Editorials
[It Came From the ‘80s] Ancient Evil and Troubled Production Within ‘The Keep’
The Keep is an early ‘80s horror film that’s never made it to DVD or Blu-ray, at least not stateside, for two big reasons; obtaining Tangerine Dream’s soundtrack rights has proven tricky, and writer/director Michael Mann (Collateral, Heat) has pretty much disowned the film. Mann envisioned the film to be an expressionistic, grown-up fairytale complete with dream-like qualities and a two-hour run time. Poor test screenings resulted in Paramount trimming the film down to a 96-minute run time, against Mann’s wishes, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg of the troubled production that makes The Keep such an odd standout in the catalog of ‘80s horror.
Adapted from a novel of the same name by F. Paul Wilson, The Keep is set in 1941 and tells of a group of Nazis taking refuge in an isolated castle in the Romanian mountains. When they inadvertently free an ancient evil from its prison within, an entity named Molasar, they turn to a Jewish historian to help them stop it from killing them all. In turn, it also sets ancient force of good Glaeken on a quest to face off against his foe one last time. It’s an interesting premise and easy to see why Mann would want to adapt it, except Mann didn’t really like the book. Remember that part about the director envisioning the film as dream-like and expressionistic? Made even less coherent by the major cuts to the run time, The Keep plays like a detached, incoherent battle between good and evil, except none of the characters really seem all that important. In the novel, Molasar is perceived as a vampiric creature throughout most of the narrative, only morphing into something else by the end.
Makeup effects supervisor and prosthetics designer Nick Maley (Krull, Lifeforce) had the extremely difficult task of creating the creature and makeup design for The Keep. Initially, Molasar was an intangible being who would gradually take a shape influenced by the setting during his appearances. This nondescript description gave Maley very little to work with in terms design, and it was complicated even further by Mann’s changing his mind on the creature, on occasion. It sure didn’t help that Mann wanted complete control over the development of the makeup and creature effects, wanting the design to look exactly like he pictured it.
The vision that Mann settled on for Molasar begins with the evil appearing as a ball of energy that slowly becomes more humanoid with every appearance. First Molasar looks mostly like a walking nervous system, next he has more skeletal forms, then muscles, until a strangely statuesque Golem-like final look. Maley and his team were also tasked with creating mechanical versions of Molasar, but the work went unused when Mann decided he wanted to see more of the creature on screen.
Since Molasar is a 7-foot-tall monster, that made the mechanical effects impossible to use, so he was turned into a man in a suit instead.
Two weeks into post-production, visual effects supervisor Wally Veevers (Superman, The Rocky Horror Picture Show) unexpectedly passed away, with still hundreds of effects needing to be completed and no one quite sure of Veevers’ original plans for them. Because of this, Mann wanted to re-do the ending, which originally was to be a massive special effects-driven battle between Molasar and hero Glaeken (Scott Glenn). But the production was already over budget and overlong, and Paramount wasn’t keen to grant more money. So, Mann had to go with a much simpler conclusion to his sprawling adult fairy tale.
It also meant scenes that would’ve shown the Nazis meeting grisly ends at the hands of Molasar went unfilmed.
There’s a lot about The Keep that should’ve worked. An impressive cast filled with names like Gabriel Byrne, Scott Glenn, Ian McKellen, and Jürgen Prochnow, with Mann’s stunning visual style and a story based on a best-selling novel all had the makings for an event horror film. Yet it was Mann’s decision to opt for a phantasmagorical style of storytelling, indecisiveness on the main villain, and massive trimming of Mann’s two-hour film that resulted in a not very coherent movie centered around a not so impressive body-building Golem thing. Tangerine Dream’s score is a vital asset, though, and has helped the film amass a cult following over the years. We’ll likely never get to see the film Mann intended, which would have given Glaeken a happier ending and fleshed out a lot of the character work and relationships, so The Keep falls under the category of the story behind the film being much more interesting that the final film. As it stands, it’s the strange movie that marks the first and last time Mann dove into full-blown horror (He did direct Manhunter a few years later, but it’s crime-based and not in the same fantastical realm).
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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