli’ 14 Years Later

Published

1 day ago

April 22, 2024

Luiz H. C.

Having grown up in a religious family, Christian movie night was something that happened a lot more often than I care to admit. However, back when I was a teenager, my parents showed up one night with an unusually cool-looking DVD of a movie that had been recommended to them by a church leader. Curious to see what new kind of evangelical propaganda my parents had rented this time, I proceeded to watch the film with them expecting a heavy-handed snoozefest.

To my surprise, I was a few minutes in when Denzel Washington proceeded to dismember a band of cannibal raiders when I realized that this was in fact a real movie. My mom was horrified by the flick’s extreme violence and dark subject matter, but I instantly became a fan of the Hughes Brothers’ faith-based 2010 thriller, The Book of Eli. And with the film’s atomic apocalypse having apparently taken place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to dive into why this grim parable might also be entertaining for horror fans.

Originally penned by gaming journalist and The Walking Dead: The Game co-writer Gary Whitta, the spec script for The Book of Eli was already making waves back in 2007 when it appeared on the coveted Blacklist. It wasn’t long before Columbia and Warner Bros. snatched up the rights to the project, hiring From Hell directors Albert and Allen Hughes while also garnering attention from industry heavyweights like Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.

After a series of revisions by Anthony Peckham meant to make the story more consumer-friendly, the picture was finally released in January of 2010, with the finished film following Denzel as a mysterious wanderer making his way across a post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book. Along the way, he encounters a run-down settlement controlled by Bill Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man desperate to get his hands on Eli’s book so he can motivate his underlings to expand his empire. Unwilling to let this power fall into the wrong hands, Eli embarks on a dangerous journey that will test the limits of his faith.

SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?

Judging by the film’s box-office success, mainstream audiences appear to have enjoyed the Hughes’ bleak vision of a future where everything went wrong, but critics were left divided by the flick’s trope-heavy narrative and unapologetic religious elements. And while I’ll be the first to admit that The Book of Eli isn’t particularly subtle or original, I appreciate the film’s earnest execution of familiar ideas.

For starters, I’d like to address the religious elephant in the room, as I understand the hesitation that some folks (myself included) might have about watching something that sounds like Christian propaganda. Faith does indeed play a huge part in the narrative here, but I’d argue that the film is more about the power of stories than a specific religion. The entire point of Oldman’s character is that he needs a unifying narrative that he can take advantage of in order to manipulate others, while Eli ultimately chooses to deliver his gift to a community of scholars. In fact, the movie even makes a point of placing the Bible in between equally culturally important books like the Torah and Quran, which I think is pretty poignant for a flick inspired by exploitation cinema.

Sure, the film has its fair share of logical inconsistencies (ranging from the extent of Eli’s Daredevil superpowers to his impossibly small Braille Bible), but I think the film more than makes up for these nitpicks with a genuine passion for classic post-apocalyptic cinema. Several critics accused the film of being a knockoff of superior productions, but I’d argue that both Whitta and the Hughes knowingly crafted a loving pastiche of genre influences like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog.

Lastly, it’s no surprise that the cast here absolutely kicks ass. Denzel plays the title role of a stoic badass perfectly (going so far as to train with Bruce Lee’s protégée in order to perform his own stunts) while Oldman effortlessly assumes a surprisingly subdued yet incredibly intimidating persona. Even Mila Kunis is remarkably charming here, though I wish the script had taken the time to develop these secondary characters a little further. And hey, did I mention that Tom Waits is in this?

AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?

Denzel’s very first interaction with another human being in this movie results in a gory fight scene culminating in a face-off against a masked brute wielding a chainsaw (which he presumably uses to butcher travelers before eating them), so I think it’s safe to say that this dog-eat-dog vision of America will likely appeal to horror fans.

From diseased cannibals to hyper-violent motorcycle gangs roaming the wasteland, there’s plenty of disturbing R-rated material here – which is even more impressive when you remember that this story revolves around the bible. And while there are a few too many references to sexual assault for my taste, even if it does make sense in-universe, the flick does a great job of immersing you in this post-nuclear nightmare.

The excessively depressing color palette and obvious green screen effects may take some viewers out of the experience, but the beat-up and lived-in sets and costume design do their best to bring this dead world to life – which might just be the scariest part of the experience.

Ultimately, I believe your enjoyment of The Book of Eli will largely depend on how willing you are to overlook some ham-fisted biblical references in order to enjoy some brutal post-apocalyptic shenanigans. And while I can’t really blame folks who’d rather not deal with that, I think it would be a shame to miss out on a genuinely engaging thrill-ride because of one minor detail.

With that in mind, I’m incredibly curious to see what Whitta and the Hughes Brothers have planned for the upcoming prequel series starring John Boyega…

There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.