Imagine you're watching a movie where Kurt Russell plays a morose man in a snow-covered landscape, bundled up in a big coat, with impressive hair and a bushy beard. He's in an isolated location where other characters want to kill him.
What film is playing? (We're omitting The Christmas Chronicles in this instance. Sorry, Santa.)
The thing is, this movie could be Quentin Tarantino's Hateful Eight, or it could be John Carpenter's The Thing. So it's a bit of a trick question.
Tarantino has said that The Hateful Eight owes more to The Thing than to any Western, although his film draws inspiration from plenty of classic Westerns like Rio Bravo, The Magnificent Seven, and Bonanza.
Russell being cast in a lead role in The Hateful Eight is no coincidence. He's more like connective tissue here, drawing a clean line between the Western and a horror masterpiece. We've already talked about the writing lessons we can take from these films, but let's look at what else we can learn.
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"The Closest I've Ever Come to a Horror Film"
Tarantino has lived within the action genre for most of his career, with assassins, murderers, gangsters, and thieves populating his worlds. But he's dabbled in grindhouse and horror, too, with his collaborations with Robert Rodriguez, which include the vampire actioner From Dusk Till Dawn.
In reality, Tarantino views his desolate Western as his only horror film. Asked by Time Out London if he could make something truly serious, he said no.
"I don't know if I could let go of that humor and be able to keep that tone of dread all the way through. Although a case could be made that The Hateful Eight is the closest I've ever come to a horror film. And more than any other western, the film that influenced this movie the most is John Carpenter's The Thing, way beyond just working with the same composer, Ennio Morricone, and that film's star, Kurt Russell."
Tarantino has also talked about being self-referential, pulling from Reservoir Dogs to write The Hateful Eight.
He continued, "The Thing also hugely influenced Reservoir Dogs, of course. And in its own way, The Hateful Eight is also influenced by Reservoir Dogs. So you could say everything is already starting to come full circle, and that umbilical cord is there, linking my eighth film back to my first."
Obviously, the set-ups are all similar, but as Tarantino points out, Russell and Morricone helped cement those narrative threads between the films.
How an Actor's Filmography Can Help You
In The Thing, Macready is a gruff helicopter pilot working at a desolate Antarctic research facility with his team, which falls victim to a shapeshifting alien intruder. He's independent, speaks his mind, and takes charge when he needs to root out the alien.
In The Hateful Eight, Russell plays John "The Hangman" Ruth, a bounty hunter bringing in "Crazy" Daisy to be hanged. He's forced to hole up with a bunch of other dubious characters during a blizzard, allying with fellow bounty hunter Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson).
These two characters' worlds are very different. But seeing Russell as a suspicious outsider surrounded by danger is a kind of shorthand the audience can grasp right away. His paranoia becomes ours. Ruth's distrust of every stranger at Minnie's Haberdashery mirrors MacReady testing everyone at the Arctic outpost.
For finding the character himself, Russell told The Los Angeles Times that working with Tarantino on Death Proof also helped.
"I'd done something in [Tarantino's] Death Proof, during one of the takes. I was getting bored with myself, and I just started doing it like John Wayne. And it fit the story, the character Stuntman Mike's life, 'cause he had a belt buckle he'd gotten from John Wayne in a movie. Quentin loved it. First thing I did when I read [Hateful Eight] was say, 'Is this kind of…' And he said, 'Go there.' So for the [Hateful Eight] script reading, I did 60% John Wayne."
This is almost like casting for the audience's memory. You can typecast, or cast against type. Either way, it should be interesting.
'The Hateful Eight' Credit: The Weinstein Company
How Tarantino Borrowed from The Thing for the Score
Hateful Eight was Tarantino's first commissioned original score. It was composed by Morricone, who rose to fame making music for Spaghetti Westerns. Before The Hateful Eight, Tarantino always curated his soundtracks using needle drops. Those tracks included Morricone's earlier work, played in films like Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained.
Somewhat hilariously, Morricone told students in 2013 that he didn't like working with the director.
"I wouldn't like to work with him again, on anything," Morricone said at Rome's LUISS University (via The Hollywood Reporter). "He said last year he wanted to work with me again ever since Inglourious Basterds, but I told him I couldn't, because he didn't give me enough time. So he just used a song I had written previously."
The composer added that Tarantino "places music in his films without coherence," and "you can't do anything with someone like that."
Well, clearly they worked it out for the 2015 Western. It seems they both had to get over a few things—Tarantino's aversion to traditional score, and Morricone's frustration with Tarantino himself. They met, and Tarantino shared details of that meeting with The Wrap in 2015.
"We start talking, and he goes, 'Well, I'm kind of wondering what you're thinking, why you're even here. Because hiring a composer to compose an original score is not necessarily what you do. You take a collection of scores from other movies, cut them in as you see fit, and you do a pretty good job of that, and people seem to like it. So why would you want to change?'"
Tarantino told Christopher Nolan in another 2015 DGA conversation that portions of the Hateful Eight score came from unused orchestral and synth arrangements Morricone wrote for The Thing.
"The only thing he used in the entire movie was the synthesizer main title," Tarantino said. "So basically, if you stay away from the synthesizer main title, all that music, all that music that's on the soundtrack album The Thing has never been used in a movie ever. So."
So there's another element of The Hateful Eight's horror pedigree, speaking to the audience from almost a secret place that still builds dread.
What do you think of The Hateful Eight?
