Despite never actually making a full-fledged horror movie before, it’s obvious why Christopher Nolan’s work would make that a natural fit in the minds of fans everywhere. One of the filmmaker’s earliest movies, “Insomnia,” dealt with detectives on the trail of a murderer in the spooky setting of Alaska. “Batman Begins” famously channeled Nolan’s fright-fest instincts during Batman’s interrogation of (ironically enough) Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow, aided by a dose of fear toxin. Even “Oppenheimer” has its share of horror imagery, as Nolan pointed out at the BFI event, particularly the sequence when J. Robert Oppenheimer delivers his hollow speech in the aftermath of the atomic bomb detonations and the audio drops out, his senses distort, and we hear the screams of the victims. But, for my money, “Inception” best captures his knack for the genre through the almost ghostlike behavior of Marion Cotillard’s Mal, the specter who literally haunts the entire movie and even causes the biggest jump-scare in the film.
We wouldn’t start placing bets on Nolan’s very next project suddenly taking a turn towards Jordan Peele or M. Night Shyamalan territory, but at least he seems very open to the idea … provided that he actually, you know, comes up with a good idea for one. Still, despite not making any promises, he went on to describe what appeals to him about the genre:
“I think it’s a very interesting genre from a cinematic point of view. It’s also one of the few genres where — the studios make a lot of these films — they’re films that have a lot of bleakness, a lot of abstraction. They have a lot qualities that Hollywood is generally very resistant to putting into films, but that’s a genre where it’s allowable.”
Fingers crossed we see this sooner than later.