Editorials
[It Came From the ‘80s] Resurrecting the Fury of ‘Christine’
With horror industry heavy hitters already in place from the 1970s, the 1980s built upon that with the rise of brilliant minds in makeup and effects artists, as well as advances in technology. Artists like Rick Baker, Rob Bottin, Alec Gillis, Tom Woodruff Jr., Tom Savini, Stan Winston, and countless others delivered groundbreaking, mind-blowing practical effects that ushered in the pre-CGI Golden Age of Cinema. Which meant a glorious glut of creatures in horror. More than just a technical marvel, the creatures on display in ‘80s horror meant tangible texture that still holds up decades later. From grotesque slimy skin to brutal transformation sequences, there wasn’t anything the artists couldn’t create.
It Came From the ‘80s is a series that will pay homage to the monstrous, deadly, and often slimy creatures that made the ‘80s such a fantastic decade in horror.
Salem’s Lot was the first Stephen King adaptation for television, and it birthed a friendship between producer Richard Kobritz and the prolific horror author over the course of production. So much so that King would send Kobritz early manuscripts of novels prior to publication for potential future collaborations. None struck his fancy (he passed on Cujo) until he received Christine. For Kobritz, it was the right blend of fun and rock ‘n roll. Leave it to King to render just about any inanimate object scary, which in this case meant a gorgeous yet evil Plymouth Fury.
Kobritz’s foray to adapting the manuscript was off to a rocky start; his first choice to helm the project was actually already tied up with another King adaptation, Firestarter. That would be horror master John Carpenter. But Firestarter fell through, as well as an additional project he’d been tied to, so his schedule cleared. Carpenter brought on screenwriter Bill Phillips, which in turn kicked off the process of condensing the novel for screen. Whereas King’s novel was more ambiguous on whether Christine itself was evil or merely possessed by the previous owner, Christine takes a firm stand from the get go with an opening scene kill of a factory worker after the car’s inception. This little lady was born bad.
Cut to 21 years later, when awkward teen Arnie (Keith Gordon) purchases Christine from the brother of its previous owner. The Fury is woefully neglected and in need of extensive repairs. The more Arnie spends working on her the more his personality changes, much to the concerns of his only friend Dennis (John Stockwell) and lady love Leigh (Alexandra Paul). It’s not just Arnie that’s changing, but the car as well. She has one hell of a jealousy streak, too. Soon enough, she’s setting off on her own, racking up a body count, and repairing herself of any sustained damage.
Kobritz and team spent months searching for enough 1958 Plymouths (not all were Furies) to use for production. They acquired around 20, some strictly for parts, and many to handle various tasks on screen. Most of the cars were destroyed during production. Bringing Christine to life fell to special effects supervisor Roy Arbogast (Escape from New York, They Live). The biggest challenge, of course, was how to handle the sequence in which Christine resurrected itself from destruction. A visual that wasn’t even in the original script, at least not on screen, until Kobritz and Carpenter felt something was missing. The now memorable sequence was done after production had already wrapped.
Carpenter shot the resurrection sequence by having the camera upside-down with the film run backwards, while the special effects team crumpled and squashed molded car parts. When the film runs forward, with added sound effects, it looks and sounds like a car restoring itself to its former glory. The perfect marriage of special effects and direction, and the result is stunning.
This may not have been the ideal project for Carpenter after The Thing bombed at the box office, but he felt he needed to take it for the sake of his career. Christine didn’t exactly set the box office on fire either, but both films wound up being heralded classics decades later for the great practical effects and Carpenter’s direction (and music, which he co-wrote with Alan Howarth).
It took months to work out the resurrection effects, but the result is timeless.
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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