Christopher Nolan Wants To Direct A Horror Movie

Move over, James Bond fans. Your endless campaigning to see Christopher Nolan take his talents to the super-spy franchise has officially been made irrelevant. That's old news. Real ones know that the blockbuster filmmaker would be much better suited flexing his muscles a bit and expanding to the horror genre. None other than Nolan himself apparently agrees ... though with a caveat or two.

If it feels like the "Oppenheimer" director has been on a never-ending press tour for much of the last year, well, that's because he has. Pop culture hype and serious awards contention surrounding one of the best movies of 2023 will do that to you, though at least this marketing cycle has uncovered much more interesting gems than simply whether, I don't know, Nolan likes Marvel movies or not. While talking to the British Film Institute at an event billed as "Christopher Nolan in Conversation" (via The Hollywood Reporter), a Q&A session resulted in one fascinating nugget (which, for anyone who's attended Q&As before, feels like a rarity). When asked if he'd ever consider making a genuine horror movie in the future, the normally elusive Nolan had a surprisingly straightforward answer:

"I think horror films are very interesting because they depend on very cinematic devices. It really is about a visceral response to things and so, at some point, I'd love to make a horror film. But I think a really good horror film requires a really exceptional idea and those are few and far between. So I haven't found a story that lends itself to that."

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.