Editorials
[Editorial] ‘The Collector’ and ‘The Collection’ are Still Begging for a Third Film to Complete the Trilogy
With the hugely profitable Saw franchise losing steam and clearly coming to an end at the time (at least for a good long while), a new horror icon made his debut on the big screen and aimed to take up Jigsaw’s mantle as the master of torture. I’m of course referring to The Collector, released just a few months prior to Saw‘s sixth installment in late July 2009.
I bring up The Collector and the Saw franchise in the same breath for a handful of reasons, one of them being that the former film was directed by Marcus Dunstan and co-written by Dunstan and Patrick Melton, the duo who together wrote Saw IV, Saw V, Saw VI and later Saw 3D for Lionsgate. And not only are there similarities between the unnamed “Collector” and Jigsaw, but it’s interesting to note that The Collector actually began its life as a pitch for a prequel to the Saw franchise. In many ways, it was literally born out of Saw‘s success.
But The Collector, make no mistake, was its own beast entirely. Like the original Saw, it was one of the rare horror films from the past 10 years that was clearly begging for a sequel, introducing a badass new villain while also pairing him up with a memorable hero as his adversary. No, not a final girl but rather a “final guy,” another rarity in the horror world.
Playing out like an intense, ultra violent home invasion film, The Collector introduced Arkin O’Brien (Josh Stewart), a compelling hero precisely because his life choices all but ensured that he was never supposed to be one. In order to pay a debt and save his family, ex-con Arkin breaks into his employer’s home while the family is away (or so he thinks…), and he soon realizes that he’s not alone in the house. This begins a game of cat-and-mouse between Arkin and the trap-happy “Collector,” a sinister dude with a black mask and uber creepy glowing eyes.
The Collector’s particular approach to murder? He likes to rig up Jigsaw-like traps in homes and dispatch entire families, “collecting” one survivor from each house he hits up. In The Collector, Arkin is the one “collected” in the final moments, setting up a sequel that the film’s box office take was high enough to warrant: The Collection, released in 2012.
Taking the Aliens approach to The Collector‘s Alien, The Collection amped up the action for a sequel that was less tense but arguably even more fun, centered on a group of mercenaries who enlist the help of Arkin to take down the Collector on his home turf: the Argento Hotel (wink, wink), where we finally get to see the Collector’s collection on full display.
The Collection doubled down on the fun factor right off the bat with a glorious opening scene, wherein the Collector goes full Ghost Ship and turns an entire dance club into a human meat grinder. The sequel unleashed gory mayhem the whole way through, firmly establishing Arkin as a badass franchise hero and the Collector as a truly iconic franchise villain.
And yet, despite The Collection leaving us off on a cliffhanger (Arkin collects the Collector!), we never did get a third film to truly turn The Collector into a franchise. Sadly, The Collection was a box office flop in 2012, pulling in just $8.9 million *worldwide* on a reported $10 million production budget. Prior to those numbers coming in, a sequel was very much on the menu.
In a chat right here on Bloody Disgusting prior to the film’s release, Dunstan and Melton told us that the third film’s working title was The Collected, and that it was to show us the Collector without his mask. They teased, “It has to be a different movie. The first two are their own experience. [The Collected] is what happens now.”
As of August 2017, Dunstan still had a strong desire to bring Arkin back and complete the trilogy. He told Addicted to Horror Movies at that time, “We’ve been taking slooooow steps toward having something more concrete to share than ‘we hope so!’ I will bellow loud & proud when such a day comes this way!”
That day still hasn’t come. And though the under-performance of The Collection suggests it sadly may never, we’re still holding out hope that we haven’t seen the last of the Collector.
Maybe if we’re all loud enough…
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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