Blood on White Tile: O'Bannon Part 1

“From childhood’s hour, I have not been as others were.”

-Edgar Alan Poe, Alone

I think that out of all the people in horror/sci-fi/fantasy cinema, the man that I feel lost out the most was Dan O’Bannon. I don’t know if he would have felt this way, but it just seems to me that there was so much more to be tapped from him. From early on, he was misunderstood, had a quirky personality all his years and felt some of his works had been played with too much when finally brought to film. Along the way, he managed to write one of the best and frightening movies ever made as well as a pretty cool Sci-Fi action film (even if it did have Schwarzenegger in it) and direct an extremely funny and poignant zombie film.

O’Bannon was born in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1946 to Bertha and Thomas Sidney O’Bannon. Thomas was a bit quirky himself. While Bertha was giving birth to Dan, he went to see a Marx Brothers movie after checking her into the hospital. An injury from WWII had left him blind in one eye, he called his son, “The Brat” and had a nasty habit of rifling through his personal things. Also, according to Jason Zinoman in his excellent book, Shock Value,

one of Thomas O’Bannon’s favorite things to do was to cut rings in the grass and call the local news to tell them he spotted a UFO. Oddly enough, though it was Bertha who encouraged reading the literary classics in her son (though he always snuck science fiction and horror into his reading list), it was Thomas that found the talent in his son. He left an 80 page journal that he kept detailing Dan’s first ten years that he called “The Book of Daniel”.

This morning we were discussing the green cheese and the man in the mood and kindred subjects. During the discussion the boy came up with the startling information that the man in the moon so loves green cheese (of which the moon is composed) that he eats up the whole moon every twenty-eight days or so and has to order a new one. So far as I know this little notion is original with him. He says he never heard it anywhere. Not bad, huh?

(Jason Zinoman, Shock Value, from Thomas’ journal)

The “Book of Daniel” is composed of many such tid-bits and his father fostered his creative curve saying, “As an artist he is the unquestioned head of the class.” But Dan’s teachers were frustrated with him because he never put forth much effort, though he showed signs of being vastly intelligent. But he did not fit in, had awkward social interaction thought that the teachers and other students were smug.

Later in his life, he attended USC (University of Southern California) after reading an advice column in Playboy magazine. Students were required to make silent short films every two weeks and his first film was one called Bloodbath. This movie effected his classmates in many different ways, most of them negative and he always thought the reaction kind of funny. In the film, a man sits in his apartment surrounded by filth, drinking coffee even though he had just dropped his cigarette ash in it. Then, out of nowhere, he accidentally slits his wrists and thinks it’ll heal. As he lay bleeding to death in the bathtub, he looks at the blood running down his legs and says, “Mmmm, sexy!”

One person who loved the film and told him so was a fellow USC film student, John Carpenter (Halloween, Escape From New York).

He told O’Bannon as much which flattered him because Carpenter was a student seen as going places, having won an Academy Award for Short Film as early as 1970. O’Bannon explained that the idea for the move began with the thought that blood, while splattering on white tile, could be a beautiful thing.
He and Carpenter became friends, wanting to make films together. Their first, and last, project together was Dark Star (1974).

It started out as Sci-Fi/Horror and they took it in a darkly comedic direction. It was not received well, however and, even though O’Bannon did the writing, set design (some brilliant space ship pieces made out of ordinary stuff) and even acted in the film. Still, he wasn’t receiving the credit he felt he deserved. Carpenter, ever the archetype of a film director, felt that he was the director and that was that. O’Bannon, on the other hand, had the attitude that he should be credited with something too because he did just as much work on the film as John Carpenter and it shouldn’t be him who takes all the credit. He did, though. His name went on it under that title and it started his career while O’Bannon was left struggling.

O’Bannon began to have issues with his stomach that would plague him. Stress was his life. He eventually wound up in Paris, working on a film version of Frank Herbert’s Dune. To him, it was the greatest experience. In a room, several artists-writers, painters, etc.-all sat and bounced ideas around. Money was never the topic of discussion. It was just a bunch of artists sitting in a room bouncing ideas off of one another. It was pure collaboration and business wasn’t an issue. The film eventually fell apart at the business level, leaving O’Bannon broke and homeless. Returning to the states, he began to write a screenplay that would change a lot for him and for the rest of the world.

Shock Value by Jason Zinoman

Dark Star DVD

Halloween Blu-Ray

Escape From New York Blu-Ray

Opening Salvo

Opening Salvo

Matthew Hamilton

Horror cinema prior to the 60’s and 70’s was all about the gimmick. William Castle perfected this,

having audience members sign releases in case they had a heart attack or, in the case of the famous TINGLER, having the seats in the theater vibrate when the monster slid by on the screen. They were films dominated by only a few actors, most notably Vincent Price. There was something of a boyish glee to the films he starred in and filmmakers such as Roger Corman were producing these pictures one after the other on an assembly line of cheap thrills and shoddy chills. That is not to say that these films are bad, it was just the norm back then. Even though they were also attacked by parents and religious groups, they were mostly harmless fun.

America was changing, however. Younger generations were coming up and wondering if everything they had been told all their lives was right. The violence of the Vietnam war was seen daily on the news, with the unimaginable number of American dead shown nightly on the news in giant white numbers on the TV screen. Horrors that were all too real permeated everybody’s homes. The counterculture was born and, with it, new films would grace the silver screen.

A change could be noticed in the 1960’s when people flocked to midnight showings of a cheap little black and white movie about flesh eating ghouls tormenting people hold up in an abandoned farmhouse. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, with its documentary style and cameras that zoomed in on the action rather than pull away, as so many had done before, was changing everything. It was hardly the first film to challenge the status quo or to try and say something about the times. However, it was one of the first in a new breed of film by a new breed of filmmakers who had something to say, and they were going to get you to listen even if they had to blast you with the most violent things you had ever seen.

But to hear Romero tell it, it was just an accident, something that happened while he was trying to make a cheap little movie with his friends. They weren’t thinking about making a political statement with their undead zombies or about challenging anything. It just sort of happened and that seems to be running theme in all of these movies that I would like to discuss. They were made by filmmakers who were just reacting to the times in which they lived, to the images that they were bombarded with everyday and, more often than not, to childhoods that molded them into what they had become.

In no particular order, all of these films said something about the times, about the directors and writers and about the audiences who were suddenly willing to gobble them up one after the other.